Cactus Rose @ Branded Saloon, Brooklyn 2/17 – Black Hillbilly live for Black History Month
Join us of Cactus Rose band for our first show of 2017 this Friday night! We are celebrating #BlackHistoryMonth with our own cosmic twang contribution to the #BlackHillbilly tradition & looking forward to reaching out farther with this advocacy into the national & international music scene during this year. Follow us on Instagram: @cactusroselovesyou
#CactusRose live @ Branded Saloon
2/17/2017
603 Vanderbilt Avenue, Brooklyn NY
10:30pm
More info/directions: brandedsaloon.com
( Black stringband in 1900)
Throwback Thursday: Kandia Crazy Horse’s top albums of 2016 x Other Music NYC
I have been mostly focused on the Red Road > powwow highway > doing activism on behalf of Indian Country especially for Standing Rock / #NoDAPL during 2016. Yet once I was a rock journalist & music editor in a previous life, and I perpetually remain a vinyl collector & music fanatic. Amongst the many losses to the music world this year was my dear folks’ seminal record store in the NoHo section of downtown NYC: Other Music. I bought my last hauls of records there back in the spring/summer & we feted their existence with a great parade down the Bowery, followed by a concert @ Bowery Ballroom starring Yoko Ono & many other artists. So it’s now bittersweet to be closing out the year by voting for my most memorable recordings of 2016 in company with the OM fam — here’s my list:
KANDIA CRAZY HORSE 2016 ALBUMS (I will shortly be submitting ballots for the Village Voice Pazz+Jop in Manhattan & the Nashville Scene country music critics poll for Nashville, TN as well…)
& the other Other Music staff + fellow update contributors’ choices can be read HEREIN
& some scenes from the closing of Other Music…A’ho*
( Kandia Crazy Horse & Other Music staffer / WFMU DJ / Bim Marx producer Duane Harriott inside Other Music’s East 4th St store on the final day of operations )
( The last 2 physical copies of my debut album Stampede for sale @ Other Music NYC )
( Other Music co-owner Josh Madell & I outside the Bowery Ballroom on Delancey Street, after the parade / before the farewell concert started )
( Other Music staffer / bandleader of Chouette Amanda Colbenson & I outside the Bowery Ballroom after the OM parade down the Bowery, NYC )
( The banner that used to hang above the entrance @ Other Music on East 4th Street, NYC )
ThrowbackThursday: “Cabin In The Pines” live from the Sacred Water Medicine Show in NYC
As filmed by Camara Dia Holloway, some footage from my Standing Rock water protectors benefit concert, the Sacred Water Medicine Show, is now viewable on this site; click the tab for MUSIC.
This song, “Cabin In The Pines,” which is based on a once-real jookhouse in Southwest Georgia but is my sonic & lyrical paean to Appalachia / Affrilachia, remains one of my most favorite songs I have written to date. If you have not gotten the Native Americana / Country / Americana album that features it yet, Stampede, it is still at my CD Baby store: STAMPEDE available here!
Playing herein @ Decolonize This Place / Artists Space in TriBeCa with my new band, Cactus Rose (minus Brother Evan on drums!) #mniwiconi #NoDAPL #ProtectTheSacred
Sacred Water Medicine Show: My Standing Rock water protectors benefit concert in NYC #mniwiconi #NoDAPL
Good Friday, y’all! I am now getting feedback & documentation from the Standing Rock water protector camps benefit I conceived, curated & performed at last Saturday in Manhattan @ Decolonize This Place (Artists Space) in TriBeCa. Such was the response, I have been asked to undertake some more & when things develop, I will be sharing the word here & on my Instagram. Regardless, my personal commitment to praying for & helping support the Oceti Sakowin & other united nations assembled @ Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota remains unabated; the setbacks to the trips I was slated on since August were unavoidable, yet I still plan to be of service there. And we of the Eastern nations are paying attention to the similar projects here in our own “backyard,” such as the Algonquin Pipeline, & doing actions locally.
My #IndigenousWeek in NYC concludes tomorrow with the re-opening of the Caribbean Cultural Center (CCCADI) in Harlem on 125th Street. More to come! A’ho*
“Water Is Life – Solidarity Concert” on Saturday, October 8th, 2016 (All photographs by Camara Dia Holloway)
(Kandia Crazy Horse giving the Introduction to the benefit concert @ Decolonize This Place in TriBeCa, by Camara Dia Holloway)
(Kandia Crazy Horse & Morgan O’Kane, singers/songwriters/purveyors of twang & Appalachian-rooted mountain music, from Virginia)
(With my lead guitar player/singer Jeff McLaughlin – Cactus Rose by Theodore Kuhnapfel)
(Alex Battles)
(Lonnie Harrington)
(Morgan O’Kane)
(Ebony Hillbillies)
(Bejike Luis Sanakori Ramos doing water ceremony & closing dance)
(My Tsalagi aunty Eagle Woman (our hostess & emcee) & the gang getting the shoutout on the welcome wall @ Decolonize This Place)
(Rehearsing for the Standing Rock benefit earlier last week in Midtown, with Alex & Lonnie)
Folkworld (Europe) on STAMPEDE
Here’s a newfound, ole fine review of Stampede from Europe’s Folkworld site
“Americana” written by Kandia and [Ben] Peeler is a brilliant mix of Blues, Songwriter, Rock and Gospel and “Soul yodel” a melancholic Country Yodel by Kandia and [Albert] Menéndez. Other highlights are the intoxicating Country Rock “Cowgirls”, showcasing Kandia’s powerful voice, or the Eagles cover “New kid in town”.
With her debut Kandia Crazy Horse establishes herself as an up-and-coming songwriter, good song writing, talented musicians and a hot new voice guarantee a good listen.
© Adolf „gorhand“ Goriup
Covered by Dead Flowers blog
Here’s a nice new write-up about my music & vision from the artist-centric Dead Flowers blog – also previewing our Honky-Tonk Relapse appearance this Thursday night in Brooklyn: READ HERE
When you hear the words “classic country music”, a few famous faces come to mind—all of them, most likely, white and male. But Kandia Crazy Horse is out to change all that. The NYC-based singer and songwriter is “on a crusade to become the first black woman to be invited to join the Grand Ole Opry.”And the way she sings — with a style that’s part deep-South traditional country, part soul, and more than a little influenced by the crossover twang-rock of ’70s California — she just might pull it off
Yes! I hope to see y’all out @ Hank’s Saloon!
Sign o’ The Twins
Y’all, I have been in the innermost songwriting cave for a spell & having some long overdue reconnection with kin…Yet today, with the arrival of Manhattanhenge, the summer’s really begun for me & shall be beaming out some vital Light for the season come Sundown. This is the time in NYC that transplanted southerners like myself — & my late mother, whose Gemini Soul & 2nd June bornday we shall be celebrating next week @ Chaka Khan in Prospect Park — feel most at peace, able to commune with the Green. Looking forward to connecting, at my upcoming shows & down by the riverside!
Peace & Love, Kandia*
Bringin’ it back to where it all began: Stampede, the debut album recorded in remembrance of my southern belle Mum, plus two singles from my forthcoming follow-up Canyons — “Tula” & “Bury My Heart At Rock Creek Park” — are available from CD Baby HERE
Stampede ranked No. 2 Country album of 2014 by the Village Voice
It’s music year-end voting time in the media, and New York City’s venerable alt-weekly the Village Voice has compiled their top 13 best country albums of the year, considering my debut recording Stampede as #2 above all! Here’s a quote from what the paper’s culture editor/writer Alan Scherstuhl had to say about my take on country & western songwriting and aesthetics:
“Rather than jamming familiar sounds together, hoping they snap together into something new, Kandia Crazy Horse operates under the assumption that all those sounds are equally hers. She’s a synthesist, the opposite of whatever Big Bang first blasted American pop into all those limiting genres. Her song titles suggest her vision: “Congo Square” (on which funky drummer meets Bakersfield riffs and Rolling Thunder fiddles); “Soul Yodel” (on which “The Tennessee Waltz” and Al Green’s “Simply Beautiful” dissolve together like sugar in her mouth); “Gunfight at the Golden Corral” (a crackpot two-step whose chorus is the name of Pauline Kael’s most famous book)…No record I’ve heard this year boasts such warmth and breadth and surprise.”
Stampede & Kandia Crazy Horse feature in May 2014 issue of RELIX MAGAZINE
Scribe Brian Robbins refers to my first-ever song / single “California” as “It’s the sort of tune Laurel Canyon singer-songwriters sometimes spend their careers trying to come up with” (!).
MOJO Magazine UK awards Stampede 4-Stars! | 05.2014
In the current issue #246 of MOJO on newsstands in the UK (print only), veteran British chronicler of American roots music (The Band) and Southern Californian folk-rock out of Laurel Canyon turns his gaze to Stampede, Kandia & the “promise of [her] sassy, assured debut.”
STAMPEDE in Acoustic Guitar | 04.2014
The April 2014 print issue of ACOUSTIC GUITAR magazine features a great review of Stampede & photos of Kandia: “Full of intersecting cultural lines, sincere songwriting, a genre-bending scope of sound, and unflinching bravery, Stampede is a powerful musical debut from Crazy Horse, who has the strength, soul, and talent to serve as a role model for other black women who want to enter the world of country music.” – Amber Von Nagel
kandiacrazyhorse.com 