"It's so hard to find a good tenor banjo," Carpenter laments about those gigs when Seabrook isn't available. The more common five-string — typical of bluegrass — is just no substitute. "It's not so much the sound as the playing style," Carpenter says, since the five-string players are usually wedded to the clawhammer picking style. Hey, as long as he doesn't nerd out about it.
GHOST TRAIN ORCHESTRA | Regattabar, Charles Hotel, 1 Bennett St, Cambridge | October 18 | 7:30 pm | $16 | 617.395.7757 or regattabarjazz.com
Related:
Streaming, Scholarship gigs, Darrell Nulisch | Just For You, More 
- Streaming
It's standard operating procedure these days for young jazz bands to mix the free and the formal.
- Scholarship gigs
When in 1999 Björn Wennås moved from Sweden to Boston to study jazz guitar, he hardly imagined that he'd one day be playing in an ensemble that specializes in Italian folk music of the 12th to 19th centuries.
- Darrell Nulisch | Just For You
This Boston-based blues and soul singer’s seventh album might seem an update of the elegantly funky Stax sound, with its deep grooves and smartly harmonized horns.
- Review: Carmen Consoli at Regattabar
How Italian was the crowd at Carmen Consoli's sold-out Regattabar show? The language was everywhere. The couple from Methuen sharing our table were 50 percent, and the Italian husband estimated the room at 90 percent. (I was guessing 85.)
- No connections
There's very little connecting these two shows except that both were jazz and both took place on the same night. So I won't try.
- Ralph Towner/Paolo Fresu | Chiaroscuro
For some, these open, airy, acoustic guitar/trumpet duets, couched in typically pristine ECM production, will fall too easily on the ear.
- Extremeties
You can experience jazz at two different extremes at the Regattabar this month, in visits from the quintets of Dave Holland and Tomasz Stanko.
- Time travelers
Trumpeter Tom Halter is wearing one of his snazzy mariachi outfits (black vest and pants with white embroidery). Russ Gershon is retouching his own make-up to get some of the green out (“I don’t look so much like a corpse now”).
- Lionel Loueke | Mwaliko
Benin-born, Paris-and-Berklee-educated guitarist Loueke knows how to cover a lot of ground and make it all sound of a piece.
- Ilona Kudina, Gretchen Parlato, and Your Neighborhood Saxophone Quartet
Although Ilona Kudina is a flutist, I'm hesitant to call her new Nothing But Illusion a wonderful jazz-flute CD, because it's really just a wonderful jazz album.
- Dominick Farinacci's hometown arias
Farinacci releases the new, romantically-themed Dawn of Goodbye (E1) on July 26 and comes to the Regattabar on August 3.
- Less
Topics:
Jazz
, Brian Carpenter, regattabar, regattabar, More
, Brian Carpenter, regattabar, regattabar, 1920s, Less
