Corb Lund is the son of a ranching family that goes back eight generations in Southern Alberta. If he can tell you something in three words, he won’t use 20. “Pretty country,” was all he needed to say in an interview with BandWagon to evoke the rolling sage brush on his family’s ancestral homestead.
While Lund may be conversationally economical, he is lyrically verbose. Over the course of twelve full length LPs, he has become one of Amercana’s most beloved songwriters; lyrically and sonically a modern embodiment of life on the range.
Last May, the Alberta provincial government rescinded a 1976 ban on open-pit coal mining on the slopes of the Canadian Rockies which threatened to scar the landscape and taint the water of nearby communities.
“It pissed off everybody up here, not just the lefties — ranchers, hunters and the first nations people,” Lund said. “It affects the water I drink. This was too egregious to let go.”
Lund collaborated with other Canadian musicians to re-record his 2009 song “This Is My Prairie,” in protest. A few months later, the government backed down and even introduced new protections.
“Every song is a different rhythm that represents a region in Latin America,” Zeta’s Juan Yilo Alvarado says of Todo Bailarlo, the Venezuelan punk orchestra’s upcoming LP. “It was really liberating and really challenging at the same time.”
“Our communities dance through everything: sadness, happiness, the good, the bad,” Alvarado said. “We are always dancing through life, moving and adapting and looking for better opportunities in remote places.”
But Zeta has not lost its frenetic exuberance by embracing its roots. This is calypso (and salsa, samba, latin jazz…) made for moshing. “It’s still rock and it’s still progressive,” Alvarado assures.
While Zeta’s sound might be aggressive, the band’s ethos is the opposite. They are compassionate, inclusive and intent on fostering community wherever they go. Dani “Debuto” Hernandez, the band’s other guitarist/vocalist in addition to Alvarado, is notorious for feeding tour mates, fans and anyone else that walks by. In keeping with the band’s shared pacifistic and environmental ethics, his cooking is vegan (with a Venezuelan flair).
“We’ve connected to, not only to latinos, but also to immigrant people from other countries and ethnicities,” Alvarado explained. “We all feel very identified with the immigrant struggle. In the band and orchestra we are all either immigrants or the kids of immigrants.”
“LowDown Brass Band has roots in the Jazz education world,” MC Billa Camp tells BandWagon, “but the Jazz education world has the habit of treating Jazz like an island. As if – Jazz isn’t birthed from the same struggle as Hip Hop. As if they are not Black father and son, born fighting the same fight.”
Lowdown Nights, the latest and most future-leaning record from LowDown Brass Band, was appropriately released during Black History Month. It takes things further out of the pigeonhole and into the pan-genre stage, using the history of the African American experience as its guide.
Especially with the hit single “Be The One Tonight,” they go mainstream – and that’s a good thing. The collective has enough talent within its ranks to deliver a show with as much variety as Beyoncés 2018 Homecoming at Coachella. It’s the multi-lingual, multicultural, multi-genre kind of mainstream pop and dance music that encapsulates the musical stew of 2022.
Mike Silverman – AKA That 1 Guy – knew what it would take to make it. Only his band wasn’t willing to live that hard life. So he did it himself.
“I was working so hard to fill this cosmic space,” Silverman said of the bass, “and I was playing on this thing that wasn’t meant to do that.” So he built an instrument that would help him create a big sound.
“It was very hard,” he said. “Some instrument builders study their whole lives to do this.”
