Across the Universe

It is helpful to think of the release of a new Joywave album as a biological function. "I just naturally produce one every several years," lead singer and songwriter Daniel Armbruster says. "I turn it in to the record company and then they decide if they want to release it. And they liked this one, so it's going to be released."

It's kind of like a snake shedding its skin?

"It really does feel like that."

January is Jeff Riales' month. He's in the midst of a monthlong residency, every Thursday night at Abilene Bar & Lounge. And Friday night at Hochstein Performance Hall, he returns to the event that he inadvertently created, "If All Rochester Wrote the Same Song."

About a decade ago, local singer/songwriter Scott Regan, the host of the weekday mornings "Open Tunings" show on WRUR-FM (88.5), was snooping around Riales' basement. Relax, Regan had been invited, it was a party. And he couldn't have picked a better basement. 

It was a little more than seven years ago that a handful of diesel fume-belching bulldozers, excavators and front-end loaders began gnawing away at a nondescript parking lot in downtown Rochester. Broken brick and chunks of asphalt were hauled away in dump trucks. Like a team of archaeologists revealing the signs of a forgotten civilization, work crews scraped away layers of debris to uncover the foundation of the old RKO Palace Theater.

We're slogging through the final week of 2019, but already I just may have heard the best local album of 2020.

The official release date for the new, self-titled album by Seth Faergolzia's Multibird is Jan. 1, but you can get a few hours' head start at the official release show at 8 p.m. New Year's Eve at Skylark Lounge.

The prolific Faergolzia assembled Multibird from the cosmic silt of his previous bands, Dufus and 23 Psaegz, the latter born of his desire to create a soundtrack for his puppet opera and accompanying film, "Moon Shaped Head Girl." 

How do you celebrate the holiday season without it coming off like a Hallmark Channel Christmas movie?

Don Potter can't tell you. He finds himself caught in that happy little chestnut-roasting vortex every year. His daughter was all grown up long ago, the grandkids are "spread out all over the country, so to find them around is slim to none," he says. In their place, Potter and his wife, Christine, celebrate in the community around them, among the hills of North Carolina.

Jake Clemons is the son of a U.S. Marine band director, a kid who grew up in a strict Southern Baptist household. "We listened to a lot of marching-band music," he says. "I was very familiar with John Philip Sousa, a lot of classical music and gospel." But Jake also knew that his uncle, Clarence Clemons, was the saxophonist for one of the biggest rock 'n' roll bands in the world: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.

I've learned from past experience that, if you want to catch Lewis Black when he is calm and displaying socially acceptable behavior, it must be in the morning.

But when I call him at his New York City apartment at 10:30 in the morning, I'm already too late. He's been watching the impeachment hearings.

"You elect somebody who doesn't, who never took a civics class," Black says, his voice rising with his anger, "and then you've got a portion of the country THAT DOESN'T UNDERSTAND HOW THE GOVERNMENT IS RUN?"

Music is a time machine. Thirty-six years, "It's hard for me to get my head around that … " says Joe Locke.

It's been almost four decades since the birth of "In Front of the Silver Screen," if you're lucky enough to find a vinyl copy of it, the only form in which it officially exists. It's the hard-to-find debut album by who was to become one of the world's pre-eminent jazz vibraphonists. The liner notes insist the album was recorded on June 1 and 2, 1983, although Locke thinks it might have been two sets in one night. But he concedes his memory of the event might be a little off. He was only 22 at the time, and maybe a little caught up in the moment.

His first album!