Category Archives: concert reviews

An Evening of (Mostly) Love Songs

I went to this show not knowing what to expect, other than a mellow evening starring the chanteuse Madeleine Peyroux.

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What we got was mellow in one sense – the audience wasn’t dancing in the aisles – but in another sense was quite stirring and emotional. Read the rest of this entry

Great Evening of Toe-Tapping Music

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Laney Jones

I love bluegrass music! There, I said it… I went to Club Passim tonight to hear Laney Jones, a young bluegrass banjo/ukelele/harmonica player who writes all her own material, who was opening for Nora Jane Struthers.

Nora Jane Struthers

Nora Jane Struthers

They each perform different styles of bluegrass/Americana, but their styles mesh well for a double-bill show. Read the rest of this entry

Wonderful Evening of Desert Blues from Terakaft

Terakaft

Terakaft

I am a fairly recent convert to the joys of African music in general and desert blues in particular.  I discovered Terakaft because I received that oh-so-common suggestion of ‘If you like X, you’ll love Y.’ In this case, X was Tinariwen and Y was Terakaft, and it was right!

As it turns out, Terakaft is an offshoot of Tinariwen, a band I saw perform about a year ago and loved. When I heard Terakaft, I was drawn to their brand of desert blues, too. Read the rest of this entry

Fabulous Ian Anderson Concert!

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I had no idea what to expect from Ian Anderson, the front man of Jethro Tull, a band I loved as a teenager but had never seen live. I was quite excited to see this show, in which the band was performing the original Thick as a Brick album for the first set and Thick as a Brick 2, released in 2012, for the second set. I wasn’t disappointed in the least.

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Keep on Truckin’, Robert Hunter

I wouldn’t describe myself as a Dead-Head, but I always loved the Grateful Dead.  This show at the Wilbur Theatre was a rare opportunity to see one of the main lyricists for the Dead.

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Robert Hunter wrote many of the Dead’s best known songs – Truckin’, Friend of the Devil, Dark Star, Scarlet Begonias, and Casey Jones, to name a few. Read the rest of this entry

First Rocktober Show!

I had heard that The Ballroom Thieves are a good rock band disguised as a folk band, which proved to be an accurate description of them.

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They are a young, Boston-based band with a CD and an EP under their belts and I was excited to see them at The Sinclair, a small-ish venue I enjoy. Read the rest of this entry

Bass Geniuses at Work

In a word, WOW!

the only shot I got with all five musicians

the only shot I got with all five musicians

This evening’s extraordinary concert consisted of four bass geniuses and a drummer. Whoever thinks that it would have been a boring show would be quite wrong.

The four bassists were Victor Wooten, who made his name with Bela Fleck and the Flecktones; Steve Bailey, the chair of the bass department at the Berklee College of Music; John Patitucci, who made his name with Chick Corea’s Electric Band; and Victor Bailey, who replaced Jaco Pastorius in Weather Report. Read the rest of this entry

Steely Dan still has ‘it’

suzy bogguss sings