Review: Maceo Parker at the Morris Center
It was a bittersweet goodbye at the final performance of the 2011 Music Festival, a later-than-usual 10:30 p.m. performance by funk legend Maceo Parker. There might have been more time spent looking back on the highs and lows of the last 17 days, but it’s a good thing there wasn’t because the crowd was there…
Review: Salif Keita
As regular readers will know, I was bitten by the Afropop bug a few years ago at the Savannah Music Festival and haven’t really been the same since. Once bitten, there’s no going back — the music is so rich, so playful, so complex yet so effortless, and so fun that nothing else quite does…
Arthur, Win Win, Hanna
ARTHUR **1/2 Here’s the dirty secret about 1981’s Arthur: It’s no classic. While a gargantuan box office hit and a double Oscar winner, it hasn’t exactly entered the annals as an equal compatriot of, say, Some Like It Hot or Annie Hall — in retrospect, this likable lark wasn’t even the funniest film of its…
Review: James Hunter/Allen Toussaint
My favorite thing about the Savannah Music Festival is how every year I’m turned on to an artist I’d never heard of before, one who simply blows my socks off and converts me into a major “I’m so going to download their music as soon as I get home” fan for life. In 2009, for…
Review: ‘Death Cell Memoirs of an Extraterrestrial’
If you didn’t catch Death Cell Memoirs of an Extraterrestrial Tuesday night at the Lucas Theatre, “what was it all about?” would be a valid question. Well, I saw it. And I still can’t tell you. At the risk of sounding like some uncultured boob in a provincial town, I didn’t see much difference between…
Sunday sales compromise
Editor, I’m writing in response to the article “The Right to Choose Booze” by Patrick Rodgers, published Feb. 22. What a breath of fresh air it is to scroll through news and find an objective article on a much heated debate in the state of Georgia, the prohibition of alcohol package sales on Sunday. It…
Don’t be like Kathy. Vote for the Best of Savannah!
I’m happy to announce that online voting is now open for our annual “Best of Savannah” Readers Poll. Ours is the original and still best such competition in town, despite the fact that many other local publications have begun their own similar competitions, in which many of the “winners” seem – well, a little too…
Gail Collins: Call feminism ‘Fred’
Author and New York Times columnist Gail Collins knows quite a lot about the achievements of women, and in her last several books she’s created a social history for several hundred years worth of evolving social mores and shattered glass ceilings. Her most recent book, When Everything Changed, was critically acclaimed as both historically poignant…
Sol searching
I watched for some months as the menu at Sol has been coaxed into its current form. Now Sol has grown into its first–day–of–school baggy, rolled–leg jeans. This new fit is like a glove, playing to strengths of the kitchen and to the casual and eclectic vision of its new(ish) owner, Andrea Johnson. Let’s start…
Pre-Prohibition cocktails
“Mixing good drinks deftly and easily is a skill that not only affords a host a fine sense of accomplishment but gives guests a great deal of pleasure. It is a skill worth having, one that enhances hospitality and can make jovial a gathering of any size.” – House and Garden’s Drink Guide, 1973 That…
Drug abuse
Capital punishment in Georgia is facing a serious problem — not necessarily on moral grounds, but on practical ones. The state no longer has access to the drugs it needs to carry out executions. Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court decided not to hear several appeals filed by Troy Davis’ defense team, closing what appears…
Mark your calendar: French films at AASU
Spring is hopping at Armstrong Atlantic State University, which begins its busiest month of the year with this weekend’s Francophone Film Festival. I’ll admit I had to look up the word Francophone – it essentially means “in the French language,” and that seems as good a description as any for the five movies screen April…
Hope For Agoldensummer and more
HOPE FOR AGOLDENSUMMER At 8 p.m. Thursday, April 7 The Sentient Bean, 13 E. Park Ave. Athens keeps turning ‘em out. If there’s one creative thread that runs through Georgia’s university city, it’s a thread of religious adherence to non-conformity. Hope For Agoldensummer, for instance, is a rootsy acoustic trio that doesn’t sound a whole…
Burden of proof
Officers were called to a Southside apartment complex after reports of a gun shot. When the officers arrived on the scene, they spoke with a woman who said that she woke up to a loud bang and the sound of broken glass. When she turned on the light, she saw a hole in her bedroom…
‘There’s always hope in it’
One of the cornerstones of hardscrabble Chicago blues is the harmonica. It’s an integral part of the electric blues framework, like the violin in a proper orchestra. Blues harp, of course, goes all the way back to the rural South, before there was electricity in every home, before the Delta players got all plugged in…
Cotton is King
James Cotton is the reigning monarch of the blues harmonica players. Born in 1935 in tiny Tunica, Miss., he was, as a young boy, tutored by none other than Sonny Boy Williamson in rural Arkansas. By the early 1950s Cotton was blowing harp in Howlin’ Wolf’s band, and cutting records under his own name for…
Bluegrass on the Rize
The 1970s saw the debut of a new generation of bluegrass musicians, young people weaned on the masters but dedicated to exploring different ways of playing the acoustic music of Appalachia. There were the Dillards from Missouri and California, there was New Grass Revival from Kentucky and, from the burgeoning hippie bohemia of Boulder, Colorado…
SMF: A few more sure things
ALLEN TOUSSAINT BAND At 7:30 p.m. April 7, Trustees Theater Songwriter, pianist, producer and arranger Allen Toussaint has been one of the most influential figures in New Orleans R&B for more than 45 years; his innate understanding of the threads that hold funk and jazz together has resulted in many, many classic records – some…
Bach to the future
Her vibrant, emotionally-charged 2007 recording of Bach’s The Goldberg Variations made Simone Dinnerstein an instant success in the classical music world. Dinnerstein, who raised the money herself to pay for the recording sessions, subsequently leasing the tapes to Telarc Records, was 34 at the time, and had been playing piano since the age of 7.…
Review: Band of Horses
“Hi, we’re Band of Horses. We’re gonna play some songs for ya.” With that low-key introduction, Ben Bridwell began what was probably the most musically satisfying concert the Johnny Mercer Theatre has heard in years. Band of Horses’ hybrid rock ‘n’ roll – a sort of electric Americana with country-tinged harmonies and sweeping U2 grandeur…
