reviews

RICK MASON, Special to the Star Tribune 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…

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…

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…

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…

JESSIE OPOIEN, The Capital Times, Madison, WI 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…

Jamie Lee Rake, Shepherd Express Milwaukee 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…

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 starting points for something that becomes uniquely…

The 60-Second Interview A bracing, fiercely creative—if all too infrequent—voice on the New Orleans music circuit is a native Wisconsinite named 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,…

March 2007 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…

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…

Rick Mason of City Pages, Minneapolis-St. Paul 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,…

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…

Dave Hoekstra of the Chicago Sun Times 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…

Dave Hoekstra of the Chicago Sun Times 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…

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…

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…

“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.”