Author: Shea Gibbs

If the origin story of local metal band Age of Fire were a rom-com, there wouldn’t be a dry eye in the theater at this point. Put on some Evanescence and try to dig it.

Boy meets girl in South Florida in 1982—but in this case, the girl is heavy metal. After six years of being in love with the girl, something comes of the relationship: a band’s eponymous debut album, Age of Fire.

The boy and girl part ways all too soon. He moves to Charlottesville, Virginia. After 20 years, the boy makes contact with the girl in 2008. But it’s not the same. For the boy, the girl is frozen in time, a memory of his youth. He’s unable to save her from the nothing she’s become (sorry, Evanescence).

Finally, three decades after first falling for the girl, the boy decides he’ll do whatever it takes to get her back. He wins the girl’s affection again, and their torrid love affair resumes.

The boy here is Greg Brown, founding member of the now-resurgent Age of Fire. In 2018, after re-releasing his band’s debut album for the second time in 30 years, he decided to grab fate by the collar and re-form. Just five years later, the band is touring to support its second album. They’ve played Atlanta, Birmingham, Myrtle Beach, and several dates in Europe. They’ve announced a streaming show on September 5 from In Your Ear Studios in Richmond, and will head to L.A. to play the Whiskey a Go Go, opening for Burning Witches, on December 6. And in the meantime, they’ll be back in the studio this fall to work on the band’s second full-length album—on Sliptrick Records—since getting back together.

“I’m laser-focused on what we are trying to do,” says Brown. “Richmond has been great to us—really embraced us. In this town, metal doesn’t seem to be very well supported. It’s a different beast.”

Charlottesville’s metal scene has been beset by recent losses, both of venues and promising acts. And while Brown admits he operates in “a bit of a bubble,” he’s never given up on the genre, even while pursuing others after Age of Fire disbanded in 1993. 

Brown returned to metal around 2012, after a cancer diagnosis. With a chemo port implanted in his chest, the classical guitar he had come to favor became impractical. The smaller body on his old electrics didn’t rub against the port, and the less technical ax work made playing easier, given his limited mobility.

“I was always into the shredders: Metallica, Megadeth,” Brown says. “But that’s actually the same thing that attracted me to classical and flamenco, the virtuosity of it.”

Working mostly from old-but-never-released recordings, Brown put together a new Age of Fire LP in late 2018, the same year he released the band’s debut for the third time. He “threw it up on the web,” he says, and people listened.

The 10-track Obsidian Dreams, Age of Fire’s first new record in 30 years, caught the attention of Sliptrick Records. Delighted, surprised, and humbled, Brown put together a band. He found a local bass player in Mike Heck and joined forces with a new lead vocalist, Laura Viglione. In 2020, Age of Fire released its first album of all new music since the band formed in 1988: Shades of Shadow. A European tour followed. It was more than Brown could’ve dreamed of when Metallica’s Kill ’Em All first made him fall in love with metal.

Heck and Viglione left the group after the Shades of Shadow tour, but Brown was undaunted. He found local bass player Ric Brown and drummer Bill Morries and decided to retake Age of Fire’s lead vocals. The latest iteration of the band independently released an EP, Through the Tempest, last year, and it’s been well received by indie pubs. 

Brown says Age of Fire still has a strong following in Europe, and he’s optimistic about the future, including the forthcoming album on Sliptrick. “Metal is starting to pick up,” Brown says. “It’s still huge overseas. In the United States in the ’90s, we went grunge, but the rest of the world didn’t.”

Age of Fire’s music has been described as dabbling in various heavy metal subgenres, including thrash, symphonic, melodic, and progressive. But for those who grew up with the ’90s shredders like Brown, it’s Metallica they’ll hear first.

Now, what’s old is new again. Age of Fire has been played on more than 1,000 traditional and satellite radio stations around the world after an unheard of four-decade hiatus. The band has attracted attention from media outlets from Portugal to Slovakia to Norway, and endorsements from Solar Guitars, Scorpion drumsticks, and Dirtbag clothing.

Still, Age of Fire isn’t Brown’s full-time gig. By day, he’s an educational services representative for Guitar Center’s Music & Arts. He says working with music teachers to develop in-school programming frees him up to make his own tunes on weekends and during summers.

As Brown tries to help kickstart the local metal scene, he looks back on his career and thinks of all the young musicians who could use a push toward his favorite music genre.

“I feel bad. … I ran a music store in this town for many years, and kids would come in playing Pantera licks or whatever,” he says. “I would think, ‘Where do these kids play?’ There doesn’t seem to be a supported infrastructure in this town for this type of music, and I would have been lost without it my entire life.”

Watch Age of Fire’s livestream performance on September 5 at In Your Ear Studios via youtube.com/@shockoesessionslive.

When local musician Jay Pun watched worldbeat band Baaba Seth take the stage decades ago, it was one of the few times he saw someone who looked like him making music that audiences loved.

“Standing at the front of the … Pavilion and seeing Mike on stage, it was cool to see another Asian guy playing music in Charlottesville,” Pun says. “I didn’t really know how much it meant to me at the time. But it really did mean a lot.

It’s been at least 25 years since Pun would’ve first seen “Mike,” aka Michael Chang, play with Baaba Seth. And it’s been more than 30 years since the band formed in 1991. 

Back in those days, Pun says he thought Baaba Seth was destined to be bigger than Dave Matthews Band. He wasn’t alone. The band’s combination of improvisational sensibility and global grooves made it a prime candidate to storm the jam scene—and even cross over into pop stardom.

As they say, the rest is history. DMB went on to become the only band ever to have seven consecutive studio albums debut at number one on the Billboard 200. Baaba Seth had some success, gaining renown in central Virginia, touring the East Coast extensively, and catching the eye of major record labels. But the band essentially broke up in 2000, and its eight members went their separate ways.

On August 18, the Baaba Seth bandmates will do what they’ve done almost every year since just a few years after their breakup. They’ll get back together to play one show, this one at The Southern Cafe & Music Hall, with their original lineup.

“It’s a different kind of band, unlike any others I had been in as far as our approach and style,” Chang says. “For me, and I think a lot of my bandmates would agree, that’s what keeps us coming back. It’s just fun to play with everyone, and the other part is people still give a crap—they want to hear our music.”

In addition to Chang on lead guitar and backing vocals, Baaba Seth features Dirk Lind on lead vocals and rhythm guitar, Hope Clayburn on sax, flute, and vocals, Dylan Locke on bass, Jim Ralson behind the drums, Len Wishart providing more percussion, Mark Maynard playing trombone, and Tim Lett on trumpet. That’s eight players with unique musical backgrounds, still playing together 32 years after finding one other in the electric, early-1990s Charlottesville music scene.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that the biggest setback for the band—essentially frozen in time and thawed out annually—over the past two decades was COVID-19. From 2003 to 2018, the annual Baaba Seth reunion shows marched forward in 4/4 time. But when the octet decided to take a short break in 2019, they found themselves offbeat for the next four years.

The 2023 show will essentially be the band’s third coming, and Chang expects it to be big.

“I don’t know that Baaba Seth is going to try to reinvent itself—it is not a going concern,” Chang says. “But since we’re doing more rehearsals, maybe we’ll try to bust out something we haven’t done in a while or a new composition. There might be a few surprises.”

Indeed, Baaba Seth hasn’t been in complete cryogenic stasis for the last 20-plus years. They have a handful of songs written and arranged after they officially broke up, Chang says. And each band member is still involved in the music industry in some capacity. Clayburn, for example, plays regular solo shows with her backing band. Accordingly, Baaba Seth will occasionally mix in a Clayburn composition, Chang says. “As long as we follow her lead, it ends up being a party,” he says.

Recently, there’s even been talk of Baaba Seth returning to the studio for the first time in two decades. “It doesn’t take anything but getting together,” Chang says. “But even that is difficult with such a large band.”

Fans might think the biggest concern for a band more than three decades in, with eight members doing their own thing 364 days of the year, would be finding its groove on that 365th day. Aren’t there times when they take the stage and find they’re just out of synch? Times when their own experiences, both musical and otherwise, have broken the wavelength they all once shared?

“We’ve never had that problem. We’ve played so many times in that configuration on the stage, and it feels like no time has passed,” Chang says. “When we have some preparation and line up in that configuration, it’s like a muscle memory thing. Even if we go to far-flung places … we drove around in a van together for so long, those memories don’t go away.”

Opening for Baaba Seth on August 18 will be another band featuring Chang, Afro Asia. Founded by Pun, the five-piece fuses traditional Thai music with funk and soul. Pun conjured the project after buying a stringed Thai instrument known as a phin on a trip to his mother country. In addition to Pun on phin and Chang on guitar, bassist Houston Ross, keyboardist Ivan Orr, and drummer Kofi Shepsu round out the band.

For Chang, Afro Asia’s vibe isn’t all that different from Baaba Seth’s. It’s “a reunion of old friends playing heady music,” he says. And for Pun, it’s a chance to come full circle and play with a bunch of guys who look like him.

“At first, it was intentional to have Black and brown members—if not really a rule,” Pun says. “And in bringing some of this traditional yet modern Asian music to America, it works because it is heavily influenced by Black American funk and jazz.”

The TinkerTar, a kids’ guitar trainer widely available for about a month now, is in many ways the synthesis of Charlottesville instrument and board-game maker Brian Calhoun’s eclectic career.

Calhoun’s craftsmanship has been well known around town, and beyond, for many years. Through Rockbridge Guitar, he makes high-end instruments and has worked with renowned musicians like Dave Matthews, Brandi Carlile, Keith Urban, Harry Styles, and Zac Brown.

After years of making guitars, Calhoun had a crazy idea in 2016—crazy at least for a respected luthier whose business was music. He had played a boring board game one night and decided he could make a better one. The outcome was Chickapig, a hilariously fanciful farmyard strategy game. Legend has it Calhoun even had help from Matthews in making and popularizing the game, which went on to win Best Board Game at the 2019 National Parenting Product Awards, and is on shelves at Target, Barnes & Noble, Walmart, and independent game stores.

Chickapig opened Calhoun’s eyes to kids’ products, he says, and the idea of a beginner’s guitar lodged itself in the back of his mind.

“I have always wondered why kids don’t start guitar early,” Calhoun says. “On the piano, they start the Suzuki method as early as 3 years old.”

Calhoun started asking parents of small children about their strategies for pushing musicianship. Having kids learn on four-string ukuleles seemed popular, and one of Calhoun’s friends pointed out that he was quite capable at drawing animals. He made a dinosaur-shaped uke and put it in the hands of some 5-year-olds. Still, the instrument was too hard. The concept of chords was too far removed from what kids think of when they think of songs.

That’s when it clicked. If you could get children to play melodies, he figured, they would take to the instrument more quickly. The best way to move to melodies? Force the issue with only one string. “If you get rid of the other strings, you have no option other than to play a melody,” Calhoun says.

The accomplished six-string luthier made a one-string prototype, and it worked. Kids could pick up the single-string instrument and play melodies after only a few minutes, immediately sparking their interest.

One-string instruments are not on their own a new idea, but Calhoun figures his TinkerTar is unique in at least a few ways. First, one-string instruments aren’t typically targeted toward beginning players. Second, the TinkerTar is fretless but includes color-coded finger positioning marks and drawn-on frets. That makes it simple to both find the right place to make a note and depress the string to make clear tones. Third, the instrument is simple to tune. Calhoun recommends starting by tuning the one string to C in the open position, but even as the TinkerTar loses fidelity, it always “stays in tune with itself.”

The TinkerTar is available nationwide at Walmart, and Calhoun says the next step is finding shelf space in more stores. He says the considerable job won’t take away from his work with Rockbridge, though. Now that he has manufacturing in place, he’s able to step away and let the business jam on its own.

“We can make as many of these as the market allows, and they have so much potential,” Calhoun says. “They can have a big impact on music education.”