Tag: The Green Room

Join us for a performance by For Now, a quintet led by vocalist and composer Isabel Crespo, in The Green Room. The Gary Topper Group will open the show.

Tickets: $10
Doors 7 pm | Performance at 7:30 pm

Wandering carefully between genres, For Now performs compositions influenced by modern jazz, contemporary classical music, visual art, and poetry. Fueled by an unending curiosity, they explore the personal and the political, turning complex situations into musical vignettes.

Their debut album, Elsewhere, was released with national acclaim in 2018. Their sophomore album, The Turning, will be released in July 2019, and will feature introspective exploration of themes including the (de)construction of self, the importance of recognizing intersectionality, and the pursuit of inspiration

Each member of For Now is a skilled musician and composer in their own right, and brings openness and versatility to the project. Their performances are dynamic, carefully weaving improvisations and composed material, and striving for new ways of unfolding the personal experience.

Join us in The Green Room for an album release concert with Memphis’ own Joe Restivo, a member of the Bo-Keys.

“One of the city’s truly special Memphis music experiences.” – Bob Mehr, Memphis Commercial Appeal

Tickets: $10
Doors 7:30 pm | show at 8 pm

About Joe Restivo:
Memphis’ Joe Restivo – member of beloved soul band the Bo-Keys – will release ‘Where’s Joe?,’ his debut album, July 12 on Blue Barrel Records (the non-profit label arm of Archer Records). The album crystalizes his interest in Memphis jazz music made at the intersection of jump blues, rhythm & blues, and jazz. This is swinging, fun music, jazz for hipster cocktail parties, which Restivo has been refining with his weekly residency at Lafeyette’s over four years.

Restivo began playing clubs in the transitional period of the 1990s, when the blues, jazz, and rhythm & blues masters could still be found on Beale Street and elsewhere in Memphis. Restivo would play regularly with organ master Charlie Wood and piano great Mose Vinson and would see Newborn play every week. “He had that bebop element but it was also kind of dangerous and had a rock and roll thing, too. It wasn’t purely serious. But he was also playing sophisticated music,” remembers Restivo, recalling that he also used to see old-school, jazz-based Beale Street players like saxophonists Fats Sonny and Fred Ford, organist Honeymoon Gardner, and trumpet player Noki Taylor, play live frequently. “You don’t hear anyone make the guitar growl a little bit in jazz. These sounds from that era are brackish water. Is Tiny Grimes a rock and roll artist or is he a jazz artist or is he jump blues?,” he asks, rhetorically. Taking these influences and making them his own, Restivo’s masterful guitar work also recalls national greats such as Oscar Moore (Nat King Cole), Loman Pauling (The 5 Royales), Tal Farlow, and Hank Garland.

Yet the album is no revival, mostly fueled by original compositions. Take, for example, the film noir-inspired “Last Starlight Motel” or the ballad “Thelma.” He recalls, “’Thelma’ I named after my grandmother because it reminded me of being in her kitchen, with her smoking cigarettes.” Even the covers are done in a new style. Restivo adds, “We played Bill Jennings and Tiny Grimes but we found our own way with them.” The standard “House of the Rising Sun” shows up in 3:4 time. Then there’s the raunchy Memphis instrumental bonus track, which recalls music from Sun Studio.

Restivo calls upon bassist Tim Goodwin and drummer Tom Lonardo, a Memphis rhythm section that’s worked together and apart for over forty years, playing behind every major touring jazz artist. Lonardo is recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Memphis Musical Heritage Foundation and has worked with who’s who, such as Mose Allison, the Duke Ellington Orchestra, Bo Diddley, The Charlie Wood Trio, Jim Dickinson, and Calvin Newborn. Art Edmaiston, a veteran of Gregg Allman and Bobby “Blue” Bland’s bands, adds his saxophone.

With the Bo-Keys, Restivo has performed in venues and festivals all over the world including Lincoln Center, London’s O2 Stadium, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, as well as shared stages with luminaries in soul, jazz and blues including Syl Johnson, Newborn, Bobby Rush, and Carla Thomas. A graduate of the Jazz and Contemporary Music Program at New School University in NYC, Restivo has also played with rising soul singer Robert Finley. He spins Memphis jazz as a DJ on his weekly radio show on WEVL.

Restivo plays a late 1940s Epiphone Zephyr Deluxe. “I don’t have any proof but this guitar was supposedly played by a guy who played with Bob Wills,” says Restivo with a smile, though he later found some evidence online to support the claim.

‘Where’s Joe?’ was recorded at Archer Record’s Music+Arts Studio in Memphis, TN to analog tape with no overdubs.

Join us for a performance by singer-songwriter Kevin Morby in The Green Room at Crosstown Arts. Opening for Kevin is William Tyler (Lambchop/Silver Jews).

Tickets: $15
Doors at 7:30pm | Show at 8pm

About Kevin Morby:
Kevin Morby released his beloved solo debut Harlem River in 2013 and has released a full-length nearly every year since. His latest, 2017’s City Music, is a collection Kevin says “is a mix-tape, a fever dream, a love letter dedicated to those cities that I cannot get rid of, to those cities that are all inside of me.”

About William Tyler:
“William Tyler knows the South — as a crucible of American histories and cultures, an entity capable of expansive beauty and incomprehensible violence, often in the same beat — as his native place, the place that holds him and that he runs from. In the music of William Tyler, the South is not apart from America; the South is America condensed.

“William’s latest album, Goes West, marks a sort of narrowing of focus for his music; it sounds as though he found a way to point himself directly towards the rich and bittersweet emotional center of his music without being distracted by side trips. Perhaps this is down to the fact that William only plays acoustic guitar on the album, a clear and conscious decision considering that he is one of Nashville’s great electric guitarists. The band that performs Goes West alongside William—including guitarists Meg Duffy and Bill Frisell, bassist and producer Brad Cook, keyboardist James Wallace, drummer Griffin Goldsmith, and engineer Tucker Martine—is the best and most sympathetic group of players that William could have assembled to play these songs.” — M.C. Taylor