Music

When Sean and Jamie Burns discovered American “roots” music during its resurgence in the ’90s, they took the music to heart. Trips to Indianapolis and Chicago to see acts like Wayne Hancock, Johnny Dilks, and Big Sandy solidified their love of swing, rockabilly, hillbilly blues, and the culture surrounding the music. After seeing Hancock at […]

When Springfield Classical Guitar Society founder Russel Brazzel calls Bolivian Javier Calderón “one of the deepest musicians to play Springfield,” he’s referring to the artist’s success not only as a performer of classical music but also as an arranger, publisher, and program director (at the University of Wisconsin-Madison). Calderón’s credits include concerts in Buenos Aires, […]

From seemingly out of nowhere, he comes. He lands on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry and receives an encore for his first performance. A song is released to the nation’s country music radio stations and he finds himself on the charts sandwiched between heavyweights Toby Keith, Kenny Chesney, and Alan Jackson. Now he […]

When the Tarbox Ramblers first escaped from Boston bars and ran into the national music scene several years ago, it was as if they were let out of a cage — wary at first, scary to see, and waiting to feel free enough to pounce. They won critical acclaim with a simply stunning self-titled debut, […]

At age 19, Elizabeth Elmore was in a band. Sounds like a lot of 19-year-olds in college at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, right? That’s where the similarity ends. Elmore’s group, Sarge, became a darling of the critics, getting write-ups in Rolling Stone, Spin, Playboy, and kudos from Greil Marcus, granddaddy critic of the […]

When Johan Fostier performs Friday in Springfield, the young Belgian will be filling in for scheduled artist Dimitri Illarinov, a Russian who found himself waylaid by an immigration glitch this year. Imprecise wording on Illarinov’s passport, it seems, stopped the performer “in his treks.” “Dimitri’s papers didn’t state he was coming to the U.S. to […]

Otis Taylor plays the blues. The hurtin’ blues, not happy, well-polished, barroom blues for the beer swigging, fun-loving crowd. He sings of lynchings, dying children, murder, race relations, social problems, and other incidents of life not always covered in the “I-got-the-blues-so-bad-but-not-that-bad” whitewashed versions popularized by rock bands parading as blues purveyors. After a brief stab […]

On Feb. 3, 1959, Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens hired a small airplane to take them from Clear Lake, Iowa, to Moorhead, Minn., for the next gig in their “Winter Dance Party” tour. The plane made it about eight miles before crashing in a cornfield, killing everybody on board. The toll left […]

The Springfield Classical Guitar Society features Russel Brazzel in its second concert of the 2003-04 season. The evening, Brazzel says, promises to be “strictly Spanish,’ featuring music never previously included in the artist’s repertoire. “The Serenata Andaluza [by Joaquin Malats], Variations on ‘La Folia’ [Fernando Sor], and the Torre Bermeja [Isaac Albeniz] are new, though […]

Drumming is an obsession for Dennis Maberry, who started banging away on a drum set 25 years ago. For years, he played with rock bands until he couldn’t maintain a semblance of a normal life. He settled down, married, and got a job. Then, nine years ago, during a visit to Seattle’s World Percussion Festival, […]

In our last episode, Russian-born-and-raised singer-songwriter Marina Gennadievna Verenikina packed up her piano and split for LA in hopes of furthering her music career. If you remember, as a 15-year-old, the green-eyed girl beat out about 10,000 other Russian students to win a scholarship for study in the good old U.S. of A. The stateside […]

If the roots of the blues grew out of the pain and suffering associated with the African-American experience, the branch called rhythm and blues hides the anguish under the most joyous and swingin’ music found in the American songbook. It’s in this time of hepcats and swingers, honkers and shouters, juke joints and roadhouses, popularized […]