Category Archives: de musica

Oh yeah, THAT’s what Fiano d’Avellino tastes like!

Posted on by

If only you could have been a fly on the wall in our dining room at the moment that Tracie P drew that first drop of Fratelli Urciuolo 2008 Fiano d’Avellino to her lips last night. “Oh yeah,” she said with a joyous reverence, “THAT’s what Fiano d’Avellino tastes like.”

For all the blessings of our lives, there’s (almost) nothing that makes me happier than bringing home a wine that my super fine lady will enjoy. “This is the Fiano d’Avellino that I remember drinking in Naples and Ischia,” she said, speaking of the nearly five years she lived, worked, and cooked in Campania before returning to Texas.

With bright acidity, great minerality, and a characteristic “toasty” note that you often find in real Fiano d’Avellino (as Tracie P noted), the wine paired beautifully with another flavor system that she brought back with her from Campania: cannellini beans cooked with escarole and chicken stock and ditalini (tube-shaped pasta) — a southern Italian pasta e fagioli. Fanfriggin’ DELICIOUS people!

After being properly nourished, the band retreated once again into the Parzen studio, where we continue to write, record, and hash out the songs for the new album that we will begin “tracking” on Sunday here in Austin.

I’ll spare you the details of my digestive cycle, but the morning after a fantastic meal of real Fiano and Tracie P’s “greens and beans,” as she likes to call the dish, I AM READY TO MAKE MUSIC! :-)

Cooking for the band: Tracie P’ulled pork with chocolate and chiles

Posted on by

Yes, hell has frozen over and the band is getting back together.

Céline Dijon and Jean-Luc Retard and I (Cal d’Hommage) have begun recording our new album in the Groovers Paradise (otherwise known as Austin).

And Tracie P has been cooking up a storm.

Yesterday, she cooked a pork shoulder for seven hours in our Crock-Pot with chiles and chocolate. They were served topped with homemade slaw, avocados, and fresh salsa and wrapped in corn tortillas from a local tortilleria. The 06 Montbourgeau made for a fantastic pairing.

Chip and dip, anyone? Please pass the grooves…

No trip to Austin, Texas is complete without…

Posted on by

A visit to Ginny’s Little Longhorn Saloon to see Dale Watson…

Dale is such a sweet guy and when he heard that Céline Dijon was in town from Paris, he kindly posed for photo op with her.

The joint was packed but some how, some way, we still managed to find a seat at the bar (we always do).

Here’s a little taste of the groovy stuff…

They’re with the band! ;-)

Scenes from our SXSW

Posted on by

It’s not easy to understand what SXSW is until you’ve actually experienced it. That’s the scene last night on Sixth Street, which is literally lined (all year round) with music clubs. During the festival hundreds and hundreds of bands come here and there is music non-stop from the morning until the dawn — and then it starts all over again.

Our high light last night was Chateau Marmount, an awesome electronica band out of Paris.

They’ve been killing it on their first American tour.

German band Torpedo Boyz rocked the Kraftwerk.

Tracie P took this pic of me with our A&R man Humphrey Bogart and Céline. I’ve known Humphrey since I was a freshman at UCLA in 1985 and he’s been with our band Nous Non Plus since the early years (1998).

Diana Ross (!) at the new Austin City Limits theater

Posted on by

Tracie P and I went with Aunt Holly and Uncle Terry to see Diana Ross at the brand-spanking new Austin City Limits theater last night.

Great venue, GREAT show… Austin just keeps getting cooler and cooler by the day…

Thanks again, Holly and Terry, for dialing that in! Super FUN… :-)

Magliocco, swordfish, and Gossip Girl

Posted on by

That’s the inimitable Shawnté Salabert, writer, voiceover artist, and song plugger for Sugaroo (my band NN+’s licensing agent). She’s the one who got our track “Catastrophe” (click to listen to preview) into Gossip Girl tonight. (Hey, I know it’s not Master Piece Theatre but if the teenage female American demographic digs my music, I ain’t complaining!)

“Catastrophe” is one of my favorite tracks: I wrote it in NYC with Céline Dijon back in 2007 (seems like a lifetime ago). Tonight’s episode also features another song I wrote and recorded with Céline in New York many years ago, when we played in another now unmentionable French band together. It’s called “Les Sauvages.”

I got to meet and thank Shawnté in person on Thursday when I went to visit the mother office and have dinner with my old friend and music biz veteran Michael Nieves, who cooked up a delicious swordfish steak, which we paired with a bottle of 2009 Terre di Balbia Balbium (I had tasted it earlier that day at a trade tasting and swiped the bottle from the rep).

This 100% Magliocco from Calabria, raised by Venica & Venica, is one of the most exciting wines from Southern Italy that I’ve tasted this year (and I’ve been tasting a lot of southern Italian wines recently for a new consulting gig).

From what I understand, some (or all?) of the grapes are briefly dried in the vineyard before vinification. I was blown away by the freshness of this wine, its balanced alcohol (a little higher than I like but nicely settled in the wine), and its juicy cherry and plum flavors and bright acidity. Extremely yummy wine, excellent with Michael’s roast swordfish steak dusted with paprika.

Thanks again, Michael and Shwanté: for the placement and the rocking piece of fish!

Magical tasting with Ronco del Gnemiz

Posted on by

Alfonso captured a magical moment yesterday at Ronco del Gnemiz with his Flip.

Serena and Christian have such an awesome record collection: we couldn’t resist asking them to pair their wines with some music (in this case Cassandra Wilson with the 2004 Chardonnay Sol in magnum).

Icing on my cake: my fav NN+ song in Gossip Girl 2nite

Posted on by

Click image to listen.

As if celebrating one’s anniversary with one’s gorgeous wife in Venice weren’t enough, today’s icing on the cake is sliced in the form of one of my favorite Nous Non Plus tracks, Monokini, appearing tonight on Gossip Girl.

71 Gattinara Monsecco (Conte Ravizza), Lenny Bruce, and BrooklynGuy

Posted on by

One last “wines and the city,” killer wines I tasted last week in NYC…

Beyond the “farmed content” found on aggregate sties (which tries to get you to land on their pages in order to show you advertising), there’s not much info out there in the interwebs about the 1971 Gattinara Monsecco Conte Ravizza by Le Colline, Vercelli, which I got to taste last week thanks to the generosity of BrooklynGuy’s childhood friend Dan (who reminded me, in all the best ways, of my favorite Litvishe Jew, Lenny Bruce, and as it turns out, whose father represented Lenny Bruce is his legal battle against censorship! Incredible!).

The bottle we shared (thanks to Dan, paired with BrooklynGuy’s stunning bread-crumb- and marjoram-encrusted rack of lamb, above) had a strip label on the front that reported: “selected and shipped by Neil Empson, Milan.” On the back, there was a round label that reported: “Acquired from a private cellar [by] Acker, Merrall, & Condit,” the famed rare wine broker of the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

In 1985, Sheldon Wasserman didn’t offer a tasting note for this wine in Italy’s Noble Red Wines, but he did write that “Luigi & Italo Nervi places 1971 among the worst vintages [for this appellation] and Travaglini puts it with the best! Antonio Rossi gave it three stars, Niederbacher, one. Obviously a controversial vintage. We never agreed with the three-star rating. Nevertheless, we find that all are too old now. At Le Colline they consider their ’71 Monsecco on a par with the ’64, so it should still be good.”

Dan mentioned that he had experienced some serious bottle variation in the lot he acquired but, man, this wine was off-the-charts good. Fresher than I would have expected on the nose (topped off? perhaps; the bottle was definitely reconditioned), with gentle berry fruit on the nose and on the palate, and wonderfully integrated tannin. I agreed with BrooklynGuy’s approach of not decanting this wine and opening it right before service (for the record, Dan had brought it over a few nights before and BrooklynGuy left it standing up right for more than 24 hours). Great wine…

Before we got to the Gattinara, BrooklynGuy reached into his cellar for a 2000 Moccagatta by Produttori del Barbaresco, which paired superbly with a savory mushroom flan that he prepared for our Brooklyn repast. Frankly, I was surprised by how tannic this wine was, especially considering the fact that Moccagatta tends to come around earlier than some of the more powerful crus (like Montestefano or Rabajà). At 10 years out, it seems to be closing down but with a little aeration we coaxed out some bramble and red berry fruit balanced by the mushroom and earth that are Produttori del Barbaresco’s signature. Killer wine…

This last trip to NYC was an intense one: after heading back through the sludge to the city, Verena and I wrote one more song before calling it a night… Someday, if that nowhere song for nobody ever gets recorded, I’ll play it for BrooklynGuy.

I didn’t get to do a lot of socializing or fancy eating this time around. But I was really glad to connect with BrooklynGuy, who’s become a super good friend.

I remember a time, not so many years ago, when he and I first met in person, in San Diego. Life then for me was good but didn’t have the direction and purpose it has today. At a taco shop in La Jolla (where Tracie P and I would later hold the rehearsal dinner for our wedding some two years later), BrooklynGuy — with the wisdom of a rabbinic Lenny Bruce — reminded me gently of the goodness in me and pointed out confidently that I would find my path again. He probably didn’t realize then how much those words meant to me. I hope some day I can return the favor…

Writing nowhere songs for nobody

Posted on by

While in New York City, I spent some intense sessions writing songs with my super good friend and writing partner Verena, aka Céline Dijon of our band Nous Non Plus. She and I began writing together in 2000 (!) and if you watch TV and/or movies or listen to college radio, you might have heard some of the songs we’ve written and recorded together with our bandmates.

These days, I write so much: for my own blog, for VinoWire, and for so many other blogs to which I contribute openly or anonymously as a ghost writer. Everything I write is published almost immediately.

The process of songwriting is the exact opposite: we come up with an idea, we play around with it, we improvise melodies and discuss the subject, and we flesh out the lyrics. In our case, I usually have a riff or a song structure and then Verena writes the melodies and lyrics. But that’s just the BEGINNING of the process. We then record the demo and start fine tuning it. If we decide that we want to release a given song, we will rerecord it and then set into motion all the elements that go into a release: rehearsing, recording, mixing, mastering, artwork for the album, and ultimately a new record — a process that takes months and months. In the meantime, these works are just nowhere songs for nobody (although I always play them for Tracie P).

Recording technology is so accessible these days. All you need is a decent computer and relatively inexpensive software and hardware (a tube-powered microphone preamp, a digital-to-analog interface, and a decent microphone). When I started working the recording arts at 19 years old (some 24 years ago), we used expensive 24-track tape machines that used 2-inch-wide reels of tape!

We took a break from the intense process of songwriting for a visit from the newest member of the Nous Non Plus family, Vivian, with her dad (and NN+ drummer) Harry Covert.

Buona domenica, ya’ll! Have a great Sunday…