Another cracking winter mix coming your way! As always, please feel free to leave comments and get in touch!

Tracklisting:

1) Morning Rain – Chocolate Puma (Wake Up Call Mix)
2) Twisted Dreams (Got Me Goin Round) – Ultra Nate Vs Edson Pride (Phil H Twisted in Me Mix)
3) Man With the Red Face – Puchi (Mark Knight & Funkageda)
4) Feels So Right – Solution (Justin Winks 2008 Remix)
5) What is happening – Alphabeat (Simmons Remix)
6) Delirious – David Guetta (Laidback Luke Mix)
7) Freed from desire – Teo Moss
Reason – Terrace Dubmix
9) Le Voie de Soleil – Hoxton Whores vs Subliminal Cuts (Dub Mix)
10) Real Things – Tikaro, J. Louis Ferran feat Rebeka Brown (Steve Pitron & Max Sanna Remix)
11) What would we do – Hagenaar Albrecht (Danism Remix)
12) Put Your Hands On – No Halo (Warren Clarke Main Vocal)

In an attempt to free dance music from its monotonous constraints, The BeesKnees have combined their efforts to create some of the grooviest dance vibes in the city. They combine guitar licks, synthesizers and vocals in a way that would make you think they were mixed somewhere in the deep realms of outer space. Now who Billi D. (vocals), Scottfree (synthesizer), S2 (guitar) and Wizabee (guitar) really are is up for interpretation, so Centerstage thought it would be best to let them tell the story of the BeesKnees and how world domination is next on their agenda.

Where did you guys grow up?
Billi D grew up in Southern California and Dayton, Ohio while the boys grew up in and around Chicago.

What are your musical backgrounds?
Scottfree : Basically, about 10 months ago these three guys asked me to play in a band and I’ve been faking it ever since-although I played piano, bass, viola and drums when I was young.

Billi D: I started singing in the church choir at eight or nine. I picked up bass and alto clarinet in middle school. Then I did choir in high school.

Wizabee: At 14, I started playing guitar and studied under a former Chicago Symphony Orchestra trombonist. I took a shit load of music classes, and I’ve played in various wacky music experiences. Oh yes, and there were drugs.

S2: I started playing the horn at 10, and then I picked up the guitar when I was 12. I rocked my first stage soon after that, and have been doing it ever since-in about 25 different bands. From funk, world, rock, hip-hop, big band jazz bands, I’ve always tried to surround myself with as much music as possible.

Tell me about how you guys got together.
Scottfree: I was fighting the two-headed man eater of Zanzibar when I saw a ninja, Wizabee, lurking in the tree-tops. He delivered a devastating blow to the two-faced monster with a mystical axe. Then a lone viking, S2, came running in with yet another mystical axe and a hollowed out beast horn. In the midst of celebrating we played a tasty jam with mystical axes, beast horns and, being the shape-shifting robot that I am, I pumped out some greasy beats and twangs from my keyboard of destruction. Drunk off of whiskey and power we roamed the land and stumbled upon a Siren in the lake of fire. We threatened her life and she joined our group of misfits and maniacs and there you have it.

S2: If I can remember correctly, that’s exactly how it happened.

After that, I’m curious to hear what motivates your music.
Scottfree: We’re influenced by many people and situations, but we find the most inspiration in the moment. These guys are my favorite musicians.

S2: For me I’ve got to say Bob Barker, Kirby Puckett, and Ralph Wiggum. People aren’t my only influences. Guacamole has had a tremendous impact on my sound since day one.

Billi D: I will whole heartedly concur with S2’s homage to the avocado as a major inspirational force in the life of the BeesKnees, both individually and as a whole. We are influenced by high vibrational sounds as well.

There’s a certain “old-school” quality to your sound. How do you stay true to that classic sound, but still come up with something original?
All music is just a fusion of the past and the present. The “classic” style is formed from our analog instruments and the “progressive” style is from the electronic elements. But basically the music all started in jam sessions just going off, so we don’t try and capture an “old-school” sound, it’s just created naturally.

Chicago has a very eclectic music scene, does that consciously affect the way you make your music?
Scottfree: No, the scene is so eclectic because you have a whole city of cats doing what they feel.

S2: We’d sound the same anywhere. If there’s a difference between Chicago and some other cities it’s that there are a lot of humble cats around here you can learn from instead of compete with.

Is getting your listeners to dance your main goal?
S2: We like to dance so we make music to dance to. Most people don’t dance and that’s cool too as long as they’re having a good time. If we’re at practice, on stage or at the studio it’s all funny business, so that’s our main goal, to have fun.

Where do you hope to see The BeesKnees in the future?
Scottfree: I’ll be a whack-job artist heavily into whiskey, cocaine and hot sauce. I’ll have about 15 kids from various women and a hot ass bitch of a wife who physically and verbally abuses me on the regular, in public. S2 is going to be a creep show Neo-art enthusiast, he’ll walk around in a robe with an I.V. filled with whiskey mumbling pig latin to himself. Wiz will end up in Thailand in the jungle with lots of young, old and crippled sex slaves. There will also be mountain goats, and a plethora of opium. Also, he probably won’t have changed out of his “kung-fu” robe in about 20 years, so he’ll pretty much be at his sexual peak. Billi D is going to land in some poor Spanish-speaking country fighting for the rights of the people, even though all they want is for her to leave so they can get back to farming instead of sitting in on her space cadet conspiracy theories. She’s smoked a lot of crystal meth over the years.

Billi D: Traveling, collaborating, learning and doing what we want.

Wizabee: We see The BeesKnees as world leaders.

S2: Eating glorious sandwiches made of gold, bacon and honor.

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photo: Cara Wasielewski

The members of The Giving Tree Band approach their musicianship a little differently than most rock or folk bands (the sound of TGTB is best characterized as a bit of both). The seven talented multi-instrumentalists who comprise the ensemble use their music as a vehicle for community-building and environmental stewardship. Their artist-owned label, Crooked Creek Records, purchases offsets to reduce its carbon footprint; several of their instruments?donated by Ohio-based Highland Strings?are handcrafted from reclaimed wood and coated with non-toxic finish; and their bio-diesel tour van?recently extracted from the mud in last month’s flooding?will soon run on waste vegetable oil. Now the band has just completed a first for both the music industry and sustainable materials production: the world’s first carbon-neutral album.

I met with four members of The Giving Tree Band at their recent gig at the North Park Village Nature Center. Brothers Todd and Eric Fink, Andy Goss, Patrick Burke and I gathered around a picnic table on an unseasonably warm October afternoon to talk about their music, their ideals and the production of their new green album, Great Possessions, slated for release next spring.

Tell me about the production of Great Possessions.
Eric: Well, we were able to do a lot of the manufacturing for our first album via wind power, with 100% post-consumer recycled materials and soy ink. We wanted to make the second album more on our level; we’re not a large band with a lot of resources. The Aldo Leopold Legacy Center just opened six months after our search started. We were lucky to find it; it’s considered the world’s greenest building according to the LEED standard of building. At first they were taken aback that a band wanted to record an album in their conference center, but we pursued and, as they got to know us, they learned that our mission was true and we intended to do work that has never been done before. We camped out and rode our bikes 11 miles each way every day to record. The production was stripped down, but we felt that was a lot of the charm of the album. The Giving Tree Band is ideal for this kind of project; we weren’t energy vampires at the center because we were just powering microphones and a laptop. At the same time, we wound up making our most arranged and experimental album; we were isolated and working ten-plus hours a day, so everything we did took a lot of thought, focus, purpose and organization. We’d wake up at 5:30 a.m. and bike to the center, then try to strap on the instruments and make an album?it took a few days to get used to it, partly because we were a little out of shape at the time.

How is the packaging produced?
Todd: The packaging is 100% recycled, 100% post-consumer content, printed with non-toxic soy inks and wrapped in corn cellulose shrink-wrapping. It’s all biodegradable?every part of the packaging. At Crooked Creek Records, we?re offsetting our carbon footprint for production. All of the projects on the label will be carbon-neutral in some way.

On your website, you state that you believe in music as service. How does your vision statement guide your choices in the gigs you take?
Andy: There’s some sort of charitable or ecological component to the gigs we do. For instance, this one, at the Nature Center, is the type of thing that brings communities together. We did a festival in Louisville that had a lot of activists and charities involved. We’ve done book fairs and played at hospitals…it’s very different than what you typically expect.

photo: Cara Wasielewski

What inspired you to make the commitment to sustainability and service?
Todd: It was born in part out of frustration with previous attempts at making music?playing at bars and clubs and not feeling like there was a lot of meaning to what we were doing. We wanted to get away from music as purely entertainment. Music has a lot of power and potential to inspire and motivate people and therefore can really impact the community and the globe even in a very positive way. We created a vision statement; we wanted these ideals to be our guiding philosophy and not stray too far or compromise those values. This was a little scary at first because we thought, “Where will we play? How will we get by?” But it’s proven to be a good path; it’s opened a lot of new avenues for us and for other artists too. Many artists?not just musicians?have collaborated with us and taken these ideas even further. It’s really encouraging when you see people from different disciplines coming forward to support and give us the thumbs up. It lets us know we’re doing the right thing.

Also, our music is really fan supported. A lot of people pre-ordered CDs and created a sort of musical CSA. We use that money toward production and then give them the album when it’s finished.

Eric: (with a chuckle) Community Supported Audio.

Todd: There you go. We think what we’re doing can be really inspiring for a lot of other artists on the grassroots level. We want to stick with our small, independent, artist-owned album so we can do things environmentally correctly and continue taking the kind of shows we want and embrace the values that have provided so much fulfillment for us as artists.

The Giving Tree Band plays November 22 at the Chicago Bluegrass and Blues Festival at the Congress Theater.

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If you’ve gone to a hip-hop show in the past two years, there’s a good chance that Nigel Ridgeway (a.k.a. DJ Trew) had a hand in making it happen. The Baltimore native came to Chicago over a decade ago, and has turned his passion for music into one of the most lucrative party organizations in the city. Since coming to Chicago he’s DJ’d at almost every hot spot in Wicker Park, started his own magazine, and organized top-notch shows featuring some of the most cutting-edge hip-hop artists to date. Centerstage had an opportunity to sit down with DJ Trew and rap about everything from solidifying the Chicago hip-hop scene to overcoming bone cancer.

Where were you born and how did the local music scene influence your taste?

I grew up in the Baltimore/DC area whose musical styles are Baltimore club and Go-Go respectively. Between Baltimore clubs and going to raves as a teenager, I gained an appreciation for house, techno, and drum & bass. The general open-mindedness of the rave culture got me into other genres that weren’t ‘dance’ music like trip-hop, acid jazz and other forms of electronic music. Go-Go got me into more percussive/syncopated styles like funk, afrobeat, reggae and such. Getting into hip-hop though is a different story. As a genre, around the mid-’80s, it was being played more and more on the radio and MTV and was very much a youth-oriented musical style. I was raised on old soul music by my mother, and since hip-hop is essentially the next step from late-’70s soul/disco, getting into hip-hop wasn’t that big of a leap for me. It was a natural progression.

When did you first know that being a DJ is what you wanted to do?
Well back in my middle school days, I was that kid who always had the new tapes the day they came out. I was that kid who carried a boombox with him from class to class in school, and whenever we had basement parties, kids looked to me to do the DJing. Back then I used two boomboxes to ’spin.’ Plus I was a socially awkward kid, so being behind the scenes worked better for me. I could speak with my music selection instead of actually talking to people. I don’t think anything I could’ve said with words would’ve had as much of an effect on people as the music I played. That was always satisfying to me – making people dance while having a good time. As I’ve grown older, I’m still somewhat socially awkward (laughs), but the enjoyment I get from rocking a party still hasn’t changed one bit.

What made you come to Chicago?

I lived on the east coast all my life, and as much as I spent time in NYC, B’more and DC, I never really felt a connection with those cities. My best friend went to Northwestern and after visiting him a few times I began to realize that there was something about Chicago that hit me in my soul.

On a personal and professional level though, I had begun working at engineering and interior design firms right out of high school, thinking that that was the career path for me. Around mid ‘98, after being diagnosed with bone cancer, and subsequently beating the disease, I took stock of my life and realized that my career paths and location in the world weren’t really doing it for me. So on a whim I moved to Chicago and haven’t looked back since. I began DJing here as soon as my U-Haul crossed the city limits. I cashed in my 401k, bought my DJ rig, and started hitting up Gramaphone a few times a week, buying all the new local Chicago hip-hop 12s. My career from that point has followed a logical progression from DJ to event planner to booking/PR/management.

Tell me about Groundlift magazine.

Back in the late-’90s and early-’00s my partner (DJ Verb) and I created a website devoted to selling hip-hop ‘breaks’ in their vinyl form. This was right before eBay blew up and most websites that had product to sell used shopping-cart software. At first we only functioned as an e-store but as the site grew in popularity, we began adding journalistic content relevant to our product: interviews, album reviews, etc. Eventually our vintage vinyl sales moved to eBay and what was left, the journalistic content, evolved into GLmag.

We focused on underground and progressive-minded hip-hop, downtempo and rare groove. Basically, hip-hop and its roots in their purest, non-commercial forms. Not that there’s anything wrong with commercial rap, but we chose to focus on hip-hop as we believe the forefathers envisioned it as culture/art, as opposed to record industry execs imagining it as a commodity.

You also mentioned that you throw events?
My first larger concert was the Budos Band. First large hip-hop event was with Ohmega Watts. Since then we’ve done shows with Blu, Exile, Mainframe, Pacific Division and Vast Aire. Then earlier this year I created the “I Love Haters” series of concerts which drew its lineup from various Chicago hip-hop scenes-backpacker, live band, progressive, hipster, and such. The idea behind those concerts was to try and bridge the gap between all the scenes. In theory it was brilliant, but I think Chicago hip-hop fans need a bit more time to accept all the different scenes as being relevant to the culture as a whole.

I was hoping you?d mention the different rap scenes. What do you think of the “hipster-rap” movement and the negative connotation attached to it?

Well anything that claims hip-hop as its inspiration has a place within the culture. Lately I’ve been trying to think back to past generations/decades of hip-hop and find parallels between current hipster rap now and party rap and hip-house then. The first hip-hop records were party records. And sometime around when Rakim and Big Daddy Kane dropped, the lyricism and flows changed from the typical disco-rap cadence to more complex rhyme schemes. Some artists, Big Daddy Kane being a good example, were able to walk the fine line between the two. But for the most part it is and was an ‘if you’re not with us, you’re against us’ mentality.

So what are your overall hopes for Chicago hip-hop right now?

Well my current goal is to [kill] the image of Chicago being “haterville.” It’s a lofty goal, but I believe it’s attainable. It’s going to take every hip-hop artist’s time and effort though and we need to all be building together, not destroying each other.

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Besides being able to get into R-rated movies without asking the good-natured homeless man outside to buy you tickets, there’s not a whole lot that changes when you turn 17. You’re still a year away from most of the good stuff: porn, cigarettes, the military. But don’t start channeling Janis Ian just yet; proving that they understand your plight, several Chicago music venues have opened up their doors to fans 17 and up (and, in some cases, enthusiasts of all ages). So get away from the Guitar Hero and have yourself a night out at one of these clubs.

Beat Kitchen
This Roscoe Village venue caters to younger fans of live rock music with frequent 17-plus shows and early all-ages shows (usually starting at about 5:30-6:00 p.m.). A lot of local acts and some national rock acts, from indie to hardcore, are known to make an appearance here. Come early and order a burger or thin crust pizza from their front room menu, or if you’re low on cash, grab a $2 slice of pizza at the show.

Empty Bottle
While Empty Bottle’s main location routinely hosts 18+ shows, the venue’s music bookers also present all-ages shows at a number of locations in the Ukrainian Village/Logan Square area several times a year: AV-Aerie, Logan Square Auditorium, Congress Theater and The Mansion. These shows usually cost $10-$15 and include the kind of dance-rock artists that appeal to the indie-music bloggerati (think Does It Offend You Yeah, Girl Talk, etc.), meaning you can check out the buzz acts before they get big enough to play the larger, 21-plus venues.

Metro
There was a time where Metro was the only game in town for rock fans younger than 21. While many of the big-name acts that play here do 21-plus shows, Metro has long been known for hosting its fair share of early evening all-ages shows, particularly festival-style shows and multiple-act bills. Coming up on November 26, for example, is an all-ages set with Chicago’s own brother-sister hip-hop team, Kid Sister and Flosstradamus.

Reggie’s Rock Club
Since it arrived on the local music scene over a year ago, Reggie’s Rock Club has offered up weekly all-ages and 17-and-under rock shows, from punk to doom metal, and less frequently local underground hip-hop. A few blocks from the Chinatown Red Line stop, Reggie’s has quickly become an oasis for younger rock fans; the median age at many shows is about 22. Even better, you can kill some time browsing CDs and old vinyl at Record Breakers upstairs or buying t-shirts at the adjacent Reggie’s Music Joint before heading to a show.

Subterranean

So your fake ID wasn?t convincing enough to get you into the Double Door? No worries, head over to Subterranean less than a block away; the venue’s second floor hosts at least one 17-and-over show a week (and the monthly Emerging Artists Showcase is all-ages). A lot of under-the-radar acts with passionate fan bases (like Dub Trio and Matt and Kim) make their way to this venue.

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The MC and the DJ are just two small parts of this ever-evolving hip-hop band.