WMO & Ellis - Together Again

report filed 3/21/00 7:33 am - Big news from Wise Monkey Orchestra! The band has just announced they will be recording selected shows, including an upcoming date at Winstons, for a new live album featuring Dave Ellis.

WMO's connection to Ellis (the Other Ones, Ratdog, Charlie Hunter Trio) is nothing new. In fact, you can call him the "other monkey." For starters, Ellis’ melodic and edgy horn work is featured on several tunes from WMO’s most recent studio release, Pathways. He has also jammed with the band on numerous occasions at shows up and down the California coast, particularly in the Bay area. The association dates back to WMO’s Colorado tour last winter, when both were playing gigs within a short distance of each other. "The quartet was playing at the Bluebird in Denver," recalls Ellis, "and their engineer/producer Rich Maloney (Ratdog, Furthur Tour, Dave Matthew's Band), called me. He said come down, check this band out. So I came down and sat in. I had such a great time, they flew me down to San Diego to do some work on their next record! I had a blast, it was really fun. I really dig them. They were just so prepared and had their act so together. You know, (laughs), anytime you want me man, if you got your act together like that, I'm there!"

WMO has been on a nationwide tour since early January, and this will be the band’s first show at Winston’s in months. Should be a rockin' night...

We had a bit of rough luck last week in terms of Big Wu photos. The Wu were scheduled to play at San Diego State University from noon to 1pm, outdoors, near the student union. Seems that they started a little early and were quickly shut down by the campus popo... by the time our crew arrived at high noon, the band was already breaking down their gear, getting ready for the long ride to Las Vegas, where they were playing later that night. Word has it that the Wu will playing Winstons in April, so hopefully we'll be able to get some shots from that show.

Shifting gears here at the Anytime/Anywhere studios from an extended period of magazine article madness, to finishing off the research for the Relix book. Just about done transcribing the 25 or so interviews already in the can (right now we're at 50,000 words), and trying to nail down the remaining 15 or so chatfests still on the docket. That's going to be the focus around here for the next several weeks. Of course, we're also going to make a good faith effort to plow through this stack of CD reviews we've been threatening to tackle for the past couple of weeks...

Although we don't have any new feature articles this time out, we are happy to post the February column from Jambands.com, 'Turn the Page - Book Magic, the 'Braryo and Travelin' Light,' as well as a couple of previously unpublished excerpts from our recent interview with Alley Stewart of Wise Monkey.

Due to space limitations in the issue of the Las Vegas Weekly that ran the article, there was no room for alot of great quotes from Alley. In our continuing effort to provide high grade content, we've posted a few previously unpublished excerpts from the interview for your reading pleasure.

You'll also find some great new links!

Although there are no guarantees (as evidenced by this week's Wu fiasco), John Brown's Body, a hard skankin' rubba-dub-rydm generator with an irie, homegrown vibe, will be playing a couple of shows at Winstons this week, so hopefully the winds of fate will cooperate, and we'll have some shots from those shows next week.

'til next time, that was this time...