A new festival will be jazzing up New Mexico for the next two weeks. There will be performances in Albuquerque as well as Santa Fe, said Tom Guralnick, founder of the New Mexico Jazz Festival and executive director of Outpost Productions.
Carson Bennett has been creatively stuck. Bennett is a graduate student at UNM and writes creative nonfiction and personal essays. Every year, he seeks rejuvenation at the Taos Summer Writers' Conference.
Jonson Gallery's new exhibit is as close to home as it gets. The exhibit is the second installment of the Jonson by Decade series, which showcases paintings by the gallery's founder Raymond Jonson from 1920 through 1929.
Band makes loneliness sound good Blackpool Lights This Town's Disaster Available Now I'll admit it. I was a little skeptical about Blackpool Lights. It seemed like an obscure name with even more obscure album art - a cartoon rendering of a burning town. Bad marketing approach? Sure.
With the release of their latest album, Flat-Pack Philosophy, the Buzzcocks are going back to their roots. The band out of Manchester, England, was formed during the punk boom of the late 1970s along with bands like the Sex Pistols. Steve Diggle, guitarist and vocalist for the Buzzcocks, said the initial period was political and explosive.
Matt Witkowski and David Reis met at Loborientation in 2004. Now, the UNM students are in the process of expanding their clothing company Rhidden. "It's our own style," Witkowski said. "It's not limited. It's not skater or designer. It's our own thing."
Video game fanatics in Albuquerque have a new opportunity to get their fix. The Dragon's Lair Ultimate Gaming Arena at 5000 Menaul Blvd. has been open for three weeks and is getting positive feedback from the gaming community, co-owner Kevin Nelson said.
The first time Steven Chavez saw a Mexican marimba was in 1980. Now, the experienced folk musician owns 33 marimbas from around the world and different eras. A marimba is a percussion instrument typically associated with folk music. It has several keys which are struck by mallets in order to produce sound.
Danny Winn and the Earthlings thought they would play in the Warped Tour - they were wrong. "Too bad we didn't get that," said saxophonist John DuBois. "There were no ska bands on there." Winn said the tour probably wants to give more exposure to other local bands and is why they won't be playing this year. "When we started, we were the only ska band in Albuquerque. Now there about seven," he said.
by Debra Au Daily Lobo The Vincent Black Shadow Fears in the Water Available July 11 After listening to the Vincent Black Shadow's Fears in the Water, I've become a new-found fan of not only the band, but the genre of ska as a whole. Despite some rather morbid cover art - a lone toy rubber ducky floating in a tub of jet black liquid - the album is fun and really upbeat.
If you happen to stumble into the UNM Art Museum, you will be pleasantly surprised. In the downstairs level, you will find an exhibit of paintings by Clinton Adams that will take you on an artistic safari through time.
As I prepared to write this column, I took Regina Spektor's jazz roots as a cue to revisit what has been described as the greatest jazz film of all time: "'Round Midnight."
There is nothing better than finding something different. The first time I heard Regina Spektor was on a song titled "Modern Girls & Old Fashioned Men" by the Strokes. In the duet with Julian Casablanca, she sounds like a jazz singer out of the 1930s. I had to know who she was. I found that she is not just a jazz singer - she created a sound through a combination of genres.
Vietnam isn't relevant anymore. However, the film "Sir! No Sir!" will probably go down in history as the Vietnam generation's last grasp of relevance in contemporary America. The film succeeds on several levels, but it fails utterly on the one most important to its creators.
Before I sit down to write a hip-hop review, I make hip-hop beats. Having acquired beat-writing software from a friend who was tragically killed by rebels in a remote Peruvian village, I find it necessary to the writing process that I suffer the endlessly repeating realization that I possess no amount of measurable musical talent. It aids in the bitter metamorphosis required to transform from ordinary human schlub to venom-spitting dynamo.
Do you ever feel like you were born in the wrong era? In the midst of all the emotional and bohemian hipsters struggling for individuality, rockabillies have found a simple style that sets them apart and takes them to a different time, a more simple time - the '50s.
June Higgins couldn't play an instrument in 2002. But what she lacked in talent, she made up for with inspiration.
The Procussions march to the beat of a different drum. But every rapper, producer, DJ - whoever - has echoed this exact sentiment from the beginning of time, no matter how derivative and unoriginal they come across.
Eva Encinias-Sandoval said Festival Flamenco Internacional has come a long way in 20 years.
Magneto really outdid himself this time. Unfortunately, it was entirely a bad thing. In the third cinematic installment of Marvel's much-loved X-Men comic, what little grip on reality the series retained in previous installments has been utterly lost.
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