With Taipei music bar's seemingly consensual swing toward noisy garage music, it's nice to know there are still other options out there. This weekend, relief comes at the alternative folk of Sasquatch, which will use drums, guitar and song to express its much more probing range of musical moods tomorrow night at 9:30pm at Peshawar.
The Sasquatch ensemble - if it can be called an ensemble - is driven by folk singer and songwriter Scott Ezell, who is continually seeking to add new elements and musical strains. At the last Spring Scream, he collaborated with a dancer and at least five other musicians, including a mandolin. On other occasions, he has also gone it alone with just his vocals, guitar and harmonica.
For tomorrow night's gig, he is joined by jazz percussionist Richard Huang, who will provide accompaniment on the bongos and the djembe, adding what Ezell calls some of the "drone tones" from the traditional music of China and India.
For Ezell, much of the music is brand new, consisting of several instrumental compositions he has worked out for his upcoming CD on local indie label TCM Records (角頭音樂). The instrumental arrangements were worked out, he said, in an effort to bridge the language gap in a CD produced for a Taiwanese audience. The release will be his first on TCM, a label that has put out CDs for locally important acts like the Clippers (夾子), Back Quarter (四分衛) and Panai (巴奈).
Ezell's new numbers will take up most of the evening's first set, while the second set will see him drop back into his old songbook of slow, soulful moaning and guitar strumming. A native of San Diego, California, Ezell sings in English and has lived in Taiwan for just upwards of six years.
Peshawar (柏夏瓦) is located on Shih-da Road, Lane 80, No. 3 (師大路80巷3號).
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