The Chapman Stick maestro’s new quintet now features local jazz flautist Gina Sobel alongside longtime trumpet player John D’earth and improvises over Howard’s originals as well as standards by Miles, Coltrane, and Herbie.
Folk legend
buy tickets onlineNew folk-rock trio from the Eddie From Ohio alum
Singer-songwriter. With Jay Glick, Matt Knisley, and Rockhouse Railway.
Evan Lewis - Alone
Evan Lewis - Millers River
The coolest Halloween concept of all time soldiers on with sets from The Petty Files as Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (duh), Naughty Dynamic and the Design as The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Slick Willy and the Interns as Alice In Chains, Teenagers From Mars as The Misfits, and Julius Hangman as The Beatles.
buy tickets onlineLocal bands “musically dress up” as their favorite legends in the neatest Halloween concept of all time. The first night features sets from Corsair as Spinal Tap, Astronomers as Queen, The Sometime Favorites as The Strokes. Hunter Smith & The Dead Men as The Cars, and Borrowed Beams of Light as The Stooges.
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Not a poor man’s Avett Brothers. PUBLICITY PHOTO
Split the difference between Regina Spektor’s least-odd moments and Owl City’s most marketable and perhaps you’ll end up on the same block as formerly-famously-redheaded twentysomething piano pop songwriter Alison Sudol. The stage name comes from a favorite line in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and she’s prone to similar flights of fantasy in her music, which always seems fittingly otherworldly whenever her seductive cooing starts dissolving into Coldplay atmospherics. This is going to be all over Gossip Girl next season.
Alt-folk duo. Matthew Hemerlein and Frau Eva.
Birdlips - Tire Chains
Birdlips - Some Kind Of Death
The local shoegazers and punky 90’s alt-rock tarts reprise their show at the Southern from a couple months back.
Manorlady - Red Juice
Manorlady - Trees
Manorlady - Lost Dogs
Manorlady - International Boys Club
Manorlady - Boy And Flippers
HotChaCha - Organ Grinders Ball
HotChaCha - One Thousand Pillows Soft
HotChaCha - Ticket Away From Prague
Danceable indie-pop. With Hermit Thrushes and Doppelganger.
Power-pop styled after Pavement and Elephant 6. Skeletons opens.
Chamber-folk with horn parts (trumpet, French horn, etc) and an occasional rock edge. Acoustic pop songwriter Robby Hecht opens.
The Loom - The Middle Distance
The Loom - Song For The Winter Sun
The Loom - Helen
CD release show for the promising local rockers. With alt-country songstress gone rock Sarah White and Lux Perpetua.
buy tickets onlineAcoustic guitarist, singer-songwriter and former pro skateboarder whose career-ending accident left him with nothing to do but write songs with the guitarist from No Doubt which eventually landed him a slot on the record label run by like-minded beach bum Jack Johnson. Everest opens.
buy tickets onlineDutch jazz sax player
Benjamin Herman - Rollo III
Benjamin Herman - No Idea
Benjamin Herman - Kwela P Kwana
Benjamin Herman - Hypochristmastreefuzz
Benjamin Herman - De Sprong O Ramantiek Der Hazen (The Romantic Jump Of Hares)
Benjamin Herman - Brozziman
Harmonica-driven roots-rock and Americana
Local rockers soundtrack your Fellini’s Halloween.
The Grey Matter - Pumpkin
The Grey Matter - Laughing Bones
The Grey Matter - Stagger Lee
Country and Americana modeled after Merle Haggard, Gram Parsons and the Carter Family.
The Corn Hog Association - You’re Running Wild
The Corn Hog Association - Sin City
The Corn Hog Association - No Depression
The Corn Hog Association - Knoxville Girl
The Corn Hog Association - Dim Lights
British choirs premiere a new piece by Nico Muhly
Female chamber ensemble performs a capella
Pop and rock songs from a quartet which includes both a banjo and an electronic drum kit. Christyl Ross opens.
Friends Of Marles - Sleeping Outside
Friends Of Marles - Long Float To Howardsville
Friends Of Marles - Live Wire
Friends Of Marles - Blood Is Thicker
Friends Of Marles - Bannjoe
Jazz singer with guitar accompaniment
Local boys jam out with acoustic covers of reggae, old-time, and rock classics.
Folk singer-songwriter and autoharp master best known for his 1980 cover of the Mike Cross comic gem “The Scotsman.”
Former Okkervil River keyboardist Jonathan Meiburg started this band as a collaborative side-project with Okkervil frontman Will Sheff, who eventually moved on and left the budding ornithologist to navigate gloomy acoustic baroque-pop territory with a new trio named after a favorite seabird. Singer-songwriter Damien Jurado opens.
Shearwater - The Snow Leopard
Shearwater - Castaways
Shearwater - Black Eyes
Seattle folk-rock and Americana singer-songwriter and his longtime fiddler pal Alisa Milner perform with several members of Richmond Celtic-rockers Carbon Leaf.
Ian McFeron - Good Morning I’m Still Here
Ian McFeron - Anna Behind The Veil
Singer-songwriter plays English call-and-response sea shanties, old-time and folk using banjo, kazoo, and accordion.
Old Man Kelly - Jolie Anne
Old Man Kelly - Bully In The Alley
Reggae
iRon Lion - Reggae Jammin’
iRon Lion - To See Zion
Local quartet plays dance-friendly funk, soul, and R&B
Americana quartet
The Judy Chops - Drugs
The Judy Chops - Long Roads
The Judy Chops - Downbeat Poet
UVA student singers perform “Ave Maria,” a Zulu wedding song, and European folk.
Pop rock
Dreaming Isabelle - Mine
Dreaming Isabelle - Not Missing You
Dreaming Isabelle - That I Am
david m. bailey - One More Day
david m. bailey - Dreaming Of Joy
Tom Goodman, Scuffletown, and others perform tributes to the local singer-songwriter, who passed away on October 2.
“Mediated Nature” is the theme of this year’s installment of the UVA music department’s annual celebration of experimental composers, this time around including soundscape artist Douglas Quin, the Praxis String Quartet and pieces involving Slovakian fujara flutes and humpback whale songs reinterpreted on cello and tape loops, the latter closing with an improvisation based on the whale language patterns rather than any man-made musical scale.
“Multimedia concert” featuring readings, stories, songs, and motets from the early music vocal ensemble
The posters have hit the streets of Charlottesville, but the distinctive red hair has gone missing. PHOTO BY HAWES SPENCER
311, twenty years strong. PUBLICITY PHOTO
Electronic jamband rockers The Disco Biscuits have big plans for Charlottesville on Halloween. First, they’re headlining a show at the Pavilion, which will then be followed by a late night all-instrumental set at the Jefferson under the alias “Tractorbeam.” This all strikes us as a fine way to spend the evening, so we’ve got a pair of tickets to both shows for you (that’s four in all, enough for two people). Just post a picture of your best Halloween costume of all time in the comments here (be sure to plug in your real email address), or else if you don’t have web space for hosting them, and we’ll add them in for you. We’ll hook up one lucky winner with the tickets and then print the winning photo in next week’s issue for everyone else to ogle. The Fine Print: by participating, you grant the Hook permission to use your likeness no matter how silly you look in that costume. Sexy cats are automatically disqualified unless you’re a dude. This year’s upcoming costumes are also fair game, of course, so get thee to a Target.
That’d be indie rock power couple Jenny Lewis of Rilo Kiley (and subsequent solo outings) and her folk singer beau Johnathan Rice, pushed together by producer Mike Mogis (aka the real brains behind Monsters Of Folk) for a collaborative round of upbeat jangle-pop a la the M. Ward/Zooey Deschanel pairing She & Him, except that it has actually earned its flirty overtones.
buy tickets onlineBright and sugary retro indie pop
WNRN’s “Acoustic Sunrise” host Anne Williams and bluegrass songwriter Adrienne Young lay down the law as judges at this year’s installment of the annual rite of passage for aspiring local songwriters.
Indie folk-rock songwriter performs alongside projections of the elaborate video project that accompanied his last album It’s All So Beautiful, It’s All So Strange, essentially a group of filmmakers and animators from around the world each contributing a music video for one of the songs.
You may have caught this rock songwriter and Bloodkin guitarist sitting in with Widespread Panic at the Charlottesville Pavilion a month or so ago, after which his bandmate Daniel Hutchens likewise played a solo acoustic set at the Taphouse.
The leaders of the award-winning Kid Pan Alley children’s music program, including singer-songwriter-renaissance-woman and local favorite Terri Allard cap off their week-long residency at the school with a public performance featuring songs written by the kids.
Kid Pan Alley - My Shoes Are Spying On Me
Kid Pan Alley - My Dog Did My Homework
Kid Pan Alley - I Used To Know The Names Of All The Stars
80’s covers performed on acoustic instruments by members of local bluegrass fiends Old School Freight Train
CD release show for E’ville Fuzz, the latest from these local local bluegrass-rockers (that’d be Earlysville, by the way). With D.C.’s rising indie-folk and roots-rock star Jesse Elliott and his band These United States.
These United States - Water and Wheat
Older 6 Day Bender material:
6 Day Bender - Kick Out The Fire
6 Day Bender - Devil Lets You Dance
6 Day Bender - Factory Man
Traditional Jewish music, featuring special guest Michael Winograd on clarinet.
“Family Weekend” choral showcase from the UVA vocal ensembles
Folk-pop songwriter who also plays bluesy rock. Local pop pianist Joseph Moses opens.
buy tickets onlineThis singer-songwriter has a new Kickstarter-funded Americana folk album called Texodus, presumably so named after his own move from Dallas to South Carolina. He also has a new blog and a photographer in tow to help him closely document his tour — look for updates at musicseentour.tumblr.com — so please be sure to show up with a few bucks for the “pass the hat” bit at the end so he says nice things about Charlottesville on the internet.
Dylan Sneed - Texodus
Dylan Sneed - Midnight Promenade
Dylan Sneed - No Worse For The Wear
Celtic rock fusion. Travis Elliott opens.
A tent gleams in the Festy night. PHOTO BY G. MILO FARINEAU
This daft audio collagist is the pride and joy of Baltimore arts scene right now and the Southern’s biggest score of the month for anybody who isn’t a Ted Leo fan. Expect a folding table crammed full of gadgets and a balding head full of trickery guiding them, dance music that remembers that the whole point of dancing is having fun, not looking beautiful. You may recall that Spiderman Of The Rings (great title, right?) opened with a warped and pitch-shifted and absolutely ridiculous sample of Woody Woodpecker cackling away; everything else here will probably likewise shoot rainbows all over the room for any lucky synaesthetes in attendence.
buy tickets onlineFour Brits, actually, who like loading up their rock tunes with atmospheric electronics.
buy tickets onlineEnergetic folk-rock and Americana that’s more Catskills than Appalachia, closer both physically and spiritually to The Band and Big Pink than Doc Watson and Merlefest, and was honed in the depths of the New York City subway system in the years preceding their deal with Bright Eyes songwriter Conor Oberst’s Team Love Records. Adam Haworth Stephens opens.
Reggae. With Zion I and Tribal Seeds.
buy tickets onlineLo-fi hairball with a heart for classic rock songwriters. Purling Hiss and Double Complete Rainbow open.
Kurt Vile - Hunchback
Kurt Vile - Invisibility Nonexistent
People, get ready for this quartet performance from the remarkable free jazz bassist, once a favorite of legendary pianist Cecil Taylor and one of the few guys willing to play his parts bowed instead of pizzicato. His most recent release is an album of Curtis Mayfield covers, the first time in his career he’s ever focused on someone else’s material instead of his own prolific output as a composer.
Lovely icelandic singer with ties to many of the finest experimental bands to use diacritical marks outside of the metal world — think Björk, múm, Sigur Rós, Jónsi — and an acclaimed sophomore album which was, for a time, tentatively tiled “Ókídóki.” Wes Swing opens.
buy tickets onlineNot-at-all-unreasonably-named indie pop and rock wizards who regularly release their albums with accompanying board games and storybooks. Adam Smith and Andrew Cedermark open.
The Extraordinaires - 2012 Overture [unmastered]
The Extraordinaires - Eloise [unmastered]
The Extraordinaires - Terzetto [unmastered]
The Extraordinaires - Hi-Five The Cactus
The Extraordinaires - Neighborhood Watch
The Extraordinaires - The Captain
The Extraordinaires - A Proud Salute
The Extraordinaires - The Chicken, the Egg, or the Song?
The Extraordinaires - The Confession Of Kyle Griever
Beer-soaked Deep South bar band plays country-rock with a sprinkling of punk.
These brainiacs moved to Tennessee when they were finished with Berklee and started a sort of Jack-White-gone-folk indie rock project which served briefly as Devon Sproule’s backing band the last time they came through town. 6 Day Bender frontman Luke Nutting’s garage rock side project Red Rattles and songwriter James Moore open.
The Young Republic - Tennessee Mornings
The Young Republic - Black Duck Blues
The Young Republic - Alchemist
You can tell Ted Leo has finally realized he’s the de facto king of indie punk rockers because these days he feels at liberty to prattle on with arguments talking up the value of recorded music like it’s still 2002. Sorry dude, for better or worse, that ship has long since sailed. (Hope you guys like the free MP3s we dug up for you, by the way!) But a sobering point to consider: lately he has started hinting at… well, not retirement, exactly, but possibly slowing down and finding a day job, just as a matter of economic necessity. And if an artist with Leo’s history can’t afford to keep his operation afloat even with a new record as widely praised as The Brutalist Bricks, how many other independent musicians can reasonably hope to do so? Go see this, and just know that if you steal the rest of the album this time, it’ll be on your head when his next tour turns into a Pharmacists-free solo acoustic outing. Be sure to show up on time or you’ll miss out on Screaming Females leading lady Marissa Paternoster showing her band how to earn their name.
Ted Leo - Even Heroes Have To Die
Ted Leo - The Mighty Sparrow
Screaming Females - Arm Over Arm
Jamband prog-rockers
buy tickets onlineAlt-rockers gone folk in the grand tradition of classic 1960’s Laurel Canyon bands like the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield — a good match, given that current Laurel Canyon folk figurehead Devendra Banhart has taken openers Vetiver under his freakishly hairy wing. Also featuring midwestern acoustic folk duo Peter Wolf Crier.
Vetiver - Strictly Rule
Vetiver - More Of This
Vetiver - Everyday
“Suburban bluegrass” and old-time with tunes improvized instrumental breaks and harmonized vocals
Intricately fingerpicked one-man loop pedal bluegrass band
