Archive for the ‘MUSIC’ Category

Santa Cecilia Orchestra will perform Dvorák and Gershwin, its next concert of the 2011-2012 season, which will take place at Thorne Hall, in Los Angeles on Sunday February 12, 2012 at 4:00 p.m.  Conductor Sonia Marie De León de Vega will lead the orchestra performing George Gershwin’s fused jazz with symphonic music with Bryan Pezzone, who returns to SCO’s stage to play Gershwin’s Piano Concerto.  SCO will dazzle the audience with their virtuosity as they close the concert with Dvorák’s greatest romantic work, Symphony No. 7.

SCO is fulfilling its Music is For Everyone mission by offering full orchestra concerts, chamber concerts and its nationally acclaimed Discovering Music program.

The concert will take place at Thorne Hall, 1600 Campus Road, Los Angeles, 90041 on Sunday February 12, 2012 at 4:00 p.m.  There will be one performance only of this program. Tickets priced at $26, $20 and $7 (youth, 17 and under) are available by calling the orchestra office at (323) 259-3011 or by visiting www.scorchestra.org/201011orderform.html#dvorakandgershwin.

A complete season schedule is available at www.scorchestra.org/concerts.html.

About Santa Cecilia Orchestra and Conductor Sonia Marie De Léon de Vega

Founded in 1992 by world renowned conductor Sonia Marie De Léon de Vega, the Santa Cecilia Orchestra offers full orchestra and chamber concerts, and its nationally acclaimed Discovering Music, a two-year music education program that is currently offered in 18 elementary schools throughout Los Angeles.  SCO has made a commitment to share the beauty and inspiration of classical music with Southern California audiences, giving special focus to Latino communities.  Media and speaking engagement inquiries, please contact Lucia Matthews of DIÁLOGO at lucia@dialogo.us or for news, photos and biographies of the conductor and soloists, visit http://www.scorchestra.org/PressRoom.htm/.

Conductor Sonia Marie De Léon de Vega and the Santa Cecilia Orchestra (SCO) return to Occidental College with “Romantic Offerings,” a spectacular opening night concert of SCO’s 19th season on Sunday November 6, 2011, at Thorne Hall.  Romantic Offerings will include the beautiful Bruch Double Concerto featuring the Orchestra’s own principal players: Michael Arnold, clarinet, and Lauren Chipman, viola.

Inspirational Maestra De León de Vega will conduct the most beloved of all the Brahms symphonies, the Second.  The evening’s program also includes Mendelssohn’s St. Paul Overture and Bruch’s Concerto for Clarinet, Viola and Orchestra in E minor, Op. 88.

The concert begins at 4:00 PM and is performed without intermission. Tickets, which are on sale now for 26/$20 (adults) and $7 (children), are available by calling (323) 259-3011 or visiting www.scorchestra.org/201011orderform.html#romanticofferings.  A complete season schedule is available at http://scorchestra.org/concerts.html.

Sonia Marie De Léon de Vega, Conductor

Maestra De Léon de Vega is world renowned for her skills on the podium as the music director and conductor of the Los Angeles-based Santa Cecilia Orchestra, the only orchestra in the nation with a specific mission to share the beauty and inspiration of classical music with Latino communities. Maestra De Léon de Vega is celebrated in education circles for creating Discovering Music in 1998, a two-year music education program that is currently offered in 18 elementary schools throughout Los Angeles.  The program has touched the lives of more than 40,000 students in 35 schools through the power of music education.

About Santa Cecilia Orchestra

Founded in 1992, Santa Cecilia Orchestra has made a commitment to share the beauty and inspiration of classical music with Southern California audiences, giving special focus to Latino communities.  SCO offers full orchestra and chamber concerts, and its nationally acclaimed Discovering Music, a two-year music education program.  The upcoming season features four concerts:  Three full symphony concerts and a chamber orchestra performance.  Media and speaking engagement inquiries, please contact Richie Matthews of DIÁLOGO at richie@dialogo.us or for news, photos and biographies of the conductor and soloists, visit http://www.scorchestra.org/PressRoom.htm.

Ice Cube may cut hair in the movies, but if you schedule a photo shoot with him, his people will request it be BYOB — Bring Your Own Barber. You’ll need to bring a makeup artist, too.

After all, he’s not the same man he was whenBoyz n the Hood came out, 20 years ago last month. The Academy Award–nominated film sparked Cube’s transformation fromAmerikkka’s Most Wanted into its most adored. He is Cube, the mogul — a rapper, actor, director, documentarian, producer, writer and pitchman. The man even once saw the lights of the Goodyear Blimp and it read, well, you know.

The only thing he hasn’t done is paint. Fittingly, his latest venture is a collaboration with Rareink to release a limited-edition line of autographed prints, each featuring an artist’s interpretation of a classic Ice Cube album cover.

Which is the occasion of our penetration of the sixth-floor compound of Cubevision, located on the Sunset Strip across from the Roxy. There you see posters of the dozen-plus films he has produced, including Sindwir Schonda?— Are We There Yet? in German. His personal office is crowded with mementos, awards and symbolic gestures. Not one, but two Scarface posters.

Even if his current world is more lunches at the Grill than ice-grills, when you meet O’Shea Jackson, in his Westside Connection T-shirt, you will instantly remember that this is motherfucking Ice Cube. You’re forced to genuflect before the poisonous pen behind N.W.A, arguably the most imaginative and greatest rapper in gangsta-rap history.

Cube has stockpiled enough street cred to sustain four lifetimes’ worth of Janky Promoters and Coors Light commercials. He started this gangsta shit. The least we can do is pay attention.

With hip-hop in its fifth decade and Jay-Z and Kanye West name-droppingPicasso and Basquiat, did your decision to do the Rareink project stem from where the genre and its fans are at now?

I was watching Nightline or 20/20 and saw an artist who could put on a Mick Jagger song and paint Mick before the song was over. I knew that if I was a Mick Jagger fan, that’s something that I’d want. I’d want one for George Clinton. If you’re an entertainer who wants longevity, you want to get to the point where your fans cherish not only your work but you as an artist. You want to provide them with something authentic.

We’re at the 20th anniversary of Death Certificate. Do you think an album that outwardly political could get released on a major label today?

If the artist was hot enough. Eminem‘s released some controversial albums, so I don’t think there’s a limit. Would it get accepted by the mainstream music community? Probably not. They thought it was the worst shit at the time, so why would they think differently today?

It’s also the 20th anniversary of Boyz n the Hood. Today, every rapper wants to diversify, but you and Ice-T were the first. Did you know even then that it was important for your longevity?

It struck me after the opportunity was presented. When you’re engulfed in hip-hop, especially as I was in the late 1980s and early ’90s, you’re just trying to be the best rapper in the world. But when I had the chance to do Boyz, I saw everything on a whole other level. Working with John Singleton showed me that if he could do it, so could I. I wrote the song “Boyz-n-the-Hood,” I did the movie and I was in N.W.A. It was the universe saying, “You’ve got to expand on this.”

How hard would it be to get a movie like that made today?

It’s not easy. Hollywood doesn’t want to fund those movies, they want comedies. And if they do a drama, it won’t deal with race issues, it will deal with family issues, like Precious. I was trying to make a movie and I spoke with a dude who was, like, “I think the movie’s cool, but I don’t like the killing in the end. I don’t want sad shit in the film.” It’s, like, are we trying to depict reality or make this fantasy bullshit? But with DVD sales down, Hollywood cares more about the foreign market. You’d have to make Harry Potter meets Boyz n the Hood to get some hard-core shit made today.

Is that why you’ve gravitated toward comedy?

It’s the path of least resistance. The thing is to work on good projects. I don’t want to be a dude like Stanley Kubrick, pop out every five or six years because I’m waiting for the perfect one. They know I can make comedies work, so that’s what they want. It’s not like you go to McDonald’s and ask for a taco.

How did those Coors Light commercials come about?

They wanted to sell more beer. I told them, “It took y’all long enough to get me.”

You have two sons rapping, Doughboy and OMG. Have you given them any advice about the rap game?

I told them to fall in love with the music and not the industry, and you’ll be fine.

Written by:

Jeff Weiss

Photo:

Jenne Warren

Back in December the music blogosphere got all worked up. Turns out there was a new indie supergroup afoot, with Michael Cera on the bass!

The band was tweely named Mister Heavenly, and it featured Islands’ Nick Thorburn, Man Man’s Honus Honus, and Modest Mouse’s Joe Plummer. Pitchfork had the story, natch, and it was the biggest news on Stereogum since Zooey Deschanel started giving Ben Gibbard foot massages.

Though Pfork’s headline was “Michael Cera Joins Mister Heavenly,” it wasn’t entirely clear that he was an actual member of the group. In the Stereogum piece, even Honus Honus (aka Ryan Kattner) wasn’t sure. “Don’t know,” he told them when asked point blank. “We are all Dogstar fans.”

Personally, this story wasn’t much on our radar until we heard Mister Heavenly was playing FYF Fest next month. Sure, we would have loved to speak with members of the recently-reunited Death From Above 1979 or South Bay punk legends the Descendents, but, c’mon, this is George Michael Bluth we’re talking about. We put in our interview request to Sub Pop’s publicist and began preparing a list of questions, which were mainly just jokes about George Michael’s girlfriend Bland.

Unfortunately, it was not to be. The publicist, Bekah Zietz, casually noted that Cera is no longer the group’s touring bassist and would not be performing at FYF. Not only that, but she says he was never in the group in the first place. “[He] did not record nor was he ever a permanent member of the band,” she wrote to us, “just a friend of the band who was helping them out when they were in need of a bassist.”

So, there you have it. No Michael Cera at FYF Fest, unless he’s there watching. It makes us wonder what happened. Could Cera have gotten cold feet after Kattner’s disgruntled-sounding comments to Spinner at SXSW this year, where the band — with Cera — performed?

“Michael is a buddy, never toured before, good bass player but he’s not playing on the album,” he said. “When the band formed a year ago, we thought it would be fun to have him on the road but it’s been kind of a distraction. I hate the girls screaming ‘Michael.’”

In any case, so long Michael Cera. We’ll always have Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.

Written by:

Ian Joulain

Image:

Evan Culbertson

At the L.A. Phil’s performance of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony last week at the Hollywood Bowl, a lot of people had a hard time keeping their minds on the, um, crescendos.

The problem — if you can call it that — was 24-year-old Chinese pianist Yuja Wang, who kicked things off performing Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto. It was hard to notice her finger work, as she was clad in a bare-shouldered, high-hemmed orange dress.

Times critic Mark Swed was particularly captivated, dedicating almost a third of his review to her and her tiny outfit. “Her dress Tuesday was so short and tight,” he wrote, “that had there been any less of it, the Bowl might have been forced to restrict admission to any music lover under 18 not accompanied by an adult.”

Um, Swed was clearly not at HARD Summer Fest this weekend.

In any case, since the review was published last Wednesday, bloggers and commenters have begun taking sides on the case of the titillating pianst. Amanda Ameer, a publicist for classical musicians, said on artsjournal.com that Wang had the right to dress to kill, even if her taste was questionable and might possibly hurt her career.

“Do I think the dresses are an odd choice? Yes,” she wrote. “Do I think wearing them is unfair to her artistic partners on stage? Possibly. Do I think that, as long as they don’t prevent her from playing the piano, she should wear them if she wants to? I do, so long as she accepts that it will be all people want to talk about, for better or worse.”

Washington Post critic Anne Midgette, meanwhile, found Swed’s overemphasis on
Wang’s outfit symptomatic of the stodginess of the insular classical music scene: “Let’s have a reality check for a minute. Yes, the dress is short, tight, and revealing. But in the real world — the world outside classical music’s still-prurient bubble — this is not unusual attire for a young rising starlet in the public eye…these dresses and shoes are not inherently shocking, let alone a cause for restricting admission to those under 18.”

Our opinion? Swed should relax. We encourage more classical performers to heed the words of The Producers‘ Max Bialystock, who memorably shouted out his office window, “That’s it, baby, when you’ve got it, flaunt it! Flaunt it!”

Written by:

LA Weekly

Re:Play L.A. is our concert series with local indie acts covering classic albums. The final installment — Aug. 17 at the Hard Rock Café on Hollywood Boulevard — will feature genre-unclassifiable duo J*DaVeY. But unlike the other artists in the series, J*DaVeY weren’t immediately sure what they wanted to cover. They considered the Stooges’ self-titled debut, the Beatles‘ Revolver and Talking Heads‘ Brian Eno–produced classic Remain in Light. Seeing that they’ve already covered “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” they toyed with the idea of performing Nirvana’s Nevermind.

Makes sense that the group’s members — singer-songwriter Jack Davey and producerBrook D’Leau (by the way, Jack’s the woman and Brook’s the man) — would have a hard time picking a style, considering they can play so many of them. They’re L.A.’s freshest, funkiest fusionists, and they’ve been coloring outside the lines and defying being “genre-cized” since forming in 1999. They can play hip-hop, new wave, rock, pop, electro, R&B and … that’s about all we have space for here.

They finally settled on the 1980 Police recordZenyattà Mondatta. “In our iTunescollections, we both have their entire catalog — not one song is missing,” Davey says. “That album is probably my favorite, particularly ‘When the World Is Running Down, You Make the Best of What’s Still Around.’”

The choice becomes more clear when it’s compared to J*DaVeY, particularly the title, which is intentionally vague; J*DaVeY avoid assigning specific meaning to their music. “I believe that leaving things open to interpretation makes [our music] more interactive with the audience,” D’Leau says.

The record’s energy also matches that of Davey and D’Leau. “Zenyattà Mondatta seems like it was more of a jam session. It’s a lot more free-flowing [than a typical studio album],” D’Leau says. As they told us when we interviewed them for L.A. Weekly‘s 2011 People issue, they don’t rehearse their shows to death, in order to give fans a different experience every time. In that same spirit, the pair decided on Zenyattà at the last minute.

D’Leau says he’s a bit nervous about the show. The record is important to him: His parents played it when he was growing up, and he introduced Davey to it when they first began working together in high school. But we’re sure any fear will dissolve once the duo start in on their slithering remix of “Don’t Stand So Close to Me.” Or maybe they’ll play that song straight. The beauty of J*DaVeY is that nobody, not even they, will know until that very moment. —Rebecca Haithcoat

J*DaVeY perform as part of L.A. Weekly‘s Re:Play L.A. series, Wed., Aug. 17, 9 p.m., at the Hard Rock Café, 6801 Hollywood Blvd., Hlywd. Free.

Written by:

Rebecca Haithcoat

Image Source

Cypress Hill
Troubadour
8-6-11

Better than . . . smoking at home.

“This is our first time rockin’ the Troubadour,” said B-Real of Cypress Hill, speaking from the fabled club on the twentieth anniversary of the legendary rap group’s multi-platinum self-titled debut. “It took us 20 years to get here.”

​Undeniably one of the most influential groups in the history of hip-hop, the South Gate stoners were the first Latino group to sell a millions copies, with four of their first five records earning platinum status — and ’93′s Black Sunday going triple-plat. They’ve ignited a revolution, becoming cultural icons for their groundbreaking early records and their medical marijuana advocacy. They also host their own SmokeOut, a single-day rap and rock music festival where medical marijuana patients can smoke freely on site. On Saturday night, they celebrated their storied career with an intimate sold out show at the Troubadour.

In the late 1980s, D.O.C. was recruited by Dr. Dre to Southern California from his childhood home of Dallas. Shortly thereafter, the Texas-bred wunderkind helped bring gangsta rap to the mainstream, ghostwriting large portions of the biggest West Coast classics, starting with Straight Outta Compton. He gave voice to the volatile yet comedic character of Eazy-E and helped define the personas of Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg. The MCs who used his words admired not just his rhymes but his ability to mold ideas and fragments into memorable songs. “He showed me how to take the greatness out of the words and combine that into a verse, a hook, a bridge,” Snoop recently told English radio personalityTim Westwood.

D.O.C.’s 1989 solo debut, No One Can Do It Better, was expected to make him a star like his collaborators. Featuring his nimble, aggressive yet warm chops, it’s considered one of the best rap debuts of all time, andJay-Z cites it as a profound influence. But while driving home drunk and high from a video shoot for a song from the album, D.O.C. fell asleep and spun out; he was thrown out of the back window before the car slammed into a tree. “I had so much in my system that they couldn’t sedate me,” he recalls over a late dinner at Sherman Oaks restaurant Senor Fred. He fought the medics when they tried to insert a breathing tube, causing it to scar his larynx. As a result, he speaks in what sounds like a stage whisper, almost like he’s talking through a smoker’s voice box.

He became utterly demoralized, so much so that when his music came on at a club, he would leave. “I didn’t want to hear that voice,” he says.

Though his subsequent rap albums wouldn’t prove successful — after all, he’d lost his trademark booming baritone — he nonetheless remained tight with his famous friends. He helped Dre and Snoop write The Chronic and Doggystyle, as well as Dre’s best-selling 1999 work 2001.

D.O.C., who is 43 and was born Tracy Curry, became relatively content in his position as ghostwriter to the stars, a post he held for two decades. But though he was one of the original owners of Death Row Records and estimates he wrote more than half of each of the first Ruthless Records albums — including Straight Outta Compton and Eazy-Duz-It, which have sold about 5 million albums combined — he never got his business affairs straight, and so never received his proper royalties. Content to stay in Dre’s posh houses, eat fancy meals with the crew and get blitzed, D.O.C. didn’t grow rich the way those around him did. “I was totally in the grips of the drug lifestyle,” he says. “The only thing I was really concerned with was having enough money in my pocket so that I knew I could get high when I wanted to.”

Making matters worse, in late 2009 he split with Dre, who’d put him up in a rented house and paid him a $20,000 annual retainer while they worked on Dre’s long-awaited albumDetox. The situation came to a head that October, when, eating dinner at an Arnie Morton‘s steak house, the pair had a huge blowup and parted ways. This wasn’t the first time they’d taken a break from working together, but the nasty argument — which D.O.C. refuses to discuss — convinced him that their partnership was over.

Since then, he has sought to get his life back together, preparing for highly experimental surgery to restore his voice, mentoring young rappers, going to Alcoholics Anonymousand settling down in his home life.

Still, the split from Dre, combined with the fact that he might never be able to rap like he once did, threatened to embitter him permanently. “I’m probably one of the best motherfuckers to ever pick up a microphone and spit in it,” he says, “but you’d never really know that, because I never really got a chance to show you.”

Things haven’t been all that bad for D.O.C. After falling out with Dre he moved back to Dallas and began living part-time with the stunning and iconic R&B singer Erykah Badu and their 7-year-old daughter, Puma. Also in the house are Puma’s well-pedigreed half-siblings: 13-year-old brother Seven, whose father is Outkast‘s Andre 3000, and 2-year-old sister Mars, whose pops is venerated New Orleans rapper Jay Electronica.

With all of these musical legends coming in and out, it’s quite a scene. Badu’s Dallas home is a “beautiful house right off of a really nice body of water,” D.O.C. says, adding that he remains enchanted with her. In fact, he hopes to film a reality show before long about the goings-on in her house, ending with their wedding.

D.O.C. is well-built and light-skinned, and has a radiant physical presence; upon meeting him it’s immediately clear why he was groomed for stardom. He’s tremendously charismatic, striding into the Ventura Boulevard Mexican eatery today and chatting up the staff members, many of whom he knows from his days living just across the street. For much of the latter half of the aughts he was ensconced there, just down the street from the Record One studio that Dre liked to use. (That is, when he wasn’t randomly flying his collaborators out to places like Hawaii and Reno, where 2001 was largely created.)

Joined by his new business partner, D.O.C. sits down in a secluded booth and orders an iced tea rather than a beer. He’s “detoxing,” he notes. There’s truth to this, as he’s been sober for more than six months. But it’s also a pun, referencing Dr. Dre’s supposedly forthcoming album, which has become the Chinese Democracy of hip-hop, so long delayed that many doubt it will be any good — if it ever emerges.

D.O.C. began working on Detox in 2005, after Dre already had been struggling on it in vain for years. It has sprung a series of uninspiring singles, and D.O.C. began to clash with Dre over matters both creative and financial, believing Dre wasn’t paying him what he was worth. Meanwhile, in his stunning May conversation with Tim Westwood, Snoop asserted that Dre had surrounded himself with the wrong people, a cast of lesser-known producers, engineers and MCs. It was he and D.O.C. who represented the historical “backbone” of Dre’s operation, Snoop went on, through his own gangsta bravado and D.O.C.’s song structures. “It has to be … holy matrimony,” Snoop said, “and right now it’s holy macaroni.” (Dre could not be reached for comment for this story.)

The fallout with Dre hurt D.O.C. deeply, and he returned to Dallas at the beginning of 2010, unsure what lay ahead. Then, in an interview with HipHopDX.com earlier this year, he announced the crystallization of plans for a medical procedure that could restore his vocal capabilities. The science fiction–sounding surgery would use stem cell tissue and be spearheaded by reveredBarcelona-based physician Paolo Macchiarini— famous for performing a windpipe transplant, using a woman’s own stem cells. In June, D.O.C. traveled to a Sacramento hospital for a series of tests to see if his body could handle the surgery. He’s still awaiting the results but says he feels optimistic.

He even brought a camera crew to the hospital for another reality TV show he’s planning, to be bundled with footage from a musical talent search. He’s in the process of training a handful of potential rap stars, including a genteel white 19-year-old namedMike Bond from a tiny town in central Texas. These unknowns will perform lyrics D.O.C. has written, and their verses will be paired on tracks with urban superstars in his Rolodex — including Snoop, Andre 3000 and Badu. D.O.C. says he’s in talks with production companies for the program, which he plans to titleI Got My Voice Back.

He hasn’t been totally stiffed. D.O.C. says he receives about $20,000 per year in writer’s royalties. This is, of course, only a fraction of what he’s owed, considering that the works he contributed to continue to sell well. Until recently, the majority of even this modest sum went to the IRS, owing to unpaid back taxes. He says a combination of loyalty and substance-abuse issues kept him from legally pursuing his publishing credits over the years.

But now he’s ready for a new day. He has paired up with a crackerjack PR rep named Chad Kiser, as well as a new full-time business partner, John Huffman, who has worked hard to get him the royalties he deserves. “We’re happy now about the situation with 2001,” Huffman says, adding that D.O.C. still hasn’t received his due from his Ruthless contributions.

While I was writing this story, something else fortuitous happened to the ghostwriter — he received a call from Dr. Dre, who invited him to come back to California. Snoop was brought back into the fold as well, and the trio resumed work on Detox at Dre’s Burbankstudios in late July. D.O.C. says he feels reinvigorated creatively, and that he brought Dre ideas to help “get that core audience back, with those types of songs and that California vibe from the Chronic album.”

Don’t scoff: D.O.C. insists the album really is coming soon. “Dre’s pretty fucking close,” he says, adding that he plans to move back to L.A. for six months, time enough, he contends, to complete the work.

This go-around, however, D.O.C. plans a different type of working relationship with the famed producer. Instead of having Dre put him up and pay him a salary, he’s going to rent a house for himself — “in Marina del Rey, with the artists” — and make sure he receives his proper back-end publishing. He says Snoop has called their recent reunion “magical.”

D.O.C. isn’t entirely certain what caused Dre’s change of heart, because Dre told him he didn’t want to focus on the past. He speculates that one factor may have been Snoop’s impassioned plea to Westwood, while another is simply that their loyalty runs deep. “We all got love for each other,” he says. “I love Dre like my fucking family.”

Dre appears to feel the same way. One night in the studio a couple weeks ago, he took a break from playing his new beats to put on a Beethoven symphony. As it played, Dre noted that the composer had created the work after he had gone deaf.

“And he drilled the point into my head, that most of Beethoven’s greatest compositions were created after he lost his hearing,” D.O.C. says. “I got the message.”

Written by:

Ben Westhoff

Photo by:

Brandon Showers

If you meet David Cohn, he won’t tell you he’s a rapper. Should you ask him what he does for a living, he’ll answer that he’s unemployed. He used to drive a Budweiser truck around Chicago, delivering beer to every liquor store south of the Loop. Then he got a job working in a shaman shop owned by a former producer for the Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev. He sold DMT, ayahuasca, salvia and enough esoteric psychedelics to make William Burroughs bug out. But only until 11 a.m. Then he’d go play pingpong.

The downside of working in a hallucinogenic Wonkaland is that there’s always someone with Day-Glo hair and a Kombucha tea addiction willing to work for soy milk and scrip. So two years ago, Cohn was axed and his personal life pinwheeled into tragedy: withering substance-abuse addictions among family members, crippling debt, a severe case of pneumonia that left him temporarily incapacitated and scarred by a pair of minor strokes.

Several months ago, Cohn fled the trauma — and the backbreaking Second City wind — to relocate to L.A., the home of his new label, the appropriately eccentric Anticon. Last week, he released Family & Friends, a bleak, melancholic and wry art-rap record that ranks as the most searing and powerful of his dozen-plus disc catalog. But unless you knew better, you would never know that Cohn was really Serengeti, his primary musical alter ego.

Serengeti emerged more than a dozen years ago, during a year Cohn spent studying abroad in Sweden, watching nature videos and teaching himself how to make music — a predilection that, like depression, runs in his blood. His great-uncle Sonny Cohn was a world-famous trumpeter in Count Basie‘s band, but the younger Cohn was raised during the Golden Age and grew transfixed by KMD and MF Doom. So he started rapping, got weirder, turned semipro.

“I’d get offers to headline in Chicago, but as the 10th rapper on a bill of 10. By the time I performed, the only people left were the rappers,” Cohn says, speaking from his small and sparsely furnished apartment in Glassell Park — his furniture having been hocked onCraigslist to help finance the move.

After all, the contemporary indie hip-hop world is a war of attrition, especially for those with obtuse sensibilities. Rap fans prefer their cult artists as cartoons, while Serengeti eschews self-promotion and contrived mythology. The latest trend is to name rap songs after SEO-friendly icons like Donald Trump, Miley Cyrus and Michael Jordan. By contrast, Serengeti’s most popular song is “Dennehy” (from the 2006 album of the same name), a paean to the gruff actor best known to the sub-30 set as Big Tom Callahan in Tommy Boy.

But Serengeti isn’t rapping as himself on “Dennehy.” Instead, the song is performed by one of his alter egos, Kenny Dennis, a 48-year-old white guy besotted with bratwurst, Buicks, onions, softball, Richard Daley, actors Dennehy and Tom Berenger, and his wife, Jueles — not to mention the Bulls, White Sox, Blackhawks and da Bears. Kenny has a mustache the size of Mike Ditka‘s forehead and an affinity for O’Doul’s — not because he’s a recovering alcoholic but because he finds it delicious.

Why would a black/Jewish rapper adopt the pug-nosed Polish slang of a Bill Swerski Super Fan? It all started when Cohn was watching the Little League World Series on TV one year, and the announcers were asking the kids about their favorite actors and athletes. “I wondered what it would be like if someone’s favorite actor was Brian Dennehy,” Cohn says, sipping coffee and wearing pajama pants at 5 p.m.

But Kenny Dennis is neither SNL sketch nor satire. Cohn’s genius lies in his three-dimensional commitment to his creations — a worldview bounded by regional chains, Windy City intonation and tribal loyalty. Nagged by the willful suspension of belief required to accept a middle-aged, blue-collar man rapping, Cohn cultivated the elaborate backstory.

“Serengeti explores the medium’s potential as art. Not in the self-indulgent or abstract-for-the-sake-of sense, but in the sense of a real person exploring the range of their experiences, emotional and otherwise,” says Mike Eagle, a friend of Cohn’s since their days at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, and a gifted art rapper in his own right. “Serengeti is vulnerable, and makes his work valuable in a way that economics or popularity can’t define.”

Serengeti is the rap Sam Beckett, quantum leaping into different spirits, including a different, 1993 iteration of Kenny — who was, in this telling, then known as KD, Tha Killa Deacon.

“It’s fun for me to be Kenny because he’s just a simple guy who’s happy all the time. All he wants is his wife, Jueles, sports, and some brats and chops,” Cohn says. “I’m usually depressed. When I’m not Kenny, everything I write draws back to my real life, which has often been really fucked up.” To wit: His first girlfriend, of a decade, died in a car accident, folks close to him have had drug problems, and he still has to deal with the spatial problems caused by his strokes.

Family & Friends navigates similarly complex terrain: the reinvention of self (“California”), deadbeat dads (“Long Ears”) and the ravages of heroin (“Tracks”).

Its offbeat pop production was handled by Advanced Base (formerly known for the lo-fi electronic project Casiotone for the Painfully Alone) and Yoni Wolf of Why?

“He originally came in with more silly, funny lyrics, but I told him to write something from the heart,” Wolf says, discussing the recording process last summer in Oakland, when he and Cohn cut six tracks in as many days. “On the spot, he wrote lines about sleeping on a pool table with his keys and wallet in his jeans to avoid getting them stolen. He’s raw and honest and has a quirky dark sense of humor.”

Kenny Dennis could never leave the Second City, but Serengeti’s keeping his spot in L.A., at least for the time being. In a simultaneous attempt to shed the burdens of the past and avoid paying airline baggage fees, he dumped eight notebooks full of lyrics prior to boarding his one-way flight to LAX.

“I wish I hadn’t thrown away all those notebooks. I had a lot of songs in there, but they felt like they were weighing me down,” Cohn says. “It seemed like I needed to toss them before coming here.”

Since landing in California, Cohn has cut an EP with ambient-experimentalist beat producer Matthewdavid. There also are upcoming albums from his side project Tha Grimm Teachaz and a full-length collaboration with Advance Base, plus a yet-to-be-announced work coming next year with one of the most famous and acclaimed songwriters in indie rock. (Unfortunately his identity can’t be revealed, due to a press embargo from one of the labels involved.)

Despite his misfortunes, and his habit of being perennially overlooked, Cohn has carved out a modest but fiercely devoted following, made up of those who like their reality rap based on immutable realities: transformations, temptations and all points of psychic unrest. He’s a writer who happens to rap and not the inverse.

“I could never stop. I hear words in my head or overhear something on the street and I have to write it down or else it will be lost forever,” Cohn says. “It’s a curse. Write, write, write, edit, edit, and then go back over it. It’s not about sitting down to write, it’s about being open to the ideas.”

Written by:

Jeff Weiss

Photo by:

Jenne Warren

The annual International Pop Overthrow festival continues here and at other venues around the Southland, and tonight’s lineup is loaded with a diverse variety of musicians working within the loose confines of the power-pop genre. Local trio the Wallburds alternate between smart, not-necessarily-retro pop-rock anthems like “Moments Before Midnight” and such intimate ballads as “Kindergarten Crush.” The L.A. duo Loch & Key aren’t strictly poppy, although Sean Hoffman used to play bass with the respected Bay Area alt-rockers American Music Club. Leyla Akdogan is an engaging chanteuse on the pair’s generally mellow songs, which glide from bossa nova idylls to dreamy balladry. Openers Black Kettle purvey sunny pop songs that are distinguished by cheery, ultra-femme harmonies. With Cannoneers and Ansel.

Catch them here

Written by:

Falling James

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