Tag: local music

Categories
Arts

Listen up: C-ville’s hip-hop scene is on the rise

Louis Hampton and Damani Harrison of The Beetnix perform at the Nine Pillars Cultural Hip-hop Fest. Photo by Ron Paris

It’s a gray Sunday evening, 50-something degrees and drizzling when The Beetnix step onto the outdoor stage at IX Art Park. It’s been raining all day, but a crowd of more than 100 has gathered on the graffiti-painted concrete ground in front of the stage. Many of them hold their phones and tablets in the air, precipitation be damned, ready to capture Charlottesville’s most legendary hip-hop duo on video.

“Come closer,” Damani “Glitch One” Harrison says to the crowd as he picks up a mic. With his arms stretched out wide, Louis “Waterloo” Hampton beckons for everyone to move in closer.

For Harrison, 39, hip-hop has been part of his life since he was a kid. A military brat who grew up in Germany and Philadelphia, he remembers exactly where he was when the music caught him.

Categories
Arts

Leaning In: Restroy’s Chris Dammann mines hidden beauty for musical inspiration

“I’m always trying to do something a little impossible,” says Chris Dammann about blending jazz, grunge, electronic, classical and mbira music into compositions for his avant-garde group, Restroy. “There’s something beautiful about impossible things.” Photo by Amy Jackson

When Chris Dammann was a kid growing up in Charlottesville, he spent a lot of time looking at his dad’s upright bass. “I wonder what that does, to be in that corner,” Dammann recalls thinking about the instrument. He decided to find out for himself at age 14, when he took the bass out of the corner and started plucking its fat strings. He never put it back.

Dammann, now 32, has spent a lot of time with that bass. He played it all through high school, improvising and taking lessons from Charlottesville Symphony principal bassist and UVA music faculty member Pete Spaar. He played it all through music school at Northwestern University and in regular sessions at the Velvet Lounge in Chicago. He’s carted it across the region in a station wagon (it’s too big for airplanes) and played it on the road with Mexo-Americana group David Wax Museum and the jazzy 3.5.7 Ensemble.

He’s spent so much time with the instrument that it’s even affected him physically. Hunching over the bass’s belly has changed how he stands, the orientation of his hips and his posture. “There’s nothing sensible about the upright bass,” Dammann says with a laugh, “but that’s part of its charm.”

He’ll bring that bass—and some of the music he’s composed on it—to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church-Unitarian Universalist on Wednesday evening, to play with his avant-garde group Restroy, combining elements of jazz, mbira, electronic, noise, classical and grunge music into a singular, experimental sound that’ll compel you to stop what you’re doing, listen and ask, “What is that?”

Dammann composes because he needs to. Usually, his music begins with the act of listening to his record collection—Sonic Youth, Nirvana, Charles Mingus, Pauline Oliveros—to “exhaust the possibilities” of whatever he’s listening to. When he can no longer find what he’s looking for in those records in that moment, he’ll create what he needs to hear.

“Whenever I play, I imagine I’m sitting in the audience and try and play exactly what I would like to hear as a listener,” says Dammann. “I’m always looking for something physical and visceral—things that quicken the heart and make me want to dance.” As for what specific feelings he’s looking to evoke with Restroy’s music, Dammann says wryly that information is “top secret.”

SaturnReturn_RestroyDammann composes most of the music for Restroy and plays bass and electronics in the group that also features Cathy Monnes on cello, James Davis on trumpet, Kevin Davis on violin, Tobin Summerfield on guitar, Nick Anaya on saxophone, Mabel Kwan on piano and John Niekrasz on drums. Dammann likes to give Restroy musicians something challenging to play, just enough information to know what’s going on, but not so much that they can get away with not listening. “Listening is the most important part of it for me,” says Dammann. “I think of a musician as just a highly skilled, highly attuned listener.”

On tracks such as “Chris&CathyBFFS4 EvahEver,” off of Restroy’s 2016 release, Saturn Return, Dammann ponders texture to give form to music for improvisation. On another track, “Dangu Rangu,” he’s arranged a traditional mbira piece that isn’t necessarily an authentic representation of the music that originated in Zimbabwe, but rather an exploration of what he finds fascinating about it: “The long lines, the feel of pulse without meter. There is meter…but all the cross-rhythms obscure it to my ear until it just sounds like four on the floor, pulse,” he says, adding that he’s captivated by “how spontaneously musical it sounds.”

Dammann knows there’s probably not a huge audience for this highly experimental sound, and he’s okay with that. But for the audience he does have, he encourages close listening.

Music is everywhere—murmuring under the hubbub of voices in a coffee shop, blaring from the car ahead of you at a stoplight and in your earbuds as you answer emails. It’s on the stereo while you cook dinner and in the movies and TV shows you watch. We’re always listening, but we’re listening in addition to doing something else—listening is rarely an act of its own.

If you let music pour into your ears and seep into your brain, your heart, your blood, you can absorb it to the point where it becomes a part of you and you’ll feel ownership over the sound. Even if you didn’t write it, you might feel like you did—that’s how involved Dammann wants you to get with this music.

“Sometimes, when you go see music, it’s like you the listener are making it happen in some magical way, and I’m always looking for that. When you’re the performer, you can engage directly with that, and if it’s subtle enough, it brings everyone into the process. …Listening is a sacred thing.”

Restroy plays Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church-Unitarian Universalist on Wednesday, April 12 at 8pm.

Categories
Arts

Local rapper Keese envisions unity through compassion

Keese will perform with Gritty City Records on Tuesday at The Ante Room. Photo by Amy Jackson

Keese is a quiet guy. While growing up in Charlottesville’s 10th and Page neighborhood, he didn’t say much. But he paid close attention to everyone around him—his friends and family, his neighbors, what was going on in his city schools. English was his favorite subject—he liked to read and he loved to write stories.

When Keese started rapping at age 20, the words came naturally, but he says people were shocked. “Ask anybody—I was so quiet. I was in my shell, but hip-hop really gave me a voice to say what I want to say,” he says.

Keese, now 26, works at the downtown Key Recreation Center, but he raps in nearly all of his spare time. He’s built a following through energetic performances at Rugged Arts Hip-Hop Showcases at the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar and sets at Magnolia House. His EP, False Hope, dropped in December, and he opens for Milwaukee rapper Milo at the UVA Chapel on Friday.

When Keese hears a beat, he starts to envision a story—a friend’s struggle or something that’s bugging him, then pages through his lyrics for the verse. “I’m inspired all the time,” he says. “I want to take people into my world, let them know what I’ve seen: poverty, bullying, racism—how the world is. The world is a pretty bad place. It could be better, but people don’t want to come together,” he says. Conscious hip-hop, though, can unite people through compassion, sympathy and mutual understanding. This is Keese’s angle.

“Purpose,” on False Hope, takes on what Keese calls “another black hood story” of a kid who’s picked on at school for not having the “freshest shoes.” “His moms can’t afford, she already got two jobs, older brother too concerned with the block, he ain’t even got a pops.” Then his crush asks him to back off and he’s devastated. “He ain’t even really had nobody by his side, no one to call for help. / Fed up with himself, he went home, older brother had a gun on his shelf,” Keese spits. Then the teen, who believes he has no purpose in life, points the gun to his head, closes his eyes and pulls the trigger, only to find the gun unloaded and himself not entirely alone.

“You got a whole lotta living left to do,” goes the hook.

Keese wrote “Purpose” for victims of bullying, as a reflection on a friend’s suicide. As a stellar lyricist, he knows the power of words and how deep they can burrow in the heart.

He doesn’t condone violence, drugs or hateful behavior. He’s “not into that stuff,” but his most popular song is called “Crack.”

“Crack, crack, I got that crack motherfucker,” he starts. “Listen to my flows, put it in your veins. / I’m gonna take you high…give it one try, you’ll never be the same,” he quips, lyrics tumbling out easily over the beat. “One time for the young Trayvons, Mike Browns, pipe down ’cause you ain’t saying nothing. / All these lame-ass rappers scared to tell the truth. / But quick to hit the booth and sell these lies to the youth. / I don’t get it, they spit it but never live it. / My lyrics speak from the soul, paint a picture with my vision.” Then, he declares belief that “we’re gonna be all right” because he’s been playing with you all along—you’ve been caught up in the sick beat, not paying close attention to the words. “I got ’em mad ’cause they thought a nigga start selling crack. / What they didn’t know is that was the plan to reel ’em in. / Now I got your attention, don’t be so offensive. / I still got the highs for your lows, come and hit this.”

“This” is his music, not rocks of cocaine. With its timely references, vivid images, killer rhymes and playful ruse, the song is clever and establishes Keese as a lyrical mastermind.

“Sometimes you have to disguise messages in certain songs to get people to listen,” Keese says, noting that the song warns of the dangers of selling and doing drugs. Opt for music instead, because it’s just as addictive and good for the soul. “Give you one track, you’ll never be the same.”

If a message isn’t something he believes in, he’s not going to put it out there. “I live what I write. I could easily say that ‘Crack’ is about drugs” to maintain a certain image, Keese says. “But I don’t want to be something I’m not. I’m sensitive. Everyone is sensitive; the world is sensitive. If that wasn’t the case, then we wouldn’t react to certain things,” he says.

People are getting his message. At Rugged Arts at the Tea Bazaar back in September, an eager crowd sang the lyrics to “Crack” at the top of their lungs—for Keese, who loves to perform live and feel that energy, the fact that people connect with his music gives him momentum.

“It feels like people are counting on me,” he says. “I want people who come to my shows to be inspired, to feel good about themselves, to want to do something better. I want to put this town in a position where everybody can do what they love.”

Categories
Arts

Flutist-guitarist Maxx Katz explores doom with a view

Before Maxx Katz plays a single note of a FLOOM set, she looks out at the audience in front of her and thinks: “We’re all going to die.”

That thought in mind, she rings out one heavy chord on her silver sparkle Epiphone Les Paul and lets it tumble out of her bitchin’ amps and through the crowd like a slow fog, enveloping everyone in the room in a two-sided truth: Death is inevitable, but the fact that we’re alive “is really big and remarkable.”

It’s hard to escape the cloud of sound; it seeps into every corner of the room, and if her listener is willing to join her on that cloud, he might reach a certain level of mysticism. It’s what Katz aims to achieve, for both herself and her listener, with FLOOM, her solo musical project that yokes the weight of doom metal—heavy, heavy metal from a low-tuned guitar played at slow tempos, often with foreboding lyrics—with the haunting lightness of the flute.

We’re all going to die, but before we do, there’s life to live, Katz says, and we might as well fill it with rad music.

Katz, a highly trained classical and jazz flutist and an experienced doom-metal guitarist who’s toured nationally and internationally with Red Wizard and as Miami Nights, recently began combining the two out of boredom and sheer necessity. It’s nothing we’ve heard here in town before.

“I don’t know how other people feel about doom, but in my favorite moments—when the riffs are good—it brings you up to the edge of reality and you look over,” Katz says. “I kind of love the bleakness,” she says, because sometimes it’s empowering to stare down a scary thing, to release a powerful sound upon it.

But after years of touring with doom bands based out of Charlottesville, Philadelphia and Portland, Oregon, Katz tired of playing the same riffs and rehashing the same sounds; she began itching for the expressiveness flute affords her. When she put them together, she found that flute expands doom “not just in a register way, but in an emotional way. It adds this register of delicacy and beauty but still [has] strength and size,” Katz says.

Last spring, Katz applied for—and received—a New City Arts Charlottesville SOUP grant for FLOOM to explore what’s going on in the space between the high-end of the flute and the low-end of the guitar. SOUP dinner attendees pay $10 for soup, salad, bread, dessert and the chance to vote for one of the artists presenting projects in need of funding; in May, they voted for FLOOM. “I had this mindset that I was too weird, that [what I make] is too weird for people, and that I was outside society in this way. But then people voted for it, and I was shocked and very encouraged. Maybe people do want to experience reality in the same way I experience reality,” Katz says with a low, warm laugh.

FLOOM songs—Katz says she’s composed about two and a half of them—are less like songs and more like sonic journeys. Instead of traveling from point A to point B, then to C and back to A, a FLOOM song will jump from A to F, make a roundabout back to B and maybe stop at C along the way. Katz creates an atmosphere with tone and texture, one where every note of the song is played live (“I’m not into samplers; I’m not into recorded things,” she says) to heighten the shared unique musical experience.

When Katz writes for FLOOM, she says she tries to make the seemingly discordant instruments work together by creating layers of sound around and between them. She’s not just looping a guitar chord progression and playing flute solos over that—“That’d be boring,” Katz says. Instead, she plays around with which instrument carries the atmosphere, which instrument creates the texture, when both are needed, and how they can complement or contradict the other. Sometimes she loops the guitar, sometimes she loops the flute. She sings. She strikes. She provokes. The songs are quite composed, but Katz keeps a certain level of improvisation in each FLOOM set—speeding things up, slowing them down, ringing a chord a bit longer—depending on how the music feels that day.

She aims to evoke the intangible through music. Music is an elusive medium in a way—we can’t see it, or hold it in our hands; a chord doesn’t ring forever. But we can feel the vibrations of the sound in our bones and our blood, and the emotion of it in our hearts and minds. Music makes us feel the invisible parts of ourselves.

“There’s this level of heart and life that’s so hard to get to, especially with the way we live. Talking to that level is my goal,” Katz says. Sometimes when she plays, she says reality seems to open up and she feels free to move. Other times, a note will hit just the right sadness, “the good kind of sadness that blooms, and it’s like, ‘Oh, thank you for doing that.’” That’s what she listens for when she’s on stage, on the edge of existence, fully engrossed in life while death looks on from a distance. There’s a bravery, a brazenness to it.

Katz says she’s driven by “the undercurrent of wanting a more complete experience of life. That’s always going to win. The making of things is a necessary thing about living a real life that cannot be avoided,” and music will always be the way she works the chi of life into something we can hold on to together. “If a performer rings their heart like a bell,” she says, “it starts ringing everyone else’s.”

Maxx Katz performs as FLOOM, combining the guttural depths of heavy-metal guitar with the piercing lightness of flute in an emotional sonic collision. Photo by Eze Amos