If you enjoy live local music and haven’t been to the Rialto Theatre, which was renovated and reopened as a live-music venue last year on Kenmore Boulevard, here’s your chance.
Orrville singer and songwriter Gretchen Pleuss will celebrate the digital release of her latest album From Birth, to Breath, to Bone on Friday.
I haven’t heard the new album, but Pleuss’ 2013 album Out of Dreams is available at iTunes and the usual online places.
As with some of her proudly stated musical heroes, which include Nick Drake, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon and Ani DiFranco, Pleuss keeps the music above the standard, three-chord, coffee-house troubadour sound with some cool chord progressions (a la Mitchell) and grooves underneath her layered vocal harmonies.
Pleuss also trusts her lilting melodies enough to use her quiet, emotive alto to sell her lyrics (i.e. there’s not a lot of manic melisma trying to tear your eardrums off).
Also on the bill are Time Cat, the bluesy, hard soul-rocking trio of singer/guitarist Jeri Sapronetti, drummer Sam Caler and bassist Colten Huffman, who are recording their second full-length album between gigs.
The powerful trio just might tear your eardrums off, but trust me, you’ll be better for it.
Rounding out the playbill will be Medina’s own Ray Flanagan, who has released two full-length albums of contemporary heartland rock with a prog-rock edge in the past couple of years, A Hard Shell To Break and Same Sky Different Space, with his band the Authorities.
Time Cat and Flanagan have Bandcamp pages if you want to check out their music.
Also, your ticket to the Kenmore show will get you a copy of From Birth, To Breath, To Bone on CD. There’s also a vinyl option.
Swap at Musica
Musica has been playing host to sponsored vinyl swap nights on Thursdays, and tonight features local guitar pedal makers EarthQuaker.
Full disclosure: Several of the nice folks at EarthQuaker came out and helped me with an upcoming story. Nevertheless, this should be a good time for vinyl lovers and especially for guitar and pedal nerds as there will be a mobile demo station featuring many of their handcrafted pedals and some “scratch & dent” sale items.
Songs at Jilly’s
Speaking of live music-related stuff you can do tonight, there will be a Songwriter Showcase at Jilly’s. That’s folks with guitars. Wouldn’t it be cool if, just once, some singing maverick were to bring a sousaphone or a sitar or a metallophone or a seal with a clown horn instead of the usual beat-up guitar? That probably won’t happen tonight unless host Ryan Humbert or the evening’s guests, Nathan Hedges of Cities and Coasts and Ryan Jones of the Buck Naked Band, have been hiding some animal training or crazy metallophone skills from their fans.
Stones in Cuba
Here’s something fun for those with a passport and a little extra discretionary income or simply no financial discretion. On March 26, the Rolling Stones will perform the Concert for Amity, the band’s first concert in the Caribbean. The band, which is shaking stadium-sized money trees all across South America and into Mexico (aka touring), will perform a free concert at the Ciudad Deportiva de la Habana in Havana, making them the first British rock band to perform an open-air concert in Cuba. That seems to me to be a strangely specific statistic.
Anyway, along with the show there will be a musician-to-musician exchange for Cubans with help from plenty of big instrument makers such as Gibson and Roland. So, ideally, that will help jump-start Cuban musicians re-entry into the current international pop world. Concert for Amity will, of course, be filmed for posterity and possibly for a bit of digital money tree-shaking in the near future.
Malcolm X Abram can be reached at mabram@thebeaconjournal.com or 330-996-3758. Read his blog, Sound Check Online, at www.ohio.com/blogs/sound-check, like him on Facebook at http://on.fb.me/1lNgxml and/or follow him on Twitter @malcolmabramABJ.