He performs I Am a Man in full with Bill Frisell, Jason Moran, Brian Blade, and Scott Coley Friday night at Duke’s Baldwin Auditorium.
Gary Suarez
Posted inMusic
Record Review: ZenSoFly Blooms Into Hip-House With Her New Sunflowers EP
Sunflowers EP Self-released Of the various trends and fads cropping up throughout hip-hop’s four-decade history, hip-house is not one of its best regarded. Though one could argue that trap EDM and even the prevalence of electronic sounds in contemporary rap beats owes the subgenre some small debt, in retrospect the dated eighties and nineties blend […]
Posted inMusic
When L.A. Beatmaker Linafornia Didn’t See What She Wanted On Stage, She Decided to Do It Herself
LINAFORNIA Friday, October 6, 9 p.m., $10 The Pinhook, Durham www.thepinhook.com The first time Linafornia performed at Low End Theory, the Los Angeles weekly club night that serves as the cultural epicenter of the city’s fabled beat scene, the up-and-coming producer somehow got into her own head while in the midst of an out-of-body experience. […]
Posted inGuides
Everywhere All at Once: Scheduling Conflicts Snarl Hopscotch’s Hip-Hop
Vince Staples’s star is rising fast. From his days in the Odd Future nebula to his releases for Def Jam Records, the Long Beach, California, native has watched his profile grow exponentially, earning critical acclaim and fan love for his lyricism and music without producing any obvious radio singles. With a new record titled Prima […]
Posted inMusic
Tuskha Makes a Conservative Debut
Tuskha Tuskha (Self-released) For a certain kind of singer-songwriter, pop music has a particular allure. Rock, folk, and related forms often provide these types with safe passage into a scene, their clandestine longings for supermarket-checkout-line levels of fame kept in a back pocket. The exhaustive contemporary use of the term indie pop, that subcategory of […]
Posted inMusic
Record Review: Boulevards’ Groove! Will Start Your Party, But Can It Make the Raleigh Funk Maestro a Star?
Boulevards GROOVE! Label: Captured Tracks With the possible exception of Scientology, funk is the most important religion to emerge from the twentieth century. The faith’s founding mothers and fathers, those bold souls of the late sixties and seventies, provided the musical and ideological tenets for a new Greatest Story Ever Told, a mix of Afrocentric […]
Posted inMusic
When Will Fetty Wap’s Fifteen Minutes Be Up?
FETTY WAP THURSDAY, MARCH 17 THE RITZ, RALEIGH8 p.m., $32.50 Aware of hip-hop fandom’s fickleness, Fetty Wap clearly intends to get as much from his fifteen minutes as he can. In addition to the quartet of radio and club smashes that led to his eponymous debut, he’s guested on songs from dozens of other artists, […]
Posted inReviews
Record review: CALAPSE’s You Know How I Feel
The holiday season: that time of the year when Christmas jingles and undertones of compulsory cheer creep into even life’s most mundane chores. Amid all the marketing mirth, though, comes a more welcome, welcoming year-end tradition: the annual arrival of a new Pop Ambient compilation from Kompakt. Each year since the turn of the millennium, […]
Posted inMusic
Hopscotch 2015: Lincoln Theatre’s great rap blast
Hopscotch Music Festival Downtown Raleigh Friday, Sept. 11, 2015 Sweating through a white longsleeve from his own Play Cloths line of streetwear, Pusha T looked out onto his Raleigh audience with a confident nod, fully cognizant of his command not only of the room but of the genre he’s made his name in. “Ain’t no […]
Posted inMusic
Hopscotch 2015: Godspeed in the rain, Deejay Earl in the basement
By design, Hopscotch rewards diverse tastes. Most music festivals pen attendees in like blue-jeaned bovines, all meant to share the same experience whether they like it or not. But this one liberates the audience from the minor musicological tyrannies of conventional concert-going. With multiple shows occurring within walking distance of one another, these three nights […]