Chad Berndtson

We at Hidden Track have grown rather fond of Cornmeal, the Chicago jam-grass quintet that doesn’t seem to have a problem being called “jamgrass” or “jamband bluegrass” even though the terms are useful only as loose groupers. Fact is, though, if you dig a little deeper with Cornmeal, you hear plenty of bluegrass, roots and old-time, sure, but also a mischievous streak that recalls forebears like New Grass Revival in the way that they draw in everything from country and jazz to funk and blues without quite embracing any one of those idioms. There’s a lot to grab onto.

The band’s actually been around for nine years, but it took at least half that time to reach a stabilized lineup, and it’s only in the past two or three, since word got out from their Midwest fan strongholds and swept the festival circuit, that Cornmeal has attracted national attention. They’re still an unknown quantity in much of the country, although bassist Chris Gangi says the band does a little better every time it returns to developing pockets of fans in the northeast, southeast and west coast.

Hidden Track caught up with Gangi to hear about what’s on Cornmeal’s radar and how he, fiddle player Allie Kral, guitarist Kris Nowak, drummer JP Nowak and banjoist Dave Burlingame plan to keep striking while they have the momentum.

HIDDEN TRACK: So where am I finding you today?

CHRIS GANGI: I’m actually home at the moment, for about a day or two before we go back out again. It’s easy in Chicago to catch a day at home, and a lot of times we’ll bypass extended tours when we’re in the Midwest so we can make sure we get a few days off. When the band started out, that’s just what made sense expense-wise — we could go out for stretches and then come back home and save our jobs.

READ ON for more of Chad’s interview with Chris from Cornmeal…

Wilco’s a peculiar musical addiction: most of their songs don’t quite bowl you over as much as sneak up on you, and you’re hooked long before you know it. On what, exactly? It’s different for everyone, but is some variation on songs and a core sound that are an uneasily balanced dichotomy: pastoral melodies that give way to apocalyptic sounding guitar squalls; plangent pop and alt-country tunes that find themselves torn open to reveal molten jams and psychedelic cores churning beneath. Jeff Tweedy seems to wear all that on his face: a goofy grin has a way of morphing into a teeth-baring growl, a bemused smile into a terrified caterwaul. His band mates seem like nice enough chaps. They also give no quarter when there’s rocking to be done.

You Never Know – Wilco w/ Feist and Ed Droste

Wilco (The Album) is Wilco’s latest, and like most Wilco albums grows on you insistently. There’s nothing on it to match 2004’s A Ghost Is Born (to these ears, the band’s masterpiece, indulgences and all), although the gems, such as the gorgeous One Wing and the stormy, head-splitting Bull Black Nova, have definitely revealed themselves. Wilco mined heavily from the new record on a laid back, groovy, immensely satisfying two-plus hours at the home of the Cyclones in Brooklyn: a show that took some time to get going – sluggish band and sluggish crowd alike – but once it hit its stride, made for that classic Wilco balance of mess and finesse.

I maintain – and it’s hardly a unique opinion – that hiring Nels Cline is the best decision Tweedy’s ever made. Cline plays guitar as if it’s an extension of a seizure, his arms and torso shaking as he peels off fuzzy, sheety sounds and hot-toned blasts of guitar noise, dismantling Wilco delicacies like Handshake Drugs and Impossible Germany and forcing them into oblivion, with the rest of the band by now well aware of when to follow him down the rabbit hole. At Keyspan, keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen, especially, was as animated as I’ve ever seen him, tucking all sorts of filigree in behind Cline’s machinations. Tweedy himself was playful and mischievous, spinning his microphone chord, stalking around the stage and making warm banter with a crowd that awoke sometime around that “Germany” and from that point kept up its end, too.

READ ON for more of Chad’s thoughts on Wilco at Keyspan Park…

When Topaz McGarrigle still lived in New York, he was a fixture – in the clubs with Topaz (the band), sitting in all over the place, a general man about town who definitely had a lot to contribute to the city’s thriving jazz-funk and jam scenes. And while it’s not as though Topaz (the man) has faded away, he’s been gone from the Big Apple for about four years now. Consider your correspondent among those who misses the infectious spirit and thrilling improvisation he brought to once-regular, now-occasional Manhattan gigs.

A native Texan, Topaz moved back to the Lone Star state in 2005, and he’s now based in Austin with a revamped band, Mudphonic. Not only is the personnel different from his earlier, jazz-funk-heavy ensembles, but Topaz also added harmonica, guitar and vocals to his own trick bag. He’s no longer “saxophonist Topaz,” at least in the sense of describing everything the man does on record and on stage.

Mudphonic, a six-piece, has a greasier, swampier, more rocking sound than any band Topaz brought on the road in his New York days – as much tethered to roadhouse blues as the jazz-inflected funky stuff on which he made his name. Mudphonic’s debut album, Music for Dorothy, came out in 2008, and while Topaz has kept the band until now a principally regional affair – most tours in the South and Midwest with once-in-a-while forays to San Francisco, New York and other spots – he’s shopping for a booking agent and readying for the next Mudphonic record, as well as more national exposure.

Hidden Track caught up with Topaz in advance of his return to a New York stage tonight at Sullivan Hall. The full Mudphonic won’t be with him; instead, Topaz will play a late show with an all-star band consisting of himself, Joe Russo on drums, Mark “Tewar” Tewarson on guitar (from Mudphonic and also the original Topaz in 1998) and former ulu bassist Justin Wallace. Expect a special guest or two, Topaz warns – the last time he was in New York, over New Year’s Eve, Will Bernard, Eric Kalb and John Popper all made the stage.

HIDDEN TRACK: You’ve been gone from New York about four years, yes?

TOPAZ: It’s been almost four. My wife is from New York, so we get back a couple times a year, and I try to set up a gig or two.

READ ON for the rest of Chad’s conversation with Topaz McGarrigle…

For me, this was the one – a serious, relentlessly energetic Phish concert that rollicked for more than three hours and drew generously on the vibes created by a happy crowd, a gorgeously temperate New England evening, and the assuredness of having spent a week on the road, working out kinks, getting sea legs back, remembering to enjoy one another’s myself onstage.

[All photos by Jeremy Gordon from 6/5]

All four of our beloved Phishermen delivered the goods, and while we’re still far from the point where they feel comfortable (excitable?) enough to take jams deep into the blurry, whirry cosmos, I haven’t seen or heard a better full-length expression of the fairly conservative, songs-first, relax-and-do-your-job well Phish 3.0 yet than what we witnessed at Mansfield last night. The boys were on. They had it. They reined things in where, say, 10 years ago they might have been an exercise in transcendent improvisation, or five years ago they might have been a frayed, sloppy trainwreck, but the crowd was better for it, the vibe was better for it, and the band, well, it’s safe to say it feels like Phish again. “Long live the Phish!” howled a goofy bobber in a Makisupa Police Academy t-shirt, seconds after Phish put the wraps on his apparel’s titular song.

All around, the setlists have been a little oddly paced in the week of shows we’ve seen so far, but maybe that’s a subtle suggestion to throw out old ideas about how a Phish show’s machinery should be oiled. They didn’t exactly lose anybody by opening with a new song (Stealing Time from the Faulty Plan — crisply rendered, if no great shakes) and a relative obscurity from Undermind, the cool, even-keel Nothing. Quite the opposite; when the groovy gallop of Back On the Train set in and had the whole place bobbing along like synchronized pogo, the band had already hit its stride, not yet even a half hour into the first set. From there came balanced moments of familiarity that were briefly, wonderfully toppled with aggressive jamming: a ripping, groovalicious Gotta Jibboo tempered by Page’s calming croon in Lawn Boy, for example, or a Trey solo nugget (Let Me Lie) splayed against Taste; or the laid back snacking of that Makisupa followed by a deceptively easygoing, then full-forced hungry Prince Caspian. Trey had already torched the midsection of Jibboo but it was here where he veered from note-y pointillism to starry-eyed, psychedelic abandon. Simply. Fucking. Gorgeous.

READ ON for more from Chad on last night’s Phish show…

Axe slinger Steve Kimock’s a most curious musical creature, and the only thing I know for sure is that I’ll follow him anywhere. A slight man with an ostensibly unassuming, almost chameleonic way about him, he speaks “guitar” – speaks it fluently, lyrically and intensely, but without the ostentatious stage presence that looks as if, by merely playing a few notes or progressions, he’s trying to wrangle a crazed wolverine or perform emergency surgery. He’s unhurried as hell; you listen on his time, not the other way around, and if you’re patient about things, you get a tremendous reward in the end.

Maybe what’s most appealing about Kimock is that no matter what the context or how spacey his licks, tender or corrosive his tones, or protracted his solos, he somehow exudes a warmth and texture in what he does that prevents it from sounding clinical. Cerebral, yet warm? To these ears, not even Derek Trucks can manage that all the time – virtuosity with candor, dazzling skills with palpable comfort.

Since more or less putting the Steve Kimock Band on hold a few years ago, Kimock’s been doing a little bit of this and that, lending his talents to bands in need (RatDog, for one), forming ad hoc ensembles with old friends and new sparring partners alike, and not quite committing to one thing or another for very long. READ ON for more of Chad’s Steve Kimock Crazy Engine review…

The Allman Brothers Band keeps pushing — gentle nudges here, violent heaves there — and with still four nights left to go in the epic and already legendary 2009 Beacon Theatre residency, calling shows like last night’s a “blowout” just seems so remote. It was a raging inferno and a soulful celebration, capped off by perhaps the greatest version of Les Brers In A Minor yet played by the current Allman Brothers Band lineup.

[Moogis Screenshot by Musichead]

Overall, the third Monday felt almost entirely unpredictable: a comfortably weird and somewhat esoteric setlist that for what its many, many guests connote, also felt just right. The first set was long and cinematic; I’ve heard better Don’t Want You No More > It’s Not My Cross to Bear openers, but the band got right to business with a chugging, dynamic Done Somebody Wrong, complete with good ol’ Thom Doucette blowing crisp and modal harp. Into this song, especially, the ABB’s breathed a lot more life in recent years: a shuffling intro that finally feels like one instead of a random pre-jam, stirring Gregg vocals, and a better jam segment.

From there things erupted: Warren blowing large shotgun shell holes in Can’t Lose What You Never Had, Derek and Ron Holloway (hi Ron!) laying waste to a wrenching Desdemona (to these ears, still the best of the “new” ABB songs), and a mesmerizing walk through the new and unnamed (though some say it’s called Orfeo) instrumental. I like it: very fusiony Bitches Brew, a tangle of minor key progressions and dark tones, rippling percussion, a little inchoate getting from the spare melody to the jam segments, but overall long and satisfying.

READ ON for more of Chad’s thoughts from last night’s show…