For the last few years, I have aspired to write about every show I see. In reality, I have not even come close to doing so, I have barely written anything, which is a shame… for me, at least. So, I’ve tried to recalibrate my expectations of myself and am going to try and summarize each month of livemusic’n, hit some of the high points and try to wrap it up in a single theme that captures both the music and my thoughts on music and whatever. We’ll see how it goes!
ICYMI: October 2023: Nostalgia Acts
December is, of course, holiday season, which means egg nog and Christmas trees, Menorahs and gifts. It also means holiday-centric livemusic and my December was bookended by two longstanding residencies that celebrate in very different ways.
The early part of the month was dominated by the annual Yo La Tengo Hanukkah run, which has been going on for decades, starting at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, but now finding a cozy-by-the-fire home at Bowery Ballroom in the Lower East Side. If you are unfamiliar with this residency, YLT plays all 8 nights of Hanukkah, pretty much repeating zero songs over the course of a plus-sized week, with each show featuring an opening act (typically one of national, if not local, interest) and an A-class comedian that you don’t find out about until the doors have opened, a literally wrapped present every light-the-candle night. The shows themselves are a gift that keeps on giving, with special guests, lots of one-off covers and plenty of deep cuts as the week progresses. Even if you’re utterly unfamiliar with Yo La Tengo, these shows are a livemusic treat, a little bit of rock and roll oil that miraculously burns really freakin’ bright for 8 crazy nights. One moderately-sized paragraph later, I don’t think I’ve adequately described the spirit or energy or downright fun of the YLT Hanukkah shows, as varied and exotic as there are ways to spell Hanukkah, something you have to experience firsthand to truly appreciate, the what-will-happen? mystery adding a tangible bit of risk to your ticket. Because there’s a non-zero chance you’ll catch a dud — an opener that doesn’t click, a comedian that falls flat or worse, or a special guest that deflates the energy — even while the odds are pretty good that you will have a transcendent concert experience.
I was able to catch 4 of these this year, maybe too few, maybe too many, maybe, just maybe, juuuuust right. I was there the first night when Sun Ra Arkestra, led by 99 year old (ninety NINE year old) Marshall Allen, opened the show. The Arkestra is a delight, both as historically significant flagbeared of the otherworldly Sun Ra, but also because they’re fun to see live. They play pretty much every Hanukkah run, just a question of which night, and halfway through their set I rememembered that they played a very, very long (too long, IMO) opening set last year an this year as much of the same. I don’t personally feel that anyone should play an opening set longer than an hour, but I may be in the minority with that take. It was good, but not the best. The comedian the opening night was godawful, the less said the better. The SRA also came out in a smaller form to sit in for a large chunk of the set and again, it was good, but maybe too long. The thing is, just like with the openers and the comedian, you just don’t know which Yo La Tengo you’re going to get from night to night… and there are seemingly infinite versions of this band: the with-horns jazzier/funkier version we got on 12/7, or the spaced-out quiet version, or the cacophonous earplugs-in version, or the exploratory jammy version or the version that plays a 5-song encore of Velvet Underground songs or some hybrid of those or something unexpected altogether.
The other three nights I caught were rather spectacular, though, the band finding a real groove, mixing up their gorgeous-whisper softness with their hair-raising loudness with a veteran expertise. Over the holiday run I passed my 40th YLT show and yet I still barely know any song titles or the history of the material. Seeing Yo La Tengo is a very in-the-moment experience for me, each moment a new surprise, a spin of the dreidel with a pot of gelt that grows or shrinks with the randomness of a spinning top’s tumble. One of the many in-joke traditions (and there are many) of the Hanukkah run is that the encores are almost entirely made up of songs written by Jewish songwriters. So yes, on 12/12 there was an entire encore of Velvet Underground songs and then on 12/13 there was an amazing juxtaposition where Damon & Naomi came out and back-to-backed Paul Simon’s “The Boxer” with the Beastie Boys’ “Fight for Your Right (To Party)” and both were kinda nailed and that all kind of sums up the delightful surprise-laden Yo La Tengo Hanukkah shows.
In between there were too many highlights to list, each show had at least two or three “monsters,” both Davids and Goliaths, gorgeous ambient weirdness or guitar-thrash fuckyeah!ness. My favorite sit-in came from Stevve Gunn who was part of the opening band on night 8 and then sat in, adding his light-but-heavy guitar most notably on “Evanescent Psychic Pez Drop” and then was given the spotlight to sing his own “Other You” which is as indicative of the kindness and generosity shows by Ira, Georgia, and James to their guests as anything. I was floored on 12/8 by a wig-flipping “Ohm” > “The Story of Yo La Tengo,” the latter of which burned enough gas for 8 days of light or more, just intense noisejams of the highest order. In the end, as cliche as it sounds, there truly is nothing quite like the Yo La Tengo Hanukkah run, in a city filled with one-of-a-kind livemusic experienes, no one can hold a candle to these guys, year in, year out.
Not even the band that completed the other bookend to the holiday month, that being, of course, the one and only Phish who plays the World’s Most Famous Arena like it’s their own private club, sitting in residency at Madison Square Garden for more New Year’s Eves than not over the past 30 years. Their run is a four-night run, typically culminating on 12/31 and I was at all four of them, different spots and different companions each night, with similar results. Those results being: how the fuck do these guys continue to operate at such a high level?!?! As unfathomable as it is to contemplate Yo La Tengo assembling and curating 8 nights of specialness, it is an order of magnitude more so to contemplate how good Phish is 40 years into their career, dismantling the biggest stage in the world like it’s no big whoop.
Highlights galore! The first night I was in close proximity to the stage, hanging out with my daughter and son with a near-perfect first-night-of-the-run. If anything, I enjoyed this one largely through the lens of my kids, especially my son who kind of reluctantly decided to join us for effectively his first show (i.e. his first show not as a toddler being hoisted there without consultation). Anyway, they both loved it, my son declaring it “sick!” and my daughter exclaiming it to be the best PH she’s seen. Personally, I loved the first set jamming of “Halley’s Comet” and “Bathtub Gin” and the inventive, holyshitness of “Mike’s Song” > “Simple” in the second, the good outweighing the bad and the awkwardness of the encore. The second night was all about the second set, a bit of Phish NYE-run perfection even though my head wasn’t 100% into it at the time.
After the 30th I heard nothing but bad things about the show as a whole, lackluster, disjointed, what-have-you. This all came as news to me, because the combination of what they played, how they played it, where I was standing, and who I was enjoying it with combined for one of the more enjoyable nights I had seeing Phish this year. While it may have started slowly, from Fuego on, I was in non-stop dance mode, in the proverbial zone, a go-anywhere “Fuego,” a taste-of-grooves-to-come “It’s Ice” and a jam-of-the-run set-closing “Life Saving Gun” highlighting the first half of the night. The second set bounced from one song to another, and yes, they did not do any extended jamming, but each tune was played with purpose, a right-song/right-time ethos propelling things and, in my section at least, fueling a serious dance party.
12/30/23 was the 30th anniversary of 12/30/93, one of the greatest livemusic nights of my life, the night I often say that turned me into the experience-it-live junkie that I am today. That show opened with David Bowie and the second set opened with 2001 and the show ended with Slave to the Traffic Light. I could go deep into the meaningfulness of all that, to the band and to me personally, but let’s just say the fact that they played all three of those songs on this most recent 12/30 touched me deeply. The Slave to the Traffic Light was especially poignant, that 30 year old version being such a seminal moment of my youth, the last 3 decades of my life, it was all there inside me bubbling up, as tears and as chills and as smiles and as laughter, as I took in the Slave of 12/30/23. Holidays and year’s end is a time for self-reflection and self-assessment and wasn’t I feeling that energy during this encore? Haven’t cried like that at a Phish show, at any show for that matter, in a long long time. Yeah sure, “More” was a cheesy, unnececssary way to end the night, it needed nothing else after Slave, but fuck it, that was just the musical tissue wiping away my tears. Onward!
If you know anything, anything at all, about Phish, you’ve hopefully already heard about their New Year’s Eve show. I wrote a review of the night for JamBase which more or less sums up my thoughts on the matter, the specialness of the night, this band, the scene. It was, undoubtedly, an all-timer, a glad-I-was-there’r, perhaps one of the best concerts I’ve been to when you consider time and place and music and history, nostalgia and future-looking, personal meaning and the who-what-where-why-when-and-how of it all. At some point it seems that everything that needs to be said about 12/31/23 has been said and that point for me may be now. Perhaps I’ll return to it with more thoughts some day, but for now, I hope you’ll read my review and let me know what you think.
The spectacle of Phish on New Year’s Eve, especially this NYE, stands in sharp contrast to the spectacle of a Yo La Tengo Hanukkah run, but somehow they are a particle-antiparticle pair, two bands that have been around for 4 decades, that improbably share a birthday, that both have made different corners of New York City the setting for equally unique and legitimately untoppable holiday runs. May it always be so! Note that next year Hanukkah starts on 12/25 and ends on 1/2, as late as I can remember it being and directly overlaid with a potential Phish New Year’s Eve run. How delicious!
Of course, there were other shows in December, some with a holiday feel of their own. Take Madonna at Barclays Center, playing a fabulous history-of-Madonna set anchored by, what else?, “Holiday.” I can’t say that Madonna was on my bucket list, but what a fun night, a show, a spectactle, a happening as much as a concert. So glad I caught her at least once, did not disappoint. On the other end of the spectrum was Yacouba Sissoko playing his semi-regular gig at LunAtico, in December on the 26th, for all intents, a Christmas show, with the usual addictive grooves mixing with a holiday energy in the crowd to create a potent mixture. If you don’t know Sissoko, he plays kora like it’s something from a magical otherworld and his band Siya are pure afrogroove. The result is total betcha-you’ll-be-dancing magic. What a great night in the best club in town in Bed Stuy. Punch Brothers (with James Taylor!) at Minetta Lane Theater!! An astounding double bill at Nublu with Jeff Davis Band and Sylvester Germaine!! Neal Francis boogie-down at Music Hall!! And so much more, a great month of livemusic in NYC to end an all-timer livemusic year for me. Final tally below…
2023 year end totals:
385 shows seen in 221 nights out totaling 435+ unique bands/artists at 146 venues in 14 cities
December roundup:
26 shows = $26 donated as part of #livemusicchallenge to Leukemia and Lymphoma Society
Five star shows seen in December:
! Patricia Brennan/Sylvie Courvoisier @ Roulette
! Yo La Tengo @ Bowery Ballroom (x4)
! Jeff Davis Band (Marta Sanchez, Jonathan Goldberger, Eivind Opsvik, Matt Nelson)/Sylvester Germain, Jonathan Goldberger, Mat Maneri, Josh Dion @ Nublu
! Yacouba Sissoko & Siya @ LunAtico
! Phish @ Madison Square Garden (x4)
Reviews written in December:
