On Tuesday night, as the setting sun shimmered meekly through a blanket of grey clouds that lay over the Missoula valley, Stephen Hoffman of Coeur d’Alene stood halfway between second and third base at Ogren Park, tilting toward center field as he listened intently to John Mellencamp singing a solo acoustic version of “Save Some Time to Dream,” off his brand new album, “No Better Than This.”
“Yeah,” breathed Hoffman at the song’s end. “That was awesome. Wow. Good song.”
The same, presumably, didn’t cross the mind of the four men who stood in a knot next to him, two of them discussing their favorite Bob Dylan songs as a third barked a beer order into his cell phone.
Such was the scene at Tuesday night’s double-bill Mellencamp/Dylan concert, the largest in Missoula since the Rolling Stones rocked Washington Grizzly Stadium four years ago. With a crowd of more than 6,000 in attendance, the two legendary performers gave their fans – who seemed to comprise roughly equal factions in the ballpark – plenty of old favorites and a few curve balls over the course of the evening. [Read More...]
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The roots of jazz are inextricably entangled with American urban culture. But for jazz pianist Paul Keeling, the seeds of inspiration were planted in the fertile soils of Montana’s Bitterroot Valley.
Though he now lives in Vancouver, B.C., Keeling spent many summers in the Bitterroot as a teenager, camping with his family on the property homesteaded by his great grandfather in the late 1800s, near the mouth of Mill Creek. He fondly recalls exploring the mountains with his siblings and his father, the renowned scientist Charles Keeling, whose data on atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, known as the “Keeling Curve,” now stands as the earliest solid indication of human-caused rises in greenhouse gases, back in the early 1960s.
Outside his professional life, Charles Keeling was an avid outdoorsman and a classically trained pianist, who at one time considered pursuing a career as a musician.
Both of those influences came to bear on Paul, the youngest of five siblings – all of them musicians. It was during those same teen years when he began visiting Montana that Paul and his brother Eric (a guitarist who until recently lived in Missoula) first discovered jazz music. [Read More...]
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Less than a minute into his 90-minute concert on Wednesday night, Michael Franti looked out across a sea of pogoing dancers in the audience, stepped up to the microphone, and let out a long, one-word shout: “Montana!” The crowd went wild, cheering back at the dreadlocked singer. Two more times during the song, Franti called out the state’s name; two more times, the crowd went nuts.
It’s a tried-and-true trick for touring performers to connect with local audiences that way. But in this case, Franti’s call seemed to carry a special reverberance — a shout-out to the mountains that echoed around him and the bare earth underfoot at this, the second-ever concert at Ryan Creek Meadows, a makeshift outdoor venue located near Beavertail Hill State Park in western Montana. [Read More...]
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I don’t normally do a lot of film reviews; but given the local interest in “Call of the Wild 3D” — which was shot in our backyard here in western Montana — I figured I’d give it a look. [Read More...]
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In just the second scene of Sarah Ruhl’s quirky comedy, “Dead Man’s Cell Phone,” a young woman named Jean professes her love for Gordon, a man she has never met and will never meet – not on this plane of existence, anyway. Gordon, it seems, has died – a victim of the lentil soup. Jean, by happenstance, has taken possession of his cell phone, and in so doing has taken it upon herself to settle his affairs, one ill-timed ring at a time.
“Help me, God,” Jean pleads on her knees, “Help me to comfort his loved ones.”
Thus begins a pseudo-mystical, cross-continental and, yes, even multi-planar journey made only marginally plausible by the magical powers of cellular telephony. [Read More...]
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