Thursday, February 19
Music Maximus
In on the Circus Act
at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA
Phone: (617) 278-5156
By Katie Johnston Chase
Globe Staff / February 17, 2009
When you write music for the circus, you have some fairly unusual subject matter to deal with. Bandleader Peter Bufano has composed a creepy waltz for a sword swallower and penned a sexy, dangerous tango for a vixen who snaps a rose out of an audience member’s mouth with a bullwhip. “I’m trying to chase the act the way music chases a cartoon,” he says.
Bufano, 40, is not just any circus musician, though—vhe’s a former clown who is intimately familiar with the rhythms of the ring. He went to clown college in Florida after flunking out of high school in Tewksbury. After two years with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey (and then studying film scoring at Berklee and working in Hollywood), he took up the accordion and now plays at circuses all over the world. He and his band, Cirkestra, have recorded four CDs based on four different circus productions.
On Thursday, he brings a five-piece version of his group (accordion, violin, drums, saxophone, and tuba—almost all played by fellow circus musicians) to the Gardner Museum. It will be nice not to have the elephants and tightrope walkers hogging the spotlight for a change, says Bufano, who lives in Allston: “They upstage me.”
When he’s creating new music for a show, Bufano works alongside the performers during rehearsals under the big top, composing a two-hour score in just three weeks’ time. But the adjustments don’t stop when the show opens. If an acrobat misses a swing or skips a trick, Bufano has to react on the fly, instructing his band to skip a page or execute a “shotgun key change” to reflect what’s going on in the ring. He keeps one eye on the performance and another on his musicians, playing his accordion and keeping up with the changing dynamics all the while. “I feel like I’m in the act,” he says.
Bufano, who also tutors Berklee students, isn’t a fan of the synthesized pop music that some circuses are using now and has been sticking to smaller organizations, such as Circus Smirkus, Bindlestiff, and Big Apple, that still favor his brand of old-style Eastern European-influenced tunes. But it’s not as if his musicians aren’t into expanding their horizons. “Everyone in the band has learned to juggle,” he says. “In the circus it's just like a survival skill.”
Saturday, February 21
Dennen Isn’t Afraid to Show His Roots
Brett Dennen Serves up Pop-Soul with Spirit
at the Paradise Rock Club, Boston, MA
Phone: (617) 562-8800
By Jonathan Perry
Globe Correspondent / February 17, 2009
Right smack in the middle of “Ain’t Gonna Lose You,” the first and best song Brett Dennen eased into at the Paradise Rock Club Saturday night, the singer-songwriter suddenly&as if cosmically struck by their soulful similarity - sprinkled in a few lines plumbed from Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You too Long” and both “Wavelength” and “Crazy Love” by Van Morrison.
It was a telling moment in a sold-out show full of them. Those musical reference points&deliberate declarations put on early public display by a 29-year-old singer-songwriter from Northern California who wasn’t even born when those tunes were written&signified an allegiance to an earlier era, and a pair of artists closely identified with two watershed pop movements: ‘60s soul and ‘70s singer-songwriter pop.
With a supple four-piece band, and a passel of mellow, midtempo groovers (“San Francisco” one of the breezy best among them) and Afro-beat inflected funk-lite jams (“Darlin’ ”) mostly culled from his latest album, “Hope for the Hopeless,” Dennen’s approach hewed far closer to the latter influence. There was, however, less of the bittersweet bite or introspective depth that defined Morrison or emotionally trenchant ‘70s contemporaries such as Cat Stevens and Joni Mitchell.
Instead, the barefoot, genial Dennen came across like the latest in a lengthening line of mild-mannered, jelly-legged performers such as John Mayer, Jason Mraz, and Damien Rice&the aural equivalent of a date movie. Dennen also seemed to play hardly any guitar, despite having both an electric and an acoustic&a prop? a security blanket?₼hung around him for the duration of the two-hour show.
What did set Dennen apart from those performers was his voice. It was a burnished, honeyed instrument with shades of chestnut and auburn whose coloring matched the tousle of red hair that sat, meticulously shaggy, atop the singer’s improbable 6-foot-4-inch frame. It lent even slight songs like “Closer to You” an element of elegant longing, and a hint of Billie Holiday around the edges. Not surprisingly then, the best moments were the quieter, subtler ones.
It was Valentine’s Day, and so romance was in the air as well as the songs. Ultimately, Dennen’s goofy persona and silly pantomimes&urging people to propose to each other; wrapping a kerchief around his head like a headband; and, finally, covering his eyes as if blind, with arms outstretched on the encore closer, “The One Who Loves You the Most”&made the evening feel like a romantic comedy, complete with mushy ending.
Singer-songwriter Angel Taylor, who joined Dennen onstage during a spirited encore reading of his “Southbound Train,” opened with a 30-minute set of folk-pop accented by piano and acoustic guitar that was as earnest as it was unmemorable.
Sound Off
On Our Minds and on Our Playlists
By James Reed
Globe Staff / February 13, 2009
We can now report that Liz Phair has officially taken the last exit out of “Guyville.” The one-time indie-rock queen of the ‘med work since going mainstream pop in 2003. Now comes the news that she’ll be in an ad campaign for Banana Republic. Because hey, when you think of $ 275 cashmere cardigans, you think of Liz Phair, right?
It’s not surprising anymore when a beloved rocker peddles high-end goods and services. After cringing through the Carnival Cruise Line commercial featuring Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life” a few years ago, we should be used to it by now. (Iggy’s latest soul-crushing commercial is for Swiftcover car insurance, by the way.)
But the stakes are higher when it’s an artist we perceive to be free of corporate trappings. Chan Marshall (a.k.a. Cat Power), herself a former indie “it” girl who’s morphed into a velvety soul singer, is the latest example. Marshall covers (rather well) David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” in a recent commercial meant to rev up interest in the new Lincoln MKS luxury car.
Fans were divided in their online reactions, with some understanding a girl’s gotta work and just as many wishing she could make a living in a less compromising manner. Even more surprising: Sometimes the fans just want to enjoy the music, regardless of how it’s used.
“I’d love to hear the whole song, but I can’t,” a reader groused on Stereogum about Marshall’s Lincoln ad. “And I’m stuck with that . . . commercial for a car that only gets 19 miles a gallon.”