Savvant Music Blogs

Thomas Marriott and Hadley Caliman play in perfect unison at Dazzle

Trumpeter Thomas Marriott put together a fantastic jazz quintet featuring the pure, clear and rich tenor sax tones of the amazing Hadley Caliman.  Marriott’s deep melodious flugelhorn and rich trumpet tones were perfectly entwined with Caliman’s when they played together, and yet they played nicely contrasting improvisational solos individually.

A little tired of standing venues with sticky floors, booming bass through earplugs and teenagers scrubbing off under-aged marks in the bathrooms, my partner Bob Carnahan and I took a night to enjoy some incredible grown-up jazz down in Denver, Colorado at one of our favorite listening rooms, Dazzle Restaurant and Lounge.

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We initially started out our Savvant Music blogs to be just that, blogs not reviews.  Our original intent was for these to be notes from gigs researching possible artists for Savvant Music. However, over time we realized that more and more we were really reviewing the bands.

As a result, I’ve gone back and edited some of my earlier blogs about artist that had some notes about some improvements we’d like to see about bands, to just tell you what we liked.  So, how do you know which bands to see, and which to avoid?

Well, if you’re a music lover, then go see them all, because we won’t write up any really horrible bands.  If they aren’t worth seeing, we won’t waste our time or your time. 

If you’re very, very picky, and only want to see the best of the best, then we’ll give you a Savvant Music guarantee that any band on our recommendations page is amazing, awesome and worth the time and money to see — assuming that their genre and style is to your taste.  In other words, you may or may not like a given band’s style, but if we recommend them, you can count on seeing a great, professional show by amazing musicians.

In our reviews,  we’ve classified bands as potential, which means they’re still working on polishing their act and amazing which means they’re pretty much there but we either haven’t had time to put together a “Recommendations” page, or the artist(s) are more mainstream than we generally look for in our recommendations policies.  Sometimes we put them in both categories, because we think they’re pretty amazing, but they are still growing and changing.

I hope this better meets your needs and better aligns these blogs with our overall goals of supporting artists’ efforts and willingness to put it all out there!

Frontman Cormac Neeson of The Answer

Shortly after SXSW 2008, Anny Randel spoke to Cormac Neeson, the front man of The Answer, over the phone just outside their practice room back in Ireland. Here are a few excerpts from the interview! (I tried to leave in the traces of his really beautiful Irish accent, but to hear it for real you’ll have to catch them on tour.)

Savvant Music - Are you guys still in the US?

Cormac Neeson - No, we’re not. We’re actually back in rainy Ireland, cold rainy Ireland. We were back halfway through last week. We were in Austin then we went on to Los Angeles for a few gigs and also to meet some producers with our next album in mind. So, ah, yeah, we’ve had a bit of a comedown I’d say. Going from SXSW which was absolutely amazing and then that was our first time in LA, and that was, what a great time, so now were back to bread and water at home here trying to get some more new material right there. We’re going to do the next album hopefully at the end of April, start of May time so we’re just getting all the stuff together.

How did it go in LA, your shows and meetings with potential producers for the album?

It was amazin’, our heads were spinning, but we met like nine or ten producers … Read More »

On Friday night, Savvant Music CFO, Bob Carnahan, and I took advantage of our Austin locale and attended a non-SXSW show performed by lovely Nashville singer/songwriter Tori Sparks. Sparks’ bluesy vocals and intensely rhythmic groove paints a sexy and sultry sound that’s a joy to hear in any venue. Sparks followed a highly amplified four piece rock band in a very loud, smoky and raucous venue (Touche’ on 6th street in Austin - not a venue I’d generally recommend for artists looking for a place to play, by the way), and despite those challenges, this 24 year old songstress rocked the room, drew listeners from tables in the back to the stage front and pulled people in from off the street (yes, during SXSW) to hear her acoustic rock and blues.

Sparks started off her set with Cold War, the lead track off her latest album, Under This Yellow Sun. This song starts out with a nice guitar hook that immediately grabs you, and follows through with gripping lyrics that bring home a cold but personal story of failing relationships. Read More »

The Answer: Paul Mahon, Cormac Neeson, James Heatley, Michael Waters

Cormac Neeson the front man and lead vocals for The Answer, gives incredibly soulful, bluesy life to this band’s repertoire of really awesome rock songs. He is sexy, mesmerizing and he sings with an intensity and grace that just leaves the crowd yearning for more, song after song. Neeson engages the crowd in a personal and entrancing fashion, making each fan feel like the gig is only for him or her.

But this band is a lot more than a great front man! Read More »

Entertaining repartee delivered with scintillating irony was the form of the day as rock icon Lou Reed was interviewed by good friend and music producer Hal Willner. Willner introduced Reed as the man who is to rock and roll what Miles Davis is to jazz, as Lou has literally changed the face of rock and roll two or three times. By way of demonstration, the two discussed the SXSW screening of Julian Schnabel’s film “Lou Reed’s ‘Berlin,’” which documents a recent performance of the landmark 1973 album. An excerpt from this film, the song “Men of Good Fortune,” aptly demonstrated at least some of why Lou Reed has had such an influence on the world of rock music.

Reed’s music carries such an emotional impact that you cannot help but go along for the ride as he lulls you into introspection with intensely quiet emotional vocals then drives you to awareness breaking into compelling rock rhythms and sound that bring you to a peak of empathy with his message. Reeds guitar solo yearns for your understanding of the bitterness and hopelessness reflected in the lyrics of the song, but also counters melodically with shreds of desperate hope and understanding gently woven into the music.

“It’s emotional music. One of the things I love about rock.” said Reed, “It’s so emotional.”

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Our musical adventures today started a little after three pm at the SXSW British Music Embassy Party at Latidude 30 celebrating the sister cities relationship between Nashville and Belfast. I went there to see Beth Nielsen-Chapman, who is slated to play in Colorado this fall at Women Rock the Rialto, a fund-raiser for the Women’s Resource Center that I’m helping to plan.  Nielsen-Chapman (who is from Nashville) was wonderful, as always, with energetic rock and her georgeous vocals.

Irishman Foy Vance followed Neilsen-Chapman with his one-man show in which Vance filled the room with a full band’s worth of music through the magic of looping. While the looping gimic has been around for a long time, Vance is a master of putting a song together such a way that you don’t even notice how it’s done. Read More »

Wow! Everything’s happening so fast I’m finding it awfully difficult to find time to write about it all! I’ll get caught up soon, I promise. Meanwhile, just a quick update on an amazing Monday night.

Bob and I were walking down 6th Street here in Austin on our way to a SXSW party, and as we walked past Nuno’s we heard some awesome blues guitar coming out the door, and decided we’d stop in after attending some sxsw “official” parties. Best idea we had ALL night, maybe all week! We stopped in a few hours later and the blues coming out the door were so incredibly soulful, rocking and pure we couldn’t believe it –then we recognized the pianist, whom we’d seen with Kenny Wayne Shepherd last year - the legendary, grammy award winning Pinetop Perkins! Read More »

This weekend at SXSW Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas, I caught a couple of cool panel discussions and presentations about how to grow on-line communities and how to leverage the strength and creativity of crowds. I wanted to share these learnings here on the Savvant Music blogs because it’s so important in what we’re trying to build here.

My vision is that Savvant Music will be influenced and really guided by the people who have always told their friends and neighbors about new cool, awesomely hip music. You know, the guy who always seems to have heard of the best groups or the chick who has tickets for the hottest concert because she knew they were great before anybody else did… A lot of these people are writing blogs now, and others are out there in chat rooms and fanzines still telling their buddies about great music via word of mouth. Some are disk jockeys playing late at night or early in the morning when the corporate monoliths aren’t mandating pop playlists from hell.

Well, these are the people we need to nurture and grow into a community which helps us find, support and promote great music of all kinds. And here’s what I learned at SXSW yesterday will help us to do just that. Read More »

Wow, I was really excited about the opportunity to hear Mark Zuckerberg, 23-year old billionare CEO and founder of Facebook tell us how it was done, and share his vision of the future today at SXSW Interactive in Austin, Texas. Unfortunately, I, along with a few thousand others, was disappointed due in large part to the incredibly poor interview skills of the interviewer, Sarah Lacy of Business Week.

Now, there must be about 400 blogs out there tonight (I don’t know, I didn’t count them) blasting Ms. Lacy’s performance, and if you’re interested in the gory details, see any of the links below. Several of the bloggers seemed to feel that the problem was that Lacy is female and was being discriminated against as such, or that she isn’t a geek, so didn’t know how to ask geek-relevant questions.

Lacy’s problem with the crowd at SXSW was not that she’s not a geek, nor that she’s female (although the hair twirling was a bit weird…). The problem was that she is a poor interviewer. Read More »