Tagged with: ben ellman
Jazzfest and surrounding period schedule.
It's that time of year again. A little more going on and there is a number of interesting performances afoot from this direction. Check these out!
Thursday April 14th- Tonight- with Blake Amos quartet at Yuki Izakaya (Frenchmen st) 8-11pm. Blake plays many originals and classics, all heavily Brazilian inflected and it's no joke, he's heavily steeped in that- but also drenched in what was here too. Simon Lott on drums. Come by, you might win the Simon Lottery!
Saturday April 16th- with guitarist Carl Leblanc at Casa Borrega 7-10:30pm(Oretha Castle Haley Blvd). Carl is one of the city's great musicians. Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Sun Ra Arkestra, but then his own thing and signature guitar sound and approach- with intelligence subtlety and rhythm. All severely lacking much of the time these days.
Thursday April 21st- At Allways lounge 9pm with James Singleton, Scott Amendola, Rob Cambre. Always a pleasure to do new things with new people. Rob Cambre runs a great new series at Allways and seems to be really going an interesting direction by getting groups whose internal mechanics are frequently vastly different from each other- and yet there is a great deal to feel less isolated about here. Rob plays guitar. James Singleton, the iconic New Orleans bassist. Scott Amendola- plays with the heavies out west. These days I often hear things described as musical. I nod my head as if I know what they are talking about. You'll probably hear that description slung around a lot over hear. That's because the players care about how they sound and the audience seems to like that. It's an old story that renews every time. Uninterrupted we like the way music feels...
Friday April 22nd- with James Singleton at Zeitgeist Multi-Disciplinary Arts Center -9pm (Oretha Castle Haley Blvd). Playing James's music again. Always a great lineup, and it gets more and more interesting and sensitive. If you missed the show here last year you get another shot now. It is a great room. The important sounds linger in the air a little longer.
Sunday April 24th- with The New Orleans Klezmer All Stars at The Old Arabi Bar. 10pm. Here is one to catch if, like me, you are interested in more alternative scenarios. Get down to further out old New Orleans neighborhood, closer than you think and see some far out music in an area far squarer than you know. But, you can still smoke in that bar, and the egregious interruptions of neighborhoods-coming-up isn't distorting the vision. The New Orleans Klezmer All Stars with the full lineup including Ben Ellman of Galactic, and Glenn Hartman on accordion, Joe Cabral of the Iguanas on bass. The way we have had it for years now.
Tuesday April 26th- with The Diesel Combustion Orchestra at Open Ears Music Series 10pm- Blue Nile Upstairs (Frenchmen St.) Dan Oestreicher, the Baritone sax player from Trombone Shorty's band has this smart outfit. We will fix your normality good and proper, isolate it, and transport straight into an ice castle at the bottom of the Mississippi river. You will flip. There's electronics, heavy exotica and exploration that will cause the catharsis to get you into that life that you wish you could slip away into effortlessly.
Friday April 29th- with The New Orleans Klezmer All Stars at Casa Borrega 7-10:30pm(Oretha Castle Haley Blvd). See above. This is dangerously close to where we really started to catch hold of the city in 1992. The food is great and the Tequila flows like wine. This one is going to kill!
Saturday April 30th-with The New Orleans Klezmer All Stars at The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. Join us. Our set is before Stevie Wonder so don't panic. ANd- the secret is, we are not far away from the main stage. You will experience the newest thing- THE MEYERS. Standby for the album you have been waiting for.
Casa Borrega on all Saturdays in May too! Come on out! Lineups TBA.
Ben Ellman: note the shirt & NOKAS drummer Kevin O'DayWe congregated in New Orleans last Friday at Galactic studios and made a start on a recording that looks to be really different from previous outings of the last 20 years...
Ben Ellman
Glenn Hartman
Dave Rebeck
Joe Cabral
Jonathan Freilich
Stanton Moore
We all were there. Ben manned the controls. But special thanks to Bobby Mack who made the day even easier and the reflections even more entertaining!
Will be performing with the New Orleans Klezmer All-Stars at The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival on Sunday, April 29.
The All-Star lineup will be:
Joe Cabral-Bass
Glenn Hartman-Accordion, Keys
Jonathan Freilich-Guitar
Ben Ellman- Saxophone
Stanton Moore-drums
David Rebeck-Violin
You don't want to miss this.
The following was written after a show on the weekend of Nov.16,2011 in New Orleans.
Somewhere between 1991-2 I was living in an apartment in the house of Klezmer All-Stars accordionist, Glenn Hartman. One night my friend, Ben Ellman, called to say he wanted some help to work out some lines on a cassette tape by a band he was going to do a gig with. At that time, Ben was playing with the Little Rascals Brass band. We had been hanging around some other places besides the golden Treme hotspots of that time- Pepinas, and Lucky's are particularly memorable backdrops, but there were others.
The cassette had a band called Lump on it. I remember thinking immediately that they had come up with some really wild lines. They would play in unison, fast, and the drum sound was really energetic and all over the place, but kept the energy at a fantastically manic level. They would rapidly change into these odd time slow sections and then declaim some really strange sounding stuff that I hadn't worked out yet. Ben mentioned that they were into a lot of interesting creative funk and jazz players (style naming is such a drag) that I also had special affection for- James "Blood" Ulmer etc.
Lump is in the past, yet the excitement, and particular emotional and conscious oulook they portrayed, stick firmly in the heads of those of us that used to see them- often by accident. One of the main features was the singular lyrics that spanned subjects from Deuteronomy to Delfayo Marsalis. Usually the music would suddenly move from the aforementioned instrumental outbreaks into these wild declamations penned by Lou Thevenot.
Going on about Lump is missing the point for some, who feel that you are nowhere without solid experience of some previous work of that band's members...but, I wasn't there. Some of these old, wizened, folks were in the audience at the Mermaid reunion show at Hi-Ho where Norco Lapalco showed up and became the stimulus for this ramble. The band really put those discussions of the past- in the past pretty quickly. In fact, not showing up with Lump (and it was probably requested) was a solid statement in itself, since they had been an early Mermaid Lounge scene staple. Norco Lapalco wasn't even a fleck in a dry imagination at that point in history.
If you are in New Orleans- you need to go out and see this group. Their stuff is really together. It drips authentic experience and Lou has always been a safeguard against pandering bullshit...so you are out of danger...that one anyway. This is really original music and it gets you in a mysterious part of the pelvis that hasn't been much written of in the yards of writing on rhythmic music. It's exciting in as much as it changes direction frequently, rapidly,unexpectedly, and yet the lyrics hang there mysteriously, well heard. (Did I mention the hot lead singer?) These are songs about what is actually happening and that provides a relief from the endless proliferation of solipsistic, escapist, pop-allegoricism that people seem to endlessly want to hang their songwriting clevernesses on. These are, after all, viscerally, fragmenting times and it's sad to see most young musical folks around New Orleans regurgitating music so old that it has no relevance except as a way to pull dimes out of misguided tourists.
This, on the other hand, is a band speaking from their time and place with a writer who doesn't beat around the bush with any of those folksy, saccharine singer/songwriter clevernesses, or cliche rock heroics. He plays guitar in a real interesting way too- as does the other guitarist. These days too many people are trying to play in standardized ways that descend from whomever they think is legit. (Did I mention the singers?-very penetrating...) It's time for more emotional experience. Go get it at a Norco Lapalco show.
photo by John MargarettenInteresting article focusing on the band's humorous side.
Through the Klezmer All-Stars site: http://www.klezmerallstars.com/
Performing at The Boom Boom Room in San Francisco on Aug 13. I will be appearing with Robert Walter on a double bill with Gypsophonik Disko (Ben Ellman+)
Robert Walter was in New Orleans for a long time playing across the scene with a driving organ style. He was already well established at that point from his work with the Greyboy All-Stars and the Headhunters. On this particular show, Robert will be leading band a composed of notable instrumental stylists, as well as having Jonathan Freilich in the guitar seat.
Ben Ellman's Gypsophonik is an interesting DJ melange. He calls the style, Sissy Gypsy and it really keeps folks on the dance floor achieving some other state of mind with his mixture of New Orleans Sissy Bounce and Eastern European music. If you equate his name with Galactic or the New Orleans Klezmer All-Stars this will shatter the frame you've got him in.
By the way...
Those of you in the area can also catch a rare West Coast appearance of my other band, The New Orleans Klezmer All Stars at the Outside Lands Festival on the day before, Aug. 12.
Someone managed to get this shot of film maker, Henry Griffin demonstrating his classic Ot Azoy dance backed up by Stanton Moore. this is really Fresh Out The Past. WWOZ even got involved in The Big Kibosh! This was a truly memorable highlight from the three 20th anniversary shows. Also on stage here are bass- Arthur Kastler; Saxophone-Ben Ellman; Accordion- Glenn Hartman, Fiddle-David Rebeck; guitar- yours truly!
It's here. The recording you've been waiting for...
Get it while it's hot! Available for instant download on...
Jonathan Freilich with
Stanton moore-drums
Todd Sickafoose-bass
Skerik-Saxophone
Mike Dillon-Vibes
Sneak preview...
01 The Asphalt is Harsh, Where's The Grass 1 by moroller