Bill Bentley in Bentley’s Bandstand-The Morton Report-Feb. 2014

Paul Cebar Tomorrow Sound, Fine Rude Thing. For the in crowd starting around Milwaukee and stretching all the way down yonder to New Orleans, Paul Cebar needs no introduction. He’s been amalgamating modern versions of age-old musical strains like rhythm and blues, rock, Caribbean calypso and even outright oddities into the Cebar Sound for so long he’s surely to be anointed iconness any day now. Paul Cebar marches to the beat of his own inner vibrations, and has been highly effective in carving out enough room to boogaloo just how he wants to. With the newly fashioned Tomorrow Sound, the frontman turns up the musical blender to warp speed and attains an even higher degree of grooviness, believe it or not, melting various influences together like so many outré ingredients. Don’t be surprised if someday this man fronts his own congregation in the Church of the Mighty Bop. There is something endlessly intriguing in the way Paul Cebar confronts reality, stretching all the way back to his early band the R&B Cadets, and there is not a chance in hell he’ll ever stop. Take the C train immediately.

Tom Surowicz in VITA.MN-Minneapolis Feb 2014

Those in search of a ferocious new groove should check out the title track of Paul Cebar’s fresh Kickstarter-funded CD, “Fine Rude Thing.” It packs a Joe Frazier-worthy punch. The album is a kitchen sink cornucopia of all the things Mr. Cebar likes, all his many diverse influences, from Afro-pop to ska to New Orleans to Tom Waits to Havana to George Clinton. “The Whole Thing” sports haunting rhythms from the Jamaican hills. “Might Be Smiling” is a cool techno P-Funk singalong. And when you strip away the busy modern production, “Not Necessarily True” recalls a classic Arthur Alexander ballad. Speaking of that production, it sometimes startles, often amuses, and occasionally just distracts. It’s clear that Cebar and the band had lots of fun in the studio, aiming to live up to their new moniker, Tomorrow Sound. The results are all still rootsy and soulful and eminently danceable, but way more au courant than retro. The band makes their belated Cedar debut this week, after countless gigs at virtually every funky bar in town. Tom Surowicz

RECENT FINE RUDE REMARKS ABOUT

FINE RUDE THING

Milwaukee’s Finest: Singer-Songwriter Paul Cebar Embraces an ‘Omni-Pop’ Sound
Cleveland Scene interview by Jeff Niesel

Much like Cleveland, Milwaukee gets a bad rap as a dying town that doesn’t have much going for it. But for Milwaukee-based singer-songwriter Paul Cebar, the reality couldn’t be further from the truth. He distinctly recalls attending an arts festival that left a huge impression.

“Somehow the booking agent was pretty hip,” he says. “[He booked] the Wild Magnolias from New Orleans. They came as a small group and walked around the grounds. I was about 12 and followed them around all day. I had that song ‘(My Big Chief has a) Golden Crown’ stuck in my head for 20 years. That day Babatunde Olatunji, the Nigerian drummer, was booked and Art Blakey and his Jazz Messengers were booked. It was this early imprinting. I missed by one year Bola Sete, the Brazilian guitarist who later has become one of my favorites.”

Though the major labels never came courting, that doesn’t diminish Cebar’s significance. His oeuvre is every bit as impressive as that of more heralded singer-songwriters such as Nick Lowe and John Hiatt, and his brand new album, Fine Rude Thing, is one of the young year’s best.

Initially, the Milwaukee native wasn’t the musical encyclopedia that he now is. But he had an epiphany of sorts when he left town to study at New College in Sarasota, Fla.

“I was blind to [lots of] music at that point,” he says. “I was studying jazz and getting into R&B. It was hard to find Louis Jordan or Buddy Johnson or any records that were ’40s R&B. It became a detective action. I used to comb the record stores trying to find 78s of these guys so I could hear the stuff. New Orleans got me the same time when I was in school. I think the New Orleans sound and all the different sounds of New Orleans led me into different diasporal forms. I saw Cuban musicians in New Orleans.”He then began playing the coffeehouse circuit and regularly visited New York. He says that time period was “not all that far from Inside Llewyn Davis,” the new Coen brothers movie that shows just how tough it was to make it as a folk singer. “I would go to New York and play Folk City and the Other End and all those places that were part of the scene way back when. People like Dave Von Ronk would come out. It was a heady time. You’d do these open mics and then get a gig every six weeks or so and play for whoever shows up. I got to open for Willie Dixon and Sonny & Brownie. It was a really nice way to cut your teeth.”

But by the early ’80s, Cebar gravitated toward a more eclectic sound with the R&B Cadets, a combo that delved deep into the American songbook of the mid-20th century.

“At that time, it was my chance to get involved with a band and be a guest and come up and sing a few Lee Dorsey B-sides and have a great time,” he explains of his early days performing with the group.

He eventually became a full-time member of the band.

“In that band, I was the guy who would find the obscure B-side or whatever the cover song was that we were going to play,” he explains.

During that time, Cebar kept up with another band that played a mix of music along the lines of quirky singer-songwriter Dan Hicks. Dubbed the Milwaukeeans, that group would embrace the world music that Cebar had come to love. About five years ago, he changed the name of the band to Tomorrow Sound to “freshen stuff up.”

“I thought we were being taken for granted,” he says. “I started seeing reviews that would refer to how we were interpreting older music. We had been playing original music for 20 years. I wanted to put the focus on the future. The marketers don’t like you to break brand, but we’re musicians.”

Fittingly, Cebar’s new album, Fine Rude Thing, features a bit of everything. “You Owe It to You” channels the Philly soul that he loves so much and other tracks on the eclectic album draw from Brazilian, Cuban and African music. The title track, in particular, is a great romp.

“I had an instrumental that my drummer and I had whipped up,” Cebar says when asked about the song. “We were calling it ‘Fine Rude Thing.’ I thought, ‘There are some lyrics in that title.’ It was during the lovely Bush era that I started working on it. My records come out years later and I can never truly address political or topical concerns because by the time it’s out, it’s over with. But in that song, there’s a bit of an indication that this was a rebuttal to their abysmal drag. It was as close as I could get to saying, ‘I’ve had enough.’ You want to encourage folks who have their eyes on fire. I was trying to conjure up somebody who was racing down the alley.”

Cebar also hosts Way Back Home, a radio show on Milwaukee’s WMSE that allows him to dig into his extensive vinyl collection and pontificate about his various influences.

“You keep plucking away and you keep following your nose and try to find out where that came from,” he says of his wide range of interests. “I started out at a time when radio was pretty eclectic and I internalized that. Terry Adams from NRBQ often calls it ‘omni-pop,’ and I like that formulation. I think that is what the deal is. You hope the playing of your band unifies things in some way, shape or form.”
In the eyes of Nick Lowe, who describes Cebar as “the real thing,” the band’s style certainly makes the music coherent.

“I have done a number of opening dates for him through the years,” Cebar says of Lowe. “I met him a long time ago and he’s a sweet, sweet man. He’s hilarious. A few years ago, I asked him if he had it in him to weigh in on what I meant or what I was about. He was kind enough to come up with that. He’s been a mentor and a real friend. The last record, he actually sang some background vocals on one of the songs. We have an ongoing appreciation of all kinds of arcane R&B and country records.”

So what’s it like trying to make a living as a musician in 2014? Cebar seems like the kind of guy who would live in a separate world unaffected by digital downloads and disinterest.

“I would like to say it’s a separate world but in a way that I wouldn’t wish on anyone,” he says. “Since we didn’t have the luxury of being on a major label, we were never subjected to the horror stories that everyone talks about.

“But we also failed to benefit from the publicity work that anyone who has been on a label receives,” he continues. “In many ways, I’m ‘indier than thou.’ I’m probably deluded, but I think there’s immediacy to the music that could have been marketed. I do love continuing on. We’re driving vans from town to town but I get a big kick out of seeing the country and seeing the people who come out. I know that for myself I love live music and dancing to live music and I want to foster that for others. I trust there are still folks out there hankering to get out on the floor and get going.”

Milwaukee’s Finest: Paul Cebar takes national stage with new album, tour

January 09, 2014 • JESSIE OPOIEN|The Capital Times|Madison,WI jopoien@madison.com

Milwaukee musician Paul Cebar and his band Tomorrow Sound are about to embark on a national tour promoting their new album, “Fine Rude Thing” — an energetic mix of R&B, Caribbean and rock-and-roll sounds. But before they play elsewhere, they’re kicking off with album release shows in Milwaukee and Madison.

Cebar talked to 77 Square about the new record and his Jan. 11 show at the Harmony Bar.

What do you have planned for your show at the Harmony?

We’re gonna debut a few of the tunes that we’ve not been playing live, and be kind of festive with finally getting this thing out.

We love Madison. I love playing there. The Harmony Bar has been a great place for us. We love the people there; we’ve always had a really nice following.

How long did it take to put the album together?

It’s been quite a saga. We recorded it, then kind of shopped it around a bit, then I ended up signing with a manager about a year-and-a-half ago, and he shopped it around a bit. In the summer we decided we would try and release it ourselves. We then mounted this Kickstarter campaign to try and hire publicity and radio promotion — something the last few records I’ve released have not benefited from.

What are you excited about with this album?

I’ve done a lot of co-writing in the last few years. I’m excited about that on this record. Through almost all of my other records, the solo record had a couple of tunes that were co-written, but the last maybe five years, I’ve had a lot of fun learning how to do that and reaping the benefits of the kind of song you write when you’re writing with somebody. You write a different kind of song when you’ve got another head in the game. It’s been a good challenge and really a lot of fun. I’m really proud of the tunes.

There’s one I co-wrote with Cesar Rosas of Los Lobos, one written with Chuck Mead, one with Pat McLaughlin. Willy Porter and I co-wrote “You Owe It To You,” and I’m really proud of that song — and I’m a bit surprised at how sweetly the recording turned out.

Mike Fredrickson, our bassist, came to our band in the middle of the recording of the record … and he’s a great harmony singer, so I think the record benefits from having him sing with us. (Percussionist) Mac Perkins returned to the band for this record. The great 18-year partnership of Reggie Bordeaux, the drummer, and Bob Jennings (multi-instrumentalist), is really warmly reflected here.

What do you like about “You Owe It To You”? How did it come together?

(Willy) came in with a chord sequence that reminded me of Memphis R&B or Philadelphia — a little more elaborate, chord-wise, than things we had written prior. He and I wrote a song called “I Didn’t Bring It Up” that was on my solo record. We’ve had an ongoing thing about five years. This one came up and it just started percolating. We batted it around and it started to turn into something. I like the little character we created there. I think ultimately it comes off as an homage to the Hi Records of Memphis sound. We’ve long had that sort of sound in our wheelhouse. There’s something about it that charms even us.

Why is the record called “Fine Rude Thing”?

I had been doing a lot of home recordings, and there’s an instrumental that Reggie and I hammered out at one point. I called it “Fine Rude Thing. I thought, ‘That’s a good title. Let’s figure out who’s a fine rude thing here.’ I came up with a set of lyrics and figured out it wasn’t at all related to that other tune.

It was during the heart of the Bush years … Frankly, when I write a song, and the time it takes to get it out so many years later, if I were to start making topical comments, I think they would be long out of date and pretty incomprehensible by the time it came out.

But the lyric, “She’s a ranking rebuttal to their abysmal drag” has to do with me trying to posit this free spirit against this politically correct crucifixion stuff. I guess it’s a bit the idealized love person — but idealized in a different way.

There are a lot of geographical and historical influences represented in your music. Are there any that stand out for you on this record?

I was just down in New Orleans for the holidays, and I’ve taken a lot of influence from the music of that town. This record doesn’t really have an overtly New Orleans tune on it — that might be a first for me. That’s been a real touchstone for me. I think I came to Latin music and Brazilian music through my love of New Orleans music. This record, there are two that are sort of strongly influenced by Jamaican music.

The final track, “Like Loving People Do,” is an overt ska tune. That one shows Pat McLaughlin’s sensibility and mine together. “Might Be Smiling” was sort of my response to post-hip-hop ideas along with a bunch of Tom Waits ideas. I like how that came out. It’s got a real kind of tribute to Sly Stone.

As much as you’re influenced by music and culture from around the world, how is your music shaped by being from and living in Wisconsin?

Way, way back, I had this little slogan that I thought of: ‘out here, you can see all the edges., I think coming up in Milwaukee with the radio, at the time I came up — things were quite eclectic on the radio. Some of them sounded pretty strange, but they were offered in the sense of, here’s the latest.

My grandmother was Slovak and my grandfather was Croatian. We’d have Catholic church festivals, and there were people trying to figure out how to fit their thing into America. I never really felt part of those subgroups. Reggie, my drummer was part of African-American Milwaukee, and his father was the first jazz drummer I saw in a night club. He brings this lovely perspective of what it was like to grow up black in Milwaukee.

I guess we came up with people like the Beatles maintaining that they could do anything. As a musician, I came to music feeling like I could do anything. If it works, run it up the flagpole, I guess.

Paul Cebar Looks To Tomorrow

ShepherdExpress Milwaukee

Jan. 7, 2014/ Jamie Lee Rake

Nearly 40 years after his first paying gig in the city, there may be no more conversationally colorful character and Milwaukee institution than Paul Cebar. Inherent in Cebar’s verbal floridity, however, is the missionary zeal of a musician whose breadth of taste manifests in his own singular style.
The most recent manifestation of that style can be heard with his latest band Tomorrow Sound on Fine Rude Thing, the CD release of which will be fêted at Turner Hall Ballroom this Friday. The band isn’t a complete break from Cebar’s past. Only bassist Mike Fredrickson wasn’t a part of Cebar’s previous long-running combo, The Milwaukeeans. But despite those old ties, Cebar saw fit to give his new ensemble a futuristic name “to put further emphasis upon the original, forward-looking nature of our artistic project,” he says. “We’ve listened long and hard to many vintage styles, but our thrust is forward.”

Cebar’s internationally inclusive, multi-generational aesthetic comes from sources both foreign and domestic. Cebar says he finds inspiration through a process of “following my dancing feet and squinting my ears.” He adds, “Great tunes have other tunes standing beneath them. Many a library, record store and nightclub search has opened up a new seam in the musical substructure. Listening to the favorites of musical heroes also opens up new streams of possibility.”

He also credits his heritage. “My hybrid Slovak-American/Croatian-American Milwaukee boyhood filters into the music, I guess, in a high regard for working class festivity,” he says, going on to credit the diversity of Milwaukee radio during his formative years as making its mark on his artistic direction as well.

Cebar himself has been in a position for more than 30 years to influence fellow musicians by his own contributions to the city’s airwaves as well. Almost every Wednesday from 9 a.m. to noon on WMSE he plays an eclectic mix on his program “Way Back Home,” which he describes as “a chance to block out three hours of listening to whatever’s been floating my boat and share it with the hipsters, flipsters and cool-rocking mamas and daddies who tune in to turn on.” Those contributions can’t be of his own origination, however. “It is against FCC rules for a DJ to play his own music on his or her own radio show,” he explains. “Thus, I have to rely upon my colleagues at any of the fine stations in town to spread the word and sound of my actual recordings to the community.”

Though he’s been a constant on Milwaukee’s FM dial all these years, his paying work has changed plenty since his mid-’70s fledgling days. This comes at least by dint of technology. “Recording methods have gotten more flexible and, marginally, less expensive, but the value of trained and adept engineers is still a big part of the picture and cost,” Cebar says. In regards to his being an indie career all this while, he adds, “By never being signed to a major label we avoided all of the horror stories of said arrangement. But we also failed to benefit from the myriad pluses of the same, prime among them being the substantial funds spent to publicize and promote virtually every artist whom I’ve admired, emulated and, in some cases, come to know quite well.”

Though touring costs are increasing and actual pay for the effort remains at late-’80s levels, as Cebar maintains, “I am proud of the genuine connection that we’ve made with our fans through a dedication to bringing them fresh work as often as possible.” He has pride in his and Tomorrow Sound’s endeavors, too.

He may have been around long enough to lure longtime fans, but these days he’s out to lure newcomers as well. “I might be your mama’s Paul Cebar but let us be your Tomorrow Sound. We’ll bring the flavor, the soul, the stomp and the understatement you never knew you were craving virtually to your doorstep. You owe it to you.”

Paul Cebar: Alchemy you can dance to
Article by: RICK MASON , Special to the Star Tribune Updated: February 3, 2014 –
With another steamy synthesis of worldly grooves, the Milwaukee roots-music hero hopes to “grow the core.”

If life was fair, Paul Cebar would have been at the Grammys last week, getting shout-outs from young colleagues for his rich body of work, hanging with illustrious friends like Bonnie Raitt, John Hiatt, Nick Lowe and Los Lobos, dropping wry comments while handing out awards, maybe collecting some hardware himself.

Instead Cebar was on an East Coast swing with his seasoned quintet, Tomorrow Sound, in support of their sparkling new album, “Fine Rude Thing,” hoping to generate a buzz and maybe reap a little of the fame and fortune that has proven all too elusive during his 57 years.

“I have this kind of wild position here where I’m 10 years younger than all these luminaries that I’ve come to know pretty well,” Cebar said by phone from New York, where his band was preparing to play for the first time in six years. “It’s mind boggling to think about the difference in scale between someone that’s actually made it. At this point I’m hoping that I can be a footnote to some sort of cultural idea of what American music is.”

Despite his relative anonymity, Cebar is a highly respected songwriter and bandleader with an encyclopedic knowledge of intriguing musical phenomena ranging from jump blues to his beloved New Orleansiana to the shimmering grooves of the Caribbean and far beyond. Through relentless touring, first with the R&B Cadets, then the Milwaukeeans, now Tomorrow Sound, Cebar has cultivated a dedicated following in select spots, especially the Midwest — his native Milwaukee, Madison, Chicago and the Twin Cities, where he’ll pull into the Cedar Thursday night.

“We’ve consistently sold the most records of anywhere in the Twin Cities,” he said. “I think actually the Electric Fetus itself has sold more of my records than any other place. I treasure my fans up there. Through all of these years I think there’s always been a group that includes us in their essentials. I hope to grow the core.”

The new seedling is “Fine Rude Thing,” the band’s first album since 2007. It’s rife with Cebar’s potent trademark synthesis of scintillating rhythms and steamy melodies, mostly from global tropical zones, laced with tasty slabs of American R&B, soul and blues. After the rambunctious title track, the disc slips down Beale and Bourbon, along Havana’s Malecón, around Corcovado, across the Mersey and into the Sahara, winding up with the ska workout “Like Loving People Do.”

You can pick out Beatles harmonies, Motown riffs, Cuban son, Al Green or Lee Dorsey references, but the joyous alchemist in Cebar has spun it all into timeless, genre-defying gold.

An inveterate musicological Indiana Jones excavating dusty vinyl bins for forgotten gems from Sierra Leone or Bahia, Cebar has been obsessed with discovering the sources of his obscure musical threads since he was a kid.

“Dad was an AV man at the school where he taught and he would bring home these little turntables,” he recalled. “And on Grandma’s corner there was a jukebox supply store so you could buy the records they’d taken off the jukeboxes for like ten for a dollar.”

He also remembers one prophetic day when he went to the downtown lakefront and the musical world opened up to him.

“There was an art festival in Milwaukee which for some uncanny reason was booked by a very hip and very elderly jazz fan back when I was about 10 or 11,” he said. New Orleans’ Wild Magnolias were there, parading around the grounds in their full feathered Mardi Gras Indians regalia. “ ‘Big Chief’s Got a Golden Crown’ — the way they did it a cappella, I had that completely imprinted. I walked around with ’em all day except when I went to the stage where [Babatunde] Olatunji played and he had probably an eight-piece African band. Then when Olatunji’s done, they bring up [jazz great] Art Blakey and his Messengers.

“I remember taking this all in and just coming home completely buzzing. Then years and years and years later I think, holy cow, I was completely sold at 11.”

All that eclecticism, fueling Cebar’s imagination and pervading his music, continues to both surprise him and cause no end of difficulties. “It actually comes still as startling to me that people do think it’s that radically eclectic,” he said. And, as Cebar has painfully discovered, artistic ingenuity isn’t necessarily easily marketable.

“I can’t say that it’s not been a problem. I looked for about a year and a half to find a label to put this out.” He said the typical response was: “I forgot how creative Mr. Cebar is… but I think my lawyers would laugh me out of the room if I suggested doing this at this point.”

The result is that Fine Rude Thing by necessity is on Cebar’s own Groovesburg Joys label, saddling him with such burdens as marketing and distribution.

“If you ask me, do I want to be a record company head, the answer would be no, I don’t. But I’ve had to take it on myself. If we had some kind of support I think we could have put out twice as many records in the time I’ve been doing this. But you can’t really think about that at this point, so I’m trying to put the best foot forward, trying to wear all the hats well or hire people that can actually wear the hat well as long as it holds out. But ya know, I’m swingin’ pretty hard on this one.”

A Kickstarter campaign that raised nearly $20,000 last year enabled Cebar to get some help from Shore Fire, a major league Brooklyn public relations outfit, and Distiller, a radio promotion company. So far, he’s pleased with the results, unleashing his eternal enthusiasm for the music end of things.

“I’m still very jazzed to be doin’ it,” he said. “I love playin’ with the band. I think we’re very, very good in a very offhand way now. So it’s a pleasure to be playin’ gigs. I’m hoping we can open up some new doors with this and reopen some of the ones that have slowly closed.

“So tell the children that Uncle Paul is comin’.”
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Tomorrow Sound Now For Yes Music People Reviews

Rick Mason of City Pages, Minneapolis-St. Paul

Tommorow Sound Now For Yes Music People (Groovesburg Joys)

It’s been six long years since the public had a new slab from Paul Cebar to slip into the box and feel those simmering grooves effervesce into a soulful nirvana down New Orleans (or Havana) way, 2001’s live disc SUCHAMUCH captured the rambunctious in-the-flesh pleasures of Cebar, a happy seeker of all music rooted to the essence of a time or place, and his redoubtable Milwaukeeans. TOMMOROW SOUND NOW FOR YES MUSIC PEOPLE – a mouthful, but overflowing with tastiness – was hatched in studios from Wisconsin to London,but again revels in Cebar’s delicious synthesis of vintage R&B, soul, New Orleansiana, Cubano Bop, slithery Afro-Caribbean rhythms, and tantalizing esoterica from around the globe.

At heart, Cebar is a musicologist who unearths obscure nuggets that he can’t resist playing, complete with twists culled from all the other great stuff he’s found. Here he rides a sweet, Sam Cooke-style voice into the soul-rich “I’m Qualified”, an early 60’s southern hit cut in Muscle Shoals by Jimmy Hughes.(Yes,that) Nick Lowe stirs in some sharp harmonies while Bob Jennings lays gospelly organ right down it’s spine.

“Hey Hey Honey” is a marvelous a capella gospel/folk tune from Virginia’s Bright Lights Quartet that juggles Cebar’s muscular, shouted lead about an upcoming assignation with a “long, tall yellow gal” with bristling responses in four-part harmony. “Do Me Justice”, meanwhile, is a lilting, calypso-like tune from Sierra Leone’s S.E. Rogie, who was king of an intoxicating local style called palm-wine music

Such intriguing covers find their ultimate fruition in Cebar’s originals, which draw from myriad sources. The scintillating rhythms and brash horns of “The Gimp Sparrow” could fuel carnaval in a dozen hot spots. The funky shuffle of “The Same Dog” driven by Cebar’s piquant guitar figures and written with zydeco accordianist Terrance Simien, seems to bring together Memphis, the Crescent City, Elvis Costello and The Band.

“I Got Trouble” (co-written with Michael Fleming) is more straightforward New Orleans, a tale of hapless woe that could have come from Jessie Hill, Earl King or Lee Dorsey. It’s all wonderful stuff, a funky global tour from the shores of Lake Michigan,thanks to the obsessively curious Cebar and his Milwaukeeans, easily among the country’s most underappreciated working musicians

* * * * *

Chris Rose Of The New Orleans Times-Picayune

The 60-Second Interview February 22,2008
A bracing,fiercely creative-if all too infrequent-voice on the New Orleans music circuit is a native Wisconsinitenamed Paul Cebar. Locals know his longtime band as the Milwaukeeans, but he has recently changed its name to Tomorrow Sound.

The web site cdbaby.com describes Cebar’s latest record as “the best batch yet of an endangered strain of fortified, intensified, fully jacked-up, roaring, cooing and exceedingly personal music-making fro a singular midwestern master.”

I could not say it better myself. Paul Cebar and Tomorrow Sound are playing gigs Feb. 29

(leap day!) at Rock N Bowl and then again (for free) on Mar. 1 at 5 P. M. at the Louisiana Music Factory in the French Quarter.

This I will Tell you: I’m a fan. A big fan. we chatted by e-mail earlier this week

You keep coming back,and keep coming back,to New Orleans.What’s the draw?

It’s the capital of rhythm culture in these raggedy states. Unlike virtually every other American city, it has it’s own food, it’s own music, it’s own architecture; it’s affinities with other grand musical hubs that I’ve had the pleasure to visit (Havana, Salvador-Bahia, Port of Spain, Veracruz) are fascinating and seemingly inexhaustible. The sense of the coexistence of many disparate cultural eras in lively dialogue with each other is present like nowhere else that I know stateside.

Are the audiences here different than elsewhere?

If you’re already dancing in the street, getting folks to let the juices flow on the dance floor is not much of a stretch. Louisiana in general has that marvel of marvels, a thriving couple dance scene. It is implicit that the ones dancing are the one’s having the fun. Bands are inspired to meet the dancefloor with all their bells on.

Is the audience different since Katrina?

We’ve only played a couple of gigs as a band in New Orleans since the storm and those were during the Fest season last year. Maybe not the best vantage from which to judge. I know that the combination of the aftermath of the storm and the abysmal national nightmare from which we still don’t get to wake up has made me an even more grateful fan, aware of the rarity and preciousness of culture,humor,intelligence et al….

The Jazzfest thing. Why don’t you play there every year?

As for Jazz Fest, I’ve been attending each year since ’81. (My friend Rick Steiger,a grand musician from Detroit claims that he met me at the Fest in ’80). It’s simply my high holidays. We put in an application each year in hopes of being included in the festivities but we’ve been invited only once, in 1997. (Michael Tisserand also invited me to give an interview in the Heritage area a year or so later.) I thought we acquitted ourselves rather winningly but what do I know. It’s not like we’re asking for money or anything.

Your music: Can you describe it in 50 words or less?

It’s original dance music rooted in Rhythm and Blues traditions with a pronounced emphasis on Latin, Caribbean and African inflections and a wildass regard for the flow of language. It’s an increasingly full blooded emulation of much of what is best in the music of your town with it’s own cocked hat on.

Tommorow Sound Now For Yes Music People. Just what the hell does that mean?

A friend of mine (Paul Finger) while on a recent trip to India somehow happened upon a circus banner painter by the name of Salim Khan in a small town in Uttar Pradesh. He commissioned him to paint a banner from a photo of me that he’d hurriedly taken just prior to his departure. We’d often joked about just what kind of music I played. In the tightly formatted, rigidly marketed present day record world, my pal asserted that we offered TOMORROW SOUND NOW FOR YES MUSIC PEOPLE. Mr Khan ran with it bringing his exuberant misspelling gifts into the bargain and thus, TOMMOROW SOUND NOW FOR YES MUSIC PEOPLE. All you No Music People out there, we’ve got something for you, too. In the immortal words of Sonny Boy Williamson, “You can call it your mammy if you want to”. It’s also a little nod to Nick Lowe’s PURE POP FOR NOW PEOPLE. Incidentally, the grand Nick chimes in on background vocals on one of the tunes on the album.

Speak to me of the magic and allure of New Orleans music.

We had the great pleasure during this past Mardi Gras week of seeing the inestimably musical Allen Toussaint not once but twice (With a small band in Milwaukee and solo in Green Bay) and everything that has set me afire through the years about New Orleans music came welling on up. By the time he launched into Prince Partridge’s HOW COME YOUR DOG DON”T BARK I was desitively where I need to be. (Do you remember that record on the juke at Buster Holmes on Burgundy? I’ve only seen one other copy!) From my first visit in ’78 when a vague notice in the Picayune led me to the human parade that was the old Tipitina’s to witness an army fatigue- clad, fully eyepatched James Booker in the middle of the floor commandeering a Hammond organ ( with no accompaniment as I recall) through my last visit, the music has hit me where I live. Boundlessly humorous, sly, ingeniously relaxed, insouciantly rambunctious.

Jessie Hill’s four tambourine attack (which I tried hard to emulate on the new record), Earl King’s sartorial and tonsorial resplendence, the offhand back-alley majesty of Dave Bartholomew’s imperial stage presence (and that phrasing, oh that phrasing!), Danny Barker’s deadpan night people hijinx, Irma’s ability to fill the room with glory without even opening her mouth all the way, the Dozen at the Glass House where everything was reborn, David Lastie, Smokey Johnson, and Alvin Robinson on a dirt floor in the back room at Jerry’s up the street from Chez Helene, Snooks throwing his fingers at the strings and playing anything and everything with some very rough semblance of a fraction of the lyrics and the very essence of the tunes, Lil Millet at Le Bon Temps Roulet , Tom McDermott and Evan lightly lilting out the connections, the return of Betty Harris, Willie Tee singing DEDICATED TO YOU…. Ah, the wonders!

Mid City Lanes:It’s a magical place. Tell me about it.

An improbable haven from the ghosts of the rats running through the hardware store down below at the very least. Boozoo, Beau Jocque, Snooks with George whispering in his ear and reaching around to tune his guitar, impromptu zydeco dance lessons ,intrigue, romance……Mooney inventing intensity all over again.

Why don’t you live here?

Each visit some time has been spent mulling over the delicate yet rugged allure of your dear, dear town and how I might fit within the panorama. Most of my major relationships have begun and/or ended in New Orleans. At each juncture when I’ve entertained making a move your way, I’ve had a fine band which I’ve been keen to sustain and see through. I’ve felt a loyalty to the hardy souls who’ve stuck out the thin with me to ride toward the thick. My sweet parents are more in need of my dubious snow shoveling skills…I don’t have a definite answer

You changed your band name from the Milwaukeeans to something else and weird. As someone who used to live in Wisconsin,I’m mildly miffed. What was that about?

Duke Ellington’s first band was called the Washingtonians but His Jungle Orchestra ended up bringing the dancers. I’ve spent 24 years proudly laboring under a mock provincial moniker. The idea was to present an almost impossibly cosmopolitan brand of musical derring-do under the banner of a little known, politically progressive,immigrant built, hard laboring Midwestern working man’s city. Years of “I thought you were a polka band so I didn’t come” “You must not really want to be taken seriously as a contemporary musical force with a name like that” ,or ”Oh, that’s cute” ensued. As my most recent group of Milwaukeeans has coalesced, I thought we might want to shake the wagon and rustle the bushes to somehow assert that we’ve got something new, vital and powerfully fonky to bring to you……TOMORROW SOUND We’ve got no grand branding machinery at our disposal so we can still be your Milwaukeeans,Chris

Note: This version of the article includes Cebar’s full responses to Chris’ questions. If you’d like to read the version that actually ran in the paper please see: www.nola.com

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The Onion AV Calendar Preview April 2,2008

Milwaukee native Paul Cebar is a singing, strumming, and dancing museum of musical culture and a self-styled historian of myriad musical forms. Countless sounds pour forth when Cebar and his Milwaukeeans take the stage. New Orleans, Chicago, New york, Africa, Brazil, Cuba, jump-blues, gospel, jazz, reggae, calypso, soul and vintage R&B are sterting points for something that becomes uniquely Cebar. This mishmash helps reimagine and liven up obscure classics, and the band’s originals present new viewpoints on established styles. Cebar offers up 13 more inventive takes on classic soul on his album,TOMORROW SOUND NOW FOR YES MUSIC PEOPLE

* * * * *

Todd Lazarski interviews Paul for The Onion’s AV Club

Yesterday Sound Tomorrow

Paul Cebar goes back to the future on his new record

If you combine the best aspects of the Chess and Checker labels, the most soulful Stax grooves, and some Afro-Cuban rhythms, all filtered through New Orleans, you might end up with Milwaukee’s own Paul Cebar. Backed by his groove brothers, the Milwaukeeans, Cebar is the city’s leading song-and-dance soul man. He’s also potent on record- the new TOMORROW SOUND NOW FOR YES MUSIC PEOPLE sounds a bit like a more soulful James Hunter or funkier Los Lobos. Cebar sat down with The A.V. Club to talk about the new album, his ritualistic wanderlust, and the allure and influence of the Big Easy.

The A.V. Club:It’s been some time since your last studio and live releases. What have you been up to?

Paul Cebar:It’s been about 8 1/2 years since THE GET-GO, and five and a half since SUCHAMUCH, the live album. The band’s personnel shifted five years back with the departure of Mike Kashou, Terry Vittone, and Michael Walls and the arrival of [bassist] Patrick Patterson and [percussionist] Romero Beverly. During the course of those transitions we began to record with an eye toward the next record. With the lineup stabilized we headed for Brooklyn to work with Gabe Roth [Daptone’s Bosco Mann], whom I had befriended on one of his early tours with Sharon Jones. Then, we headed back home and began working with the producer, David Vartanian, whom I’d worked with mixing, editing and assembling the live album. To get it sounding uniform after all that rambling around, there was a lot of fine-tuning, remixing, editing and re-sequencing done, first with David V. and toward the stretch with Mike Hoffmann. Then a ridiculous label search for a doggone long-ass time. And voila!

AVC:You also did some home recording, right?

PC:We were touring out East and I started hollering “Knock It To Me Now” while pumping gas on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. I’d been working on a series of instrumental recordings built off of sub-par handheld tape recorders, boomboxes and samples and “Knock it…” seemed to want to exist in that world, with a nod in from [drummer] Reggie Bordeaux and Dave V. “Spread That Sugar” was inspired by some “advice” offered to me by Olu Dara, and took initial shape on a car recording that was augmented by drums we recorded at a house we used to stay in in Pittsburgh, and then melded at Dave’s studio. Subsequently, the band has turned it into a live highlight a few funky miles down the the track from the crypto-mysterio

version on the disc.

AVC:Jim Macnie of the Village Voice once wrote that your music has “it’s heart somewhere in the 5th ward of New Orleans.” Is New Orleans music still a big influence for you?

PC:New Orleans has always been a touchstone for me since my first visit back in ’78. I’ve made an annual visit to Jazzfest as something of a religious holiday since either ’80 or ’81. i actually met the writer of that blurb while driving him and a friend to the 5th ward to see a very early performance of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band.

AVC: The new record seems to cover a lot of other physical territory as well.

PC: In recent years, since the last studio record, I’ve made a return trip to Cuba, a visit to carnival in Trinidad, four trips to Mexico, and a grand visit, with the assistance of Milwaukee visual artist, Gerald Duane Coleman, to Salvador, Bahia in Brazil. all of these were undertaken in an effort to follow my heart to the music and feel. Also, I’m hoping that all my time driving the van around the country and shouting it out has added up to a coherence and clarity to my process that probably doesn’t come any other way.

–Todd Lazarski

* * * * *

Dave Hoektra of the Chicago Sun Times

Paul Cebar is Milwaukee
May 30, 2004

He has traveled the world with his band, but Paul Cebar always has called the Cream City his home. But his soul has never left his native Milwaukee. Cebar is the bandleader of Paul Cebar and the Milwaukeeans, who formed in 1986 as an offshoot of Milwaukee’s R&B Cadets. Cebar, 47, has since been a staple of the club scene in Chicago, Milwaukee and Minneapolis.

Few people understand what makes Milwaukee famous better than this adventurous native son.
I’ve always liked Milwaukee because of the late 1950s “Laverne and Shirley” texture of the city. Milwaukee is a treasure trove of funky bookstores, used record stores, vintage clothing shops, neighborhood bars and old world restaurants. I asked Cebar how the city retains its retro qualities. “We don’t have enough money to rip it all down,” he cracked during a daylong tour. “It’s a working class town. It can’t quite put on airs, it’s a down-to-earth situation here.

Any given day begins at Cebar’s apartment in the East Town neighborhood, several blocks northeast of downtown. His nine-room, fourth floor apartment is packed with 14,000 albums, 2,000 45s, hundreds of music books and several guitars. “A place like this (circa 1906) becomes a bargain because of walk-up status,” Cebar cracked. “Eight flights of stairs.”
One entire room is lined with African, Brazilian, Latin and gospel albums. Another huge section is devoted to jazz. Across the way, a reggae and calypso vinyl library is evenly divided. Boxes of Stax-Volt and New Orleans rhythm and blues 45s rest atop a bookshelf. A nearby coffee table has rare Cuban video dance tapes Cebar unearthed in Miami. A Regal resonator guitar (circa 1930s-40s) leans against the record library. Cebar found the precious instrument at Wade’s Guitar Shop, 3490 N. Oakland Ave (414-961-0848).

Fortunately–or unfortunately–Cebar lives a block away from Musical Memories, 833 E. Kilbourn, (414-271-0666), a place jammed to a Wisconsin walleye’s gills with 200,000 45s, 150,000 LPs, old cassettes and sports memorabilia. Musical Memories also has the best collection of 45 carrying cases this side of the Kane County Flea Market.

Cebar and I picked up two copies of “Wisconsin Grooves, Vol. 2,” a 28-song Milwaukee CD soul compilation with wonderful one-hit wonders like “A Man Ain’t Nothing Until a Woman Takes His Name” by Marvell and the Blue Match. “And Harvey (Scales) singles are tremendous and you never can find them,” Cebar said as he cited Scales dance numbers like “Get Down.”
Sometimes I’m reluctant to disclose the deepest of road secrets in the fear they will get overly discovered, but Cebar knows of the Park East Hotel, 916 E. State (414-276-8800, $99-$119 nightly), a dandy place in his neighborhood, walking distance from Lake Michigan. “A lot of musicians stay there,” he said. “And the Plaza Hotel (1007 N. Cass, 414-276-2101; ranging from $50-$94 nightly) is in East Town. They have a good diner (Cafe At the Plaza) there.”

Cebar also lives near Brady Street, a gentrified Italian neighborhood of small grocery stores and corner bars that has touches of San Francisco’s North Beach. Glorioso’s is a deli and grocery store at 1020 E. Brady (414-272-0540) that offers superb muffalatas and Italian sausage sandwiches. Joseph, Ed and Ted Gloriosio opened the grocery store in 1946. The restaurant followed in the 1960s. Cebar said, “Actually, the family of (late San Francisco Mayor Joseph) Alioto lived here. That gang from Sicily came here and to New York, Chicago.”

From his dance pad, Cebar regularly walks over to the breathtaking Milwaukee Art Museum (MAM), 700 N. Art Museum Dr. (414-224-3220). He is a member, and I know this because he dug out his membership card to help me get a discount in the museum gift shop. Time magazine named MAM’s addition, designed by Santiago Calatrava, “Best Design of 2001.” The addition features a moveable, winglike sunscreen on the roof. Cebar is proud of the museum. “It’s an oddly meditative place,” he said as he walked around the museum, filled with natural light. “I come here a lot. It’s like our city pet. In the summer, you stand outside on the lawn and you feel like you’re nuzzling up against some big elephant.”

The Milwaukee Art Museum has more than 20,000 works. The collections of American decorative arts, German Expressionism, folk and Haitian art and American art after 1960 are among the nation’s best. Cebar likes to goof around sculptor Duane Hanson’s “Janitor,” (circa 1973), a profoundly realistic figure made from polyester and cast fiberglass. This is when he thinks of the 1972 Betty Wright hit “Clean Up Woman.”

After leaving East Town, we drove three miles south through the Third Ward, Walker’s Point, (named after George Walker, one of the city’s first mayors) to the up-and-coming Bay View neighborhood. Picture Chicago’s Lincoln Square adjacent to Lake Michigan.
Cebar drove his new blue Chevy Van while playing some of his works in progress, such as ambient recordings he made with a (Cuban) marimbula recorded on a cheap tape recorder. In a Milwaukee studio, Cebar later added tambourine, maracas and guitar to create a Middle Eastern/Caribbean sound. He also contributed the Tams hit “Untie Me” to an upcoming Joe South tribute album that includes Chicago soul legend Otis Clay and vocalist Kelly Hogan.

Another favorite Cebar stop is the Walker Point Antique Center, 1134 S. 1st (414-383-3036). “It’s underneath the Allen-Bradley clock (now Rockwell Automation),” Cebar said. “The largest FOUR-SIDED clock in the world–at least it was when we were kids [it still holds the record]. It was also known as ‘The Polish Moon’.” At night, each of the 40-feet wide, 12-ton clocks are illuminated. Cebar laughed and repeated, ‘FOUR-SIDED.’ They had to qualify it. That’s a Milwaukee kind of distinction.”

Cebar and his band rehearse in Bay View and the neighborhood is the home of Cafe LuLu, 2265 S. Howell (414-294-5858), one of Cebar’s favorite restaurants. The cafe is in the distant shadow of St. Josaphat Basilica, 2333 S. 6th (414-645-5623). Cebar looked at the church and said, “It was an old post office building they brought up piece by piece from Chicago.” This is when I began to realize Cebar was more than a tour guide. He is a vital part of this city’s everyday fabric.

Cafe LuLu is characterized by an eclectic retro feel, including a collection of 60 vintage cookbooks. The three-year-old restaurant seats 110 people in two rooms and is open from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Saturday. Don’t expect a lot of fried foods. Specialty items include the Trinidad Chicken Salad (grilled chicken breast, seasoned with citrus rub and tossed in a house-made fresh lemon vinaigrette with (the root) jicama, $6.75) and The Mooney Tuna (Cajun-seasoned yellow-fin tuna steak grilled and set on a toasted kaiser roll, served with a side of blue cheese sauce, $6.50). Cafe LuLu was a good place to have Cebar sit down and dig into his roots, which are quintessential Milwaukee. His parents Anthony and Dorothy Cebar are retired schoolteachers. Anthony grew up in West Allis, not far from the old County Stadium. Anthony’s father was a factory worker from Croatia. Dorothy was reared in the industrial valley of Milwaukee. Her mother was from Czechoslovakia and her father came to Milwaukee from Austria. Cebar has a younger sister, Mary, who is a Head Start teacher in Milwaukee.

Cebar started playing guitar when he was 17. He attended New College in Sarasota, Fla., where he earned a degree in humanities with an emphasis on musicology. He wrote “The Blues What Am,” a thesis about 1940s bandleader Louis Jordan and the split between art and dance music. Cebar said there wasn’t a tremendous amount of music around the house growing up and the Ed Sullivan television show blew the doors open for rock ‘n’ roll music as it did in the mid-1960s for kids from Milwaukee to Manitoba.

“But Dad was an AV (audio visual) Man at his school,” Cebar said. “So he’d bring home turntables and fix them. He’d bring me transistor radios. I tried to listen to crystal radio. I got hooked. I’d be down in the basement listening to Barney Pip (on WCFL-AM out of Chicago). At night, we’d get WLAC (out of Nashville).”

Cebar’s earliest memories of hearing live music in Milwaukee is the Lakefront Festival of the Arts, still held (June 18-20) at the Milwaukee Art Museum. “It was a way for city kids to mingle with rich kids,” he said. “It was idyllic. It was jazz-oriented in my youth. I saw Red Norvell and Helen Humes. The Wild Magnolias came (from New Orleans). I was barely in my teens. You know (the Magnolias tune) ‘Big Chief’s Got a Golden Crown’? I had that in my head for years. Summerfest has been around for 30 something years. I remember seeing Dr. John there in the getup with glitter and the whole deal.”

The Milwaukee music club scene has become more scattered since Cebar broke out of the coffeehouse circuit in 1976. “Now there’s smaller clubs in different neighborhoods,” he said. “There’s nice theater venues. The Pabst Theater (144 E. Wells, 414-286-3663) has been restored and it’s a beautiful place to play at. They reconfigured the (old Milwaukee) Arena and Auditorium and that’s the Milwaukee Theatre now. There’s all this housing going up in the downtown area, it’s hard to say what’s going to happen.”

Cebar named his band after Milwaukee while playing a show in the trendy SoHo section of New York City. “I thought to just own up,” Cebar said. “All the names were so great back then. The Del Byzantines were playing. You couldn’t top it. Milwaukee means ‘gathering place of the waters,’ although one year someone wrote it meant more like ‘sinkhole’ to Native Americans.”
Cebar and the Milwaukeeans are a staple at the 300-seat Shank Hall, 1434 N. Farwell Ave. (414-276-7288, wwwshankhall.com). Glass Harp (featuring guitarist Phil Keaggy) appear at 8 p.m. Friday, followed by singer-songwriter Patty Larkin at 8 p.m. Saturday.
“When I started hitting clubs that was called Teddy’s,” he said. “I remember the week I got my ID, they had Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee on Tuesday, (Charlie) Mingus on Wednesday and Howlin’ Wolf on Thursday. I only had enough money for one show. I went to Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. I never saw Mingus or Howlin’ Wolf. I have to say it’s not like that right now. But it’s not like that anywhere.”

Cebar has strong fan bases in New Orleans, San Francisco and Seattle. I’ve known Cebar for nearly 20 years and have wondered why he stays in Milwaukee. He laughed for a long time before answering the question. “I get tired of that question from myself,” he said. “Early on it was very inexpensive. I could build a band here where their rent wasn’t so high they couldn’t afford to play with me. Also, Chicago is 90 miles, Madison is an hour and a half, Minneapolis is 51/2. That was my circuit, initially. My folks are here and I’m pretty close to them, although I don’t see them as often as I should.

“Also at different times I felt strong about the advantages of being from an ‘underdog’ town. My band was actually rehearsed, where my friends in New York had bands they couldn’t afford to rehearse. I had four sets I could play if I wanted to. Plus, if something happens in Milwaukee, it’s not like it gets imposed on you from somewhere else. There is an economy of scale that is somewhat attractive. Whenever I travel and come back, it is a good place to recharge and gather forces for another fore out into the wild world.”

Please contact Dave Hoekstra at dhoekstra@suntimes.com.

* * * * *

More from Mr Hoekstra
December 2003

The dance music of Paul Cebar and the Milwaukeeans is something regional clubgoers have taken for granted, like faint lights and fully krausened beer. But Cebar is making some of the most vital music of his career, fronting a new band that embraces hip-hop, reggae and old-school soul.Its a different band.
“It’s an evolution,” Cebar said last week from Milwaukee. “The last member to go was Terry Vittone, who left two years ago New Year’s. He was playing lap steel and additional guitar. But rather than add another member, I pared back and put the focus on rhythm. And its more focused on the idiosyncratic guitar work from the guy up front [Cebar].”

Cebar and the Milwaukeeans appear at a New Year’s Eve house party in the new 125-seat Sidebar at FitzGerald’s in Berwyn. “I’m coming in the sidecar to the sidebar,” Cebar cracked. “I hope there’s a salad bar.” Not quite, but appetizers, spring rolls and mini-quiche will be served from the Roosevelt Grill next door. Cebar is the first act to play two New Year’s Eves at FitzGerald’s. The cover to Cebar’s show also includes admission to the Cathy Richardson Band, playing next door in the main room.

The current edition of the Milwaukeeans consist of Reggie Bordeaux (drummer) and Bob Jennings (keyboard, saxophone and accordion), both of whom have been with Cebar since 1995. The newest members are Patrick Patterson (bass-vocals) and Romero Beverly (congas, percussion). Beverly also is musical director of the Ko Thai Dance Company in Milwaukee. Patterson plays in reggae bands around Milwaukee and also did some time on the Chitlin’ Circuit with Malaco Records, based out of Jackson, Miss.

“Our percussionist has been to Cuba and Senegal,” Cebar said. “He is a rhythm student so our Latin and African end has intensified with his abilities. Pat is a funkateer and reggae fiend. My departure has always been funk and soul oriented, with African and Latin aspects. If you look at the one record I’ve gotten played on the radio (1996’s “Didn’t Leave Me No Ladder”), it was a funk tune. But the funk end of things has certainly been stepped up. There is a freshness going on. Everyone is a very good singer. Its been fun to work on the blend of the whole band singing at different times.”

Paul Cebar and the Milwaukeeans formed in the summer of 1986 as an offshoot of the R&B Cadets. Now leading his fourth version of the Milwaukeeans, Cebar has been unyielding in his devotion to Afro-Cuban rhythms and 1940s jump music while incorporating contemporary influences such as hip hop and (reggae) toasting. “We’ve been struggling to find the next generation,” Cebar admitted. “The band has really come into its own within the last year, with an intensity some of my other bands maybe didn’t bring to the table.”
Cebar and the Milwaukeeans haven’t released a studio record since 1997’s “The get-go.” (Don’t Records) In 2001 they released “Suchamuch,” a live CD. A new studio record is in the can while Cebar shops for a label.

Cebar is a relentless road tripper. The band just came off a tour that started at the Green Parrot in Key West, Fla. (the island’s version of the Old Town Ale House in Chicago), moved north to the Hurricane in Marathon, Fla., an outdoor festival in West Palm Beach, a club in Tampa and finally the Rock n’ Bowl in New Orleans. “I’ve been doing a lot of field recordings as I’ve been traveling,” he said. “Since the last studio record we went to Cuba again, Trinidad for Carnival and I’ve been to Mexico pretty regularly. On all these journeys and all around the country, I’ve been recording on a primitive tape recorder and taking photos. The new record will incorporate some of that. I’m working on a whole [solo] record of primitive sound source with sample kind of music. I also did some recording with [coronet player, guitarist-vocalist] Olu Dara and that’s yet another record. I’m trying to keep it all going.”

Dave Hoekstra

* * * * *

Pamela Murray Winters of the Washington Post – August 2003

The band took the Rams Head Tavern stage Friday for three hours of jubilant, percussive music….. “Their blend of African and South American sounds placed them worlds away from the other Hawaiian-shirted throngs. Cebar currently tours with two percussionists, Reggie Bordeaux and conguero Romero Beverly, and they joined bassist Patrick Patterson for beats that were more lively than heavy. With Cebar on guitar and Bob Jennings on saxophone, keyboards and accordion, the result was full-on, pan-ethnic party music. Whether with a palm-wine song from Sierra Leone’s SE Rogie, a reggae reinvention of “Second That Emotion” or Cebar’s own soul/jazz/rock-influenced songs, the Wisconsinites seemed to have gone south from the Cheese State to form their own Bourbon Street second-line parade.

Cebar himself started slow and easy, with a( ……. )voice soon revealing itself to be a flexible and compelling instrument, particularly on his solo encores. The quiet eye at the center of this clamorous hurricane, he reveled more and more in the rhythms as the show progressed. During “Wasabi,” as Jennings pounded on the keys, the frontman performed a charming, idiosyncratic take on the Bus Stop, thrusting and hitching as his guitar, unneeded, dangled at his waist.
— Pamela Murray Winters

Tom Cheyney of the LA Weekly – July 2003

” If you need more groove after getting trancey with the Afro Celts on the Santa Monica Pier, then pop up Wilshire to catch a couple of sound collectives from our country’s prodigious midsection. Although his band’s name suggests oompah rather than git-go. Paul Cebar has been a primary investigator and promulgator of funky Afro-Carib-inflected Americana since the ’80’s. It’s been a while since he’s played here, but Cebar stays vital, putting his good foot forward from Green Bay to Baltimore to the Big Easy. Whether he’s checking for holes in the love bucket, building it on up from a firm foundation of love, or marveling at a sweet thing who’s twice little 16, Cebar wryly shines his lyrical high beams on the murky byways of the hetero heart. July 2003

Jim Macnie, The Village Voice – 2002

“Some regionalists are dreamers, and while this group of rhythm rounders
is situated in Wisconsin, their hearts are somewhere in the fifth ward of New
Orleans. They put a lively bar band spin on all sorts of American strains, from
second-line to funk to zydeco and they do it with a load of whimsy.”

* * * * *

Here are a couple of reviews that Paul has written for onmilwaukee.com when heroes have come to town:

Allen Toussaint Live at The Pabst Theater

Saturday, February 17th, 2007

Reviewed by Paul Cebar

Let me begin this review with a bit of a disclaimer. Near the end of the 70’s, I had the great pleasure to work my way into the captivating world of playing in a band by rubbing shoulders with my fellow R&B Cadets (John Sieger, Robin Pluer, Mike Sieger, Cy Costabile et al.).

Aside from John’s wonderful original music, the band’s repertoire was the result of a headlong effort to discover and rediscover the wonders of 50’s, 60’s and 70’s R&B. At certain times in the life of the band, fully half of the non-original material that the band performed came from the pen of one Allen Toussaint.

As Elvis Costello so craftily demonstrated this past year on his bracing,”The River In Reverse”, collaboration with Mr. Toussaint, in his own reticent, self-effacing, seemingly offhand though effortlessly elegant manner, Allen Toussaint has crafted an enormously expansive body of work that rewards scrutiny and re-examination with an impossibly winning mixture of light-heartedness, gut-level soul searching and sly, streetside philosophizing. Funky as hell to boot .

A quintessential writer-arranger (and virtuosic pianist), Toussaint first made his mark as a wizardly, behind the curtain creator of vehicles for an eccentric grab bag of insouciant streetwise characters in that most colorful hotbed of street level eccentricity that was late 50’s – early 60’s New Orleans. While allowing the likes of Lee Dorsey, Ernie K. Doe, Benny Spellman and truly countless others to “keep it real”, Toussaint’s delicious craft allowed him to keep it dreamy, debonair and ever so modest. Irresistable, in a word.

Fitting then, that on this his first headlining tour in an awfully long time if not ever, Allen and his lean 5-piece band (more on that in a minute) saw fit to launch into a medley to introduce those less familiar in the audience with the scope of the initial burst of creativity that put his collaborators on the map and his nuanced musicality at the root of many a later musical development.

Beginning with “A Certain Girl”, featuring an effective interpolation of Rhapsody In Blue in his piano solo, proceeding through “Mother-In-Law” (both tunes originally recorded by Ernie K Doe), followed by a pungent “Fortune Teller” (cut originally by Benny Spellman) punctuated by a caustic guitar solo from New Orleans veteran Renard Poche, romping through “Working In A Coalmine” (written for the impish auto mechanic, Lee Dorsey) during which Allen demanded and immediately got the audience’s help on the background vocal “whoops”(“I need my whoops”was how he phrased it) and finishing with a reprise of “A Certain Girl”,this was musicmaking of high spirits, loving memory and spare mastery.

After recounting Benny Spellman’s amusing arrogance in the wake of his role as the bass voice on K Doe’s “Mother-In –Law”, Toussaint slid into “Lipstick Traces”, his vehicle for Spellman, replete with a lovely, searching ”Won’t you come on home” bridge after which he quickly remarked, ”I did get Benny off my back for a couple of minutes with that one”.

Then, a stirring version of “All These Things”,his ballad written for a very young Art Neville with a terrific unison figure executed with”Aw shucks,that was nothing” aplomb by the seasoned combo.

After explaining that this tune was one of his entrees to the country market through a cover by Joe Stampley, he then self-deprecatingly mentioned that his recording of the following number sold 5 copies but that didn’t matter once Betty Wright recorded it and took it to the upper reaches of the R&B charts.

A storming version of the miraculous “Shoorah,Shoorah” ensued. He then spoke of the inspiration provided by a sandy-haired Scotsman whose genuine soulfulness and reliance upon warm Pabst tickled him into writing a few of his favorite tunes. (Though he never mentioned his name, this was the woefully under-recognised Frankie Miller.)

Cue “Brickyard Blues (Play Something Sweet)” and it’s plea for directness plus that wonder of a bridge. ”It’s enough to make a light in the dark, It’s enough to make a bite into a bark….”

Then, addressing the ”plenty of curses and lots of blessings” of the Katrina experience; one of the latter being the by-product of bringing Toussaint and his band out of New Orleans and into the Pabst tonight. He spoke of the experience of working with Costello and of Elvis’ encouraging recognition of the near prophetic prescience of Allen’s back catalog. (Toussaint is far too modest to speak of his own work as prophetic, however.)

He prayerfully slipped into his curbside entreaty,”Freedom For The Stallion” and damned if it didn’t strike my ear as the crafty and soothing elder brother to Curtis Mayfield’s masterful ”People Get Ready”. The Pabst is a fine dark place for crying tears of joy and otherwise.

“Freedom For The Stallion,Freedom for the Mare and her Colt

Freedom for the Baby Child who has not grown old enough to vote

Lord , Have Mercy, What you gonna do

About the people who are praying to you?

They’ve got men making laws that destroy other men

They make Money God,It’s a Doggone Sin

Oh Lord ,You’ve Got To Help Us Find A Way”

Then, into “Who’s Gonna Help Brother Get Further?” initially recorded for Lee Dorsey’s “Yes We Can” album and last year, the centerpiece of “The River In Reverse”. An unblinkered examination of our responsibility to each other in terms much more playful than most such things,

“What happened to the Liberty Bell

I heard so much about?

Did it really ding dong?

Ding Dong

It Must Have Dinged Wrong

It Didn’t Ding Long

With a reminder that it’s Carnival Time, the maestro and his crew paid a visit to the kingdom of one of his mentors, Professor Longhair, in the guise of a medley of “Big Chief”and “Tipitina” offered instrumentally with heartbreaking minor key restatements of the themes in a ruminative, meditative fingering of the grain of the experiential weight of these ostensible frolics. Intimations of loss, of the thinker abstracted from the festivities, of the flight of fancy…………..followed by a quick glance at “Yes We Can” with a delightful, rapid-fire accelerating vocal duet with tenor saxophonist Amedee “Breeze” Castenell.

Following the introduction of band members, Chris Severin on bass, Herman Le Beau on drums, Renard Poche on guitar and the aforementioned “Breeze in Db” on saxophone, Toussaint began to muse with pianistic punctuation about trips he, his father and siblings had taken ”out to the country where the old folk live”. Beyond the reaches of electricity,”none of that big B flat Big City Hum.”

Sketching a heirarchy of Creole forebears, ”This was before the world belonged to children”…”We didn’t know grown folk lied yet”, he rhapsodically conjured the extended family as self-sufficient and ever so contentedly sitting on the porch looking to the moonlight at play in the leaves above, “that soft sweet light show shining”.

Drifting into the near falsetto frailty of “Southern Nights” and forever rescuing it from the overplayed, glib vicissitudes of Glen Campbell’s lucrative hit version, this was the vulnerable,enormous beating heart of a grand storyteller sweetly intoning his long-hidden empathetic embrace of the ineffable thickness of the world. Among other things. With a full band fanfare of the theme, it was off to the wings with a standing ovation.

Then, as an encore, two tunes that have played large roles in others’ repertoires ( Bonnie Raitt and Boz Scaggs to name a couple ).”What Do You Want The Girl To Do?”, a laceratingly self-critical examination of one’s cowardice in the face of unconditional love. And “What Is Success?’, an examination of the tangled motives of Art and Finance couched in a tune more lilting than it has any right to be. “Truly believing and trying over and over again.” Ah, the gift economy!

Another glance at “Southern Nights” with an especially piquant two-fisted piano storm and off into the night.

The stripped down 5-piece band offered a tantalizing glimpse into the playfulness and exploratory vigor of Toussaint’s process. I’ve made pilgrimages to encounter the spectacle and pageantry of Allen Toussaint’s New Orleans performances replete with scores of impeccably scored horns, choruses of lusty background singers and an occasionally attendant surfeit of Vegas-like glitz and superficiality. Miraculously, virtually none of that tang of the tawdry clogged the musical palate last evening. His is a fragile and intimate muse. What a lean dream. Bravo and huzzah a thousand times.

* * * * *

“YOU CAME HERE ‘CAUSE IT WAS GONNA HAPPEN!”

Taj Mahal at the Pabst Theater

Thursday, September 14

Halfway through his playfully masterful seventeen song set Thursday night at The Pabst, Taj Mahal paused to remind the audience just why they’d come. “You came here ‘cause it was gonna happen.” And happen it most certainly did.

From the opening instrumental shuffle reminiscent of T-Bone Walker replete with his signature head-wagging, hip churning physicality through the thoroughly lovely island inflected lilt of “Loving In My Baby’s Eyes,” his encore, Taj embodied his grand, unassuming, but carnally persuasive vision of the living African diaspora.

“Thought we’d open right up with the blues, get your blood boiling,” he remarked before launching into “Done Changed My Way Of Living,” his first vocal number of the night. (As a footnote, that number is a particular highlight of his most recent album MKUTANO, a collaborative project recorded in Zanzibar with the Cultural Musical Club. The Cultural Musical Club, on their debut tour of the U.S., will coincidentally be performing this Sunday at 1 P.M. as part of the Global Union Festival at Humbolt Park.) It was clear from the git that we were in for an easy flowing pageant of hard-won but delightfully casual mastery.

This decade has unfolded as a grand return to the guitar for Mr. Mahal. After spending much of the nineties demonstrating his front man prowess whilst traveling with the Phantom Blues band, Taj has stripped back to a trio format and rushed into the breach with a stinging, ringing, and altogether righteous single-line solo style that is a most welcome complement to his unparalleled rhythmic finger-style approach.

In the vocal department he slides between his own clear impassioned upper range to a burnished, intimating,ever so masculine purr with stops at all stations in between including a dead-on Howlin’Wolf-inspired nasal shake. This chameleon like shading (which could come off as mere trickeration in lesser hands) was put to grand effect in an ominously throbbing tale of a lover so fine, “You did a rat-ta-tat tattoo on this heart of mine. You make a strong man holler, make a weak man lose his home”. Paced by Kester Smith’s clenched hi-hat and the insistent, dead-simple throb of Bill Rich’s bass, Taj turned the wolf loose on the strong man and delivered the weak man line with an excruciating tenderness reminiscent of his ballad singing on his landmark THE REAL THING album of 1971.

The glory of seeing this versatile performer forty years after his emergence on the scene is in encountering the enduring sass and fervor of his earliest work enriched and informed by the kind of gravity, authority, and offhand delight one achieves only through the sort of tireless devotion to exploration he has exhibited through the twists and turns of a restless, searching career.

Bill Rich, who played on the aforementioned 1971 release and with Taj for two decades following that, is the kind of steady foil that allows Taj’s rhythmic nods and feints to starkly charm and sting. Their ease and lightheartedness with one another is a joy to behold.

Trinidadian born Kester Smith anchored Taj’s sublime Caribbean-inflected bands of the ‘70s and ‘80s and his subtle, implied Carnival is just the ticket for their reinvigoration of their prescient previous breakthroughs.

Years ago, Taj remarked at a workshop that African-Americans use the song to get to singing. Through the course of his set, familiar lines, blues commonplaces, would find themselves inflected in stirringly singular ways in different tunes, riffs and rhythmic displacements against steady backdrops reinforced a fresh and open-ended sense of play. One delightful exchange came in the hypnotically insistent theme called “Zanzibar” with a lovely, tiptoeing, increasingly abstracted conversation between Taj’s amplified acoustic and Rich’s chiming harmonics on his electric bass.

Able to draw the audience into singing with him at a moments notice, switching tone on his guitar conjuring the starkness of John Lee Hooker one moment, the snap of Albert King the next, the impossible tenderness of Mississippi John Hurt or his own pan-Caribbean Joseph Spence-informed dancing hybrid of a thump (An absolutely efflorescent thicket of a syncopated guitar solo on his still glorious pulse-beat “Corinna” rushes to mind), Sublimity is close at hand and in plain view of the alley whenever Taj Mahal is in town. May he quickly return.

-Paul Cebar