Maha Not Happening This Year, Four Winds Festival Announces, Cooper James, Willi Carlisle, David Nance and More Tonight Plus Living Colour Review
Friday Night Live Music List Included
There is a lot to cover today, so let’s get to it. The Living Colour Review is after the calendar.
The Maha Music Festival announced yesterday that it was pausing this year and rethinking the festival for 2025. The festival was to move to the Riverfront this year from Stinson Park. Financial issues were addressed in social media posts and emails to volunteers. No paid staff were a part of the Maha after last year.
There are a lot of backseat opinions on why the festival is taking a pause, but touring in America and all over the world has become very expensive, and the costs involved with putting on festivals have changed a lot over the past few years. Many festivals are doing or have recently done the same thing that Maha is doing. Some do not return.
I have been involved with Maha since the second year as a stage manager and have attended every festival. Maha brought an incredible amount of talent to our stages—so many acts that we would never have seen otherwise. It was a unique festival in that, being in Omaha, they often had to really scrape together lineups, and many times our festival did not look like many of the other ones. Probably, for it to be financially successful, it won’t be able to look or exist as it has for the past decade and a half. They did knock it out of the park in it's final year with what I believe was the best lineup and headliner to date.
We do have many other festivals, including Outlandia, Petfest, and Lincoln Calling, and over in St. Charles, Iowa, is Hinterland. If you want to spend a day, weekend, or more checking out music, there are plenty of options in the area.
A festival that announced its lineup this morning is the Omaha edition of the Four Winds Festival. This will take place on July 19th, 20th, and 21st at The Waiting Room and Reverb Lounge. Some of the artists on the festival are Doobie, King Iso, He Is Legend, From This Day Forward, C10, Taebo The Truth, Otis Julius, C-Mob, Lardi B, and many more. This DIY festival from Nice Enough Entertainment grows every year, and there is a lot of support for it, so grab your passes sooner than later.
Tonight David Nance and Mowed Sounds celebrate the release of their self titled album, which came out last Friday on Jack White’s Third Man Records. Nance and his band will be at Reverb Lounge tonight. This will be one of those shows that many in the area will look back on fondly years from now.
The show I have been looking forward to most this month is Willi Carlisle at Slowdown tonight. I cannot recommend this show enough. I saw him a couple years ago, and he is a great songwriter, but his performance is so engaging, engrossing, and entertaining that it is very hard to describe. While watching him last time, I wanted to get on the phone and make people get over there quickly. So, consider this "that" phone call.
Also tonight is country songwriter Cooper James, who will be performing a couple of shows back in the area. James moved from the area last year and has released a seven-song project that describes some of the things he has been dealing with. The project is called 6th Gear and is seven songs and fifteen minutes, and it’s pretty heavy, soul-baring, and heartfelt music. You can check it out here. Cooper will be performing at 5:30 p.m. at Stories Coffee in Grena and at 8:30 p.m. at Gretna American Legion Post 216. Both performances will also include Tyler Anthony and Eli Holland.
Here is the rest of the lineup for tonight.
Friday February 16th
Dry Spokes Open Mic 7PM (Omaha)
CTRL ALT DELETE at 10Foward (Omaha)
Peach Truck at Gray’s Keg 8PM (Lincoln)
South of Center at Bogies West 8:30 PM (Omaha)
Chris Jones at Island Bar & Grill 8PM (La Vista)
John Rogers at Wine 121 7PM (Omaha)
Chad Stoner at The Releationship Center 8PM (Omaha)
Blues Project at The Zoo Bar 5PM (Lincoln)
David Nance and Mowed Sound with Pagan Athletes at Reverb Lounge 8PM (Omaha)
TaylorFest at The Waiting Room 9PM (Omaha)
Gallivant at The Zoo Bar at 9PM (Lincoln)
Michael Tipton with Dead on the Dust at Down Under Lounge 9:30PM
Willi Carlisle at The Slowdown 8PM (Omaha)
Chad Lee at Twisted Vine 7PM (Papillion)
Swing Time at Copacabana 9PM (Omaha)
Colin Roberts at Vino Mas 7PM (Omaha)
King of Diamonds at Beach House Bar 8PM (Omaha)
Wicked Fun Band at Cappys Hotspot Bar 8:30PM (Lincoln)
Day Traders at Whiskey Roadhouse (Council Bluffs)
All Sorts Of Good, with Willam Danze and Spector Poetics at B. Bar 8PM (Omaha)
Grunge Pop at Maloney’s Live 9PM (Council Bluffs)
DJ Essentials at Bar 415 (Omaha)
Derek Warfield of the Wolfetones at B. Bar 5PM (Omaha)
Benson Soul Society at The Sydney 10PM (Omaha)
Living Colour at Barnato-February 15th, 2024
Do you ever fantasize about a band or artist just skipping the typical set you would expect and going deep into their catalog? How about playing an album that you love, but that was kind of shunned by others? I do this a lot, especially if it's a band I've seen before. This is what happened tonight with Living Colour at Barnato. Not the fantasy, but it actually happened.
In 1993 I was working in the record store when Living Colour’s third album, Stain, came out. People had already fallen off the band, and the second album, Time’s Up, was stocked deep in the used bins. Stain was dark and heavy and felt important. I assured customers that this album was going to blow their minds. It did not, and these ended up in the used bins, and the band broke up a couple years later. Now, I think a lot more people appreciate stain these days. Well, music nerds do. It was probably a little ahead of its time.
So, tonight the band played Stain and did not play a best-of-type set in the least. It was glorious. They came onto the stage at Barnato, which is not very high off the ground, and lead singer Corey Glover seemed a little taken back by being among the people pretty much. He seemed to warm up. Guitarist Vernon Reid seemed very happy with this set-up, and drummer Will Calhoun and bassist Doug Wimbash just seemed content in general. The band started off by covering MC5’s “Kick Out The Jams” in tribute to the recently deceased Wayne Kramer. They then went into the Stain album, which sounds more relevant today, both in subject matter and musically, than it ever has. Stain is also the first album that bassist Doug Wimbash played on, so we really were seeing the band that made this album on stage tonight.
Highlights included an audience sing-a-long on “Bi”, a stunning version of “Nothingness” (which I thought was the highlight of the night), and the amped up “This Little Pig." It was so good to hear these songs live, and Corey was in phenomenal voice. You have three of the best musicians around on stage in this band, and these songs lend themselves to allowing them to showcase why they are the best without a lot of showing off, extended solos, or jams. There is just a lot in those songs for them to sink their hooks into.
When they did veer from Stain, it was with a cover of “Nothing Compares To You," “Funny Vibes” off of Vivid, and a few songs off of Times Up, including "Type," the title track, and "Love Rears It’s Ugly Head." Calhoun did a drum solo that also included a lot of looping and synthetic drums that he turned into a song. I wonder if he does something different every night, as the band really watched him with genuine curiosity from the side of the stage. Doug Wimbash was a session musician who played on the Sugarhill Gang and Grandmaster Flash albums. So tonight they did a live medley of some of those songs, including “White Lines” (Don’t Do It), "Apache", and “‘The Message”. It was super fun.
A big surprise was a gorgeous version of “Flying” off their fourth album in 2013 when they got back together that very few people paid attention to. It’s actually a very good album, and that song is a highlight. That song has not been on recent set lists, so it is pretty interesting to have it come out tonight. The band, of course, closed with “Cult of Personality." It’s pretty early in the year, but this show will more than likely be on my best list this year. It was great to see a band play what they felt was relevant and what they wanted to play, and it made the show so much more interesting and special than a best of set. I won’t lie though, I played “Glamour Boys” in the car on the way home.