My goal for 2019 is to write at least a little something about every show I see, preferably by the next day, we’ll see how it goes. I will compile weekly and post here as-is.
So, in that spirit, this is the thirteenth of hopefully 52 posts…
[note: I am considering creating a mailing list where you would get these reviews on an as-written basis. If you are interested in such, email me.]
26mar19
Ryley Walker @ Union Pool
Right before Ryley Walker started his fourth and final night of his March Residency at Union Pool, someone pointed out the post that he had just made to Facebook wherein he had cancelled his upcoming Europe tour and that his mental health was at an “all time low” so he was going to be seeking help. Pretty heavy shit for a Facebook post, I can’t imagine getting up the courage to write something like that, let along hop on stage in front of a pretty packed room and play a set of music. So that’s sort of what was on my mind right when Ryley took the stage… who knows what he was thinking.
Whether it was my own perception of the situation or whether it was real, it definitely felt like the music Walker & his band for the night — Ryan Jewell again on drums, C Spencer Yeh on violin/effects and David Grubbs on second guitar — was a reflection of his mood. As such, the music was a sort of wild-eyed improvisation that bounced between different emotions: confusion, anxiety, fear… this was not comfortable music, dissonance and weirdness were in ample supply, but it wasn’t an unlistenable mess, either, far from it. There were moments of beauty and coherence and, dare I say, hope. I was totally zoned out and drifted into a not-quite-sleep/not-quite-awake state for much of the set. Similar to last week’s set, about halfway through the short, one-piece set the band found a common ground and crafted something rather compelling and rather awesome. It seems to sum up Ryley Walker, his risk-taking, his talent, his ability to surround himself with wonderful musicians who are great, but whose greatness is in creating a space for Ryley to be himself and, ultimately, find some sort of peace in his often chaotic music. I wish him well, it’s clear he’s a troubled guy, but also a rather unique and beautiful soul.
Subtonics @ Letlove Inn
Third week in a row of Ryley > Astoria and once again, a total mindfloat of the free-ranging rockjazzjamgroove thing that the Subtonics do so well. These guys put me into a late-Tuesday trance like nothing else. Last night they featured the 2 saxophone line-up that was similar to a couple weeks back, and at one point I snapped out of my groove-induced stupor to realize there were three saxophones on stage, creating a rather subdued layered funk. Costas took a few ridiculous solos, he started sitting, but eventually stood up literally and metaphorically. All things told, i thought the hero was Adam Klipple on the keys who really created some great synth-bass sounds and then took a few great solos. Can’t recommend this show enough.
27mar19
Roots & Ruckus @ Jalopy
The resideNYC club hit the Roots & Ruckus weekly gig at Jalopy last night after a lovely Italian meal. This is a sort of “showcase” type show run by Feral Foster, my first time there, but apparently it’s sort of 4 or 5 acts a night, including a set from Foster with a tip basket passed around for each individual performer toward the end of their set. The music falls exclusively under the “folk” umbrella, like more or less everything at Jalopy. The room is one of those not-sure-I’m-in-Brooklyn-anymore venues, feels more like a sort of small barn-turned-performance-space in New England with brick walls, a sort of old fashioned stage, wooden fixtures in the bathroom and a helluva lot of charm. The music I was able to catch before having to head home — 2.5 sets out of 5 — was really great, but more than that, it was the laid-back, earnest energy in the room that really made it a(nother) special NYC residency for me. You sit in church pews and it really feels like something from a more innocent, olden-days time. It was also a lot easier to get home from than I was expecting, which was a nice bonus.
The first performer was Avi Jacob who was a sort of accidentally hilarious bantersmith with a set of songs largely about failed relationships, with women, the mother of his child, his father. I’m no psychologist, but between his demeanor and his songs, seems like a lot of hurt that he buries underneath a detached joking facade and his songwriting. I thought he was rather great, reminded me of a less-intense, “poor man’s” Christopher Paul Stelling. His guitar had the beat-up look of someone who’s played the heck out of it for many years and his music matched that pretty well. Would see again. Feral Foster was second, who is someone I had seen before. He really had this old-timey/old-school throwback feel to his songs, but with a modern twist in the lyrics. He forgot his guitar strap, which felt like a bit, but he made it work. The third act was (don’t know the name), a man playing guitar for a woman who sang spirituals, encouraging the audience (about 20–30 people) to sing along. It was the kind of thing you could only get away with in a place/moment like that… in another setting, even in the same setting if they had gone on first, it probably wouldn’t have worked, but it really did in that moment, like for the time you’re in that room during this gig you’re not in Brooklyn anymore, you’re not in 2019 anymore, you’re in a safe space, a simpler space, with music doing the magic to take you there. In a way, it reminds me of a little folk fest, where the universe kind of turns on its head for a brief while. Like any other residency that’s last more than 10 years, it was something special. Hopefully make it back sometime soon. Highly recommended.
28mar19
Donny McCaslin (Noveller opens) @ BRIC House
A day or so late, but I’m determined to continue to write up a least a little bit of everything I see, so hopefully I can remember a detail or two about this show at the BRIC space Thursday night…
First of all, this is a great kind of performance space that seems to be woefully underutilized. Pretty easily accessible (short walk from Atlantic Terminal) and a good size with an easy layout and a very music-first vibe (same folks who put together Celebrate Brooklyn)… somehow they only put together a small number of shows/series/festivals a year.
Got there Thursday about 1/2way or maybe 2/3way into Noveller’s set. I had hoped to catch more, but what can you do? This was maybe my 4th or so time seeing Noveller which is the musical name of Sarah Liptstate. Lipstate is a filmmaker/artist who also happens to make music and so her music sometimes feels more like abstract art. She’s a guitarist/effects/looper type, playing solo. Bringing a sort of filmmaker’s eye to her music, she builds from the background to the foreground, creating narrative and tension along the way through beats and bits of melody until the full picture comes into view. Although there may be some perceived coolness to the her, dressed in a rather sleek black dress and delving deeply into the technology of knobs and buttons, I find her music to be full of emotional resonance. I am a big fan. Thursday’s set felt a bit darker than usual, with blinking animations scanning on the brick wall behind the stage… less beauty and more drama and a kind of musical poking or discomfort. Still great. Love her.
For the headliner, Donny McCaslin, there was this sort of riser in the middle of the room with big “ball” on a stick, bigger-than-a-human-sized. At the start of the set, a woman was standing on the riser and she picked up this old cassette player and kind of dramatically made a motion to press “play” on it which kicked off the show. Kind of a cool way to start and signaled that the show was going to feature some performance art beyond just the music. A still-young sax player and a serious up-and-comer in the jazz world, McCaslin already has a vibrant and fascinating career, going from side-man to bandleader to getting his reputation favorably wrapped up in David Bowie’s Blackstar album (McCaslin’s band was Bowie’s backing band) and now being the kind of guy who headlines the Vanguard with his own band or does sort of experimental shows at BRIC on a Thursday night. Still, with McCaslin you never know what you’re going to get and what you get seems highly dependent on where you are seeing him and who’s in the band. Along those lines Thursday was a decidedly B team… which isn’t a knock on the guys playing, more a testament to the fact that the “normal” band features Tim Lefebvre and Mark Guiliana who are, in my humble opinion, among the best bassists and drummers on the freakin’ planet. So, no, those guys weren’t there for this show. Zach Danziger was on drums and I didn’t catch the bassist’s name, although he was good, I thought the best part of the music. Not to belabor the point, the last time I saw McCaslin @ the Vanguard, which was definitely my favorite time seeing him, I commented that Donny was perhaps the worst guy in his own band. Thursday also featured the 5th member, a vocalist who also plays a little guitar. They played almost exclusively songs off his newest album “Blow” which features a lot of singing, something closer to a pop/rock thing in a jazz body. So that’s what the show more or less was. I like some of the songs a bit, especially “What about the Body” which opened the show. Some of ’em are kind of meh, though. The best moments were definitely the semi-chaotic jazzjams between the verses or the non-vocal songs. That’s just what this band is built to do. About halfway through the lady from the riser took that big ball on the stick and guided it through the audience up on stage. She was wearing a hardhat and so was the singer and he had this GoPro attached to it facing his face and then the video from that was projected onto that big orange ball. It was decidedly lo-tech, but also very cool. There was just a lot of shit going on on stage and it was reflected in the music. Always appreciate seeing someone try something new. That being said, we ducked out early in an attempt to hit the early Krantz set, because… Krantz!
Wayne Krantz, Evan Marien, Josh Dion @ 55 Bar (early)
This was my 10th Krantz show of 2019 and I think the 3rd time that I’ve seen this exact same trio out of those ten. Which is to say that this isn’t a “regular” group, but they certainly have a little extra chemistry on top of the already unique physics that go on inside 55 Bar on a Thursday night. It was interesting to contrast directly with the previous week of le Fleming/Almond which felt like a very aggressive non-stop rage. I thought that the Dion/Marien pairing brought a lot more rounded edges to the music. Yes, they definitely can get aggro and headbang-if-you-can raging, Dion is a fucking beast. But he has a natural finesse, a softness that Almond doesn’t (Cliff Almond is awesome, but he is a hit-em-til-they-dead drummer). Marien is a guy that just continues to impress. His comfort with the material and the swim-with-the-sharks style of a Krantz gig is so apparent. Not only does he swim with ’em, he’s leading them into all sorts of tricks. You watch Evan Marien play and you realize there is a lot there on the surface, but also I think some amazing music/bands in his future, magic just below the surface. On paper it seems like the styles of these three guys are somewhat opposed, but to see a set like Thursday’s is to see a sum-of-the-parts thing, where it doesn’t even feel like Wayne’s in charge, but that all three are equal partners. That’s what the old K3 felt like and it pops up every once in a while. This threesome definitely have it. I’d say that was some A- Krantz. I was happy that we had gotten in for the early set because I started to fade towards the end and definitely would not have fared well in the late set, but I’m sure it was a leg up from the early, which it usually is. Until next time…
29mar19
Peter Apfelbaum’s Sparkler @ The Stone
[[***My 100th show of 2019!!***]]
Kind of snuck this one in on a Friday night and man, I’m glad I did. This is Apfelbaum’s week at the Stone and each night had very different line-ups and Sparkler is a rather unique project. He was mostly on piano and synth with trombone (Natalie Cressman), sax/flute (Jill Ryan), guitar/synth (Kyle Sanna) and drums (Charlie Ferguson). They start and it’s like Ryan doing this spoken word narration thing, kind of dreamlike, surrealistic storytelling which eventually gets overtaken by the music. Most of the show was like that, with vocals and lyrics that felt like a bizarre story. I was getting a very strong Fiery Furnaces vibe, although with a much groovier kind of funkjazz with a very heavy dose of prog-rock. Sounds a bit strange, I’m sure, but it was very much in my wheelhouse. I had no idea what to expect but I can tell you I was not expecting that and I very much loved it. These were compositions that unfolded with an intelligence and purpose, the music helped tell the story. It was also very groovy. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone stand up and dance at the Stone before, but a couple ladies did just that in the back. The room was only about 1/3 full and an interesting mix of Stone regulars, jazzheads and, with the Cressman/Apfelbaum Anastasio connection, a few hippies as well. Apfelbaum was very impressive playing piano and a lot of basslines on the synth and then adding in saxophone (his natural instrument) at times. Melodies were shared between multiple instruments so there were doubling and tripling effects when say the vocals matched a guitar or horn riff. The two horns worked together really nicely, creating a nice resonance effect a few times and even more so when Peter made it three horns. The main musical thrust came from the horns and the drums, the guitarist was really just a complement to everything. I really like seeing Cressman play in this group, more interesting than whatever goes on in the Trey band. Actually, having seen several different offshoots, the kind of music being made by members of Trey’s band (and probably a lot of it only because these people play in TAB), really runs a fascinating gamut and all of it is quite good. I don’t think it’s obvious that this would be the case, so it’s nice to see. Anyway, I really liked this show. They hit the 9:30 mark which already is basically the “limit” for a show at the Stone but they said we’ll do one more and then proceeded to play the longest piece of the night, a 15-minute opus which was great, but caused me to be late for…
Garcia Peoples with Chris Forsyth and Ryan Jewell @ Nublu 151
I don’t mind walking into a show already in progress quite as much as I used to, in fact I kind of enjoy it, although it always hurts to miss something, you’re always missing something. So I walked into Nublu and the second set was already about 20 minutes or so in progress and it felt like I had been dropped in through a wormhole into a parallel universe. Like everyone looked familiar, human and whatnot, plenty of people I recognized or knew, a venue I’ve been to dozens of times, but the room also felt… different, like they’d followed some alternate parallel path and the music they had witnessed up to that point had tweaked their existence, a shared experience had changed things. In a good way, of course. I understood why after about 15 seconds of listening to what was going down on stage. The room was packed and rather overwhelmed with a deluge of heavy duty guitarjam coming from the stage. Three guitarists, two drummers, bass and drums and whoooboy!, they were locked in. I assume they were locked in from the start, not to mention the fact that Garcia Peoples had already played an album-release first set beforehand, but when I walked in it was like hopping onto a freight train… not a freight train slowly leaving the yard, but a locomotive at full speed, opening up new channels of travel and interstate commerce. When you hear about the fact that GP would be joined by Forsyth and Jewell you can’t help but wonder, “will this be a total clusterfuck?” Clusterfucks are fine, I’ve seen many of them and statistically every once in a while they’re going to happen and it’s actually entertaining to watch. Let me tell you, this was not a clusterfuck. Not even close. This was like it was a real band that had been built and rehearsed to be a total jam machine. What I liked best about what they were doing is that there was very little sense that one guy or the other was the guy, it was really a full-band, everyone’s in sync kind of jam. In the end I caught about 30 minutes of this gloriously heavy freeform, the whole thing building to an adrenaline-pumping version of the Grateful Dead’s The Other One. A pure ‘69-energy version that built-to-peak a few times, building raging bonfires with raging bonfires all the way up. Holy crap, that was fucking awesome… not much more you can say than that.
I’d seen Garcia Peoples a couple times before, and I’ve enjoyed them, but they’d also left me a little bit good-not-great on them… but it’s been a bit and I was pleasantly surprised with how they were laying it down. Of course, this was with Forsyth and Jewell, and while that may have pushed last night’s session into that holycrap! region, that wasn’t the only thing. Good shit.
Innov Gnawa @ Nublu 151
Stuck around (well, went to bar across the street and came back) for the late show @ Nublu which was Innov Gnawa. These guys play traditional Moroccan gnawa music which features one guy playing a gimbri (a sort of three-stringed bass) and doing a kind of call-and-response singing with the rest of the band who sing and play hand-percussion (kind of these double hand-cymbal things). The word they used to describe it was “transcendent” and it really was. Super rhythmic it was tough not to move to, but also absolutely hypnotic, with a droning repetition of those rhythms, it’s equally tough not to lose your concentration in it. The gimbri is really one of my favorite sounds, it’s like a bass playing through some viscous fluid, like the notes take a little bit longer to get to you and when they do, they’re kind of dripping in something oily. It’s both primitive and futuristic and really funky as all heck. There seemed to be three different flavors to the music: the steady state was as described, the guy playing the gimbri would sing a line and then the other 5 guys would respond and they’d be playing these rhythms with those hand-cymbal-thingie’s, something that evoked a rushing train or a bunch of horses tramping around at a good pace, a bit frenetic but controlled and, like I said, kind of dreamlike… the clicking of gears in some celestial clock. A second mode was occasionally when all the synchronicity of the percussionist/singers went to rot and everyone created their own rhythm. This was rather unsettling and chaotic, but clearly was on purpose and perhaps preconceived in terms of who was doing what… it almost felt like they were trying to fuck each other up in a joking manner, but I don’t think they were joking too much. The final “type” was when they would build to a powerful peak, picking up speed and energy, an avalanche of rhythms, fast enough that it was almost too much to keep up with dancing, and then they hit it and BOOM!, and then back to controlled rhythms again. This was just my observation of what I heard last night, who knows if there’s any truth or format to it. There were actually 2 gimbri players and it’s totally possible that one of them was a “guest,” they started with an older guy who had the austere feel of a “master” and then a younger guy took over who was a bit funkier and more dynamic, but both were fantastic. This is the kind of music you could listen to and dance to for like ever. Just on and on and on. Also fascinating to me how Nublu will turn over on a night like that, room totally packed with one crowd and they file out at the end of a killer two-set show and you don’t think there’s any way anyone’s coming to a late show and then… the late show starts, not at the listed time of 11pm, but after midnight and the room isn’t empty at all, but like 1/3 full of people who showed up from who know’s where and are really into it. I love that so much. Not only that, but the crowd actually grows as the set goes on, more people there at 12:30 then there were at 12. Only in NYC, what a town!
Definitely will check these guys out again…
30mar19 Nils Frahm @ Brooklyn Steel
Read my “official” Nils Frahm review for the Bowery Presents House List here, but Wowow! Totally flabbergasted at that show. Just 2 straight hours of magic. How one guy can encompass all that, the range, the depth, the quality, the transcendence… One guy sustaining that level of mindblow for so long. Wow. Whatever studio stuff I’d listened to before the show really felt irrelevant to seeing him live. Whole different beast.
