Articles of Section 'Offbeat'.

Offbeat | Chic of the Week

Documentary style

By Angela Murrills

Two reasons to love the Mother Corp. It’s definitely couch-potato time tonight (Thursday, January 18, at 8 p.m.) when CBC TV airs Hairstyle Confidential, a one-hour documentary. And coming January 25, there’s Chocolate Confidential. Next, radio. Among the bonuses on CBC Radio Two’s Music & Company (weekdays, 6 a.m. to 9 a.m.) is Web goddess Sue Gardener, plugger of offbeat sites. She recently shone the spotlight on street-fashion blogs around the world.

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Offbeat

A world recipes for the skewered

By Angela Murrills

Overfamiliarity with burgers and wieners already causing barbecue burnout? Time to invest in a copy of The World of Kebabs.

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Offbeat

Ladies love Horvitz's Sweeter Than the Day

By Alexander Varty

When it comes to matters of the heart, I have a less-than-perfect track record. But trust me on this: if you have a special someone you want to impress, consider taking them to hear Sweeter Than the Day at Rime tonight or Friday (April 20 and 21).

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Offbeat

Brozman goes back in time

By Alexander Varty

Here in Vancouver, $2,500 will buy you three months' rent on a downtown shoebox; if, that is, your shoebox isn't particularly new, stylish, or well situated.

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Offbeat

Carsick celebrates simplicity

By Alexander Varty

"Rise to Downpour", the last and longest track on the Vancouver duo Carsick's self-titled debut CD, is a wonderful instance of musical scene-setting. Opening with JP Carter's sputtering trumpet and sparse plucking from Dave Sikula's electric guitar, the piece gradually morphs into a sinuous melody that in turn becomes a moody seascape, all foghorns, lapping waves, and Echoplexed seagulls.

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Offbeat

Willies head for the country

By Alexander Varty

If the Grammys were to offer an award for stupidest song, high on the list of this year's nominees would be "Lou Reed", by the Little Willies. Set to a lazy country shuffle, the lyrics chronicle the West Texas adventures of the other Man in Black, as seen by some out-of-state interlopers. "We don't mean to sound like we're trippin'," goes the chorus, "but we swear to God we saw Lou Reed cow-tippin'."

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Offbeat

Malian master will live on

By Alexander Varty

I don't understand a word of Songhai, the most commonly used language in Northern Mali. Nor do I speak Peul, Bambara, Tamashek, or Fulani, which were among the other languages favoured by the great Malian songwriter Ali Farka Toure.

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Offbeat

Klucevsek pushes buttons

By Alexander Varty

Squeezefest, at Rime from Friday to Sunday (March 10 to 12), offers local listeners an unprecedented chance to survey the world of the accordion, from folksongs to free improvisation. And according to featured guest Guy Klucevsek, the get-together will be equally revelatory for its performing participants.

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Offbeat

Soul sister gets second shot

By Alexander Varty

It takes 10 seconds, tops, before we know exactly where and when we are: Memphis, Tennessee, sometime around the end of the 1960s. That punchy bass line, those greasy keyboard stabs-this must be the Dixie Flyers, the hottest white band in the South. Jim Dickinson, who'd go on to record with the Rolling Stones, is behind that big Hammond organ. Tommy McClure's bearing down hard on his classic Fender Precision bass.

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Offbeat

Cohen's home is where the music is

By Alexander Varty

Avishai Cohen's new CD is called At Home, but it's a great thing to hear on the road, as I recently found out during a daylong drive down the length of Vancouver Island. At first, my curiosity was all business: I was due to interview the Israeli bassist the next day, and wanted to spin his latest effort a couple of times before picking up the phone. Somewhat to my surprise, the disc never left the car stereo; I must have played it five times through without ever getting bored.

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Offbeat

Tradition inspires new sounds

By Alexander Varty

A week of sun after a month of rain makes it gloriously obvious that beauty is all around us: in the snow-capped mountains, in the glinting ocean, in the budding daffodils and cherry trees. But for a truly concentrated dose of sensory delight, make your way to the UBC Museum of Anthropology on the evening of Tuesday (February 21), for a concert that might also shatter your preconceptions about ethnic music and the avant-garde.

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Offbeat

Über-eccentric garbologist decodes Dylan

By Alexander Varty

If A.J. Weberman has any regrets about the year he spent in jail, he hides them well. In fact, he wears his prison record like a badge of honour: as a first-generation hippie and long-time political activist, he's honour-bound to flout the laws of society. And as a connoisseur of irony, he no doubt sees the circumstances of his arrest as delicious beyond all imagining.

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Offbeat

A Beat-driven collaboration

By Alexander Varty

Beat as in beatific, beat as in smacked down, beat as in tired or junk-sick-the Beat Generation writers were aptly named, for their efforts encompassed every state of being from hobo to holy. But there's another sense of beat that's applicable, too: beat as in rhythm. Poetry and music have always walked hand in hand, but Jack Kerouac and his circle made that connection especially explicit.

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Offbeat

Koto virtuoso goes virtual

By Alexander Varty

Miya Masaoka loves a challenge. Not only is she the only koto virtuoso ever to record an album's worth of Thelonious Monk tunes (1988's Monk's Japanese Folk Song), she's also given theatrical performances that involve giant hissing cockroaches, thousands of honey bees, and her own nude torso. In comparison, the upcoming premiere of Chironomy, a structured improvisation for koto, clarinet, guitar, and electronics, should be a snap.

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Offbeat

Wabenzi is a lot to drink in

By Alexander Varty

Not a lot happens in I, Wabenzi (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $36.50), the first installment of U.S. author Rafi Zabor's new, four-part memoir. The year is 1986, the narrator's parents have just died, and he's on his way from Brooklyn to Belgium, where he plans to buy a used Mercedes and drive it to Turkey. Four hundred and seventy-two pages later, he's made it as far as England but he's not going anywhere fast.

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Offbeat

Caribou swimming in talent

By Alexander Varty

WHITEHORSE-Outside, snow is falling on the steel-grey current of the Yukon River, but it's short-sleeves warm inside the fish hatchery that's been David Petkovich's main source of employment for the past several years. The affable biologist ushers me into a darkened room and slides an off-white plastic tray out from a waist-high shelf; within, thousands of inch-long salmon fry swirl over and around each other, so densely packed I could scoop them out by hand.

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Offbeat

Collective not just for nerds

By Alexander Varty

A few weeks back, Payback Time correspondent Nic Brown wrote in to chide the Georgia Straight's music department for reviewing Boubacar Traoré and Early Man CDs but not his own personal fave, Animal Collective. John Lucas answered Brown's complaint by noting that only an "elite readership of indie nerds" gave a damn about the Collective, and claimed that we were holding off on covering its new disc, Feels, because "we were waiting to see what Pitchfork had to say about it."

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Offbeat

Amy Denio keeps it loose

By Alexander Varty

Telephone interviews are generally straightforward affairs: you call someone up, and they tell you about their new project. But when I phone multi-instrumentalist Amy Denio at her Seattle home, I find the tables turned. Rather than tell me about her new band, she wants me to fill her in on who she's going to be playing with at Rime on Tuesday (December 6).

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Offbeat

Philosopher ponders songs on the wing

By Alexander Varty

On a sandstone shelf jutting out into the Strait of Georgia, a mixed flock of dunlins and black turnstones are calmly picking away at their invertebrate lunch-until, with a single shriek of alarm, the shore birds rise and fly off, twisting out of sight. Only then do their human observers look up to see a peregrine falcon knifing out of the fog.

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Offbeat

Existential Angst Party explores joy of angst

By Alexander Varty

Unexpected combination of disparate musical forces is no laughing matter

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Offbeat

Jelly Roll tastier than ever

By Alexander Varty

We'll never know what Ferdinand "Jelly Roll Morton" Lamothe, who died in 1941, would have made of the glass towers of contemporary Vancouver and the forest of construction cranes that now determine our skyline.

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Offbeat

Cuong Vu's tunes tell tales

By Alexander Varty

Even if you're into jazz you might not know Cuong Vu's name-but you've probably heard him play. And if you were at Pat Metheny's February show at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, then you've definitely heard the Vietnamese-American musician at work. Vu was the slight figure on the riser at the back of the stage, contributing majestic trumpet lines, warm vocal harmonies, and touches of keyboard and percussion to the popular guitarist's near-symphonic ensemble sound.

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Offbeat

Tiller's Folly spins gold from vanity project

By Alexander Varty

Tiller's Folly would never have recorded its latest CD, Buchan Bluegrass, if Laurence Knight had had his way. Today, however, the local Celtic band's bassist, harmony singer, and de facto manager is glad he was overruled, and even concedes that the newly released disc is probably its most coherent effort so far.

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Offbeat

Neil mixed sublimity, chaos

By Alexander Varty

This year's edition of the LIVE Biennial of Performance Art is dedicated to the notion of the artist as prophet, shaman, masochist, addict, and anarchist-and with that in mind, the event could find no better figurehead than Al Neil, Vancouver's 81-year-old master of interdisciplinary art, psychic exploration, and creative chaos.

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Offbeat

Spasm Band still twitching

By Alexander Varty

You might think that after 40 years of playing together, the members of the Nihilist Spasm Band would be pretty good musicians-but you'd be wrong, at least in terms of their technical ability. And according to founding member John Boyle, they haven't had to work particularly hard to avoid acquiring impressive chops.

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