TO DO LIST: Simone Dinnerstein & Tift Merritt TONIGHT @ The Hamilton!!

With no accompaniment at all, Tift Merritt's soulful voice is enough to give goosebumps the chills. That she is a singular, gifted artist with a storied career understates her many talents. Tonight at The Hamilton Live, she will join celebrated classical pianist Simone Dinnerstein for what will surely be a night to remember. Their unique blend of stirring classical music and the very best of North Carolina's rich contemporary folk sound is deftly showcased in the video below for "Colors" from their collaboration Night.

A perfect pairing of artists should be showcased in a perfect venue, and that is an apt description of The Hamilton Live. Visually and sonically extraordinary, intimate and alluring, and luckily for you, not yet sold out! So get tickets here and make sure you're there!

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LIVE: Sister Sparrow and the Dirty Birds @ The Hamilton - 2/8/13

The best estimates of the number of words in the English language is currently about 750,000, not including slang or obsolete words. No matter how quickly that list expands, we will eventually run out of ways to combine them to come up with adequate superlatives for description, at which time we will either need to begin repeating them or, as often happens, create new ones. In terms describing of an extraordinary band like eight-piece R&B powerhouse Sister Sparrow and the Dirty Birds, it’s possible that the most accurate expressions have already been used – John Fishman describing Fishbone as “tighter than a mosquito’s ass” and Duck Dunn describing the Blues Brothers as “powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline” come to mind. In short, there’s only so many ways you can say a band kicks ass.

The writer, then, is forced into two difficult positions: the first is to find a new way to describe a transcendent musical experience; something that goes far beyond “man, were they freaking good.” The second is to avoid the deus ex machina of music critics everywhere, even if it’s completely apt: writing that the band needs to be “seen to be believed.” I will admit up front, dear reader, I am going to fail in both regards. Sister Sparrow was freaking good, and they have to be seen to be believed. This isn’t due to my failings as a writer – it’s due to this being one of the best live bands in the history of man.

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LIVE: Wanda Jackson w/Jonny Fritz @ The Hamilton - 12/11/12

If anyone at the Hamilton had any reservations about how much petrol the legendary Wanda Jackson had left in the tank, those fears quickly went out the window with the first bluesy notes of her opening song, “Riot in Cell Block No. 9.” The diminutive 75-year-old “queen of rockabilly” with the honey-and-whisky-tinged growl sang about “serving time for armed robbery,” and it was easy to believe that’s exactly where she was during the titular jail fight. The rocking tune kicked off an raucous set of music that started great and somehow kept getting better.

She kept it rolling with “Rock Your Baby,” a hit from 1958, which Jackson told the enthusiastic crowd would be the start of a “musical journey through 58 years” of her career. The journey continued with 1956’s “I Gotta Know,” her second hit (after 1954’s “You Can’t Have My Love”) which reached #15 on the country charts. Her backing band, The In-Laws (more on them in a bit) performed the alternately rockabilly/honkytonk song brilliantly, as Jackson snapped her fingers through the frequent tempo changes. Jackson shrugged off the “rockabilly” label, however, noting that “they called it rockabilly - we just called it rock and roll.”

Proof of how far-reaching Jackson’s fanbase is was evident in her fourth song, the 1961 hit “Funnel of Love.” Jackson re-recorded the song in 2003 when she was joined by The Cramps, and the tune has been covered by the Meat Puppets, The Fall, and Mike Ness of Social Distortion. Jackson, however, proved that no one does it better than her.

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