rimblr.com

Reviews from Stone Temple Pilots’ first few gigs in eight years have been mostly favorable, but expectations are about ankle-high. Frontman Scott Weiland slumped into the reunion after botching things up again with the law and his bandmates of the past five years (Velvet Revolver). His battle with addictions is so well-chronicled, his arms need their own publicist. And let’s not forget that STP — with brothers Dean and Robert DeLeo and drummer Eric Kretz — was hit-or-miss even in its ’90s heyday. Many fans turning out for the reunion no doubt grew up hearing hits like "Plush," "Vasoline" and "Interstate Love Song" on the radio but were too young to see the quartet in concert, so for them at least, the gig could provide a first-time high. (7:30 p.m. today, Roy Wilkins Auditorium. Sold out.) (C.R.)
Indie goddess Ingrid Michaelson, the darling of MySpace, Old Navy commercials and "Grey’s Anatomy," offered a plucky presence and an unforgettable rendition of Radiohead’s "Creep" at the Fine Line in March. Now, she returns to headline her own show, begging the faithful to love her "The Way I Am." That would be as a purveyor of melancholy lyrics set to almost-sunny melodies. Opening is laid-back Greg Laswell, another alum of the Hotel Cafe Tour. (8 p.m. today Fine Line, $16.50.) (J.B.)
With Prince turning 50 Saturday, the second annual Prince Family Reunion has upped the ante with two special guests. Dez Dickerson, the Revolution’s first guitarist, is coming in from Nashville, and Prince’s sister, Tyka Nelson, will be a featured singer. The band includes former Purple sidemen Dr. Fink, Eric Leeds, Michael Bland and Sonny Thompson as well as Odell, Billy Franze and Jerry Hubbard. (9:30 p.m. today, Cabooze, $15-$20.) (J.B.)
Rolling Stone called Zappa Plays Zappa rock’s best tribute band. As a new live double-DVD shows, this is an extraordinary group of musicians — including guitarists Dweezil Zappa and Steve Vai, and drummer Terry Bozzio — performing extraordinary music by the late, great, wonderfully wacky Frank Zappa. He may be more famous for his quips to Congress and novelty hit "Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow," but he’s best remembered as a musical savant who ingeniously melded rock, jazz, classical and hip humor into terrifically underappreciated art. His underrated guitar-playing son and ZPZ make a strong case for the dad’s brilliance. (9 p.m. today, First Avenue. $30.) (J.B.)

startribune.com

With an estimated economic impact of $33 million and headlining musical acts like ZZ Top and Sawyer Brown, you’d think Riverfest would be a welcome attraction by everyone in the Little Rock’s River Market.
But many restaurants finding themselves outside the music festival’s gate say the three day event takes a big chunk out of their bottom line.
“You’d think with a huge influx of people that we’d make a lot of money, or that we’re busy,” Chuck Corzine with Bosco’s. “In fact, the opposite’s true.”
Corzine says difficulty getting to the River Market, coupled with limited parking, has many regulars avoiding their favorite water holes and restaurants.
“You’re talking 15 to 20 percent down,” he said.
Numbers that could equate to more than $10,000 lost during the course of the week for the microbrewery.
But Riverfest executive director DeAnna Korte says she can’t see how the River Market restaurants are suffering. “I think in the long run, when you look at how many people are packing into the restaurants, some are even opening earlier than on a normal weekend,” she said. “That’s having a great impact on them to get people in.”
Tim Chappell with Gusano’s says Riverfest returns fluctuate from year-to-year for the restaurants. “Over the last four years, we’ve had years that were good and some where people didn’t venture out past the gates,” he said.
That’s why he says seven restaurants are partnering together, trying to attract festival patrons. “Friday and Saturday, one cover gets you into all seven places,” he said. “It definitely is a different approach to how we’re trying to get business.”
A different approach intended to improve River Market sales and spread the wealth during the holiday weekend.
Riverfest kicks off Friday at 6 p.m. and continues through Sunday. For a complete list of acts and parking accommodations, click on the link to the right.

todaysthv.com

DeAnna Korte, executive director of Riverfest, says Sawyer Brown will replace Haggard in the Riverfest lineup.
Haggard was scheduled to perform at 9:30 p.m. Friday on the Budweiser Stage in NorthShore Park in North Little Rock. Shooter Jennings, son of country Hall of Famer Waylon Jennings, will still open the show for Sawyer Brown at 7:30 p.m.
Advance tickets for Riverfest 2008 remain on sale at all Harvest Foods and central Arkansas Big Red locations. Advance tickets are $10 for three days’ admission–half the cost of the $20 gate admission. Children 6 and younger are free, and children 7-10 will be admitted for a daily price of $5 at the gate only.

todaysthv.com

If you didn’t know that Nora Chipaumire is a powerful woman with a strong message to deliver, you’d sense it several seconds before her solo Chimurenga (struggle, cry, revolution) begins. She doesn’t slip onto the stage during a blackout; you can hear her bare feet strike the floor as she strides into place. When a parallelogram of light appears around her, she’s got those feet planted, and she’s already breathing hard. Her shaven head and angular face are shining with sweat. She rolls up the sleeves of her white outfit and stares toward the mob (us) confronting her. Watch out!
It’s lucky that she doesn’t take a real rock or two from one of the small piles on the floor; the imaginary ones she hurls could break your head. We are in Chipaumire’s native Zimbabwe at the time of the Second Revolution, and this is a woman at the barricades—throwing stones, falling back, thrusting one aggressive hip at us as if it had a cutting edge. A film (by Chantal Buard and Kristin Tieche) of Chipaumire running through a ruined, desolate cityscape is projected on the back wall. She looks as if she could keep running forever.
Chimurenga is an expansion of Chipaumire’s 2004 Convoys, Curfews and Roadblocks, and she has added film, décor, a new sound score, and three costume changes. I get that feeling that she has stretched her explosive material a little too thin. There are dead spots amid the many gripping passages. For instance, we wait in near darkness while she changes from one rough-edged yet shapely outfit by Naoko Nagata to another; we can’t quite see her, but we can’t not see her either. Her use of assemblage as a structure often makes it hard to understand how the vivid moments connect or add up.

villagevoice.com

I was 16 when I attended my first rock concert, the B-52s at Dartmouth College. In retrospect, this seems really cool, as the B-52s are a cool band. (Check out “Funplex, their first new CD in 16 years, where they sound as fresh as ever.) But I wasn’t really that into the B-52s at the time. (I liked “Love Shack,” but, in that peculiarly adolescent combination of ignorance and dismissive arrogance, I thought they were sort of lame and soft.) The main reason I went to the concert was because I had heard that the Violent Femmes, my favorite band in high school, was the opening act. To my everlasting sadness, that turned out to be a baseless rumor, and now I can’t even remember who the opener was. And I couldn’t even stay for the whole concert, because I had to go to bed early so I could get up the next morning and take the PSATs.
One of last weekend’s small delights was accompanying a friend and her 7-year-old son to the boy’s first rock concert, the They Might Be Giants family show on Saturday at the Egg in Albany. I had seen They Might Be Giants a couple times, at Five Points Music Hall, since closed, in Birmingham, Ala., and at the Tulip Festival in Washington Park. They’re a good live band, which might come as a surprise to people who think of them as two nerdy guys who like to play the accordion and sing about James K. Polk and nuclear fission. I’m most familiar with their older work, and “Minimum Wage,” which features the sound of a cracking whip and the pained cry of a stricken worker, remains one of my favorite songs. (It always makes me think of my first job, at Colonial Deli Mart in Lebanon, N.H., where, yes, I earned minimum wage.) I was interested to see how a They Might Be Giants family show would differ from one of the band’s grown-up shows. As one of my friends put it, TMBG’s music is kind of like kids music for adults. But in recent years the band has released several children’s albums, with songs like “NO!” and “I Am Not Your Broom.”

dailygazette.com

What’s awkwarder than awkward?
“The Office” has been answering that question for some time now, but last night’s episode took uncomfortable office relations into “The Dinner Party.”
Michael and his confounding love match, Jan, decide to host a couples night in their home, giving Jim and Pam, Angela and Andy a view into their distressing relationship.
Jan sets the tone for the evening when she accepts Pam’s gift of wine:
“Wow, this will be great to cook with,” she says, before taking the guests on a tour of their home.
The dinner hasn’t been prepared, so charades and other entertainments ensue; Jim’s attempt to escape, by claiming his apartment has flooded, fails.
When Dwight and his date (his aged, one-time baby-sitter) show up uninvited, Michael and Jan begin to bicker, revealing more about their history (think Michael’s three vasectomy procedures) than their colleagues would ever want to know.
Angela, meanwhile, refuses Dwight’s salad:
“The thought of popping one of your beets into my mouth makes me want to vomit.”
In the end, Jan throws a trophy of Michael’s into his plasma TV; the cops show up to check up on the dispute and Michael goes home with Dwight before anybody got to eat dinner.
Jim and Pam, ever-cute, go get burgers.
AMERICAN IDOL: AND THEN THERE WERE 7
We are so upset that all we can say is Michael Johns was voted off.
(Carly and Syesha joined him in the Bottom 3).
IN 40 WORDS OR LESS
Miss your favorite show last night? No problem. Check out our super-condensed recaps.
Scrubs — Elliot gets mad at J.D. for not taking her advice, but she helps him get a burn victim to graduation because something’s going on between them. Turk learns Spanish for Carla, but instead of telling her, uses it to eavesdrop.

blog.silive.com

For the second season in a row, it looks like Bret Michaels might make the sensible choice, by selecting Ambre Lake over bat-shit crazy Daisy De La Hoya.
But should he?
Sure, Ambre is sort of sweet, brutally honest and much closer to Bret in the age department, presenting experience over Daisy’s naïve instability. But she is also an actress.
And judging by this interview it could have just as easily been “Spock of Love” with Leonard Nimoy and Ambre would still be in the mix, hoping for an erotic mind meld from the aging actor.
Watch out Bret!
I hate when people get up on their high horse about reality tv and the downfall of society. If you don’t like it, don’t watch. If you don’t like the blog, don’t read it. Do yourself a favor and lighten up. You might find some humor in the world instead of getting all worked up about a show you don’t even watch.
— kweed    Apr 9, 08:29 AM    #

regulus2.azstarnet.com

The superb musicians of the St. Lawrence String Quartet, led by Geoff Nuttall, first violin, who is described by St. Lawrence cellist Christopher Costanza as having “rock-star status in the classical music world,” will perform Tuesday in the Peace Center’s Gunter Theatre.
The event is co-presented by the Peace Center and the International Chamber Music Series.
Reached on tour, Costanza says the first thing he noticed after he joined the group in 2003 was the very high energy of the players. “I said to myself, ‘I can’t wait to be part of it.’”
Case in point is the high physicality with which Nuttall, with long, flowing locks and perpetually dancing feet, leads the foursome that he co-founded with violist and fellow Canadian Lesley Robertson.
The other co-founders, violinist Barry Shiffman and cellist Marina Hoover, have left the group and were replaced by second violin Scott St. John and Costanza on cello. A Utica, N.Y., native, Costanza is the only non-Canadian in the group.
“This particular group of musicians is unique,” he says. “I jumped on a moving train, so to speak. They are full of intensity and focus, and the level of activity — we perform well over 100 concerts per year — is something I had not experienced before.”
On the other hand, when the opportunity reared its head, Costanza says he couldn’t have been happier to embrace it. The program
Two Haydn string quartets will bookend the St. Lawrence program at the Gunter.
They are the C major Op. 54, No.2, and the G major Op. 77, No.1. The latter was recorded by the quartet last week.
The “77,” says Costanza, is one of the last string quartets that Joseph Haydn wrote in 1799. As expected of the founder of the string quartet form, it begins with the allegro (fast) movement, followed by the adagio (slow) movement.

greenvilleonline.com

First, my congratulations to Rock Chalk Talk , SB Nation’s outstanding Kansas blog, and the Kansas Jayhawks for capturing this year’s NCAA national championship in basketball. Keep your eyes on the prize there Kansas. As soon as Michigan starts its own basketball program, we’ll be right on your heels. (what’s that? We’ve got one? I thought they were… never mind…).
Second, my congratulations to Ohio State, for not losing last night’s national championship game. That would’ve been two years in a row. Whew. That would’ve been embarrassing.
On a side note, one of the things I’ve always, always loved about college basketball is that its games are played within a fixed amount of time. (duh. Hold on. I’m getting to the point.) Unlike football or baseball, basketball is a fluid game with a basically running clock and minimal stoppage time.
That is, of course, unless you’re watching the game on CBS.
God lord. Last night’s national championship game took nearly as long as the football national championship. And that should be impossible! The games are 20 minutes shorter. Literally. And when you talk in terms of actual game time, there should be no comparison. The clock doesn’t stop after (just about) every play. There are two 20 minute halves as compared to four 15 minute quarters. Notre Dame isn’t playing. The game should’ve been over in two hours, tops.
Oh, but not on CBS. According to Einstein’s theory of relativity, objects speed along the temporal timeline relative to each individual’s vantage point on that timeline. So a person on the ground would see an airplane overhead and think it was moving fast while a passenger in the airplane would think the person on the ground was moving slow. So, a Football game broadcast on NBC takes the same amount of time to watch at home as it does in the stadium, it just seems like it takes longer because you’re stuck in South Bend, which seems to be stuck in 1982.

maizenbrew.com