jwgh | Entries tagged with hip-hop

As I think most of my Providence-area friends know, Saturday is AS220's 20th anniversary festival. Which will be awesome. It's even free!

What not everyone might know is that my band is supposed to be performing in it.

We're backing up hip-hop artist Mr. Bodega, so where you see him on the schedule you will also see us play.

We're scheduled to play at 11:45 pm inside AS220. This is 15 minutes before Mahi Mahi is supposed to play on the main stage, which is a bit unfortunate since everyone loves Mahi Mahi, but I figure that y'all can come inside, check us out for a couple of songs, and then either stick around or head over to Mahi Mahi depending on how things are looking; I won't be insulted!

I think I'm going to be at 20 fest all day (it starts at 1 pm), and I will definitely go to see Erin McKeown at 5:30, so I hopefully will run into many of you ...

Also, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that

peachcrush and

restartsmyheart will have a booth where you can buy items that they have crafted, and that there will also be a booth somewhere where you can buy CDs and other merchandise, which will be your first opportunity to buy Chris Monti's new album.

Current Mood: happy

I forgot what knitting a pattern that I couldn't work on easily while watching TV was like. Hmmm.

On the other hand, this yarn felts up really, really nice -- a single go-through on my tiny wimpy washer and it was felt city. Maybe I will bring the little square I knitted for guage to drunken snb tomorrow for the adoring crowds to admire.

Hmmm, I seem to be in an odd mood, don't I?

Random music news:

We had an impromptu hip-hop band practice yesterday, the first in a while. It went really, really well. We have a couple of shows coming up at AS220 in July (I think we might be playing the first night that they'll be open after they finish remodeling) so it is good to know that we haven't completely forgotten all of the songs.

Chris and I will probably go to an open mike in Fall River on Wednesday, unless we don't. We'll see.

Thursday might be dance band practice if everyone can make it.

One of my upstairs neighbors is involved in the Southside Community Land Trust's City Farm project which has an annual plant sale with live acoustic music. A couple of months ago he knocked on the door and said he'd heard me and Chris playing through the floor and asked if we'd want to play at the plant sale, so we'll be doing that from 1 to 2 pm on Saturday May 14. It'll be fun! It will be a two-guitar show, since it sounds like there won't be an easy way to plug in the piano. Today I did a little rummaging through our song lists to separate out all the guitar pieces ...

Friday I'm throwing a party to commemorate the

snbprov's first anniversary (which technically is on Wednesday, but ...). It should be a lot of fun! Tomorrow I should try to put together some shopping lists and the like. Whee!

I think that's about it for tonight.

Current Mood: weird

I am not up to writing something witty about this, so instead I will replicate two things that other people have written about it. First, Chris Monti says:

Mornin Y'all,
The Killdevils had a good nite at Billy Goode‚s last night. Although it lacked one of the two components that make for a GREAT nite at Billy Goode's: One, someone passing out during our set, or Two, someone falling off their stool during our set. One can only look to the future and hope.

Ok.. Hip Hop:
Plan B and Third Story Congress will be at AS220 tomorrow night (that's Wednesday, little boy). Boston Hip Hoppers Savin Ill go on at 9, Plan B and 3SC at 10, and Waterbed featuring B.C. and Poet for on at 11 and play till morning.

Live Hip Hop, dance music, blardy blardy blar.

I hope you all are well.

-Chris (Currently d-hip-hop-itizing to some Brahms (1833-1897), apparently quite a hipster in his day. When asked in an interview what he liked to do in his spare time he responded, "In denen ausgearbeitete Werk von symphonischen bis hin zu Mozart wie eigenstandig das bluntensichtlich," which to my understanding translates to, "I like to kick back, smoke an L, and rock some Mozart on the old harpsichord, you dig?")

ps AS220 115 Empire St Prov

and on AS220's website it says:

Plan B - better known as MR. BODEGA - will have you breaking your neck to uptempo hip hop beats and a dirty south flow. Hip hop from the soul. This is a get crunk event, with special guests CHRIS MONTI and THIRD STORY CONGRESS providing hot live beats for M.I.A. Live band hip hop at AS220 - the feel of the Roots, but not as conscious.

Well, OK, I'm not sure what any of that means, but it will be a nifty show and everyone in Providence who is even marginally interested should show up, says I, because a good time will be had. Yes!

Here are some practice recordings which may give you some sort of idea.

Also, I will be playing keyboards.

Man, was I ever happy tonight that I got around to finishing the giant scarf.

Had a show down in Newport opening for Paul Geremia. In figuring out the set list and so on I was sort of excited by the possibility that Paul might show up early and hear us play, and in the even he actually did! However, in real life it turned out that that just made us really nervous. Regardless, I think we put in a pretty good set, although I'm not sure how into it Paul was.

However, he played really well, maybe the best I've heard him play recently. He took an extended set break from around 11 pm to midnight to go back to his apartment and retrieve some 78 RPM records for Chris and I; at a previous show he'd heard us do a couple of Louis Jordan tunes and he had picked up a couple of Louis Jordan 78s to give to us, and then I guess once he was back at his apartment he got sucked into his record collection and by the time he returned he had a somewhat random selection of, I dunno, maybe thirty or so to give to us. Pretty cool! I don't have a record player so Chris has custody of them currently.

I thought there were other things too. What were they?

Oh. Tomorrow the hip-hop group's supposed to do a couple of short sets at The Providence Black Repertory Company, and then on Sunday I was thinking of heading up to Massachusetts to visit family (my brother-in-law's birthday is on Monday). But I guess we're supposed to get a couple of feet of snow tomorrow, so some or all of this may be cancelled, which in reality I wouldn't mind too much, because it would be nice to have a weekend in which I had an excuse to basically sit around and watch movies and knit all day. I should probably go grocery shopping tomorrow afternoon though.

Also, I foolishly turned off my heat when I left for tonight's gig, so I'm sort of chilly now.

For reasons too complicated and dull to go into here I am doing laundry right now.

Anyway, I was sort of sad to miss

snbprov, but going to Newport ended up being a lot of fun, so I'm glad it worked out.

I should probably post this before it gets any more incoherent.

Man, lots of music posts lately.

Well, anyway. Some of y'all may remember that last month I participated in a hip-hop show that at least one person really enjoyed. After my posts about it a couple of people expressed interest in hearing recordings of the show, especially the song 'How U Feelin' or 'Hip Hop From The Soul', which featured some rapping over BB King's 'The Thrill Is Gone'.

I still haven't heard a recording of the show (though supposedly there's a video), but last week we all got together for a practice which Chris recorded, so here it is:

all we need is ... hip hop from the soul

Update: And here's a bit of random noodling that may never turn into anything. Still, it's kind of fun-kay in parts, I think.

Tonight's show went really well (no recordings though I'm afraid). Since we weren't sure in advance that it was going to go that way (Ed Demille, who played the Handsonic drum kit, set the baseline at the beginning of the night by saying that he would be happy if nobody threw anything at us) it felt all the better.

The way the evening worked was:

At around 9:30 pm a DJ played some beats (from a CD) and some people breakdanced. After that, a few rappers rapped to some CD beats. This brought us to around 10:30 pm.

At that point we (Chris on guitar, me on keyboards, Ed on electronic drum kit, and Francis on upright bass) took the stage. Each of us except for Ed sang a song, and I think each of us expected the crowd to hate his song. The songs were:

1) Scuzzy Wuzzy -- this was Francis's song with a sort of spoken word chorus. It's funky! This was a good choice to lead off. During this song pretty much all my nervousness about performing melted away. I got to make flying saucer noises.

2) Long in the Tooth -- this is a song Chris wrote and sang, a sort of reggae number. Chris was nervous about how into this song the crowd would be and for a while this song was scheduled to be played third so that there would be another song for the crowd to get used to us in. However I convinced him that my song needed even more of a buildup, so we ended up doing it second. Anyway, people liked it.

3) Caldonia -- my song. This song was written by Louis Jordan and I wasn't sure how appropriate it was, but everyone enjoyed the hell out of playing it in rehearsal so it was decided that it should be included. It's an upbeat blues with goofy lyrics. It got applause.

4) Country Boy in the City -- Chris wrote this song, which is sort of Ani Difrancoesque, but for this show he decided not to perform the lyrics and instead had Plan B and some of the other rappers come up on stage and do a freeform rap. It worked really well.

This allowed us to segue nicely into the set we had planned with Plan B, which included seven songs that he gave us arrangements to on a CD, plus a song where we played the changes to 'The Thrill Is Gone', and finally a song whose arrangement we came up with during practice by jamming in the key of E.

We got done around midnight or a little after and get a lot of applause and people came up to us after and said nice things and one woman got Chris's card because she was interested in having us do some musical accompaniment for something sometime. So, big success!

After the show, local artist Peter Boyle came up to me and said, "I'm not sure what you did, but I know it will have reverberations." So, there you are.

After we finished our set the next act, a funk band named Waterbed, set up and started playing. They were good, but I decided that I had to either go home and decompress and hopefully get to bed by around 3 am or so, or else I could stay there and probably not get any sleep tonight. Tomorrow being a work day I decided that trying to get some sleep was probably a good idea.

Current Mood: happy

A few weeks ago or so Chris Monti met some members of a hiphop band called 'M.I.A.' and they got along quite well. The M.I.A. members suggested to him that they might do a show together, an idea that Chris was pretty psyched about.

The basic idea is that Chris would get together a few people to provide an accompaniment for the group. They talked to him again a couple of weeks ago and it looks like it's on -- they've got a show at AS220 on December 9 and they want Chris to provide backup.

Chris has drafted (not that they needed much persuading) most of his other band for the project, so he's got Ed Demille providing beats and Francis Brennan on bass. He's also asked me to play keyboards. So I'm going to give it a whirl. Unfortunately I'm going to miss the first practice, which is tonight (I'm driving up to New Hampshire), but I'll go to Sunday's and we'll see how it goes. Chris gave me a CD of theirs for me to listen to. It's not really a style I've played before but the keyboard parts are pretty simple. The plan is to plug the keyboard into my computer and use Garage Band MIDI stuff, which hopefully will work OK.

I am slightly scared to death.

Current Mood: excited
Current Music: The Way The Story Begins - M.I.A.