| Indigenous frontman chasing the sun on his own
Guitar heroes don't come easy these days. There was a time generations were marked by their six-string icons. We know most of them -- Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Ritchie Blackmore and Eddie Van Halen -- just to name a few. Some hail hyper-speed wizardry or plodding tuned-down tones as the makings of a guitar god, while others are more inclined to use descriptions like "passionate," "emotional" and "soulful." Native Nakota Indian Mato Nanji falls in the latter category. He leads an idea more than just a band. He calls his music Indigenous. It's how he expresses himself in a number of different directions within his chosen genre, that of electric blues. Eight years ago vocalist and guitarist Mato, his brothers Pte (bass), and Horse (percussion) along with sister Wanbdi (drums) left their reservation in South Dakota to record "Things We Do," a tangled mixture of rocking blues with Stevie Ray Vaughan appeal.
Jim Beal: Well-traveled Big Soy happy to see local fans
With July 4 falling on a Tuesday, it's not really a holiday weekend, but it's not really not a holiday weekend either. There are plenty of live-music happenings designed to keep your sparklers lit. Big Soy's back Big Soy, the alt-rock/folk-punk, etc. trio of John Edds (guitar, vocals, lyrics), Adam White (drums) and Joseph Caceres (bass), is back from a tour of England and Scotland and cranking up the local gigs. "It's really great to be back in front of the home crowd," White said. "We can relax, play for our friends and go home at night. In the U.K., we stayed with people we didn't know. Sometimes it was great. Sometimes it was a little weird." Hot on the heels of the release of the group's "Part of You" disc, the follow-up to the debut, "Putting the ___in___," Big Soy headed for Britain to do eight gigs in 14 days.
Disposable Nation
In my teenage years, I was pretty handy with cars. Being decidedly working-class, we Jowerses favored used cars, somewhere between two and 10 years old. I did my own tune-ups, replaced my own rusted-out exhaust systems, stripped wrecked cars for parts and put those parts on my own cars. On any given day, I could fix just about any given car problem and get to where I wanted to go. But I felt the winds of change one day when my daddy, Jabo Jowers, pulled into the driveway with a lightly used 1962 Oldsmobile Jetfire. Jabo opened the hood like men did in those days when they wanted to show off a car. “Look here, boy," he said. “They tell me this thing's got a turbocharger." I looked into the cramped little engine compartment, which had tubes and wires crammed together so tight that there was no room for human hands or Craftsman wrenches.
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