Formed in 1999 by Rob Waller and brothers Paul and Anthony Lacques during a philosophical discussion and rock throwing session on an East Mojave desert trek, I See Hawks In L.A. wrote their first batch of songs and then sought advice from local country rock guru David Jackson, sideman with John Denver, Dillard and Clark, and Emmylou Harris.Jackson set up a few mics and recorded Rob and Paul, playing along on bass. This demo turned into featured songs on the Hawks eponymous debut on now-defunct Ethic Records, featuring legendary fiddler Brantley Kearns (Dwight Yoakam, Dave Alvin, Hazel Dickens).
The CD established the Hawks signature sound: high lonesome three part harmonies, twang guitar and unadorned acoustic arrange-ments, with lyrics musing on mortality, whales, and the geography of pre-apocalyptic L.A. I See Hawks In L.A. received rave reviews, made the F.A.R. Alternative Country Chart, and continues to get regular airplay. With its experimental spirit and wide ranging musical influences, the record tweaked some traditionalists. But most agree that the Hawks have broken new ground.
The Hawks hadn't planned on much more than back porch songwriting and beer drinking, but the buzz prompted them into live performing, and they quickly rose to the top of heap in the brand new Los Angeles alternative country scene.
Bassist/vocalist Paul Marshall (Strawberry Alarm Clock, Hank Thompson, Rose Maddox) threw in with the Hawks after sitting in at Ronnie Mack's Barndance in Burbank, and after brother Anthony left to pursue documentary film making, drummer Shawn Nourse (Dwight Yoakum, James Intveld) signed on for a trip to Texas and SXSW and never left. Shows all over SoCal, from their basement downtown home of Coles Bar, down Sunset to the House of Blues, and across the 405 to the Cinema Bar, garnered the Hawks two L.A. Weekly Best Country Artist awards in 2002 and 2003.
The Hawks second CD, "Grapevine," was released on the summer solstice 2004, and immediately went to #1 on the F.A.R. Chart, lingered in the Americana Chart's top 100 for months, and hit #2 on XM Radio's X Country station in January '05. Strong press reviews and a national audience followed the Hawks 28 city Summer '04 tour, from a state prison in Vermont to a Mississippi roadhouse to the Cactus Cafe and KUT's Eklektikos in Austin, to Hempfest in Seattle. Summer of '05 West Coast and Rockies tours brought the Hawks to the woods, and the woods to the Hawks.
Ian Foster
Canadian writer Thomas King wrote that the truth about stories is that they’re all that we are. This is what one should be thinking when they listen to the songs on Ian Foster’s “Room in the City.”
Influenced by some of the greats (Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen), as well as some of the new contenders for that title (Josh Ritter, Matthew Good), Ian's music is amongst the best of the new singer-songwriters currently making a name for themselves. A finalist for the International Songwriting Competition and 5-time MusicNL nominee (including SOCAN Songwriter of the Year for his song “Troubadours”), Ian has been touring in his home country of Canada for years. But the root of it all is the song. His new album, the follow-up to 2006’s “Through the Wires,” finds Ian singing songs about dark nights in bright places, long drives and longer conversations, all set amidst musical backdrops peppered with guitars, strings, piano, and a variety of other, less common sounds—marimba, glockenspiel and xylophone, just to name a few. The characters that inhabit the record make their way into and out of cities, taking their stories with them.
The songs on “Room in the City” are inspired by experiences at home and on the road, with many of the songs written in various Canadian cities. His music has been featured on radio and tv stations throughout Canada and in Europe.
Imagined
Rex Fowler and Tom Dean emerged as prominent folk-rock artists in the 70's. Rex’s band, Aztec Two Step, burst upon the scene with their self-titled debut album on Elektra Records in 1972. This, and their three subsequent albums on RCA Records, were staples of college and progressive FM radio and helped usher the music of the 60's into the 70's and beyond.
Tom Dean and Alana MacDonald's band Devonsquare was signed by Ahmet Ertegun, the legendary chairman of Atlantic Records, after hearing Dean’s "Walking On Ice" from their self-released album of the same name. Devonsquare went on to record another CD for Atlantic titled "Bye Bye Route 66", which spawned several critically acclaimed singles including "If You Could See Me Now", featuring Alana's powerful vocal performance.
Collectively they have toured worldwide, been reviewed in Rolling Stone, performed on David Letterman and shared stages with such musical luminaries as Bruce Springsteen, Bonnie Raitt and The Band, and continue to distinguish themselves as esteemed song-writers, performers and recording artists in the venerated genre of folk-rock music.
Along with several prominent studio musicians, Rex and Tom have teamed up in this labor of love to celebrate the genius and artistry of John Lennon. As a gift to John for his 70th birthday on October 9, 2010, they have re-imagined exquisite acoustic renditions of Lennon’s legendary Beatles songs. Besides a smattering of tasteful percussion, Rex and Tom’s distinctive acoustic guitar and vocal stylings and the beautiful voice of Alana MacDonald, featured instrumentation include cello, violin, mandolin, mandola, bass, slide guitar, accordion and chromatic harmonica.
Happy Birthday John!
Incendio
How does a music band make ends meet these days?
The last 10 years have seen the total decimation of the “old” industry system. Record companies, along with the promotional and technical firms that support them, have downsized dramatically or disappeared altogether. Self-motivated musicians have taken their future into their hands and moved forward with bold steps.
Such is the case with the latin guitar world fusion group Incendio. This Los Angeles-based group started in 1999, and came of age during the last gasp of the old record industry paradigm. Faced with the prospect of being an instrumental music-driven band in an age of increasingly bleak pop-driven market (where one-shot youngsters are heralded as geniuses, then sadly discarded in six months), Incendio has persevered and even thrived, taking instrumental Spanish guitar music to new and uncharted artistic levels.
The group has had seven international CD releases. The most recent, the guitar trio CD “Vihuela”, came out on their own Incendio Music label in late 2009. They additionally have a live DVD, “Dia Y Noche”, which has received critical acclaim for its sonic quality and uncompromising focus on “just the music”. It was the Who’s legendary Pete Townsend who said in 2003, “bands in the future must be able to play well live – that’s the only music market that there will be”. Incendio has taken that to heart, embracing the do-it-yourself ethos of indie rock and punk by self-booking and touring over 170 dates a year across the United States.
But it is the music they present at these shows upon which they have built their reputation. Sweeping, romantic playing is usually the heart and soul of live Spanish guitar performance. But the diverse backgrounds of the musicians in Incendio mean that, in addition to that romantic and passionate playing of their instruments, their concerts balance rock-style enthusiasm and energy with a tremendous technical and improvisational sophistication. Thus, Incendio achieves the difficult task of appealing to both a general audience who enjoy the melodies, as well as that more difficult audience: other musicians, who have come to respect the group’s vision and work ethic as much as their fretwork wizardry and occasionally complex arrangements.
The group’s CD’s also feature a unique compositional and performance slant. Echoes of their predecessors like Strunz and Farah, Jesse Cook, and the acoustic side of Al Di Meola are obvious. But the group has explored jazz, Celtic, middle-eastern and electronica throughout their career, putting their own stamp on their self-produced music. They subtly bring influences as diverse as Weather Report, Jimi Hendrix, XTC, Paco de Lucia, Buddha Bar and Joni Mitchell to bear on their musical tapestry. Thus, their music is a true “fusion” and sounds like little else in the genre. And thus, as they have moved through new age, through electronica, through every subheading, the band’s sound and enthusiasm has continued to evolve – no two Incendio CD’s sound exactly the same.
Since their music defies easy characterization, the behemoth of terrestrial radio in big markets like LA has not embraced them – but they seem to have worked well without it, thank you very much. It is the smaller radio markets, college radio, satellite, internet, where the burgeoning support for the band has grown exponentially over the last five years. And press reaction around the country has been similar – “who are these guys, they’re great, why haven’t I heard of them”. The band takes it in stride – it’s a long haul game, and this determined band seems to be comfortable with taking cities and states by storm, one location at a time.
Incendio’s richly textured music is rooted in myriad sources: Carbé’s flamenco and classical guitar training as well as her Sicilian ancestry, Durand’s Peruvian heritage, Stubblefield’s European travels and musical collaborations with Kuwaiti oud maestro Waleed Hamad, not to mention Durand’s penchant for rock-style dramatics and Stubblefield’s lightning-fingered jazz-fusion mastery. Carbé’s deceptively graceful bass and guitar playing grounds Durand and Stubblefield’s dazzling twin-guitar attack, resulting in adrenalizing sonic explorations that take on greater dimension when they call longtime friends like percussionist Bryan Brock and drummer Nicole Falzone.
The evidence of the strength of live show can be seen and heard in the "Dia Y Noche" CD and DVD release. Available as of December 2005 on their own Incendio Music label, it literally shows day and night aspects of Incendio in action. While the nighttime footage was filmed in an elegant concert hall, the daytime scenes capture the electric intensity of an Incendio performance as they play at the eclectic Strawberry Music Festival in Yosemite, California. The footage of Durand and Stubblefield’s tightly interlocked guitar solos — almost like spiraling shredding contests — with Carbé propelling the floor-pounding rhythms, all three rocking from the gut, leaves no doubt that this is a band that is, first and foremost, about performance. Crowd scenes reflect the thrilled surprise of audiences experiencing Incendio for the first time. It’s that immediate visceral response from listeners upon which Incendio has painstakingly built a reputation over the past six years.
“We’re definitely a niche market,” Stubblefield allows. “But it’s a niche market that, when a lot of people hear it, they say, ‘I like that.’ We’ll play a street festival and sell 200 CDs in a couple of hours. The radio won’t touch it but people who walk by and hear us think it’s great. That’s been crucial to our success, and we’ve just slowly built on it.”
Word of mouth has been crucial and delightfully kind to Incendio. Carbé recalls how a concert booker was turned on to the band by her guitar-fixated teenager: “This 14-year-old boy watches us on Vista LA and he’s into Hendrix, he’s into Coltrane, and he said to his mom, ‘You need to hire these guys.’ So she looked us up because of her son.” Incendio was subsequently booked for a high-profile university concert series.
“We always have had great word of mouth,” Durand adds with gratified pride. “It’s just approaching that tipping point. If we play for a thousand people, we won’t get 800 people coming up and giving us a perfunctory pat on the back, saying, ‘You guys are really good.’ We’ll get 50 people coming up saying, ‘We will follow you into hell.”
