Chad Berndtson

Sometime in the last two years—there’s no exact date, but the shows that birthed Live at Tonic are probably a good place to start the discussion—Marco Benevento became a brand unto himself. Given the number of hats he wears, who’s to say what group, configuration or collaboration is his number one priority—and does he have to have just one?—but we’re past the point where any of Benevento’s eponymous groups is a mere Benevento-Russo Duo side project. That “B” in “Marco B”? Could just as easily stand for “bandleader,” dude.

[All Photos by Jeremy Gordon]

In his Benevento trio shows, which have one and soon two-full length albums from which to draw a panorama of core material, Benevento’s main focus is piano. There is, of course, the requisite sampling of other keyboard effects and toys for good measure, but the emphasis isn’t on creating an effects-driven soundscape so much as it is song-based: wrapping piano improvisation around a core melody and milking that melody for endless possibilities.

If there was anything discouraging about Benevento’s headlining set at Drom on Saturday, it was brevity: the whole thing was over and done with in a swift, encore-less hour-and-twenty. It wasn’t the band’s fault (Marco’s publicist, Kevin Calabro of Hyena Records, advises Hidden Track the band was originally told it could play at least another half hour, til 11:30 p.m., then was swiftly denied an encore right at 11 as Drom turned into a dance club). But it left little time to savor what Benevento, Jon Fishman and Reid Mathis had cooked up so much as absorb it like a laser beam to the head: tight and sinewy jams passing in blurs, and dazzling virtuosity to spare.

READ ON for more of Chad’s thoughts and Jeremy’s photos…

We’ve always had a soft spot for Coheed & Cambria, which has garnered a legion of fans over the years as it continues to top itself with prog/alt concept record

I’m no great expert on groovy jamband electronica or the various strains of breakbeat, but what I like most about EOTO—the entrancing and quite versatile project from former String Cheese

If you’re lucky enough to live in live music strongholds like New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Boston or Chicago, there’s something good to go to literally every night of the week. It isn’t always the national headliners, of course, or indie-blog buzz acts that make the rounds, either—it’s the tireless musicians who form the backbone of every local music community and the tireless music hounds who come out to see them week after week.

With that in mind, welcome to Soul of the City, where we’ll be checking in on city-specific scenes and getting the lay of the live music land from local correspondents from time to time. To kick things off, here are a few dispatches from the unslept city. If you want to wax on a bit about your local music scene—NYC or otherwise—and give us a scribbler’s tour of local haunts, drop Chad a line at cberndtson[at]gmail[dot]com.

Shayni Rae’s Truckstop (Mondays at the National Underground, Lower East Side)

I first heard Kevn Kinney the same way a lot of folks in the Northeast do: through his longstanding association with Warren Haynes and other heavyweights of the jam scene. His catalog of honky-tonk-ready, folk-blues nuggets includes at least one great (and regionally iconic) song, Straight to Hell, and every time you see him you’re hard pressed to figure out why he’s a well-known quantity in the southeast but nowhere else.

Anyway, Kinney’s in New York often—he splits his time between the Big Apple and Atlanta—and apart from one-offs, opening slots and scooting back down South for gigs with Drivin ‘n’ Cryin’ and others, he holds it down every Monday night with the weekly (and recently revived) honky-tonk series Shayni Rae’s Truckstop. The titular Shayni Rae, of course, is Kinney’s wife, and the National Underground is a kind Houston Street nook, co-owned by Gavin DeGraw and his brother Joey.

This, friends, is a greasy slice of Monday night country-soul nourishment, and apart from the regular contributors, which include Kinney, drummer Anton Fier, and the wily Madison Square Gardeners, the Truckstop has played host to impromptu appearances from Norah Jones, Audley Freed, Cat Popper, Gov’t Mule’s Andy Hess, and Gavin himself, and members of the Drive-By Truckers and other big guns have also been spotted there. Good scene. Sob into your beer a bit but come out feeling better than when you went in.

READ ON for more of the debut edition of Soul of the City…

There’s only one certainty in the realm of vault material released by Warren Haynes and the Gov’t Mule camp: we don’t know when any of it will see the light of day, but there will be more—and eventually, we’ll get it all.

With so many projects going on at once—Haynes is among everything else an idea man—there’s been a number of false starts for various promised projects (we’re still waiting for the official releases, for example, of those zany, jazz-rock blowouts the Mule cut with John Scofield in Georgia in 1999). But patience is rewarded, and if Haynes and his producers have painted themselves into a corner by calling this chronicle of the 2006 Christmas Jam Vol. 8 — now you’ve teed us up for Vols. 3-7, Mr. Haynes—we know they’ll get ’round to it eventually. What fun it must be to be a point person in the Mule archives. READ ON for more on this DVD…

When you’re onsite at a festival as delectably lively as the Gathering of the Vibes, inevitably a few cool trees get lost in the broad expanse of the forest. With