Mike Bookey

Jamin Marshall is at home last Friday afternoon and is trying to get some rest. Just two days earlier, he and the rest of his band, Larry and His Flask, drove 30 straight hours from Rochester, Minn. to arrive in their hometown of Redmond.
That's more than 1,800 miles, but Marshall isn't trying to impress anyone with that number. After all, the acoustic-meets-punk band has put some 16,000 miles on its touring van in the past seven months, zigging and zagging across the country playing shows – sometimes in basements, sometimes in bars and, when needed, on street corners.
But this time around, Larry and his Flask are returning to their hometown after what has inarguably been the biggest trip in the band's history, playing big rock clubs and theaters in support of famed Celtic punk act Dropkick Murphys on their always popular St. Patrick's Day tour.

Mark Ransom is turning 40 this weekend and he's just fine with that because he's having a big damn party to celebrate.
While he once dreamed of skiing in Chamonix, France, to celebrate his summitting of the proverbial hill, Ransom says Saturday night's throw down at McMenamins Old St. Francis School, which features his own band, The Mostest, and an impressive who's-who list of other local musicians joining in for an acoustic song circle earlier in the night, will suit him just fine. And this makes sense because this guy is the face of local music in Bend, even if he might not exactly agree with that assertion.

The last time we wrote about a benefit concert for Haiti (Rise Up International's event at the Domino Room), there were predictions that news about the impoverished country and the devastating earthquake that killed so many of its citizens would soon vanish from the headlines. At that time, just a few weeks after the January quake, this didn't seem possible. But just this has happened – Haiti isn't in the regular news cycle that anymore.
In Bend, there have been continuing efforts and special events to raise relief money for the country and its people, but it seems even talk of those efforts has quieted down. This is all changing this week, however, with perhaps the largest-scale Haiti relief event coming to Bend on Friday, the Bend for Haiti benefit at the Tower Theatre.

On Tuesday night, two men will be blowing their horns here in Central Oregon and both will be getting terribly funky. One specializes in the saxophone while the other favors the trombone but their styles both weave through the realms of jazz, soul and, again, the funkiest of funk.
There are plenty of other similarities to be found between these two men and their dance-happy sounds, but where they diverge is the 43-year age gap between them. The man on the saxophone is Maceo Parker, one of the forefathers of funk music, and the other is Trombone Shorty (real name: Troy Andrews) the 24-year-old New Orleans virtuoso who has already generated a mystique of his own, having burst onto the scene as a youth on his namesake instrument.

When Eric Tollefson released his full-length disc, Sum of Parts, last year, it seemed like the towering redhead had come out of nowhere. There'd been little buzz about him before the release, but soon after he couldn't be avoided, opening shows for Jackie Greene and playing a hard-charging set to warm the stage for G. Love and Special Sauce in early September at the Domino Room.
While G. Love was on stage, Tollefson, wearing the Breedlove Guitars baseball cap that seems to be his constant around-town companion, was near the back of the crowd, leaning against the wall. On the Juneau, Alaska, native's face was the sort of grin that comes only from really kicking ass at something, which is what he'd just done – even if he did make the mistake of addressing the blues-guitar playing, hip-hop-rhyme-spouting artist as “G” rather than his preferred “Garrett” when the two met backstage.