Taste the Music: Conversations about creating.

Helen Feest: Building community one jam at a time

Feestet's jazz jams are steaming hot affairs, even when the air is crisp in the atmosphere. Bandleader and singer Helen Feest belts out tunes on vocals, and the band warms up the already misty crowd while jammers await their turn on the stage. Today, on Taste the Music, Helen Feest joins us to talk about the vibe, how she got into this crazy thing called jazz singing, and what kind of outfit she’s running anyway (it turns out it’s a good one). She also gets into how a very old way of getting paid might just be making a comeback (not that one!). And it’s helping build a little community, too. Today’s episode of Taste the music was written, produced, and edited by me, Mark Griffin. You can check out more of Helen Feest and the Feestet’s music at Feestet.com. Taste the music was created by me and Whitney Mann, who has a new single out on Bandcamp, right this second! Solid horns!

Paul Otteson: Finding Purpose in the Music

Paul Otteson’s music is like a message in a bottle that was tossed in a loch west of Glasgow, that drifted along the jet stream to the New World. It stopped in Brooklyn’s folk revival scene in the early aughts to pick up a pleasant spacey jangly sound that eschews the stomp clap hey of the early teens and it made its way via the fur trade up to the waters of the Gitche Gumme and down to the land of Dejope. Today, on Taste the Music, Paul Otteson talks about the passions that made his journey in songwriting worth it - and they weren’t always musical in nature. He also tells us about the reckoning that comes with comparing yourself to others, and about the comfort that can follow. Today's episode was produced, written and edited my me, Mark Griffin, and engineered by Aaron Scholz at WORT studios. You can learn more about Paul Otteson and his band Faux Fawn at PaulOtteson.com [PaulOtteson.com] or on Bandcamp [https://paulotteson.bandcamp.com/]. As usual, you can find all episodes of Taste the Music at TastetheMusic.org [TastetheMusic.org] or wherever you get your podcasts.

Uriel Lopez Rodriguez: Bringing the Love to Music Performance

Today, on Taste the Music, on 89.9 WORT FM Madison and TasteTheMusic.org [http://tastethemusic.org], Madison band Automatic Lover’s front man Uriel Lopéz Rodriguez takes us on a ride through his musical history, from a kid who couldn’t stop dancing to a short political career in Mexico, to Arizona, Colorado and finally back to Wisconsin, when a week visiting friends led him back to the music scene he couldn’t avoid. It seemed like wherever I went last summer, Automatic Lover was there, a rhythm section, horns, keys, stalwarts in their craft of groove. And up front on vocals, Uriel Lopéz-Rodriguez, clapping his hands, urging the crowds, electrifying the audience with each beat. The music, a sound that’s somehow a fusion of latin funk, Reggae, hip hop, and groove rock. An amalgam, a reflection of what a diverse music town is on its best days. Lopéz Rodriguez talks about forming Automatic Lover, why he’s committed to it, and the idea that maybe a vocation isn’t singular. Maybe it’s a patchwork of creation, iteration and praxis, incubating a social movement of love that’s a lot more complex than it looks on paper.

Louka Patenaude, the Musical Chameleon

Today, Louka Patenaude joins us on Taste the Music. Patenaude is a chameleon of sorts. There’s the singer songwriter, sometimes with a country sound. There’s the bluegrass picker, then there’s the sultry 70s Grant Green sounding Jazz man. There’s the jangly indie pop that emanates from some of Patenaude’s tunes like From In My Tea, and there’s this off-kilter interpretation of Bob Dylan’s Don’t Think Twice, that dutifully transcribes the tune down to a minor scale, while preserving the melody. A local Madison yokel, Louka Patenaude studied with the famed Richard Davis (RIP) at UW–Madison, who himself was known for being a jazz contemporary of Miles Davis, Eric Dolphy, Joe Henderson, but also for being a pop staple. You hear Davis on Bruce Springsteen’s early albums, Van Morrison, Bonnie Raitt. It makes sense, then, that Patenaude plays like one of his heroes, weaving in and out of Madison's various musical pockets, to create a space all unto his own. So, grab a root vegetable, get comfy, and Taste the Music. Today’s episode was written and produced by Mark Griffin. Taste the Music was created by Whitney Mann and myself.

The Writer: How one storyteller turned to a life of words

In today’s episode of Taste the Music, our host, Mark Griffin, tells his own story of becoming a writer. Why would anyone do such a thing in the first place? And why keep doing it? For Mark, it started with a dreaded blue exam notebook, refashioned into a weekly journal by his fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Brauer. Her assignment: write what’s going on with you. It was a fun activity that was better than rehashing the same math assignments over and over again. So he kept doing it. One day, though, he just didn’t feel like completing the assignment. So he drew a picture of an ogre with a smirking jack-o-lantern mouth. Then he engaged in the time honored tradition of putting his head down on his desk after finishing an assignment early. This one act led to a cascade of events that ended up with Mark pursuing a career in science and culture writing. There was the story for his college newspaper (no edits) and a misunderstanding at a party with someone who thought he was a writer, at a time when he didn’t see himself as one. Then there was Mark’s interview technique. When he was young, he noticed something about the way he could sense other people’s feelings through their facial expressions. Mark felt like he could almost read their minds. Developing this skill was a challenge for teenager Mark, but as an adult, he could use this skill to interview scientists, cancer patients, taco truck owners, and jazz bass players with the same ease. Musician and today’s co-producer Whitney Mann then returns to grill Mark about his experiences in writing, revealing some insights into how we pass on those traits to our kids.