list.in.to.chicago this week: 01.02.2006

Welcome to the first 2006 edition of list.in.to.chicago. As you may have guessed by now, I did NOT resolve to get this out the door any earlier.

Actually, I've been hard at work recording some -- okay, one -- of my own songs since I got back into town last week. Check out the music page on notabbott.com for the full blow-by-blow, and a link to the first finished song, a little ditty called "Not This Time" that I'll play at Vaughan's every once in a great while.

Pick of the week
Gotta go with Granian and Matt Hoffer at Double Door on Friday. You might recall that I played a couple of gigs last year with Granian, who plays all over the country without actually bringing a band with him. It's good stuff, even if I had a tough time remembering if it was a one-bar or a two-bar turnaround at the ends of verses and choruses and whatnot.

And I'm going to get a headstart on recommending next week's 3Friends Benefit and Memorial for Michael Dahlquist, John Glick and Doug Meis featuring EXO, The Dials, The Returnables and The Negligents on Saturday the 14th at Metro. More details next week, but mark your calendars now.

list.in.to.COZ
I think the calendar on the website is up to date. If you want a headstart, it'll be Diver at Cullen's on Friday the 13th (ooh, scary), Soma Star at Elbo Room on Saturday the 21st, then a Diver/Wingman twin bill out in Lincolnshire at the Cubby Bear North on the 27th. And there's always Vaughan's, at least as long as you show up so we don't get fired.

Recap
I want to congratulate Friends of Coz Steve Gillis and Dana Lawrence. Steve tore it up with Nicholas Barron's Hyperactive on Thursday at Elbo Room, and Dana had the crowd at Uncommon Ground eating out of the palm of her hand on Friday. It was a good way to, ahem, ring out the old year.

1.02   monday
Jeff Parker Quartet (Green Mill)
If you watch the Green Mill ad from week to week, you'll notice that they always like to list everyone who's playing in a particular band on a particular night. Except that, if you've ever been around the local jazz scene, sometimes you just don't know. So their workaround is that, tonight with guitarist Jeff Parker, "Someone Good" will be playing sax.

1.03   tuesday
Open Jam (Vaughan's)   COZ SINGS!
For no other reason than it lodged itself in my head on the morning of New Year's Day unbidden and wouldn't let me sleep in, I learned "Breakfast in America" from Supertramp for this week. Seriously, I don't think I've even heard that song in ten years. How the hell did it get in my head like that? Brains are weird. Mine, anyway, but we sorta knew that.

The Strokes (Park West)   SOLD OUT!
Tickets for this one disappeared quickly, which means everybody has pretty much forgotten how, well, forgettable the band's sophomore effort was. Word on the street is that the new record is much more mainstream.

1.04   wednesday
Matt Geraghty Project (Tonic Room)
I ran into bassist Geraghty -- who you may recall from the short-lived full band version of the only slightly longer-lived cover band The Neighborhood many, many years ago -- a few months ago at a bar, and he had mentioned that he's still out there with a project under his own name. This would be it. I've only been to the venue once, so I don't know how the balance between live music and neighborhood (ha, continuity!) college kids works as far as the user experience goes.

Liquid Soul (The Note)
Liquid Soul in Wicker Park every week and Nicholas at Elbo Room on Thursdays again. Are we sure we didn't accidentally ring in 1996 last week instead of 2006?

1.05   thursday
Nicholas Barron's Hyperactive with Charles Mack (Elbo Room)   FRIENDS OF COZ!
I've probably seen Nicholas play close to a hundred times over the years. So why is it I never noticed he's a dead ringer (there's that word again) for Vince Vaughan until he commented on it from the stage last week? The band, by the way, is an organ trio augmented with a three-piece horn section, which gives them a bit more in common with the old Swimmer days than I was initially expecting.

Rollover with Zipperhead, Karmageddon, Reactavox (Double Door)
There's a name I haven't seen in a while, but I get the feeling I've said that two or three times in 2005, so maybe they're back in business. I vaguely remember them being my kind of wiseasses, which could explain why this is billed as a "pre 4th of July bash."

1.06   friday
Granian with Matt Hoffer, Al Weber, John Condron and the Benefit (Double Door)   FRIENDS OF COZ!
I think I only picked up the Granian gig last time because Dario from Soulfix couldn't do it, so I'm not going to hold a grudge about not getting the call this time. Hoffer will be pulling double duty with that band and his own, who whipped out "Number Two Pencil" from guitarist Larry Schroeder's old band Regal Standard the last time I saw them. Al Weber is also on the bill, which I say mostly because I know he's reading this.

Escape From Earth with Absent Star, Blame Twilight, Flying Just Below Radar (Metro)
At several points last year, it seemed Escape From Earth were on the verge of breaking out. I'm not sure if they've still got that momentum, but if they do, it's almost certainly because they played with URT (I'd link to the website, but it's currently non-operational) once. Depending on your definition of "almost."

Melvin Taylor (Rosa's Lounge)
If I'm going to make any l.i.t.c.-related resolutions for 2006, top of the list is going to see more of those bands I keep saying that I keep meaning to go see. Since the last time I saw bluesman Taylor was back in 1999, he's way at the top of that list.

1.07   saturday
The Bish with Bumpus, Dearborn, Air This Side of Caution, Todd Carey (Metro)   FRIENDS OF COZ!
Besides Mr. Schroeder being everywhere this weekend (see Hoffer's gig, above), this looks like a pretty solid lineup across the board. Just go get a beer when the drummer from Air This Side of Caution launches into his ill-advised drum solo, because we need to stop rewarding that sort of behavior. And yes, I'm going to keep harping on that, because I've fished myself out of that particular pond. I say this for his own good.

16 Candles (Cubby Bear)
Probably the next best thing to that "80's Prom" thing. I'm not ashamed to say that me and Joe, the Cubby Bear's monitor guy, went right up front the night we played with these guys and did the quintessential 80's Courteney Cox-in-the-Springsteen video dance. You had to be there.

1.08   sunday
Nicholas Barron's Hyperactive (Long Room)   FRIENDS OF COZ!
I'm probably not going to get in the habit of recommending both of the regular shows for these guys every week, but I wanted to point out that, on Metromix, the Thursday gig at Elbo Room gets listed under "Rock," while the standing Sunday gig at Elbo Room, aside from being billed primarily as "$3 pints of Warsteiner," is listed under "Jazz." Which is as much as I'm going to say about Metromix's craptastic user interface for now, because I can grind that particular axe for a long, long time if given an opening, and quite frankly, those kinds of rants belong on the website proper and not in this particular space.