Andre Hayward at the Skylark Lounge with the late Margaret Wright’s piano (Photo by David Brendan Hall)
Standing onstage with saxophonist Elias Haslanger s local quintet, Andre Hayward preps for his moment. As the two men finish a harmonized riff on the bandleader s Smiley s Stairs, Hayward lifts his bell to the microphone to take the first solo. The trombonist sticks close to the melody at first, adding slight variations, before scattering flurries of notes that belie their creator s relaxed state.
At the point it all threatens to veer too far outside, Hayward brings it back home, gracefully recasting the melody and setting up Haslanger s own break. Though there s no live audience, Hayward earns enthusiastic applause from his bandmates.
Bandcamp
Alongside Austin s Dicks and Big Boys, Houston s Really Red proved as integral to early-Eighties American punk
culture as Black Flag or Dead Kennedys. Lasting 1978-85, the aggregation of singer/frontman Ronnie U-Ron Bondage Bond, drummer Bob Weber, guitarist Kelly Younger, and bassist John Paul Williams rarely followed regulation punk templates. Old enough to recall Texas psychedelia on ramalama like Crowd Control, their trace elements of art-damaged funk and blues seeped into – from 1981 onward – the band s ballistic thrashing à la Bad Brains on tracks such as I Was
a Teenage Fuckup.
Meanwhile, Bond s lyrics engage race, sexuality, police brutality, and resistance to authoritarianism.