09/04/2010 09:10 PM MDT With the Labor Day weekend, summer is in its final throes. This season has been a fine one for outdoor festivals, but my favorite live music moments occurred when guitarist Nels Cline sonically peeled the paint off of Dazzle's walls a couple of months back.
The big kiss-off: Great breakup songs 09/04/2010 10:34 PM MDT - One of the most passed-around online videos in recent memory is an expletive- laced exercise in spite and heartbreak.
2010 Fall Arts Preview: Classical music 09/04/2010 09:00 PM MDT - It's easy to dismiss a Beethoven festival as cliche. After all, orchestras everywhere do them regularly, and his music is anything but surprising.
Vampire Weekend is seeing better days 09/02/2010 03:15 PM MDT - Much has been written about Vampire Weekend, the smarty-pants band that rose to superstardom via its intelligent, melody-savvy indie-pop jams. But the group hasn't gotten a lot of credit where it most deserves it: as a solid and tight live band.
Cyndi Lauper plays eTown show with Charlie Musselwhite 09/02/2010 08:33 PM MDT - Cyndi Lauper has barely tweaked her flashy, squeaky persona over the years, and it's proved a smart strategy for the '80s-bred pop singer. Despite a drop off the commercial radar in the '90s, she's surged back on her gay- rights-centered True Colors tours (which have featured Erasure, B-52s, Margaret Cho and others), her frequent soundtrack appearances and her willful pop culture stature — as seen in last season's "The Apprentice" and countless talk shows and series bit parts. Lauper headlines a rare Denver appearance of the eTown radio show on Sept. 23 with Charlie Musselwhite, promoting her June album "Memphis Blues." Tickets are on sale. ($29, TicketHorse) Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey are pulling out all the stops for their latest show, "FUNundrum," which celebrates the circus company's 200th anniversary. For its Sept. 30- Oct. 10 run at the Denver Coliseum, the show will truck in 130 performers from six continents and almost 100,000 pounds of performing pachyderms, cowboys, pirates and mermaids. And if prices for the Cirque du Soleil-style horse show "Cavalia" (at the Pepsi Center parking lot starting Sept. 22) seem too steep, the $15.50- $67.50 range of "FUNundrum" may strike you as more family-friendly. Tickets are on sale. (Ticketmaster)
Clubs: End-of-summer patio roundup 09/02/2010 03:45 PM MDT - It's always bittersweet when summer turns to fall. There are still a few official weeks left of summer, but Labor Day weekend is the symbolic cutoff point. The countdown begins.
Best shows this week, 9/3/10 09/02/2010 08:13 PM MDT - Pavement was an erratic live act during its '90s heyday, as anyone who saw the legendary indie rockers will attest.
"Rain on a Tin Roof" was buried deep on Julie Roberts' magnificent 2004 debut album, the 10th track of 11, and maybe only the seventh-best. But it had teeth as an ambivalent declaration of love for a fickle man and sung with a weighty sigh.
It's easy to fall for Lana Mir, a Ukranian-born singer-songwriter who finds herself a New Yorker as she releases her debut record today. Mir's an attractive woman, yes, but she's also a strong writer with an assertive sense of grace.
What do George Gershwin and the Beach Boys' prime mover, Brian Wilson, have in common? A jaunty, exuberant tunefulness for one thing, and a desire to push pop into high-art territory for another.
John Mellencamp set out to make a historic record in historic places, and in a few days between dates on the Bob Dylan/Willie Nelson tour in 2009, he came up with "No Better Than This," out next week
Is Dave Matthews our modern-rock messiah? He's the best live act in the game. He's the salvation of a sagging touring industry. He's a smile on a rainy day. And he's all those things, despite the doubters — those who dismiss his heady vocals, his for-the-masses songwriting, his affinity for flannel shirts. Whether you are a fan or not, Matthews is a phenomenon in 2010.
Seventeen-year-old Taylor Momsen hung up her plaid skirts and headbands in exchange for raccoon-like eye makeup, garters and hooker heels. The singer-songwriter, best known for her role as Jenny Humphrey on the CW's "Gossip Girl," a show that chronicles the lives of New York's elite.
For five years, the Warlock Pinchers were Colorado's most notorious export. The rowdy punk band formed out of a too-well-to-do Boulder angst in the fall of 1987 and was known and celebrated for its "Official Sound of Satan," its uncanny merchandising, its rap-influenced two-MC approach, its meat cannon (seriously), its angular punk guitars and its sacrilegious and profane sense of humor.
For 15 years, Denver musician Jimmy Stofer has stood in the shadows, playing bass with noteworthy acts like Rose Hill Drive, the Fray, Flobots, Meese, Hello Kavita and more. For those who harbor unfulfilled rock star fantasies, being a side man — a musician who joins up with a band for a single recording, show or event — isn't what they have in mind.
Sitting behind his Baldwin grand piano, ignoring the world around him, Neil Bridge was finishing the tenor saxophone arrangement for Morgan Lewis' "How High the Moon." He was copying the notes onto music paper with his ballpoint pen, a writing tool he used only after he had completed the original copy in pencil.
She brought Bob Dylan into the spotlight and marched alongside Martin Luther King Jr. After more than 50 years as a force in music and activism, Joan Baez is still sharing her voice and her views with diverse crowds that are as into Steve Earle, Josh Ritter and Tom Waits as they are Pete Seeger or Woody Guthrie.
After logging tens of thousands of miles chugging up and down the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains in a 16-passenger van with their siblings, the Odnoralov brothers are finally seeing the fruits of their hard work and patience.
Naming the most important painter at work in Colorado is a tricky task at best, but Clark Richert is as strong a candidate as any for the title. The veteran artist bridges abstraction and mathematics in his often complex works.
Winter is the hottest time of year on Denver Center Theatre Company stages, when the new plays that provide its lifeblood take center stage. This year brings the space odyssey "When Tang Met Laika" (opening Jan. 28), and "Eventide" (Feb. 4).
He once commanded an area of 12 million square miles, four times the size of the Roman empire, and was named Time magazine's "most influential person of the millennium."
That's the major issue that 4,000 artists and administrators will take on when they gather in Denver for the National Performing Arts Convention, which runs from Tuesday through Saturday at the Colorado Convention Center.
