Hendrix was in Dallas on Saturday for an appearance at All Good, when she began experiencing a problem with her left eye.

“It was a scare for everyone involved,” she said in an email to her fan group today. “It ended up being an eye infection, but the docs wanted to make sure.”

For those who have tickets for any of her upcoming shows, Hendrix says not to fear.

“I will be there,” she declared. “I’m humbled by your kindness and your support as I continue to climb out of the rabbit hole and into the sunshine.”

In addition to the Dallas show, Hendrix was forced to cancel an appearance at the Bugle Boy in Lagrange.

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Matt Tolentino dances to the rhythm of his own offbeat.

Matt Tolentino

It began when he was 8 and a lady next door gave him a cassette of the Coffee Club Orchestra. The tape was filled with the carefree songs of the 1920s ( Matt Tolentino performs with the Singapore Slingers in Old East Dallas. The band’s playlist from the early 20th century includes songs like Sheik of Araby and Waltz Me Around Again, Willie.)

While other children his age danced to hip-hop and played air guitar to rock music, Tolentino, now 25, was transfixed by the sounds of ragtime, waltzes and foxtrots. He decided early on that he would devote his life to introducing a new generation to the music his great-grandmother danced to.

“I don’t know why this era strikes me,” Tolentino said. “I can put it on when I’m in any kind of mood and feel happy. This isn’t music to be played in the background of a retirement home. This is party music.”

After several years of recruiting those who shared his passion, Tolentino has realized his dream. His 17-piece band, the Singapore Slingers, is one of just a handful across the country that perform the music live. During one of the Slingers’ recent shows at the Pocket Sandwich Theatre in Old East Dallas, the cherub-faced Tolentino dressed himself up in sheik’s clothing and danced onto the stage for a themed show titled “A Night in the Orient.” He found the rhythm in his nodding head, tapped his foot and the band began to play.

Tolentino grew up in Dallas’ Lakewood neighborhood. His parents said they can’t pinpoint when their son became the nonconformist he is, but it probably had something to do with the music running through his head. As with most musicians, Tolentino’s talents evolved with practice. He first learned the piano, then the recorder. Later he found the saxophone and moved to the clarinet and accordion. When he was about 16, Tolentino spied a $1,500 accordion on eBay. His parents asked if he’d rather have a Honda. Tolentino said no. He chose the accordion over an Accord.

In the Old East Dallas house where he and his wife live, he’s collected old instruments, antique bric-a-brac and an ancient record collection the Smithsonian would be proud to own. But it wasn’t always easy growing up an old soul, said his mother, Rebecca Tolentino.

“There were times when he had a hard time because he was so different.” she said. “He thought he’d never find anybody who would share his likes. He even told me if he tried to be someone else he wouldn’t be happy.”

In the audience at the recent Pocket Sandwich Theatre concert, Dallas resident Mary Hart danced in her seat and beamed at Tolentino’s performance. “He is the true word of an entertainer,” Hart said. “I’m impressed. He’s such a young person to be so talented.”

As audience members tapped their feet, Tolentino worked the crowd with self-deprecating humor, and exchanged banter with the band, whose members are as unique as the music they play. They include full-time musicians, a few attorneys and teachers, old men and young women. Tolentino recruited them all.

“His personality and enthusiasm is a big reason this group exists,” said banjo player George Gagliardi. “People wouldn’t do it for just anybody.”

Since forming two years ago, the band has played about a dozen small concerts in the Dallas area. Some nights a band member walks away with as little as $30 for a two-hour performance. Sometimes Tolentino will walk away with nothing just so his players can earn a bit more.

“Matt won’t take money for himself,” said violinist Brittany Oswald. “For all the work that he does, he needs to take his cut.”

Right now Tolentino doesn’t mind not making money; he’s focused on exposing people to the music.

“Money isn’t the only measure of our success,” Tolentino said. “We sell some CDs, they laugh at our jokes and give thunderous applause at the end of our gigs. Real success is people coming back and bringing some friends with them.”

Outside the theater after one of the band’s recent shows, Dallas attorney John Larrimer wondered how far Tolentino and the band could take their talents.

“Maybe he can put something together on Broadway,” Larrimer said. “Who knows? It might take off.”

Claudia Gray of Arlington called the band “sheer genius” after seeing the orchestra for the first time. “This is incredible,” she said. “It’s like he was born in that era.

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Photo by Peter Cronquist

July 19, 2009 Houston by Bill Aspinwall

You’re on a creek, no, a river, in the back of a canoe, hands full of paddle. Something about the Yukon, years ago. There’s a brief flickering in your peripheral vision. Or what? Wait, there it was again, some small, fluttering thing, off to the right. Maybe it was that shivering heap of wings, collapsing behind the pickup that just passed, a brief blur of feathers, settling like a sigh in a small, shuffled lump. A miniscule moan, a knelling beneath hearing, waxing into a bloom of notes, with caliche and corduroy undertones, keening and yearning. Then drop rushing rapids, boiling with snowmelt, paddling backwards, bouncing with double stops that match the river’s rhythm. There’s danger at play, mutiny on the Yampa, chaos on the Cache, skittering light shards in the Frying Pan, stone hard promises, lightly brushed chords, the prophetess and the scribe of Chronicles, bass notes thumping like standing wave hollows, Double Mountain Fork of the Brazos River. From underwater somehow, clouds are bubbling out at the surface and drifting off, shimmering clouds of notes, with darkness at their edges.

Dream memories; dreams and memories as are evoked by the songs of Amanda Shires and Rod Picott, an extraordinary duo, fiddle and guitar

Shires and Picott played at a house concert in Houston, hosted by a friend, David Britton. Before being invited, I had heard neither of Shires nor Picott, but I’m no encyclopedia. I do trust Britton’s judgment when it comes to music, and as luck would have it, I happened to be in Houston that particular weekend..

Photo by Peter Cronquist

Amanda Shires (www.amandashires.net) is a fiddler, with classical training and some serious schooling in Western Swing. She also plays ukulele and she’s a founding member of the Thrift Store Cowboys, a very well received atmospheric indie-alt-country-punk rock group (apologies to all for that string of hyphenated pigeonholing); just another batch of inventive musicians out of Lubbock. Listen to their music and decide for yourself.

Rod Picott (www.rodpicott.net) (last name is pronounced “pie-caught”) is a guitarist/singer/songwriter from Maine, currently working out of Nashville, having co-written songs with old friend Slaid Cleaves and others. Straight forward songs with slightly twisted lyrics, reminds you of your hermit good friend, too long in the woods – but instead of fuzzy odd brain lichen, there’s clarity, apprehension, he’s sees different and writes scary good.

This performance was in the small, combined space of a living and dining room, a small head count, every chair practically a front row seat with some barbecue and beans to boot. A small suggested donation. Sir Paul for five hundred in a mega-coliseum-saurus-plex? Sorry, I’ll take a house concert any day; live, live music and food, glorious food.

House concerts are relatively new for presenting live music, but really, it’s just a continuation from the times of troubadours, a history of thousands of years: instruments of music played for a small gathering. In this particular case, it was a unique opportunity to hear some really excellent songwriting and musicianship in an immediate, intimate setting, unamplified.

Photo by David Britton

Not to disparage sound engineers, but there are certain elements (in the right hands) that can’t be reproduced by an amplified sound chain, particularly with gifted musicians. Paradoxically, just the thing an audiophile should hear: the way an unamplified musician can judge just the right amplitude to fill a room completely (but no more), and then diminish to a whisper than can be just heard; replete and glorious.

Two sets (hand-written set list at their feet on the floor), a small group of listeners and two well matched musicians. Their music revolves around a genre we call Americana now; unadorned but flawless instrumentation, roots music, with lyrics upon which you can chew: glimmer and darkness, chicory and cane, spokeshave, chisel, hook and chain. From the barley shaking wind of County Clare to pigeon wing and Pigeon Forge. Spare stories, not-quite-legends, making the case with a subtle cross that leads into the box canyon of perjury – how did I get myself into all this here?

There’s an awesome range of tones coming from her five-string fiddle, Amanda – pigtails and cowboy boots, Cadillac and cognac, forked deer in the low ground, Panhandle Rag done sul due corde, dolcissimo and bariolage. Picott’s guitar playing includes sturdy finger picking or lightly strummed chords, steel strings that sound almost like nylon at times and a voice like rough silk. As a pair, they fit like joined wood, a whole lot of understatement, a velveteen jackalope. On ukulele, Shires plays first position chords that fit like a tailored suit.

Photo by David Britton

They presented songs from their recent duo release, “Sew Your Heart with Wire” and songs from solo projects they have released separately. The lead vocals are sung by either with a few duets thrown in the mix. The lyrics tell a variety of stories, murder ballads with purple-full passion; spare, longing plaints, dust blown and shoeless; country rambles, with or without lyrics – country country, sand hill plums, land bank loans, gated irrigation pipe, snoose-chewing, Bud-guzzling Uncle Trafton’s tractor at auction.

The Thrift Store Cowboys (http://www.myspace.com/thriftstorecowboys) are known for the ability to create atmospheric music, sonic landscapes and surely some of that must come from Shires. She still tours with them and seeing them perform should be on your to do list.

Picott is an original; might make partner in the classic American storytelling firm of Irving, Poe, Crane & Twain. He sings in the range that includes tenor to baritone, with an occasional breathiness, capable of strength and whisper in the space of a line.

Shire’s singing is a thing unto itself. Clear mostly, twang enough as needed, and perhaps the most fascinating part is at the end of a line (usually, but sometimes elsewhere, when it fits) she’ll flutter in pitch around a note, rapid vibrato, like the beating of dove’s wing or a hummingbird or a meadow lark’s song. In less capable hands, it might prove an irritation, but with Shires, it happens as though it’s just meant to be. It’s almost subliminal at times, a unique and spellmaking style.

Photo by David Britton

Shires grew up in Lubbock, having been born in Mineral Wells. An excellent interview of Shires by author Chris Oglesby is currently available online at (http://www.virtualubbock.com/intAmandaShires.html). There’s an appealing directness and grounded sensibility in Shires that shines back and forth in the interview, as well as a pleasantly skewed sense of humor. Another very good background article, sort of a combination of a review of her solo album “West Cross Timbers”, with some interview material is available on the Texas Music Magazine website: (http://www.txmusic.com/articles/2009/07/spotlight-amanda-shires).

If you’re interested in following the thread of the wealth of musicians from Lubbock, there’s a very good book available, also written by Chris Oglesby, Fire in the Water and Earth in the Sky (UT Press, 2006) that talks about that convergence.

With Shires, you have the opportunity to hear her connection to western swing fiddle masters, Texas-style, like Frank McWhorter, Lanny Fiel, Bobby Boatright and Tommy Allsup. These names were new to me prior to meeting her; if you have any interest in western swing or fiddle music I recommend doing whatever research you can on those names.

Picott was born in New Hampshire but raised in South Berwick, Maine – a place with a little bit more history than West Texas. The Maine of ship-building, saw mills and river powered textile factories, labor drawn from Scottish prisoner-of-war pools; the Maine of the days when America provided the Chinese-cheap labor for the Old World; the Maine of statehood negotiated under the Missouri Compromise. Remember the Maine?

Echoes of Maine rebound in Picott’s song “Work Shirts and Turpentine”, a classic Americana rendering of childhood and place.

Maybe a better way to introduce Picott is to have Slaid Cleaves tell it, as he talks about co-writing the song “Broke Down” with Picott:
“This is really Rod Picott’s song. He wrote it as his second marriage was breaking apart. He said, “Yeah, I’ve got these 4 year marriages down.” I just changed a few lines and smoothed out the melody. He’s the only songwriter I write with regularly, which is about once a year these days. We grew up around the corner from each other in a little town in Maine. We bonded as fellow outcasts, staying inside and listening to Beatles records when we were 10 instead of playing football outside. We formed a garage band in high school – the Magic Rats – named after a character in Springsteen’s “Jungleland.” Even at the time, we knew we’d stick with music for the long haul, while the other guys in the band would drift off into normal life.” http://www.slaidcleaves.com/stories/brokeThoughts.html)

Photo by Peter Cronquist

One of the songs from the Shires/Picott CD, “Little Darlin” had some lines that were so disquietingly real, I had to play the song later, several times, just to make sure of what I was hearing – infidelity and murder, fiction told more real than life.

I’d like to think that the story we hear in this song isn’t nearly so lifelike. I’d like to not think that those white knuckles could be so human and not believe that someone might, after choking the life force from an unfaithful wife, actually think such a thing as “I only helped her keep the promise that she made”.

But every day we’re faced with choices and, humans that we are, our own choices aren’t always the stuff of stories we’d like to tell our grandchildren (if we’re lucky enough to have any).

How many reminders do we need to remember what is really important? To be reminded of why we learn to cook for our family and friends; why we read, travel, pray, dance, learn foreign languages, give thanks for our daily bread and breath, celebrate birth, myth, sex, death, wine, art, light and chocolate; why we make bread, music and love; why we love, fail and love again; why we fight only when we’re forced to; why a hundred feet above the deck in a pelting monsoon, we climb out on footropes to furl the royal, clinging to the jackstay; why we welcome the opportunity to be part of the sag wagon for our loved ones and why it’s so very, very important to listen to live music.

Civilization without live music is no civilization at all.

At the age I’m approaching, I’ve started what amounts to a bucket list that includes a list of musicians I’d like to see before joining the Big Top. I’ve added two more musicians to that list. Right now, I’m thankful for Amanda Shires and Rod Picott.

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