The question for an artist like Rupa Marya must be: what do you do when you’re so well known for your unpredictability that it threatens to become predictable? Her sold-out show Sunday with her band Rupa & The Fishes—the finale of what appears to have been an extremely successful Winter Fest for…
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“We kill the alive to praise the dead,” is how Robert Glasper summed up the current jazz scene in his interview on NPR last week. In other words, if you can’t relate to jazz, he’s feeling you. And he’s making big waves for trying to change that, especially in the wake of…
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As Rise Against have gone from scruffy Chicago punks to chart-topping mainstream hitmakers over the last decade, they’ve run into no end of blowback from early fans who think they should still be putting out minute-long blasts of hardcore for Fat Mike.
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Rupa Marya calls her style “intentionally unclean.” Beyond that, it’s difficult to explain. Cooler and crazier than useless phrases like “world music” could hope to describe, her San Francisco-based band Rupa and the April Fishes takes gypsy jazz on a punky, border-crashing joy ride that sprawls across multiple styles, cultures and languages.…
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James Graham is not exactly holding up his role as lead singer of the Twilight Sad. The man known for songs like “And She Would Darken the Memory,” “I Became a Prostitute” and “Don’t Look at Me” sounds damned psyched on the phone as he crosses over the border from Canada into…
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by
Aaron Carnes on February 29, 2012
What would happen if a bunch of freestyle rappers started a jam-band? It might sound impossible, but that’s exactly what happened to San Jose’s Rebelskamp. Four members of this rock, funk, avant-garde, free-form, genre-busting quintet (along with Kung Fu Vampire) were at one time the local freestyle rap crew, LSB.
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A lot has happened to Derek See in the last year. It’s been about that long that since The Bang, the girl-group band he started with his partner Angeline King, broke up.
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Fully recovered from that racist fruit vendor incident, and even 30 Minutes or Less, comedian Aziz Ansari brings his “Buried Alive” tour to the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts on July 19.
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Chicago’s DMN Ology has been spelling his name about six different ways since he came up in the Chicago hip-hop scene in the ’90s. It’s not so much that he’s into Satan—although devils and demons do pop up in the imagery of his songs—it’s that “Demon” was his nickname growing up, a…
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Maybe it’s just a plot to keep American indie kids from getting even more depressed, but Scottish shoegazers the Twilight Sad had a hell of a time getting visas for their new U.S. tour, which comes to the Blank Club in San Jose on Wednesday, March 7. Things got so bad that…
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