Main Street Farmer's Market opens

The Main Street Farmer's Market is open again. Besides offering a range of locally produced goods, the Market (which operates on Thursday afternoons) features musical acts. The inaugural performer this year was Dan Baker who, with an assortment of other talented artists, played several jazz tunes for shoppers.

The O-R has decided to start a new video feature; the Main Street Artists Series. We will be featuring as many of the various artists that play at the Market as we can on our website in an ongoing series of videos. For our first week, I recorded Dan playing a couple of lighthearted numbers early in the afternoon.

The first is 'Summertime'. Dan is the guy with the awesome red dreads. Accompanying him were two tenor saxs (Bill Shadel and Sam Kearney), an alto sax (Mark Higgins), two drum sets (Curran McDowell and Joel Panian) and a trombone (Jim Cope). The same ensemble performed 'Black Orpheus'. Look for a new artist to be featured as often as every week.

A shot of Vitamin L

Someday I'd like to apologize to B.E. Taylor.

When he released his album "Love Won the Fight" in 1983, I was asked to write a review about it for the college newspaper. Since I was a know-it-all who considered anything recorded after 1970 not to be worth my while, I didn't have the greatest things to write about the record.

Hey, that was a quarter-century ago. What did I know?


What I do know is that hearing B.E. perform "Vitamin L" at the recent benefit concert for Tony Janflone Jr. was an experience that certainly transcended writing for the school paper. With a stellar cast, including "Vitamin L" composer Rick Witkowski on guitar, B.E. had the audience members where he wanted them, including yours truly.

A highlight of the performance was a bass solo by Tommy Bellin, who does a jaw-dropping rendition of Vince Guaraldi's "Linus and Lucy" in mid-song. Aspiring bass players might want to study Johnny's technique closely. Tommy, by the way, plays regularly with No Bad Ju Ju, a band that's definitely worth catching.

Here's the full video version of "Vitamin L."

And if you run across a 1983 copy of the IUP Penn with a writeup on B.E. Taylor, please ignore it.

Bill Toms: 'Spirits, Chaos, and a Troubadour Soul'

If you meet Bill Toms, you'll find him to be a very polite guy who speaks in a relatively unassuming, somewhat modest tone of voice.

That's the off-stage Bill. Put him and his guitar in front of an audience, and he's a changed man, infused with the spirit handed down to him by the great rock 'n' rollers.


Bill spent two decades playing with Joe Grushecky's Houserockers, and eventually he formed his own band. Attending a Bill Toms & Hard Rain show is like chugging a Red Bull, without the aftertaste: It's all about energy. Check out the video of "Another Round for the West End Kid" recorded at a benefit Bill and his wife, Joyce organized for victims of the political fallout in Darfur.

Though he can rock with the best of them, Bill has another musical side, exploring the folk tradition of Americana with an introspective pen. He is ready to release "Spirits, Chaos, and a Troubadour Soul," an album that showcases his penchant for capturing real-life situations and distilling them through often bittersweet but always accessible songs.

While "Spirits" features plenty of acoustic guitar, Bill mixes it up with some heavier vibes. The album opens, in fact, with power chords and energized slide guitar leading into the upbeat "Together."

In contrast is the somber, elegaic "There Was a Time," Bill's duet with musical partner Tom Breiding (Peters Twp. resident), who produced the album, most of which was recorded at Tom's AmeriSon Studio. The production, by the way, is impeccable; Tom is a perfectionist in the studio.

"Spirits" features a revolving cast of characters playing with Bill. The full Hard Rain lineup (up through 2007) appears only on the album's sole cover, the Waterboys' "Fisherman's Blues," and the closing track, "Revelation Shuffle." Both those were recorded at Rick Witkowski's Studio L in Weirton. (You may remember Rick's guitar playing from the '70s band Crack the Sky.)

Other performers of note include Megan Palmer, whose violin adds a sense of urgency to the paranoid visions of "No Way Out"; vocalists Jill Simmons and Andrea Pearl; and even Tom's son Jack Breiding, an aspiring percussionist who helps lend to the ambiance of a couple of tunes.

A featured track on the album is shaping up in "It's Saturday Night Somewhere." Check it out on YouTube:



The scheduled release for "Spirits, Chaos, and a Troubadour Soul" is April 15. A local CD release show with Bill Toms & Hard Rain starts at 9 p.m. Saturday, April 5, at Cefalo's in Carnegie. Opening acts are Erin Sax Seymour and Lorenzo Bertocchini.

Have a new release you'd like to see featured? E-mail Harry Funk at hfunk@observer-reporter.com

PSB2

Amwell Township resident Patti Spadaro played her second show with a four-piece band the weekend before last at Scooby's in South Fayette Township. I wanted to come up with some better audio quality than at the Patti Spadaro Band's debut in January, when a patch from the soundboard didn't quite do the trick. So this time, I used a pair of ambient microphones, an approach that I'm finding to work fairly well as I record more musicians.


The audio, indeed, turned out much better. Unfortunately, I did nothing with the camera to compensate for the lack of bright lighting at the Scooby's gig, so I brightened the footage during the editing process. As a result, the finished product is kind of grainy.

Oh, well. You still can see clearly how well Patti plays guitar, and that's what counts.

Here is Patti's original composition "Give a Little Back," the opening track of her CD "Short Stay."

And check out the band on another of her originals, "Let's Roll".

Flashes of creativity?

Two of my favorite musicians, Tom Breiding and Patti Spadaro, both Washington Countians, have been joining forces onstage every once in a while.

On Saturday night, they combined acts at a venue called Scooby's in South Fayette Township. Tom opened with an acoustic set, followed by the Patti Spadaro Band playing its second-ever show.

Patti and Tom played one song together, at the end of Tom's set, performing "The Balladeer's Son" from his album "Happy Hour in the Round Hotel." They previously had done the tune as a duo when Tom played last month at the Inspiration Cafe in Washington.


Scooby's has an area set aside specifically for enjoying music, complete with a sofa and a few comfy chairs. It's a nice atmosphere, with one minor drawback for the videographer: not-so-strong lighting. That's fine for the musicians and audience, and I thought it would be OK for my camera; it looked OK as I filmed it. But I ended up toning the finished product to up the brightness, and the end result looks a bit grainy.

During a good portion of "The Balladeer's Son," I was wondering around taking photos on an aging Nikon CoolPix. As a result, the video captures a series of flashes during the performance. What to do ...

It was a no-brainer to drop the resulting stills into the video at the appropriate spots. But to make the effect distinctive, I superimposed the stills over an old-fashioned, 35mm-film-type image. (Technically, I guess I should've rendered the stills as negatives in that case, but that would've looked truly bizarre.)

Anyway, if nothing else, the music speaks for itself in this video version of "The Balladeer's Son"

'Feels Like Yesterday'

Here's a tricky editing idea ... take a song called "Feels Like Yesterday" and lose the color. B&W. Get it?

Jordan Umbach, the performer, probably has never seen a black-and-white TV, but he's monochromatic on this particular video, recorded when he opened for Brad Yoder on Saturday. The vocals are way over into the left channel, but otherwise the audio sounds fine.

I've seen Jordan play here and there for a few years now, and he's come along very well for a young singer-songwriter-guitarist. Keep an eye out for him as he continues to hone his craft.

In the meantime, here's "Feels Like Yesterday"

Song for a gray day

Last month, I caught a performance by a guitarist who really caught my attention: Reza "Ron" Ziai, who plays a variety of instruments and gets some interesting sounds out of them.

Today, I received a note that he's posted a new song on his MySpace page, and it really fits the mood of a day when the cloud cover is here to stay and the rain looks to keep on falling.

Visit Ron's page to hear "Become"

Brad Yoder

Writing songs is not easy, by any means. If it were, we'd all be stars. Or it would be a situation in which, as Brad Yoder says in one of his song titles, "Everybody's Got a Record."


Brad is one of the select few who not only writes songs, but writes them extremely well. He labels himself a folk singer, which is true, in some records. He often documents life as he sees it, and his audiences can identify with the words he sings, a combination that usually makes for an entertaining show.

Some of his tunes merit heartfelt laughter (Check out "Local Band"); others might bring the sensitive listener to the verge of tears. But whatever he chooses to sing, prepare to be impressed by what he accomplishes as a singer and guitarist. And a songwriter, of course.

On Saturday, Brad played at the Inspiration Cafe in Washington, a small coffee house that has some pretty good acoustics. I recorded him through the soundboard on one channel, and on the other I used a microphone placed about four feet from the speaker onstage. The result is a mix that highlights his guitar in one channel and the vocals in the other, perhaps a bit too prominent of a separation in some places, but the sound is very clean.

Unfortunately, I must have inadvertently did something with the white balance as far as the video, as Brad shows up in sort of a magenta hue, and the image isn't as sharp as it should be. Oh, well. I'll double-check next time.

You can see what I mean on this video: 'One Excuse'

Opening for Brad was Jordan Umbach, a Washington student who shows a lot of promise with his own songwriting and is developing an assured manner of performing in front of audiences. I'll post something of his shortly.

'Suck da head'

OK, that title should've gotten your attention. It's a New Orleans-type expression that applies to eating crawfish. You know, with Mardi Gras coming up soon and all ...

Speaking of crawfish, if you're a fan of the small, freshwater crustaceans (we used to catch 'em in the creek and call 'em "crayfish"), and you don't make it down to N'Awlins very often, there's a festival that's just for you. Although you still have to make the drive to Jersey ...


In 2000, I attended Michael Arnone's Crawfish Festival in Sussex County, N.J. That's about midway between the Poconos and New Jack City, in a scenic mountainous area of Jersey that most folks don't know exists. I went with some friends primarily to see a New Orleans ensemble called the Radiators - "best band in the land," it's been said about them - and also sampled quite a bit of the Cajun-laced cuisine on hand. (The Rads, BTW, do a song called "Suck Da Head." They, of course, played it in '00.)

So this year's Crawfish Festival, the 19th annual, is the weekend after Memorial Day, May 30 through June 1. There's plenty of room for camping if you're a Western Pennsylvanian who wants to make the pilgrimage and rough it for a few days. Along with the Radiators, some of the close to two dozen acts scheduled to perform include the legendary Allen Toussaint (check out his album with Elvis Costello, "The River in Reverse"), the Funky Meters (big hit with "Cissy Strut"), Tab Benoit, Donna the Buffalo, Guitar Shorty, Mitch Woods and the Rocket '88s, and Rosie Ledet & the Zydeco Playboys.

If you're planning to stick around Western PA that weekend ... well, you're not going to find quality crawfish anywhere around here.

Your Music Genre Isn't Dead

Well, not necessarily. I suppose if you're into the baroque movement, there isn't a whole lot of innovation going on for that right now, but if you're a fan of something slightly more recent and some of the groups that appear on the previously-mentioned Wolfgang's Vault interest you, then I have the the website for you. Pandora.

Now, this site isn't just for lovers of oldies. You can learn about a lot of current-day mainstream hits and get a pretty thorough tour of the various underground scenes as well. Pandora aims to find music suited directly to your tastes and play that music for you in a streaming radio format.

Here's how it works: you register an account (it's free), then you create "stations." A station can be based on an artist, a specific song, or a genre. Pandora then accesses a vast database of carefully cataloged music and attempts to play other songs that will fit your musical taste defined by whatever song/artist/genre that station is formed from. So, you can start a Beatles station, for example, and expect to hear many other bands, new and old, that share some part of their style with the Beatles.

It's not perfect, but it's constantly being updated and it does have useful feedback devices. First of all, if you hear a song you like, you can give it a thumbs-up. Songs with a good rating tend to pop up in your play list again and again. If you hear a song you dislike, you can give it a thumbs down. It'll be gone for good at that point. You can also bookmark artists and songs so you can remember them later and proceed directly to sites where you can buy their albums. Finally, they've recently introduced a feature that allows you to link your Pandora account to your Facebook account so your friends can see what you're listening to. Pandora also has some minor networking features built in.

Give it a try. You can even create mix stations that combine two or more of your previously defined stations so that you get a wider range of music. I find that works best.

Wolfgang's Vault

The Wolfgang's Vault site has been up for a while, and it's a tremendous resource for hearing classic rock (and other styles of music) performances that you'd never encountered before.

"Wolfgang" was the real first name of the man known as Bill Graham (1931-91), the legendary promoter who, to a large degree, is responsible for the rock concert as we know it. He accumulated a large archive of performances, and they've been prepared for streaming through the Wolfgang's Vault site.

The Concert Vault is where to find everything from a 1965 show by Jefferson Airplane, before Grace Slick joined the band, to a handful of 21st century concerts (obviously the collection extended beyond Bill's death). If A Flock of Seagulls is your thing, that one-hit '80s wonder is on the list, too.

My personal favorite is a Pink Floyd show on April 29, 1970, at the Fillmore West in San Francisco. I've had a bootleg of the concert for a number of years, but the Wolfgang's vault version sounds a heck of a lot better. The performance is from the pre-"The Dark Side of the Moon" era, when Pink Floyd did quite a bit of improvisation compared with the closely choreographed shows of later years.

Some of the shows also are available for download, for not too much money. So if you want to hear Peter Frampton as he really sounded live - as opposed to the augmentation that resulted in "Frampton Comes Alive" - this is the place to look.

Inspiration Cafe

There's a coffee shop on South Main Street in Washington, the Inspiration Cafe, that is starting to host performers on pretty much of a regular basis. It's not the biggest place but can hold quite a few people to enjoy music and beverages.

Sandee Umbach, who runs the shop - the proceeds benefit WashArts, which has the mission of serving children through free instruction in the arts - sent along a notice about a coming show that merits attention.


I saw Brad Yoder play a couple of years ago, and I can say he's one of the more entertaining performers and talented songwriters in Western Pennsylvania. (I've tried writing even a half-decent song. It's not easy.) He'll be at the Inspiration Cafe this Saturday, Feb. 2, at 7:30 p.m.

Jordan Umbach will open for Brad. I've seen Jordan perform here and there for the past couple of years, and he's developing into quite a singer-songwriter, himself.

Better Time

All right! Decent audio for the reggae-infused "Soon You'll Be Mine" by One Gig at a Time on Saturday. If you checked out the set's opener and weren't impressed with the change in sound quality halfway through, this worked out much better.

Watch "Soon You'll Be Mine"

'Very first gig ever'

I posted a video of the Patti Spadaro Band performing her composition "Tonight," as I really like the song and captured decent audio of it during her show Friday night at P.D.'s Pub in Squirrel Hill.

During the set's opener, a rendition of the Grateful Dead's "Franklin's Tower," I spent most of the song fiddling with the input controls, trying to get them to record properly. As I result, I pretty much just had the camera pointed at the stage.

I had pushed the record button just as Patti was announcing, "Our very first gig ever," so I figured I might as well post "Franklin's" as a piece of history. I managed to clean up the sound by stripping off the problematic channel, which was full of static, and playing around with the other to give it a little bit of depth.

As far as editing the video, I thought I'd leave it pretty much raw, since I wasn't doing anything with varying camera angles, etc.

I'll tell you that Patti said she had a cold that night, but her guitar playing didn't suffer whatsoever!

Click here to play "Franklin's Tower"

Kicked again

OK, here's a good song performed by Kicked on Saturday night that's about half as long as "Babylon." It's called "Mary" and features the lead vocals of acoustic guitarist Justin Thompson.


There also is an live audio rendition that plays automatically when you visit Kicked's Web site.

Again, thanks to Josh at the Hard Rock for the soundboard patch. It's an adventure every time I try to set up a good audio feed, so any help I can get is much appreciated!

Click here for "Mary" video

Audio 'gremlins'

On a positive note, the opening of One Gig at a Time's show Friday night - "our first gig in that configuration," says band leader Steve Cunningham - came through the video camera's sound inputs fairly well, as the players grooved on a major/minor riff reminiscent of Grace Slice's "White Rabbit," or the "Spanish Jam" the Grateful Dead often performed in the '60s.

By the time the jam segued into the original composition "Chasing Sunsets," various clicks and pops had begun to overwhelm one of the input channels. That wasn't good news.


To beat the "gremlins," I ended up switching the audio track from stereo to mono at the start of "Sunsets." The quality takes a dip, but it's preferable to hearing all the interference I was getting through the connection to the soundboard.

Anyway, here's 11-plus minutes of the start of One Gig's performance. Just be prepared for the audio adjustment in the middle:

Click here to play video

First time around

The Patti Spadaro Band made its debut Friday at P.D.'s pub in Squirrel Hill, a pretty good venue with an area off to the side where an audience can gather to enjoy a performance a little bit out of the way of the rest of the patrons.

Patti previously had a band when she was in Los Angeles, simply called Spadaro, which released an album, "Short Stay," featuring her original compositions.

One song that isn't on the album is one I particularly enjoy her play. In fact, we filmed her playing "Tonight" last summer on lower-grade equipment, and I was hoping to capture a better version with her new band.



The debut started with the Grateful Dead's "Franklin's Tower," during which I was trying to get a decent audio feed using one microphone pointed at the stage and a patch from the soundboard. The soundboard connection wasn't working, though, so I had to make some adjustments. By that time, the band was firing up "Tonight."

The raw tape revealed some "clicks" and minor distortion on one of the channels, but I was able to repair that for the most part. For some reason, the tape cut off in the middle of Patti's guitar solo, but the finished product is six-and-a-half minutes of a cooking jam.

Click here to check it out.

Putting some teeth into it

The video camera's tape had just about run out, and after the band One Gig at a Time performed a stellar version of Jimi Hendrix's Little Wing, I figured it was time to put my equipment away.

I'd gathered everything together and was talking with some people when I noticed the decibel level had increased significantly. Up on the stage, One Gig's Steve "pUNK" Cunningham was adding to the band's volume by taking a chainsaw to an old wooden nightstand.


I guess that's somewhere in between Pete Townshend smashing his guitar, Hendrix torching his and Wendy O. Williams sawing through a Cadillac. Whatever the case, I quickly grabbed the camera back out of its case in time to capture a few minutes of the epic display.

The result, with just a bit of tweaking with the sound, is on display at right in our YouTube player.

In the meantime, I'll work on editing some One Gig at a Time footage from earlier in the set. The band's music was even more impressive than pUNK's performance art!

Cure for the wintertime blues

Years ago, the thought of going out to a club at 10 p.m. wouldn't have fazed me in the slightest. That was before 10 o'clock was right around my bedtime ...

Over the weekend, I managed to adjust my schedule a bit to see some musical acquaintances do their thing. Hey, it beats sitting around the house, looking out the window and watching it snow.

I took my video equipment, of course, and when I sort through everything, I'll post performances by:

The Patti Spadaro Band. Patti (Amwell Twp. resident) is a terrific guitar player who recently formed her own group, which made its debut Friday at P.D.'s Pub in Squirrel Hill. We've featured Patti in our Living in Washington County magazine, and I've recorded her in an acoustic setting. But hearing her fire away with her four-piece band was a treat.

One Gig at a Time. I'd met band leader Steve "pUNK" Cunningham, he of the thundering six-string bass guitar, while he was playing with Fungus a few years back. His current band features a lot of original music against a colorful backdrop, in more ways than one. More on that later.

Kicked. Last summer, I helped organize the annual Rock Off during Peters Twp. Community Day, and Kicked earned the honors as the top band in the over-21 category. I remember being blown away by an original of theirs called "Babylon" (a lower-quality video exists in our library), and they're good guys, to boot. They played a rousing show Saturday at the Hard Rock Cafe at Station Square.

Stay tuned for the videos.

Grateful Dead Night redux

Back in the late '80s, Peter's Pub in Pittsburgh's Oakland section used to have Grateful Dead Night, playing cassette tapes of Jerry Garcia and company.

I hadn't been there since then, but decided to pay another visit recently to see Fungus, a band that draws much of its repertoire from what the Dead used to play.


A couple of years ago, I saw Fungus at an outdoor festival in Nottingham Township, and I really enjoyed the show. So when I received an e-mail from guitarist Dave Gasbarro about the band's performance at Peter's, I decided to take along some video equipment and see what happened.

I recorded the first set with the audio patched straight into the camera from the soundboard. That sounded OK, but fortunately keyboard player Mike Tony informed me that guitarist Terry Callahan's guitar amp wasn't running through the board. So I positioned a microphone directly in front of Terry's Marshall and ended up with a nice sound mix during the second set.

Following the show, I edited three videos, and I've posted three more songs as MP3 files. Take a look to your right, and there they are, for your Sound & Vision enjoyment.