Hampton Phish – 2009 Hampton, VA Phish Video and Audio Clips

Welcome back to JamBase’s baker’s dozen to the bright lights of the music world. Last time we heard from Big Light.

While it’s hard to tear one’s attention away from the heavy breathing, gospel-tinged, rising hemline leader of Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, any red blooded rock ‘n’ roll fanatic will likely snap their head around to guitarist Scott Tournet. His playing demands one’s focus, the sort of beefy, fast streaming, foot-on-the-amp style that made ears prick up when a young Marc Ford joined The Black Crowes in 1992. There’s also more than a touch of genuine guitar heroes like the young Eric Clapton and Rory Gallagher, not to mention modern innovators like Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien and Nels Cline, in Tournet, who provides a lot of the muscle in the Nocturnals, where he’s increasingly savvy about the ways of pop-rock picking.

However, for a real dose of contemporized denim ‘n’ suede rock one needs to explore Tournet’s other labor of love Blues & Lasers, where he’s joined by fellow Nocturnals guitarist Benny Yurco and the pair shows off what fine, fine songwriters and singers they are in addition to the smiling shredding throughout. With no disrespect intended towards his work with Potter, it’s in Blues & Lasers that one recognizes what a heavy hitter Tournet is, a craftsmanship-minded musician with a slippery, gently adventurous edge who writes the kind of songs Thin Lizzy and Robin Trower would have killed to pen back in the day. Blues & Lasers’ sophomore album, After All We’re Only Human, released in May, is a commanding set that establishes the group in a very tangible, exciting way. It’s a far cry from the latest self-titled Grace and the Nocturnals album, showcasing Tournet and Yurco’s grittier, free-flight sides in a wholly satisfying way. Like Tournet himself, it smacks of great things to come while being perfectly freakin’ tasty in the here & now. (Dennis Cook)

Here’s what Scott had to say to our inquiries.

Scott Tournet with Blues & Lasers

Instrument of choice: voice, pen, guitar, harmonica, effects, noise, soul

1. Great music rarely happens without
Honesty to yourself. The music or lyrics themselves don’t need to be specifically “honest” though. Look at Zappa or Townes Van Zandt. They both made shit up, but they were completely honest to their vision and art.

2. The first album I bought was
The Greatest American Hero theme songhere…lol…7″ vinyl. I’d put my cape on and sing along until one day my whole family caught me doing it. I was mortified – my first encounter with “public opinion”.

3. The last song or album to really flip my wig was
It’s been out for a while but Spiritualized Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space really got me. That’s the kind of album I continue to aspire to make.

4. When I was a kid I wanted to grow up to be
A cowboy or a professional baseball player. Got to have options.

5. My favorite sort of gig is
Headlining in a theater that holds anywhere from 500-3,000 people. The sound is great, the audience all have good enough seats. You get to play for as long as you want. Love it.

6. One thing I wish people knew about me is
Hmmmsome people already know, but I hope that in the next few years more people will find out that I’m more than just a guitarist. I feel honored that people listen to any music that I’m a part of, but I really want more people hear my songs/lyrics. I used to only want to be a guitarist, but in the past 8 years or so I’ve had a burning desire to be heard as a songwriter/lyricist. Within my musicianship, I hope more people can hear that there’s more going on than just blues rock/classic rock. I get lumped in that vein a lot and a lot of my looping, noise, sheets of sound stuff, harmonica, lap steel, etc. gets overlooked.

7. I love the sound of
Harmony

8. One day I hope to make an album as fantastic as
Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland. Hendrix was my first love and I feel a very, very strong kinship with him. The mainstream just thinks of Hendrix as this wild/drug taking guy who played the guitar with his teeth and played the “Star Spangled Banner” at Woodstock. He was so much more than that. Jimi was so overlooked as a singer/songwriter/lyricist/producer. Electric Ladyland has everything – great songs, dreamy moods, amazing/ahead of its time production, genius guitar playing, tasteful/eccentric instrumentation, etc, etc.

9. The best meal I ever had on tour was at
The catering at the Greek Theatre. The chef is Italian and she cooked up incredible pasta with red meat sauce and garlic bread, salad and the works. And then came the cheesecake. Out of this world. I was still burping during the show.

10. I always find the coolest audiences in
The south. People down south are not afraid to get down. I love it.

11. The worst habit I’ve picked up being on the road all the time is
Losing track of the days and the place that I’m in. Also stopping all communication with my friends and family. I usually lose my cell phone halfway through tour.

12. The Beatles or the Stones? Por que?
The Eagles. They can fly.

13. The craziest thing I ever saw was
Two trannies and a midget…I’ll leave the rest to imagination.

Blues & Lasers Tour Dates :: Blues & Lasers News :: Blues & Lasers Concert Reviews

Grace Potter and the Nocturnals Tour Dates :: Grace Potter and the Nocturnals News :: Grace Potter and the Nocturnals Concert Reviews

JamBase | Dynamite With A Laser Beam
Go See Live Music!

By: Dennis Cook

Matthew Houck by Sebastian Mynarski

Hard to place but unmistakable, there’s a profound resonance to the music of Phosphorescent, the recording moniker of Matthew Houck. With tendrils reaching back to the golden West Coast ’70s rock explosion, the grounded feel of classic Nashville, and further afield into the timeless elsewhere of Megafaun, Hiss Golden Messenger and other slippery contemporaries, Phosphorescent is deep stuff yet hardly unapproachable. One of the first descriptions I hit on for Houck’s work was that it had “a stratospheric reach that suggests a new fangled kind of country-gospel that just might reach all the black clad sad sacks who obsessively listen to Elliott Smith and Iron & Wine” (see rest of review here).

In the years since that impression his music has grown simultaneously denser and more accessible – a mighty rare dichotomy that creates an appealing push-pull for the listener, who’s made comfortable and oddly uncomfortable by turns. One floats along his stream only to bump into truthful logs and other psyche poking flotsam. Put another way, Houck makes you hum AND think, two things he excels at on Here’s To Taking It Easy (released May 11 on Dead Oceans). Abetted by his touring band – Scott Stapleton (piano), Jeffrey Bailey (bass), Christopher Marine (drums), Jesse Anderson Ainslie (guitar) and Ricky Ray Jackson (pedal steel) – the new album possesses an ease and gently tugging forward motion befitting the title, but also dustier, less polite elements than the indie rock ghetto Houck and his crew are often lumped into. Your average skinny jean wearing mope isn’t capable of pulling off lines like, “If I’m talking to you, mister, then you better be writing it down/ If you’re talking to me like that you best be quickly walking away/ I can’t stand for none of this bullshit/ I came here to play.”

A few more clues to the band’s ethos and wit come from their MySpace page, which contains the slogan “Turn it On. Turn It Up. Turn Me Loose” and the description “Experimental / 2-step / Gospel.” These are the same guys who cut one of the finest tribute albums of the past decade last year, To Willie (JamBase review), a confident saunter through the Willie Nelson catalog that never genuflects too deeply and was good enough to attract the attention of the Redheaded Stranger himself, who invited them to play last year’s Farm Aid. Seeing Houck on the same stage as Willie, Neil Young, Jeff Tweedy and the other big guns behind Farm Aid just made perfect sense. That’s the strata this guy operates in, steadily turning out one quality album after another and earning his stripes in barrooms and concert halls worldwide.

JamBase had the good fortune to snag a few minutes of Matthew Houck’s time while he and his band were waiting on a flat tire. The show must go on but sometimes one does need a fresh wheel to make it happen.

JamBase: The new album has such a great title. It’s one of those cool phrases that one wonders how nobody else got to it before you.

Matthew Houck: You’re right [laughs]. I like it, too.

JamBase: It immediately, before you’ve heard a note, settles your brain into a place, and titles don’t always do that. Often they’re puzzles to be unlocked and this is a handshake that puts you at ease before you put the needle down.

Matthew Houck: I’m really glad it comes across like that because that was the title from the beginning. It was the very first thing I wrote down even before we started recording these songs. But you know how these things go, when it came to actually title this record after it was all done I, of course, spent a couple of days knocking around different themes present on the album thinking the very first thing I wrote down couldn’t possibly be the title of the album. But as it turns out, there was no question, that’s the title.

Phosphorescent Band by Miss Martha Jewelle

It situates you right away in a mindset that says this is not to be rushed; it’s to be eased into. In ways you’ve modernized the vibe of early Crosby, Stills & Nash or solo Paul Simon. You’ve found that groove but in a contemporary, non-derivative way.

There’s nothing I dislike more than throwback, regurgitated, genre-specific exercises, where people write songs like they were written in the 1920s or something. There was a specific effort – I produced it and did a lot of the engineering – to study all those records from the late 70s/early 80s. Those records have a sonic quality that’s absent from most records today, and I thought it’d be a good thing to aim for that sound, though obviously without access to all that gear.

One of the things you nail is you can actually hear the instrumentation on this album, which is something that’s been lost in much modern production, which tends to blur sounds into one mass. It’s pleasing to hear the crack of a snare drum or someone shaking bells or string strikes. It often gets shorthanded as ‘warmth’ but I don’t think that’s all that it is.

Exactly. It’s not actually warmth. I’ve gotten really enamored with engineering and the way you capture sounds. It does get shorthanded a lot as warmth but it’s not. It’s hard to explain, but there’s a separation of things and an expansion of each one of those things so they fill up the space.

I think it’s a word people are wary to use, but there’s a grandeur to those records that’s largely missing from rock ‘n’ roll these days.

I totally agree, and there’s something special about those records. There was one album I referenced a lot when thinking of the sonic universe of [Here's To Taking It Easy], and that’s Ron Wood’s [I've Got My Own Album To Do]. It is a monster of a record. There’s parts of it where the only that’s happening is an acoustic guitar, a bass and maybe a drummer pattering away, but that’s it, just three instruments, yet somehow it sounds massive. How they were able to do that is a super fascinating trick to me right now.

It’s a room filling sound, and there’s a sense of place. The music doesn’t seem disengaged from the world, it’s made somewhere tangible, which is strikingly different to modern production which makes music sound like it was done in a cleanroom. Where did you record Here’s To Taking It Easy?

We recorded the whole record with the exception of “Hej, Me I’m Light” as a band in three days at Headgear Studios in Brooklyn with this guy Alex Lipson (The Jealous Girlfriends) engineering. So, we tracked everything live and I took those tracks to my studio and used those sessions as sort of blank tape to build the actual record. So, they got manipulated and recorded over and worked on for about six months.

One thing you’ve always done well, and again on this record, is your use of the human voice. You seem to be interested in the potential of what you and others can do with vocals. You play with your voice in interesting ways and I don’t think you have a sound, per se.

Phosphorescent live

You don’t think so? I disagree. I think the human voice thing has been the common thread – to me, anyway – that makes a Phosphorescent record a Phosphorescent record.

Maybe what I mean is say as much as I love Bon Iver, a lot of the time he’s hitting one groove, whereas I think you have a lot more variety even as distinctive as your vocals are.

Sure, I can agree with that, and I think it’s only gonna get a little more diverse given the new songs that have been popping out. But I do think the vocals are the common thread to all Phosphorescent songs. They do a lot of different things to songs. They may not exactly go together from record to record but the singing is a link.

With so many artists it’s really easy to trace their lineage – this band plus this songwriter plus this band equals the sum total. I dig that I can’t do that with you.

For me, it’s really hard to trace things backwards like that. I’m not aware of any specific influences from inside [myself]. I’m drawn to music that has that one little extra thing inside it. Unique isn’t the word because uniqueness isn’t that important, but heart or something. You can just kinda tell when something’s doing that one extra thing.

You frequently capture emotion and heartfelt intent on tape. It’s clear through your singing and the general atmosphere of your music that “one extra thing” is present. It’s ineffable but it’s certainly tangible and often most apparently in your vocals.

I think I’ve learned a lot about singing over the years. At some point, even as much as you’ve stubbornly ignored it, you learn ways to control your voice and little techniques from playing and touring so much.

However, your vocal style and production in general presents challenges to adapting the songs to the live setting.

There’s no challenge because by and large we let go of the recorded versions and the live versions are what they are. Very rarely do we even try to reproduce something from a record. When I’d tour solo there’s only so much you can do by yourself, so I’d fall back to the core and play with various effects pedals and the like. But now with this band – who are seriously some of the best musicians alive, in my opinion – we generally toss the recorded versions aside and just see what we can do live. It’s a moment and we’re in it.

Phosphorescent performs tonight at the Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco with J Tillman and Little Wings. Find full Phosphorescent tour dates here.

Phosphorescent Tour Dates :: Phosphorescent News :: Phosphorescent Concert Reviews

JamBase | Here, Taking It Easy
Go See Live Music!

By: Ron Hart

Marco by Michael Benevento

Few musicians have defined the state of piano jazz in the 21st century quite like Marco Benevento. Whether alongside longtime partner drummer Joe Russo as the Benevento/Russo Duo, as the leader of his own trio with bassist Reed Mathis and drummer Andrew Barr or playing in such groups as Garage A Trois or, most recently, as the new member of The Slip spinoff Surprise Me Mr. Davis, this 32-year-old native of North Jersey enjoys an ample playing field by which to manipulate is uncanny arsenal of analog and digital keyboards.

Between The Needles and Nightfall is Benevento’s third solo album in three years, and stands tall as the finest work he has created under his own name to date. Recorded at Trout Recording in the artist’s adopted home of Brooklyn, NY, Between The Needles was helmed by an ad-hoc crew of prominent studio wizards – Bryce Goggin (Pavement, Swans, Ramones, Luna), Mell Dettmer (Sunn O))), Eyvind Kang), Jesse Lauter (Low Anthem, Elvis Perkins) and Vid Cousins (Amon Tobin, Kid Koala) – each of whom helped Benevento to successfully envision his fusion of electro-enhanced major-chord jazz for baby grand piano treated by a cornucopia of guitar pick-ups, effects pedals and found toys.

Currently Benevento is in the midst of a whirlwind summer tour that includes dates with Surprise Me Mr. Davis in the Pacific Northwest, a pair of NY area gigs with Garage A Trois (as well as an appearance at this year’s Outside Lands Festival), and two exciting shows for the Celebrate Brooklyn! Concert Series in Prospect Park, including playing a key role in the performance of Miles Davis’ 1969 voodoo classic Bitches Brew alongside such city jazz greats as James Blood Ulmer, DJ Logic, Lonnie Plaxico, Cindy Blackman and the Mike Stern Band in late June and an August date that finds his trio performing a live score to Roger Corman’s 1960 horror classic The House of Usher. However, Mr. B was kind enough to take a few minutes out of his busy schedule to talk with JamBase about the making of Between The Needles and Nightfall, joining Surprise Me, covering Amy Winehouse, and skateboarding to Men At Work.

JamBase: How does it feel to be one-fifth of a traditional rock band like Surprise Me Mr. Davis as opposed to being the leader of your own group like your trio?

Marco Benevento: It’s great. I love playing the role of being just the keyboardist in a band, trying to come up with just cool, simple parts for a song. Not having to be the leader definitely is a pretty nice relief.
JamBase: How democratic is SMMD in terms of creating the music?

Marco Benevento: Everyone pitches in and has their voices heard, but primarily Nathan [Moore] and Brad [Barr] do most of the writing.

How long have you known the guys in The Slip?

Man, I’ve known those guys and jammed with them since ’95.

Do you have a favorite memory of jamming with the Barrs prior to joining Surprise Me Mr. Davis?

One time we were out on tour and we got stuck in a snowstorm in Flagstaff, Arizona. We got snowed in at our friend Brooke’s place and we just played music in this A-frame house until the sun came up. That was in February or March of 2000. It was really fun.

Between The Needles and Nightfall is a very big-sounding record, with a lot of major chords and huge pop melodies, particularly for the baby grand piano. What inspired you to go in this direction?

Benevento by Mike DiDonna

I think just years of figuring it out; years of playing and touring and finally opening up the bottle that’s been shaken up. I’ve always wanted to play with a bass player and a drummer, and I always wanted to sit behind the piano and try to do more piano stuff. Over the last three years and over the last three records, I’ve been getting a lot better at ProTools, working in the studio in my house, and composing, of course. It all cumulated to this point of a healthy blend of rock and jazz and big beats and quieter songs. Even Reed Mathis, the bass player, said that this was his favorite trio record that we’ve made.

What albums were you listening to at the time of recording Between The Needles and Nightfall?

I was listening to this record called Flow Motion by the group Can. That record I was really digging a lot. That record has a lot of songs that are built from loops. I was also listening to a lot of relentless, groove-oriented songs where it starts and you immediately like it and it has a nice tempo and you’re bouncing with it and barely noticing what’s going by. That was what I felt I did on a couple of the tracks on this new album. I just got into this [mindset of] “let the music play” and don’t worry about a studio cut or worry about making it sound tight, just play it. There were a lot of free-for-alls on this record. There are a lot of newer bands like Grizzly Bear that I’ve been digging lately. I’m still very much tried and true with The Beatles as well. You always notice something new with The Beatles every year it seems. I’m a big fan of The Black Keys; I like Dan Auerbach, the guitarist, a lot. And the guys and me, we’ve been listening to a lot of Men At Work lately as well. I grew up in that timeframe. I was born in 1977, so I did a lot of skateboarding and listening to Men At Work on my Walkman while I skated. And Herbie Hancock as well; “Rockit” [with] that Linn drum sound always did it for me. I’ve also been listening to more electronic bands lately as well, like this band called Chromeo. They’re pretty cool. I like LCD Soundsystem a bit. Squarepusher blows me away, but that’s sort of a given I guess. He’s a big name around everybody. But I could still afford to be turned onto more electronic music, though.

Following up on your 2009 LP of covers, Me Not Me, you chose to take on only one interpretation of someone else’s work for Between The Needles and Nightfall. What made you go with Amy Winehouse’s “You Know I’m No Good”?

I just love the tune, man; I love the soul of it. I’m a big fan of a lot of the Motown stuff and Ray Charles and Wilson Pickett and Little Richard, and I feel like the song stems from that trajectory. Amy’s got a great voice. I really like her voice a lot, and it lends itself to the piano really fantastically. It’s really easy to play; it almost sounds like a Duke Ellington/Medeski, Martin and Wood kind of hybrid. Playing it live is a real treat, too. People really get into it.

Of all the covers you have done over the years, which one was the most difficult one to get right?

Well, you know, they all make me work to get it right – from the simplest ones to the hardest ones. But I’d say one of the more involved covers that we play is “Seems So Long Ago, Nancy” by Leonard Cohen. There’s a lot of changes and there’s a lot of chords in it. And we play it in more of a jazz type feel where I improvise over the changes and stuff. That’s the one that is still hard to this day even though we’ve been playing it for like ten years.

How did you come up with the idea of rigging your baby grand with guitar pickups?

Benevento by Rob Chapman

I just had one in my house from a tour, and they sorta sucked for guitars so we never used them onstage. I had one lying around and was planning for a piano trio tour and thinking, “Oh good, I could just fly and play pianos and that’s it.” And I thought about how all these demos that I had been making had reverb and effects on the piano and was wondering how I was going to do that for the stage. So, I stuck that guitar pickup on the inside of the piano and ran it into the amp that I have and it was that simple. Then I was like, “Okay, I can put distortion pedals and all these things in between before it gets to the amp.” For the last three years I’ve been trying to dial that in. It’s a hard thing to do. It’s an acoustic instrument and it’s pretty wild with loud drums right next to it. But at the same time, it’s a really attractive thing. What’s really nice is running the piano through tremolo, especially on this amp that I have. It’s this really nice old amp that has a tremolo on it that’s like buttah.

You are going to be scoring a screening of House of Usher at the Prospect Park bandshell in Brooklyn later this summer. How are you going to go about it?

I’m going to go wherever the film takes me. I’m also going to see if there are any original songs that I’ve already written that could work in there and maybe even use Between The Needles and Nightfall as a soundtrack to the movie if I could. It would be pretty fun to try to dial some of that stuff into it. I’ve also been writing new music for it and setting up sound effects and whatnot.

You just performed Bitches Brew with that phenomenal supergroup in Prospect Park recently. Did you play the role of Joe Zawinul or Chick Corea?

I actually tried to do both. There was only one keyboardist so I had to make it sound like two or three. Nevertheless, to be amongst those incredible musicians was a true honor.

Marco Benevento Tour Dates :: Marco Benevento News :: Marco Benevento Concert Reviews

JamBase | Skating The Edge
Go See Live Music!