Jazz the Dog lights up the Ugly Mug in Soquel with 420 shows
By Michael Gaither
SOQUEL — Everyone plays cover tunes. When you first pick up an instrument, you learn the songs from the artists you admire. You might eventually start writing your own material or maybe just stick with picking through the millions of songs already out there and just play cover tunes. It’s all art, and that’s fine.
Jazz the Dog takes an extremely different approach. For the most part, they play other people’s songs, but I hesitate to call them a “cover band.” Comprised of local favorite musicians Rhan Wilson, Rick Zeek and Patti Maxine, they “cover” a wide variety of songs and styles as a trio, only occasionally bringing in drums, bass or guest musicians. I sat with Rhan recently and asked him to elaborate on what they do and what makes what they do so unique.
“Our instrumentation is two guitars and a lap steel,” Rhan said, “so we look at, ‘What sounds good with just that instrumentation?’ I have to say some cover bands are amazing. Some will go so far as playing note for note, even matching the amplifiers and guitars.”
But what you’ll hear with Jazz the Dog is familiar tunes with a completely different spin. Since the band is acoustic-guitar driven, that’s what they work with. Rhan said, “We like to take songs and come up with, for example, ‘What if Chaka Kahn was a singer-songwriter?’” They also adapt different styles to well-known songs. Think Hank Williams’ “Hey Good Lookin’” in a jazzy, nightclub motif or the often-overplayed Bob Dylan/Old Crow Medicine Show tune “Wagon Wheel” done in a minor key.
Fun fact: Rhan spent years pioneering the idea of putting songs into minor keys with his annual “Altared Christmas” shows, which played at Kuumbwa and The Rio, to name just a few venues. Rhan and Patti are also both previous Gail Rich Award winners.
“It’s definitely unique,” Rhan adds. “People know the songs. It’s fun to watch when I’ll see people’s ears prick up and go ‘Oh, I know that song!’ So you’re honoring the song. You’re keeping the hook and the chord progression. And the chorus is still singalong-able.”
Their unique rearranging also brings new life to well-known tunes. “I don’t know why, but ‘Bad Moon Rising’ ended up in my head one day,” Rhan said. I changed the feel of it and made it more soul-like. And I realized, ‘hurricanes and earthquakes.’ That’s a dark song! I never realized that at all, but the lyrics suddenly stood out more when we gave it a different spin.”
For this weekend’s shows, Jazz the Dog takes on 420 with their 10th annual tribute to pot-themed tunes. Rhan said, “It’s a pretty big umbrella, and we’re loosening our requirements this year. There are obvious pot songs like ‘Don’t Bogart That Joint’ and Dylan’s ‘Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,’ which has the (really not about pot) line ‘Everybody Must Get Stoned.’ ” Rhan adds that, “For this show, anything alluding to marijuana or the culture is fair game, so we’re including a couple of Dead jams.” He laughed, saying: “Honestly, anything I listened to in high school counts as a pot song.”
As always, no matter what the tune or the theme, you’ll get a completely one-of-a-kind show from the group. “We won’t do the same song the same way twice,” Rhan says. “We emphasize improvisation over note-by-note repetition. We’ve gotten really good at being in the moment and improvising. I love rearranging familiar songs. Rick is really good at creating a space for us to improvise. And Patti of course can just go along with anything.”
“We want our Jazz the Dog shows to have a ‘You had to be there’ feel,” Rhan adds. Where people say, “They may do the song again later, but this night, they were playing right to us.”
Gail Rich Awards 2012: The creatives among us
Santa Cruz musician Rhan Wilson has talent, experience and creativity to spare. But what elevates him to the mantle of a special artist is a genuine artistic vision. That vision began more than a decade ago when Rhan conceived of "An Altared Christmas," in which he reworked well-known Christmas songs, playing them in a minor key.
That minor alteration inspired Rhan to create an entirely new aesthetic tradition done up in blue and black instead of red and green. Every December, Rhan and his merry band of collaborators bring alive that aesthetic on stage in a concert that, he says, is not meant to parody or replace traditional holiday celebrations, but, in fact, to enhance them and give them new meaning, particularly to people whom a commercially oriented Christmas has failed to inspire.
Rhan has expanded his "Altared" brand to include Valentine's Day and "4/20," but ultimately his goal is to revive and unleash the lost magic of Christmas.
Wallace Baine - Santa Cruz Sentinel
http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/general-news/20120105/gail-rich-awards-2012-the-creatives-among-us
The new Father Christmas
By Wallace Baine
There is a conversation we're not having in this culture about Christmas.It is a conversation that centers on a paradox -- How can so many people both love Christmas and dread it at the same time?
It is a conversation that has little to do with the so-called "war on Christmas" that becomes a tiresome trope of the culture wars every December. It really has little to do at all with religion, though it is deeply entwined with the ideals we often express in religious terms.The conversation we're not having revolves around one provocative question: Has the apparatus that contemporary consumer culture has built around Christmas strangling the more noble meanings of the holiday?
For the past seven years, Santa Cruz musician Rhan Wilson has taken it upon himself to reinvigorate the idea of Christmas with his show "An Altared Christmas." It's a delightfully eccentric show where red and green and replaced with blue and black and old familiar Christmas songs are reworked into a minor key.There are those who think Wilson is just kidding around, that he's mocking Christmas tradition.
Nothing could be further from the truth, he said.There are some misconceptions about this show," he said of "Altared Christmas," which takes place Saturday at the Rio. "A lot of people think it's irreverent. And I'm always baffled by that. They think we're making fun of Christmas, which is not true at all. What the show is commenting on is about what we've done to Christmas.
Christmas has not only become commercialized, it's become overly ritualized as well.
Too many people drag out their tinsel and ornaments, and slap on that Nat King Cole Christmas album without much thought about it. There's a certain amount of comfort in the ritual itself, sure. But the great irony of the most holy of holidays on the Christian calendar is not necessarily that it's a spiritual observation celebrated with an orgy of materialism. The greater irony might be that it's a time meant for reflection that turns into robotic ritual.
As Wilson puts it, "Nothing really stands out anymore.What Wilson is setting out to do with "An Altared Christmas" is to take the familiar and make it just unfamiliar enough to give it a fresh feel. Wilson and his disciples do not change the lyrical content of the Christmas songs they perform. They change the setting of them and that makes all the difference.
Wilson's latest example of freshening up the familiar is a new rendition of "Angels We Have Heard on High." Wilson arranged the song in a minor key and Santa Cruz blues/gospel singer Tammi Brown recorded that arrangement with a string quartet. Almost everyone who has heard it, said Wilson, "has flipped over it.The performers are a broad cross section of Santa Cruz's finest musical talent, including Ukulele Dick, Patti Maxine, Dale Ockerman, Rick Zeek, Pipa Pinon, Celia Gutierrez ... well, it would easier to name who's not in the show. Condoleeza Rice isn't in the show. Penn & Teller are not, either. And that about covers it.
Altared" is really about examining songs that we too often sing without being conscious of what they say. Most famously, "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" has become a kind of melodrama of delusional thinking in which the young girl who witnesses the title act grows up to be a deranged "Baby Jane" type.
It's such a fascinating story to me," said Wilson. "One woman so tortured by a simple mistake that she goes over the edge.
Other songs get reworked as well, including "The Little Drummer Boy," one of the most grievous victims of December overexposure. Wilson and the band have re-imagined the song in a Middle East musical setting with Pipa Pinon lending lead vocals.
"Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" is daringly mashed up with the Police hit "Roxanne.
It's all in the spirit of bring a little freshness and a little fun to a season that is often missing both.
At the same time, Wilson will have a kind of memory shrine at the show, dedicated to all those who have died in the past year, again inviting us to reflect on the meaning of the season.
Christmas has become all about gimme, gimme, gimme," he said. "And I can't be holier than thou. I'll have product in the lobby for sale. But the idea, the original concept, was aimed at people who need to find a reason to believe in Christmas again, people who have always loved Christmas, but are just burned out by the way we do it nowadays.
It's about helping people find joy in this time of year.
http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/general-news/20111208/wallace-baine-the-new-father-christmas
New band puts new twist on old songs
Wallace Baine
Rhan Wilson does nothing ordinary. The creator of "An Altared Christmas," the live show and album that reframes common Christmas tunes in a minor key, has put together a new band, and there's nothing ho-hum about it.
ROMP is an anagram of the first names of the four members of the band "" Wilson, Olaf Schiappacasse, Matt Bohn and Patti Maxine. All in the new band have played in Wilson's "Christmas" extravaganza; three of the four ROM have been part of the house band at the "Planet Cruz Comedy Hour."
The band is unusual not only for its instrumentation "" it will use everything from the baritone ukulele to the lap-steel guitar "" but for its off-beat treatment of beloved old songs.
Chuck Berry's already bizarre "My Ding-a-Ling" performed in a minor key and sang in a Russian accent. The 1960s chestnut "Ode to Billie Joe," about the day "Billie Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge," is combined with the beat of the late Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" to create the "Ode to Billie Jean."
"Proud Mary," "Harper Valley PTA," songs from Grace Jones and Gogol Bordello, all get thrown in the whirl and come out a bit different, said Wilson.
"We're not trying to make every song we do be odd or weird," he said. "We're just looking to have fun. I've been in a lot of bands, and all I want now is to play music and have some fun.
https://www.santacruzsentinel.com/2009/07/09/new-band-puts-new-twist-on-old-songs/
With ”An Altared Christmas,” Santa Cruz musician Rhan Wilson shakes off the staleness of the Christmas holiday and re-invents the sound of the season
It”s easy to believe that the Christmas holiday is the most fundamental, enduring, and unchanging cultural tradition in the Christian world.
But many of the trappings of Christmas — trappings that generations of Americans have grown up with — date back only to Victorian-era England. And though the legend of Santa Claus goes back centuries, Santa”s modern-day image is almost wholly a creation of Coca Cola, which refurbished the jolly old elf as an advertising pitchman in the 1920s.
So, considering the holiday”s ever-changing nature, the question isn”t merely: why can”t Christmas be re-invented again by, say, a 50-year-old Santana-loving Santa Cruz rock guitarist who is regularly moved to tears by Spanish flamenco and Pakistani devotional music?
Rather, the more pertinent question is: Isn”t it about time?
Rahn Wilson is an unlikely candidate to change Christmas As We Know It, but that”s not stopping him from trying. Wilson is the impresario behind “An Altared Christmas,” a performance curiosity that will be presented for its fifth year at the Rio on Saturday.
Wilson”s first twist is to present many of those Christmas tunes played ad nauseum in almost every retail environment in America this time of year in a new format, namely, a minor key. Changing “Deck the Halls” and “Jingle Bells” from a major to a minor key jerks the song out of its familiar rut and freshens its lyrical content, Wilson believes. It redeems songs abused by overexposure and allows listeners to get something entirely new out of them.
“Altared” even cues its new orientation toward Christmas with a new color scheme. There won”t be a trace of red and/or green on stage Saturday. Instead, the performers will be decked out in the “altared” colors of blue and black.
What”s more, the performance occupies a curious middle ground between rock concert and theater, something like a musical revue with singers and musicians playing theatrical roles to re-invigorate the songs with new meanings, without changing the lyrics or the melody.
Wilson said that he is trying to appeal to audiences who might be feel alienated from the contemporary celebration of the holiday. Yet, instead of rejecting Christmas, he”s looking to rescue it.
“I”m sick of the whole thing,” he said of the modern-day observance of Christmas. “It”s stressful. It highlights a lot of dysfunction in people”s families. There”s a lot of pressure.
“What we try to do is to kind of inoculate you against the excesses of Christmas, so you can laugh about some of this stuff, and really enjoy it again.”
The trick is to re-interpret the songs from a different point of view. Case in point is the favorite ditty “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.” With the help of singer and excellent lap steel player Patti Maxine, Wilson reworks “Mommy” as a kind of off-beat, mildly disturbing story of an insane old woman dealing with a repressed memory that has essentially ruined her life. It”s a cutesy bauble rerouted through the viewpoint of Bette Davis in “Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte.”
“Deck the Halls” is another example, reworked into a canny statement on the stresses of the holiday season. “If you listen to that song,” said Wilson, “it”s basically a giant to-do list. What if we had a tired single mom singing the song, getting frazzled about the chores she has to do?”
“Altared” began as a recording project when Wilson, who knows his way around a recording studio, wrote new arrangements of popular Christmas songs and played almost all the instruments himself. Wilson credits his friend Santa Cruz uke master Rick “Ukulele Dick” McKee with the inspiration for the original idea.
It was, however, a task of a different magnitude to bring the “Altared” concept to a live performance. Wilson pulled together a group of local musicians and debuted “Altared” five years ago at a monthly meeting/jam session of the Ukulele Club of Santa Cruz County. After another year at the Ukulele Club and a year at the Cayuga Vault, the show was brought to the Rio for the first time last December.
This year, Wilson”s blue-and-black band of eccentrics will number 19, including Patti Maxine, Ukulele Dick and singer Tammi Brown, along with new additions White Album Ensemble keyboardist Dale Ockerman and Solcircle percussionist Michael Horne.
For Rhan Wilson, “Altared” represents a bold new step in a lifetime of trying to find his voice as a musician. He”s a lifelong Santa Cruzan, having grown up on Branciforte Drive in the shadow of the Mystery Spot and graduated from Harbor High School. His father Don Wilson was a longtime newspaper reporter for the Watsonville Register-Pajaronian and the Santa Cruz Sentinel. He remembers as a child visiting the crime scene of one of the infamous mass murders that haunted the area in the early 1970s.
As a kid, Wilson was a sucker for rock music, starting his first band in the 6th grade with friends Pat and Nancy Kasper called “Paisley Pudding.” A formative event in his early life came when, as a teenager, he met Carlos Santana who was then living in Aptos.
“My two goals in life back then were 1 to meet Carlos Santana; and 2 to play with him. I did the first, and the second, not yet. But when you ask the universe for things, sometimes you don”t get them right away.”
Since then, Wilson has played in a variety of rock bands and has been involved in a number of musical projects, most notably a creative partnership with the violinist named Thoth. But, he said, he”s never been more busy and creatively engaged than he is now. He”s playing in an insistently creative new band called Romp the members of which are part of the “Altared” band, and is the bandleader for the house band at comedian Richard Stockton”s monthly Planet Santa Cruz Comedy Hour.
In February, he”s embarking on a new project with Romp, “An Altared Valentine”s Day,” with love songs delivered in a minor key.
Though now past his 50th birthday, Wilson feels like he”s just getting started artistically. In his 30s, he changed the spelling of his original name, Ron, to the more exotic Rhan, a move, he said, that gave him the psychic permission to “shed my insecurities. Rhan is a different guy. He”s not introverted. He can do whatever he wants.”
Wilson admits to a certain vulnerability when it comes to emotion. He cries often to the passion found in music and sees laughing and crying not as opposites but as related reactions to what he calls the “bittersweet and melancholy quality of life.” He insists that “Altared Christmas” isn”t a joke, but rather an effort to re-engage people in the underlying universal spirit of the holiday, in both laughs and tears — an altar to the deceased will be part of the show — as well as a call to fight the impulse to defer one”s dreams to some later time.
“I used to always tell people that they have to give themselves permission to be incredible. I mean, what”s stopping you? I see it in my life too. If I want to do something in my life, I better be doing it right now.”
Click here to read this Santa Cruz Sentinel review of An Altared Christmas - December 10, 2009