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(09/21/06 4:00am)
Many moons ago, piano legend Thelonius Monk made his reputation by changing the way pianists viewed Western Civilization. His compositions stand as staggering contradictions- classic standards that can never truly be duplicated, layered with rich dynamics that seem motionless. Monk never just challenged conventions. He melted them without batting an eyelash.
(03/30/06 5:00am)
The strangest part of discovering Ted Leo is realizing that he never cried out to be found. Nothing about his music or work ethic has really ever suggested anything overly self-promotional. He just puts his nose to the grindstone and doesn't worry about image. So it's usually up to his followers to pick up the slack, throwing his name into the same hat with Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello and Thin Lizzy.
(02/23/06 5:00am)
The shroud of an Ennio Morricone spaghetti western score as a prelude should have been the first hint that Tuesday night would be a different sort of Flogging Molly concert. The Irish folk/rock sextet were launching into the first of a two-night stand at the 9:30 club, reestablishing their work ethic outside of tours geared toward album promotion. Usually, their demeanor is decidedly sunny, reflected in plaid and lime green overtones. Everything simply felt more sinister this time around, from the black banner hanging behind the stage and perhaps even the funeral-like dress of all the band members.
(02/13/06 5:00am)
It was Leslie Feist's third stop to D.C. in the last four months. After playing with Broken Social Scene at the 9:30 club, she was an opening act for Bright Eyes at Constitution Hall and finally sold out the Black Cat as a headliner Wednesday night. But even those who've had her solo debut "Let it Die" on repeat have only been barely introduced to Feist.
(11/10/05 5:00am)
Every month, it stands out as a bold curiosity on the Black Cat's schedule: "Mothertongue: Women's Spoken Word $5 Backstage." The inevitability of it showing up each second Wednesday has been an unshakeable truth for the past seven years.
(10/13/05 4:00am)
There is something cosmically unfair and maybe a little un-American about Halloween falling on a Monday this year. The burden, henceforth, falls on the activities of the weekend before to provide a degree of mischievous fun and a sense of the fantastic.
(09/26/05 4:00am)
They blew kisses and thanked D.C., but the crowd wasn't done with Q and Not U for the night, even if they were moments away from permanently dissolving as a group. Coaxing them towards a first encore was simple, with the applause not faltering or even tripping on itself for one second. But another taste of dance rock bliss was needed badly. This would not be a fitting epitaph for a group that tragically never moved from the same cusp of contemporary fame allotted to The Killers and Bloc Party.
(09/22/05 4:00am)
The Thelonius Monk Institute of Jazz's 18th annual international competition was an invitation to jazz guitarists all over the world, an opportunity to prove their skills on a stage that has evolved into a generational testing ground for the likes of Joshua Redmond, Jane Monheit and Tierney Sutton, among many others. Diversity is always the key ingredient to ensure the talent pools for specified instruments remain fresh. And diverse the competitors were, hailing from Nebraska, Jerusalem and even Norway.
(04/18/05 4:00am)
A funny thing happened on the way to the 21st century. In the midst of America's love affair with prepackaged music, from Lou Bega's boppy "Mambo No. 5" to the Backstreet Boys' opus "I Want it That Way," there was a primal scream let out by one of the last original club kids. Pointing out that electronica could find middle ground between Prodigy's fascist nonsense and U2's horrid experimentation, Moby's "Play" boxed the listening public's collective ears.
(04/11/05 4:00am)
Somehow we all blinked sometime around the year 2000, and Austin, Texas made its first steps toward ruling the world by the time the half millisecond was over. Anyone in the know was telling you about all the awesome things happening down in the creative heart of the Lone Star state. Comparable to the burgeoning grunge scene in the Pacific Northwest in the early '90s, Austin's premiere bands are continually scraping towards mainstream success, albeit at a snail's pace, while baffling mainstream media in the process.
(03/31/05 5:00am)
Comic book fans will probably never forgive Hollywood for deflating the puffed-up immortality of their favorite characters. On the big screen, the loose laws of comic book reality are usually downplayed, counting on the average filmgoer's limited suspension of disbelief. Instead these adaptations are usually bound by the conventional movie standards that their source material shatters with reckless abandon.
(03/21/05 5:00am)
Millions
Directed by Danny Boyle
Fox Searchlight
98 Minutes
B-
(03/17/05 5:00am)
The term "psychobilly" first entered the music lexicon through the voice of the man in black himself, Johnny Cash. His 1976 country music hit "One Piece at a Time" described an autoworker's crudely constructed "psychobilly Cadillac" from bits and pieces of various models stolen from the assembly line over several decades. Like the genre it would later be emblematic of, the car's charm would not lie in its flawless construction, but in the bizarre disunity of parts that formed a style all its own.
(02/28/05 5:00am)
Whenever they step onto the bandstand, Flogging Molly can have the power to roar like a lion caught in a hurricane or melodically wilt like a shamrock drifting in an autumn breeze. Their hybrid of traditional Irish folk music and punk rock has exploded from a cult-like following on the West Coast to a national fan base that lives for every opening note and dies a little on the way home.
(02/24/05 5:00am)
If you understand the workings of a .45-caliber pistol, you realize there's something unmistakably American about it. A star-spangled blast in every bullet fired that's cheap enough to become almost democratic. While it's bathed in the glitz of Hollywood films, it's also available at every pawnshop in the ghettoes. A lot of the contradictions you can use to describe the weapon are applicable to famed journalist Hunter S. Thompson, who used it to finally depart Earth in the fullest sense Sunday evening at his home in Woody Creek, Colo.
(02/14/05 5:00am)
Ten minutes before the Black Cat opened Thursday night, an 18-year-old boy adorned in rhinestone-covered leather, acid-washed jeans and enough genuine punk paraphernalia to suspect he'll burn down his local Hot Topic one day, coughed up his dinner in the 30-degree winds of downtown D.C.
(12/13/04 5:00am)
Wynton Marsalis' map of accomplishment commonly runs through two points: his birthplace in New Orleans and his adopted home of New York City, where he serves as music director for Jazz at Lincoln Center. However, he maintains a special relationship with Washington, D.C., as well.
(11/22/04 5:00am)
The responsibility for keeping genuinely great forms of art alive falls to every generation. Each son and daughter of future musical revolution is expected to serve as anthropologist for their forerunners at times, providing new ways to look at pieces studied with exhaustive thoroughness.
(11/15/04 5:00am)
"Have you ever meditated with Dennis Hopper?"
(11/11/04 5:00am)
Great artists have the ability to pilfer our sense of reality, ambition, love and order. Trying to seek out the roots of this power is often a dark proposition, filled with moments of uncomfortable self-revelation for the unprepared. The center of the musical "The Highest Yellow" revolves around this reality.