If roasting chestnuts on an open fire, listening to carols and waiting for ol’ St. Nick to arrive is not your thing, then the Saturday Night Lights Christmas Eve Bash may be the bright spot you’re looking for. Hip-hop, trap and club cuts by DJ Double-U keep things moving into the early Christmas hours and assures all a good night.
Saturday, December 24. $5-15, 10pm. The Ante Room, 219 W. Water St. 284-8561.
The four members of post-rock band Woods Running are about halfway through a pot of mint tea at Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar when they catch the eye of a bearded, ponytailed man sitting at the next table.
“Hey guys! I thought that was you,” the man says with enthusiasm. “When’s your next show?”
December 9, they tell him, at The Ante Room.
“Sweet,” he replies. His own band’s show for that night got canceled, so he’ll catch their set instead. “You guys rock. Let’s play a show together soon,” he says, before turning back to his own mug of tea.
“That guy’s in a band here in town,” Jacob Sommerio, who plays guitar in Woods Running, tells me in a lowered voice, before promptly freaking out with his bandmates. For Sommerio and his bandmates—guitarist Jake Pierce, bassist Aaron Richards and drummer Benjamin Snell—there’s a huge thrill in being recognized as musicians.
One, they’ve only been writing music for a year and a half, and playing shows for even less time.
Two, all of them are in high school. Sommerio and Pierce attend Albemarle High, and Richards and Snell are part of the same homeschooling collective. They began playing music together about four years ago, at first getting together for jam sessions via their youth group at Maple Grove Christian Church.
“Normal teenagers want to go to the mall to hang out; we just want to hang out in Ben’s basement and jam,” says Richards. “[But] we’re definitely not your typical teenage garage band.”
And he’s right. Woods Running’s ambient post-rock is devoid of the punky, chunky power chords and angst-ridden lyrics that you’d expect adolescents to write. The band’s sets are entirely instrumental; no words at all. “It’s a different feeling from other music,” Sommerio says. “My grandpa is always asking, ‘What are you doing, making up all those songs? That’s not what a guitar sounds like.’”
“It’s an emotional soundtrack,” Pierce says, one that explores the landscape of sonic time and space, allowing these four musicians to discover the overall feeling of a piece as it’s written.
The band wrote its first song, “Eleanor,” in about 30 minutes, just so Snell’s older brother (who is a member of indie-folk band Rain Tree) could make a live session parody video. It’s named after a friend’s 1991 baby blue Cadillac that had driven its final mile a few days before. That first take, the bandmates say, was “terrible, awful,” but they’ve refined it into a thoughtful song that starts off with straightforward, fingerpicked guitar and swells gently into an airy, reverb-y atmosphere not unlike the sideways shoreline sunset that graces the band’s Preface EP cover.
The EP’s other tracks, “Harmony of Inhibitions,” “Father of Lights” and “Swift and Certain,” with its reverb-drenched guitar parts, simmering drum beats under shimmering cymbals and full, deep bass, are fuller and more unexpected, demonstrating a level of confident, emotionally expansive and sensitive musicianship that sounds wise beyond the band’s adolescent years.
So far, all Woods Running songs have been written accidentally. “Seriously, nothing is intentional,” at least not at first, Sommerio says. “We’ll play, feel it out, then run through it again. It’s evolving every time,” Sommerio says of the process.
The band knows it has something good to work with when its members look at each other with “What the heck did we just do?!” expressions on their faces. Once, Pierce locked himself in the bathroom to freak out about a song. Other times, the band will run screaming from the room, or jump on a bed.
Preface was created with a “let’s make some dope songs and put it out there” attitude, they say; they recorded four tracks in Snell’s parents’ basement using Logic Pro.
The band’s new material, which the guys are currently recording at the Music Resource Center (Sommerio and Snell are budding audio engineers), is more intentional. Now, each time they run through a “freak-out song,” as they say, they stop to work out each section. They’re playing with structure, paying attention to loudness and quiet. They’re exploring the heavy, the light and the sonic and emotional sound and space that exists between the two.
“We’re pushing ourselves, trying to find our niche,” Pierce says.
They all admit to getting a bit nervous before shows; they’re still learning how to feel as comfortable on stage as they do in the Snell family basement.
“There are definitely moments [during shows] where you realize it’s all coming together and this is what we wanted it to sound like,” says Pierce, who has a penchant for playing with such urgency that he’ll break a string and have to finish out the set with guitars borrowed from other bands on the bill.
Local audiences are responding well. So well, in fact, that less than a year after Woods Running debuted at Maple Grove, the band has played the Tea Bazaar twice and will open for Girl Choir and Matt Curreri & The Exfriends at The Ante Room on Friday.
Snell says the band never intended to perform for audiences, but Will Mullany, who books DIY shows for Milli Coffee Roasters, reached out, and from there, other local bands and bookers started inviting Woods Running onto bills.
When asked why they play music in the first place, the guys joke about only being able to play so much Minecraft, disliking sports, having no interest in Model UN and wanting to do something that sets them apart from their peers. But then Snell deadpans, “What else would we be doing?,” and the group smirks and nods in agreement before taking another sip of mint tea.
Whether you are thankful, guided by a dark star or happy pickin’ over leftovers, a live gig awaits that’ll shake off the holiday gravy and leave you grateful for the blues.
November 23: Thankful Dead featuring Bigfoot County and Mama Tried at The Jefferson Theater.
November 24: DJ Sir RJ’s Thanksgiving After-party at The Ante Room.
November 25: Hackensaw Boys and Larry Keel Experience Present: Home For Thanksgiving Hangover Pickin’ Party at The Jefferson Theater.
November 26: Lord Nelson’s Leftover Party with Gold Connections and Big Mama Shakes at The Southern Café and Music Hall.
November 29: Dark Star Orchestra’s Grateful Dead concert experience at The Jefferson Theater.
The event name says it all. Locals Play Locals is a big ol’ Charlottesville music cover show. More than a dozen bands and solo artists—Tequila Mockingbird, Gina Sobel’s Choose Your Own Adventure, Genna Matthew, Phil West, Marchenko and others—will swap songs and even genres in this benefit concert for Charlottesville’s Music Resource Center.
Friday 11/18. $8, 8pm. The Ante Room, 219 Water St. 284-8561.
Tagged on Sonicbids as Americana, rock, country, doom post-metal and psychedelic stoner rock, Asheville’s BASK shrugs off classification with a note to fans: “Most of all we want you to listen without concern for what you are hearing. To listen only for the sake of hearing.” Judging by the slew of rave reviews for its 2014 album, American Hollow, the heavy-hitting quartet is being heard—loud and dark.
Monday, November 7. $7, 8pm. The Ante Room, 219 W. Water St. 284-8561.
Go to a hip-hop show in Charlottesville and you’ll see a rapper spitting lines to a crowd full of people giving him their full attention. They’ll be standing there, hipsters and hip-hop heads alike, stroking their chins, heads nodding to the beat. “They’re listening to every single word,” and when the rapper “says something dope, people fucking cheer,” says Mike “Mike Bizarro” White, a local rapper who performs as one-half of the duo Cognitive Dissidents.
“People go because they admire the craft, both in the beat production and the lyricism. It’s almost like going to see beat poetry,” White says. “Everybody’s there wearing their heart on their sleeve,” and with events like the newly established Round Robin Hip-Hop Showcase at The Ante Room, local rap artists are being given more chances to gain new audiences.
Jeyon Falsini, who owns and runs The Ante Room, noticed that rappers brought in by local promoters to perform during the last hour of his venue’s dance parties had more talent to share. The rappers needed a stage to themselves, so he started building hip-hop bills.
“I was noticing that rappers’ fans that came out for just their one friend wouldn’t stay to see the other acts,” says Falsini. After hosting a singer-songwriter round robin, where each artist played a song before passing the mic to the next artist, Falsini thought a similar format would work well for hip-hop. Each rapper performs a short set before passing the mic to the next MC. The mic makes two full rounds—each rapper performs twice.
Falsini expects the performers to come prepared, to know their lines and spit them out over their backing tracks—“warts and all”—no lip-syncing. “The energy, ‘the vibration,’ as I’ve heard it put, comes from performing live,” Falsini says.
The next showcase takes place on October 6 and features three individuals and one duo, all from Charlottesville, with each offering a slightly different musical style (it’s a broad genre, after all) and a different perspective on life. But they all agree on two things: Hip-hop is important, and it’s on the rise in Charlottesville.
Danny Lz, one of the youngest rappers on the scene, delivers straight-up hip-hop, with rhymes and beats heavily influenced by ’90s rap (think Jay-Z and Nas). He tends to tell stories about himself, and about his life, to relate to his audience. The genre, he says, “keeps your ear to the streets, to what’s going on in the world.”
That’s precisely what drew Louis “Waterloo” Hampton, member of The Beetnix and one of the scene’s most established lyrical artists, to hip-hop when he was a teen in the ’90s. “At the time, I didn’t have a dad in the house, and I was the big brother, so I didn’t really have anybody to look up to,” he says. “Music let me know what was cool, what was hip. It let me know what to keep my eyes peeled for, gave me the advice that I needed.” Plus, it “let me know it was okay to be who I was.”
Hampton cites Ice Cube’s “Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself,” off of 1992’s The Predator, as particularly important to him. Not only was it musically and lyrically fantastic, it offered good advice: “You better check yo’ self before you wreck yo’ self,” Ice Cube insists, warning of the pitfalls of the street.
“Ice Cube really spoke about the ills of the system and police brutality,” Hampton says, sighing heavily before pointing out that incidents of police brutality toward black men is, 24 years later, still an issue. Hip-hop, he says, can provide sound guidance.
For White, who played in jam bands before forming Cognitive Dissidents with Phil “dogfuck” Green, rap is an emotional and mental release that’s open to audience interpretation. When he spits “My thoughts sink distantly, consistent as barflies / Stand guard for epiphany, turn rosary to barbed wire,” he expects the listener to find personal meaning in his lines. “It’s not up to me what my words mean,” he says. He’s all about metaphor and simile, allusion and allegory.
Green, on the other hand, goes for specificity. He raps: “Your mom’s so white, she said ‘Hey’ I said ‘Hey.’ / I said ‘Goodbye’ and she said ‘Namaste.’ / Then she dove in her Volvo and drove on her way / To practice her Spanish down at Chipotle. / Your mom’s so white she almost makes a white dude’s pay / But if she stayed at home and raised you then that’d probably be okay / and Hannity and company, they wouldn’t have shit to say about the welfare state of America’s decay.” He calls out his own whiteness, gender and race politics, big business and more all in a few lines.
Lalo Lloyd, who lived in Washington, D.C., New York, Baltimore and Philadelphia before moving to Charlottesville about a year ago, blends old-school hip-hop with a little R&B. “I base everything off an emotion,” he says, beats and lyrics alike. His songs are about relationships. As a child, he watched his stepfather abuse his mother; he’s lost friends and family members to drugs, to disease. “Most of it is stuff I’ve seen with my own eyes,” he says. “When people listen to [my music], I want them to feel like they know me. What you see is what you get; there’s no smoke and mirrors here.”
In addition to The Ante Room, Magnolia House, Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar and Milli Coffee Roasters host local hip-hop shows. But while the scene is emerging, it can only grow and deepen if people start to come to shows and if more venues begin supporting the hip-hop community, says White, who insists Charlottesville needs that musical diversity.
But no matter what, “Hip-hop is never going to go away,” Hampton says. “It’s a part of music—it’s a genre of music that’s in every city, everywhere you go. So, to have hip-hop in Charlottesville is totally normal,” he says. Not only that, but it’s necessary. “There are kids, who grew up like I did, who need that outlet like I did,” kids from all backgrounds who need their version of The Predator, he says. Maybe he—or another local rapper—will be the one to provide it.
Contact Erin O’Hare at arts@c-ville.com.
In May, Ruckersville-based comic Chris Alan found himself backstage at Amy Schumer’s stand-up comedy show at the Blue Cross Arena in Rochester, New York.
Alan, a Rochester native, was there supporting his pal Mark Normand, Schumer’s opening act that night.
The three comics chatted a bit in the green room, but Alan says he was too nervous to say much to Schumer (she’s the biggest active comic he’s met, after all). Alan, who has been in the Air Force for 18 years, says, “The military came out of me. I popped out of my chair and was standing there all tall, calling her ‘Ms. Schumer.’ She told me to stop it and just talk to her like a comedian.”
Right before the show started, Alan saw Schumer whisper something to Normand, then she looked at Alan and asked, “So, do you wanna do five minutes?”
“Fuck yeah!” Alan told her, and moments later he was on stage in front of a sea of people. He had no prep. No warning. Nothing but his jokes.
In those moments, Alan says he thought of all the shows where there were more empty seats than filled ones, the nights when he and his fellow comics made no money.
But this time, he killed it. “All the jokes hit: boom, boom, boom,” Alan says, snapping his fingers. He told his hummus joke, his black man driving a Prius joke (helps save money on gas for all those drive-by shootings). He gave some love to his high school and trashed its longtime rival.
Five minutes goes quickly and, before he knew it, he was backstage again, shaking like a leaf, calling his mom, fending off tears, getting Twitter and Instagram notifications from new fans in the audience. He recalls Schumer’s people telling him he looked “amazingly too comfortable” on stage—and he was. “I was just ready,” he says.
Chris Alan
The Ante Room
September 29
For the past year and a half, Alan has worked the L.Y.A.O. comedy showcase in Charlottesville—opening for national comedians such as Kyle Kinane and Sasheer Zamata—and is growing the local comedy scene with monthly open mic nights at the Southern, Holly’s Deli and, most recently, The Ante Room. Usually they’re “show up and go up” events, where budding comics sign up and Alan creates a roster based on what he knows they’re capable of. There are a few up-and-comers in town, he says, like Winston Hodges, Ken Edwards and T.J. Ferguson.
Alan, who also hosts the “Negro Please” podcast, says there’s been great support for the scene, from small but dedicated audiences and booking agents such as Danny Shea at the Southern and Jeyon Falsini at The Ante Room. He’d like to see more people come out to perform and watch…and, let’s face it, Charlottesville could stand to loosen up a bit.
Alan’s been prepping for that Schumer moment since he was a kid. “I grew up in the inner city,” he says. “I was fortunate enough to have both my parents, and that was very rare, to see an entire black family in the city, so I got picked on a lot.” On top of that, he went to private school. “In my neighborhood, I was the rich kid, but when I got to school, I was the poor black kid. I wasn’t black enough for [my neighborhood], but I was too black for the rich white kids,” he says. (This disparity extends to current struggles in the comedy scene, where he often feels “not black enough for the black shows” and “too black for the white shows.”)
Alan learned to use humor as a social inroad. “I would lash out and talk a lot of shit, just hurtful stuff,” he says. “I had bad teeth and glasses, I didn’t have the cool clothes. I was the worst fighter, the most unathletic dude, so that’s how I learned to be funny—it was a defense thing.” By high school, Alan realized that if he lightened it up, his sharpness could actually make people laugh.
He cracked up his Air Force bunkmates by mimicking drill sergeants, and by the time he got into comedy, in Las Vegas in 2010, he knew he’d found his people, his place.
“I want to be funny because I want people to listen…I want to make them think,” Alan says. Parenting jokes, marriage jokes, jokes about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, feminism and bigotry, Black Lives Matter and more—he’s not drawing any lines in the sand. (He won’t insult his wife or her family, though.) He wants his audiences to consider experiences different from their own—it’s why he jokes about race, gender, politics and things that, for all of our many differences, are shared human experiences.
Like bathroom farts, the thing that Alan finds most hilarious of all. “That’s such a vulnerable moment for anybody,” he says, giggling. “You could be the most powerful person in the world or the poorest person in the world.”
Alan believes that good comedians develop huge followings because “people want to hear what comics have to say. I think that comics are the voice of the people. It’s not your politicians, it’s not your state representatives. It’s frickin’ comedians,” Alan says. Comedy gives performers a license to say what others cannot say—or are afraid to say—and in a public space, no less. “We need comedy,” he says.
But “if you wanna see some seriously funny shit,” he tells me while peering over the rims of his thick-framed glasses, “come to the Waffle House with us after a show. We’re there until like, 2 o’clock in the morning, just comic-on-comic. That’s the real show.”
West Coast punk blasters Green Jellÿ began as Green Jello in the early 1980s, playing electrifying performances with rowdy crowds that eventually resulted in the band getting banned from some venues, and a Kraft Foods lawsuit that forced the name change. Imprinting itself on Hollywood’s underground scene, Green Jellÿ grew its reputation with the addition of characters such
as Sh*t Man, Cow God and Satan’s Ham before breaking up in 1995, then reuniting in 2008.
Thursday, September 1. $10-12, 8pm. The Ante Room, 219 Water St. 284-8561.