Supabad, the James Brown-inspired funk band from Bangkok, likes it ‘loud, hard and dirty’. They will return to the FCC Phnom Penh later this year.

The new Café Fresco Sunway in Toul Kok does afternoon activities for kids every Saturday. Read the full story.

Phil Manning is bringing his unique blend of front-porch guitar blues to Phnom Penh.

Manning will play The FCC Phnom Penh on June 29 and 30.

Phnom Penh, once a sleepy outpost along the Mekong River, has in recent years began evolving into a robust Asian capital. Manning is the latest in a string of international acts to perform in the city over the last 12 months. Others include DJ Cash Money, Sean Kingston and The Backsliders.

“I never go anywhere far from home without a guitar,” says the 61-year-old Tasmanian bluesman, who will be traveling through the region with his wife. “It’s just terrific to have the opportunity to play while we are there.”

Manning has been a fixture on the Australian music scene since the late 1960s. In 1969, he co-founded the band Chain, arguably the greatest blues band Australia has ever produced.

Manning and Chain are often credited for exposing Australia to blues music, the roots of which come from America’s black communities in the country’s deep south.

Critics praise Manning for his sensational technical abilities, silky vocals and insightful songwriting. A finger-picker and slide guitar player, he points to the six-string style of the early delta masters as the foundation of his music.

With those powerful roots, Manning has blended a lifetime of further musical influence, and echoes of country, bluegrass and folk reverberate through his songs.

“Later on I discovered players like Doc Watson, Norman Blake, Tony Rice and the whole bluegrass thing,” he says. “All that (and a bit of Celtic) have rubbed off in the way I play, although I never sat down and learnt much of it note for note. I’d probably be a better player if I had, but I’ve sort of got my own way of going about things as a result.”

He has shared the stage with many of the genre’s greatest names, including Muddy Waters, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee, Albert Collins, Freddie King and even Bo Diddley.

“We had about 10 minutes of rehearsal and that was it,” he says of playing with Diddley, the legendary Chicago bluesman. “From that we did an hour and a half show.”

Manning says that after 45 years of pickin’ and grinnin’, he has now matured into a complete guitarist.

“My influences are totally absorbed into my own playing, and there is sense of satisfaction that comes from that,” he says.

For the Phnom Penh shows, Manning will play much like the turn-of-the-century American blues travelers of a hundred years ago.

“I’ll have one of my acoustic guitars (with pickup of course) and a stomp box,” he says.

Rather than work from prepared material, Manning prefers to let the crowd set the direction.

“I usually have a few things I start with to settle in and relax. After that the set goes where it feels right,” he says. “I have a lot of songs in my head, mostly original and traditional blues or blues-based pieces.”

You’ll forgive me for not immediately realising that Phnom Penh is an oyster town. It’s not next to the sea and there doesn’t seem to be a word in the Khmer language for oyster. And yet there’s an oyster culture in Phnom Penh, with locals and expats alike enjoying oysters on the half shell all over town

Lina’s gives a quick rundown of the Phnom Penh oyster scene, including one streetside stall where oysters sell for a mere 1,400 riels each. And, as an aside, according to colleagues there is in fact a Khmer word for these succulent, slippery mollusks. It’s oy-stuh.

Well … that’s too long.

El Dealbrakers. Saturday night. No cover.

Called the “second Angkor Wat,” Banteay Chhmar approaches it in size, is more frozen in time than the manicured and made-over superstar, and has so far been spared the blights of mass tourism of recent years at Angkor.

In 2011, an average of 7,000 tourists a day visited Angkor, one of Asia’s top tourist draws located near the booming northwestern city of Siem Reap. Banteay Chhmar saw an average of two a day, with no tour buses and bullhorn-wielding guides to disturb the temple’s total tranquility or traditional life in the surrounding village.

Sounds magical.

If Edward Lear had penned music instead of poems, El Dealbreakers is exactly what it would sound like. This squeaking, honking, tub-thumping cacophony is as close to musical nonsense as you can get — and it’s indisputably brilliant.

They call it rhythm and greens.

“It’s kind of polka-billy or something,” says 51-year-old accordionist Frank Ruffolo, whose dulcet Californian drawl suggests the folk icons of the La Canyons more than the ’70s punk rockers who influenced him most. “We lay it down, make up the parts and then take other people’s songs — Elvis Costello or Iggy Pop — and we try to beat it into some sort of rock-metal polka, using horn parts instead of guitar parts. We just try to mess things up. We play the right songs with the wrong band.”

It’s all in the name, says Frank, a self-declared songwriter and bum. “A deal-breaker is something that makes it wrong. Like a guy who is dressed really well, with a mullet; or a date with someone really attractive, who gets drunk and passes out: any one detail that ruins the rest of the picture. It’s about our concept of blowing away convention with our choice of instruments and songs.”

Their set-up is anything but conventional: guitars and harmonicas are banned. “They tend to play over the top of what you’re trying to do. It’s the only rule. It’s not that we hate guitar and harmonica, it’s just that we’re trying to do the forms of American music that aren’t the regular 1/4/1/5 blues and not use those instruments, or bass, or drums. It’s a deal-breaker.”

Instruments that aren’t banned include the bajo-quinto, a 10-string Mexican guitar played by Matt Schumacher and a sousaphone, a type of tuba played by 23-year-old Garrett Smith from New Mexico.

Less peculiar but equally essential to the rousing chorus are the trumpet and mandolin, played by Chicago music scene veteran Justin Ringsak, with Chris Davis — discovered in Kampot two years ago — on fiddle and Sydney jazz trombonist Senor Nick.

The resulting oom-pah effect is nothing if not comedic. “We’re all about the fun. We pretty much started this band to have fun with it. The sousaphone makes us laugh; the tuba makes us laugh all the time when we’re playing it. It’s at the high end of hilarity, what we’re playing, because of the instruments we’re using. It just clanks all the time and honks and squeaks and squeals and barks. It’s something…”

What makes this melee so magnificent is as much about the musicians themselves. Influences span everything from Irish and country music to jazz and bluegrass, but boundaries are surprisingly fluid.

“Everybody’s a good musician. Matt, who plays the bajo quinto, is also a funk bass player by trade. Garrett the sousaphone player is a champion trombonist, so he taught the trombone player how to play. The bass player taught the tuba player what to play and the guitar player is a bass player, so he can also tell the tuba player what to play. The tuba player is also a trombone player, so he can tell the trombone player what to play and I have the keyboard, so I can arrange horn parts. It just kind of gels.”

What also gels is the band’s twin sets of roots, one here and one in the US. All of the full-time members have bases in Butte, Montana, but several spend up to half the year here.

“Montana’s the place where we hide from the US, and here’s where we hide from Montana. There’s nowhere to go after this except maybe the moon.”

Cambodia and Montana are not as disparate as their coordinates might suggest. “Montana’s a broken down mining town in a beautiful place. Kampot is like that for us: a functioning ghost town. It’s a spaghetti Eastern for us here, a cowboy movie. It’s like New Orleans 150 years ago. Cambodia is like Montana in a way. Relatively lawless, but not totally lawless: a wild, wild East vibe that we like.”

While Cambodia’s wild side has mellowed some since the band first arrived, that gentrification has brought with it better musical opportunity. The scene has matured, says Frank. “There are a lot more venues and it seems everyone’s in about three bands. There aren’t enough musicians to go around. When I first came, you could only get a job playing Thin Lizzie covers for the old beer-drinking expats. If you tried anything outside that, you’d get ridiculed, but now eclectic music has become much more acceptable.”

The fact that El Dealbreakers arrived in Phnom Penh minus a member, but were able to hire a substitute on the spot bears testament to his claim. “We came here without a trombonist and one just fell into our lap. We were sitting in a bar and in walks this guy with a trombone case. I find good musicians in all sorts of places. I see some accordion players and think wow, I wish I could play like that — and they probably look at me and think wow, we wouldn’t play like that…”

Frank laughs — which, ultimately, is what El Dealbreakers is all about. “Everybody mashes it together and makes up parts. We all know what it’s supposed to sound like, so we just reassemble a song and try to steer it. We just let it out of the chute and try to hang on for three minutes.”

Written by LJ Snook

Next up is the absolutely fabulous El Dealbreaks, who play the FCC rooftop Sat Jan 14.

If Edward Lear had penned music instead of poems, El Dealbreakers is exactly what it would sound like. This squeaking, honking, tub-thumping cacophony is as close to musical nonsense as you can get — and it’s indisputably brilliant. They call it rhythm and greens.

Check out the El Dealbreakers web site for downloads and other goodies.

The smoky, soulful vocals of Filipino native Juram Gavero return to The FCC Phnom Penh this weekend. The singer-songwriter plays one show Saturday night, Dec 3.

Based in Saigon, Juram has in recent years become something of a regular on the Phnom Penh live music scene, where he has steadily built a loyal following.

At a previous solo show at Chow, the bar’s front doors were opened to let the music pour into the street. People walking past couldn’t help but stop and take note of Juram’s deep, powerful vocals.

Yet for a lead singer with an award-winning voice, the 32-year-old Juram remains remarkably humble. He refuses to skate on talent alone — although anyone who has heard him sing knows he could do just that. The foundation of his success, he says, comes from being an entertainer first, not a singer.

“When people tell you, oh, you sing so well, you have such a great voice, you can’t listen to that stuff,” he says. “You can’t let that go to your head.”

Soothing his vocal chords with a glass of red wine, Juram says the audience is the most important part of any gig and connecting with the crowd is his number one priority. He makes eye contact with everyone who walks through the door, and between sets, he likes to mingle with the crowd, shaking hands and making friends.

While many musicians often play from a prepared song list, Juram the entertainer lets serendipity and intuition lead the direction of his shows.

“I study the rhythm of the people,” he says.

He likes to play a few songs and see how people react, then let the energy of the crowd guide him.

Juram plays mostly rock ‘n’ roll classics, but like every good musician, he is well-versed in the standards of other genres as well, and he is comfortable playing everything from Johnny Cash to Metallica.

Raised in Mindanao, Juram first left the Philippines in 1998 at the age of 20. His band, named Juram, had just won a nation-wide battle of the bands contest, and the grand prize was guaranteed work on either a cruise ship or in Singapore.

He says life on a boat did not appeal to him, so he hopped the flight to Singapore. When the gig was up, he followed some friends to Vietnam, where he is now a fixture in Saigon’s live music scene.

“Music is my passion,” he says. “If the sound is right, and I am sitting with the right people, I can play until morning.”