Compact Lexie Mountain rummages through her tape collection, pulls out yet another cassette and pops it into the Centennial tape player on the floor. “Her tapes are bonkers,” Mountain says of the woman on the recording. Play. “God, I wish I could stop shaking,” says the woman. Audibly, she shutters, shivers. Then silence for...
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Out of their heads I once interviewed Adam Hopkins and Matt Frazao, who curate the constantly changing lineups of improvisers that perform as the Out of Your Head collective at the Windup Space every Tuesday night, and they both singled out pedal steel guitarist Susan Alcorn as one of the standout players in their...
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Lafayette Gilchrist Lafayette Gilchrist continues to tour the world as pianist for the David Murray Quartet and as co-leader of a quartet with Chicago drummer Hamid Drake, Hungarian bassist Matyas Szandai, and Hungarian saxophonist Mihaly Dresch (the latter group releases its debut album this fall). But Gilchrist still lives in Baltimore, and this past...
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Get Em Mamis The Windup Space doesn’t book hip-hop shows very often, but it’s proven that when it does, it gets it right. Saturday night’s bill was in many ways the perfect trio of acts to represent Baltimore rap at the venue: left-field and approachable enough for the Station North crowd, but still hip-hop...
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The life of the solo drummer has gotta be a rough one, up there all alone and exposed, goofy faces front-and-center, every little stumble comically magnified, or, worse, just keeping what is essentially one long drum solo—that now somewhat maligned relic of bands with big hair—not just interesting but engaging enough to keep a...
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Evan Parker When two of Europe’s leading improvisers, British saxophonist Evan Parker and Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stanko, came to the United States this month, there was a reason that they both skipped Philadelphia and Washington D.C. to play their only Mid-Atlantic dates in Baltimore. Our town has, somewhat improbably, become a major center for...
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Avant-garde jazz can sometimes be a dour, cerebral exercise but not when Han Bennink plays it. The Dutch drummer may be 67, his hair gone silver beneath his bright red headband, his Amsterdam home full of Europe’s top jazz prizes, but at the Windup Space on Wednesday, he played with sheer abandon and infectious...
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| Image by Greg Szeto Maybe it goes without saying, but Thank You‘s awesomely free show Friday night at the Windup Space was packed. As such, we realized another sort of cool/weird thing about the North Avenue venue/bar/etc.–it may be a weird spatial mind trick, but the Windup Space is huge. Pretty sure that...
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