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FOUND KEYS ON 7/1/09 at Rockview beach please contact Randi at 588-4988Wednesday, July 1 more... |
City Employees Downsize Work WeekTuesday, June 30 City employees are currently taking a 10 percent furlough in an effort to solve $4 million of the city’s $9 million deficit for the 2010 fiscal year. As a result,... more... |
Mayor Declares June ‘Derby Girls Month’Tuesday, June 23 The Santa Cruz Derby Girls are on quite a roll this season – from selling out the Civic Auditorium time and time again to finally realizing their goal of becoming... more... |
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North Dakota is a “snowy, cold, flat place,” according to singer-songwriter Tom Brosseau. He ought to know. That’s where he grew up, and he wouldn’t have had it any other way.
When you tour as much as local soul/funk/reggae outfit Naomi and the Courteous Rudeboys (NCR), it isn’t always easy to find the time to come up with fresh material. Bandleader Naomi Wilder has found a creative solution to this problem: She does much of her composing in her head while she’s behind the wheel of the group’s biodiesel-fueled tour bus. “There’s music playing, but the engine is so loud that I can’t really hear it,” the good-natured vocalist explains. A productive use of time—but also dangerous. 
Everyone knows that old saying “Those who can’t do, teach.” Well, in response to it, meet Esperanza Spalding. The standup bassist, composer, bandleader and multilingual vocalist is annihilating such skepticism left and right. At the age when most people begin their college pursuits, Spalding accomplished a jaw-dropping feat by becoming Berklee College of Music’s youngest professor ever—when she was merely 20 years old. For jazz’s sparkling up-and-coming gem it wasn’t a whirlwind, it was natural. 
With its guttural grunts, Tolkien-esque imagery and exaltation of violence, gore and vulgarity, death metal has always sounded like the kind of music orcs would play if they traded their weapons for instruments. Taking this idea to the extreme is the local colossus that the lords of darkness have named A Band of Orcs.
In the period preceding the creation of Grammy-winning “folkabilly” artist Nanci Griffith’s new album, The Loving Kind, the 55-year-old singer-songwriter found herself faced with a dilemma she’d never encountered before: She’d lost her passion for songwriting.
If you haven’t met Craig Prentice yet, you’ve probably seen him towering in the back of a crowd in his trademark black beanie, as the 6-foot-plus bassist makes it out to nearly every show in town. If you do meet him you’ll probably think to yourself that “Hermit Convention” is a strange pseudonym for a rather sociable guy like Prentice. But after years performing in bands, he’s now taking the stage alone with just his bass guitar and loop pedal. “We can be alone together,” reads his MySpace tagline. The indie rocker explains, “When we’re honest with each other we realize that we’re not alone ... we all have doubts and fears we’re ashamed to admit.” Hermit Convention lets it all out in the form of fuzzy, heartfelt sentiments on notably lo-fi songs. 
The Happy Hollows are a band that comes from the far off world of Negahdariland. It’s a place where the sun never sets and the landscape is an ever-changing sheet of psychedelic colors crawling with cute furry creatures and surreal gardens. But if you’re looking to travel these strange lands, you’ll have to first figure out how to get inside the head of Sarah Negahdari. Just who is she? She’s the L.A. rock scene’s new femme fatale, and she’s quite strange.
“I had this dream where I was playing catch with a little kid and I noticed he had a beetle behind his ear. And in my dream I knew it was called a powder beetle and it sucked wave voltage from people’s minds and would make its own frequencies that would affect your thought processes and controlled you like a parasite,” recounts Peter Wallner, who may be one terribly shy and self-conscious kid, but the quiet ones are always the biggest dreamers. In 2007, Wallner came home from tour only to lose both his job and his girlfriend. 
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