Please Meet Andy Frasco

After a three month hiatus, it is already time to start hawking shows for our fall season. This year, our season is going to start early with "Andy Frasco and the United Nations" breezing into town on Friday, August 16th. Summer shows can be a hard sell, and we will only do them if they are something special. Well, this will be something special!

I have seen Andy twice before and knew this will most likely be our only chance to have him here this year. My guess is that after he leaves, he will be on the list of artists we want back every year. He is another one of those artists that after the show is over you have to ask yourself... how is he not famous? If you have someone of a younger persuasion that you would like to introduce to our shows, this would be the show.

Andy and his band will appear as 5 pieces. Andy plays dual keyboards, and Eric will be the best sax you will see since, well, our last show with the Iguanas. The rest of the band is pretty tight too. I think Andy must have robbed Arkansas of half of its stellar musicians to put this band together.

To put it into our perspective, Andy has the charisma of a Griffin House with the energy and showmanship of a Chuck Prophet. He likes to refer to his genre as "party blues" and it will be a party, I promise. His show can be slightly raunchy and you will be dancing. This is not "Ray music."

While on vacation last week, I had a chance to see and meet Andy at small venue, Moody's in Truckee, California. We go to great lengths to research these shows. This also happens to be the same small stage where Paul McCartney courted Heather Mills a decade ago. The atmosphere was electric.

Normally, I really hate bar video. The Asian vs Caucasian is a crude and unauthorized sample of what you are in for. Andy likes to pit band members against each other in bare-knuckle battles to the death. This is just an example of one of many knock down drag outs you will see between band members.

Feel free to check out these links to view some of Andy's music videos as well:

• Please Meet Andy Frasco
• It's Been a Struggle

Purchase tickets online for the August 16 show!

Keep reading to learn more about Andy and his band...




Artist Bio:

Andy Frasco, a twenty-three blues/jazz musician hailing from the San Fernando Valley in Southern California, is nothing short of an enigma. Influenced by Damien Rice, Sam Cooke, Professor Longhair, Van Morrison and Tom Waits, Frasco’s style is as uninhibited as those artists who inspire him. Let’s call it Party Blues. Within the past three years alone, Frasco has trekked over 120,000 miles, performed over 700 shows, with spanning over 6 countries. Frasco’s journey, however, is just beginning. This revolutionary is on a mission to alter the music business as we know it. Frasco’s a rarity in the music business: one who is an industry “insider” and a talented musician. This unparalleled insight is due, in part, to his days of managing and promoting bands when he was 16 years old. He’s booked bands like HelloGoodbye, and worked with labels and venues such as Drive Thru, Atlantic Records and The Key Club in Hollywood, Ca.

What’s more, Frasco does not come from a musical background. His family played no instruments, and it wasn’t until the age of 17 that Frasco met his soul mate: the piano. At 19 years old, Frasco traveled to New York to work with friend and colleague Jordan Stilwell, producing his first album Growth and Progress. From there, Frasco toured the country with VH1’s Save the Music Foundation, raising money for Music Education in the Public Schools. Yet 220 shows in 360 days through 33 states that he personally booked on the Save the Music Tour wasn’t enough for this young prodigy. Frasco headed back to Los Angeles to form his own band and produce his third and current album, Love, You’re Just Too Expensive. Frasco continues to prove that he is a dynamic force with which to be reckoned, as listeners marvel at his talent and soulful performances wherever he goes.

Andy Frasco has jammed with artists such as Leon Russell, Galactic, Jakob Dylan, Pretty Lights, Butch Walker, The Flobots, Spill Canvas, Suburban Legends, Nural, Tyler Hilton, & John Mayer. In 2011 alone, Frasco received musician of the year at showcases such as Sundance Film Festival, HatchFest, Orion’s Music Festival and the European Independent Film Festival. Frasco may just be the “Second Coming” of blues music for this emerging generation, changing the course of mainstream music in a blazing path of glory that will someday take him home.

Ernie Chang, known as “The Wiz” or “The Asian Tom Cruise” to his fans and friends, is a titan of modern jazz and blues! Asian Tom was a man birthed from the gods and demigods of bebop. This is no ordinary and simple Chinese boy, this boy was sired by men who pushed the threshold of horn-playing to its utmost boundaries. From early childhood Chang was abducted by Tibetan monks and forced to take a vow of silence and to listen to Charlie Parker all day every day. At the age of six, The Wiz was fluent in over fifteen forms of Kung Fu, and twenty three different languages. It is fabled that the first word he ever spoke as a child was “Whiskey!”. Thus began the career of one of the most illustrious and brilliant horn players in the history of man. The monks pooled together their small resources and bought “The Wiz” his first horn. He played and played until the secrets of the musical universe were opened up to him. With this new-found knowledge he set out into the world to play “the perfect note” and bringtrue happiness to all people who were ready to listen to jazz and blues. Though not much is known about The Wiz immediately after he left Tibet, it is thought that The Wiz wandered most of China searching for the perfect Saxophone.

At some point in the last year or two, “The Wiz” joined up with Andy Frasco and his band of musical madmen. It is here that Ernie has made epic leaps and bounds into the music industry and the world of the true fusion genre. To explain such a genre would cause the writer, and I’m quite sure, the reader to have a severe brain aneurism. (Such things are better left experienced). To try and summarize his sound would be a blasphemy, though I shall attempt at the hazard of losing my very sanity. In a word, the sound that “The Wiz” produces from his horn is explosive! With a fury which seconds that of a hurricane, Chang wields his instrument and prepares nightly to go to war! War with your ears, your eyes, and in extension your very own primal senses and whole being!

“Asian Tom” does not simply play music; he entices your core, and splits the great divide wider cracking your instincts as to what is true music. He creates fissures with his blazing horn solos and heavy hitting notes. He violently paints for you all the things that would caress you into carelessness and then disrupts and obliterates those feelings for an avant-garde sound that is yet to be expressed in a single phrase. It has been said that when he plays live his music causes tornadoes nearly three thousand miles away. Natural disasters occur in other countries when he does an extended solo. It was said that at a show in Las Vegas, the horn solo he played caused several women to squirm in Dionysian ecstasy, and later caused a riot inside a beautician school down the street!

The truth is, a man of such musical caliber cannot be explained by some futile biography, he must be experienced in all the splendor that he is. But beware! Once you have gone down that road, you may never be the same! You have been forewarned! “The Wiz” awaits, and I promise, you shall not be disappointed!