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.
21 May 2019 Slavic Soul Party @ Barbes
Trying to find the time to write these things up still, but mired in a bit of stretch here… still, 2 days late ain’t too bad, no?
Tuesday night the resideNYC “club” took Barbes by storm. Barbes is the undisputed kingdom of the NYC residencies, as well as the crown jewel of the whole livemusic shebang, a hidden treasure of great music the likes of which you just can’t find anywhere else. You should go as often as possible…
…like Tuesday nights when Slavic Soul Party is playing. Let’s see, the band had like 2 trumpets, two trombones, a tuba, a sax, a guy on percussion and Matt Moran leading the way like Robert Preston in the finale of the Music Man, big fat bass drum with a cymbal attached. This is a Balkan brass band and they really bring the party to the Slavic Soul Party. Moran is typically a jazz vibraphonist who dabbles in the avant garde like all good NYC musicians do, but he is really in his element in this band, totally animated, funny banter, often playing from the center of the room, sometimes on his knees or back… as much as a musician can feed off the audience, he was doing it, and thankfully we came with about 20 strong, which had to be about half of the room, which was full, but not so packed that you couldn’t dance. Because you need room to dance when these guys are playing. The music was somehow rooted in Eastern European melodies, but often felt like a New Orleans funk outfit and the other times, actually almost felt like an electronica band. Which is to say for all the horns, it was a whole lot of rhythm. They play for 3 sets on Tuesdays, although I only stayed for 2 this time around. Will definitely be back and definitely can recommend this one should your Tuesday night need more soul or party. ..
Barbes, every night, every week, nothing quite as consistent.
23May19
Scott Sharrard’s Green is Beautiful @ LunAtico
This is what it’s all about. Great musicians bouncing around the NYC scene, mostly under-recognized, finding each other through whatever means and getting together in cool, intimate spaces to make music that should fill rooms 5x the size on random weeknights on GPS-enabled corners of Brooklyn. I’ve seen Scott Sharrard a bunch of times and have always had a I-should-be-seeing-more-of-this-guy impression of a guitarist who exudes both the passion and intelligence of someone who listens to a lot of different music. Still, as someone who looks on Sharrard as a, I guess, Southern-rocker by trade I was not prepared for the hour-plus of straight-fire grooves he led the band through last night. See this band is called “Green Is Beautiful” and is basically a Grant Green tribute band. There should be more Grant Green tribute bands out there. Everyone should listen to Grant Green, go listen right now, it’ll do you right, trust me, but seeing this music live is where it’s at, and since we can’t see Grant Green anymore… may I introduce you to Mr Sharrard?
The band is guitar/organ/drums at its heart, last night with Pat Bianchi on organ and Tony Mason on drums. That trio alone was phenomenal. I’d choose these three over Soulive, but that was the vibe. Bianchi and Mason were the foundation, totally in each other’s pocket. Actually, let me diverge for a sentence or two on Tony Mason… I mean, I’ve seen the guy play before and, sure he’s a “good drummer” but ain’t it so easy for “good drummers” to get lost in the NYC shuffle. I could rattle off about 20 drummers in New York that come to mind before Tony Mason. But, damn, don’t sell this guy short. He kind of blew me away last night, supremely funky, but in a way that somehow escaped the cliches of funk drummers. He played last night like a phenomenal player who could fill in on whatever genre you choose and just happened to be killing the organ-soul-Grant-Green thing last night. But, may I repeat myself and just say damn, that was impressive. I think part of it was the fact that he just looked like he was having a blast up there. It makes a difference. It was a theme for the drummers for my Thursday night, but don’t want to get ahead of myself.
Sharrard explicitly made clear before almost every song that Green was someone who actually did a lot of covers, a guy who took other people’s music and Grantgreenified it, so that it all felt like his music. Sharrard and company — organ + drums + a tenor and baritone saxophone, did an incredible facsimile of those interpretations. They didn’t interpret the interpretations, they didn’t have to, that part was already done. They just had to bring the boogaloo, and that they did. Sharrard was Grant Green at the back of LunAtico. He made it look easy. Like an acrobat or free-climber who scampers up the side of a mountain, where the correct path is rarely straight up, but rather some sort of elaborate zig zag, but he sees it and then he does it. That was Scott last night, scaling the face of a mountain of groove, scampering up the notes, little toeholds of boogie and then up, up, up, up.
The second set opened with “Ain’t It Funky Now” and it just about encapsulated the set in one ridiculously good 15+ minute jammer. Long Sharrard solo that was just so easy and funky it could have gone on til Labor Day and I would still be dancing. Sax solos on both sides, both great. Then a stretch where it was just the organ and drums. I actually got Duo flashbacks, to the old fucking days when it actually was an organ and drum duo, that’s what it sounded like. I mean, Mason and Bianchi were the shit last night and this was their chance to shine. Eventually to a drum solo (the world needs less drum solos, but Mase earned this one and made it count, not too long, but didn’t detract from the funk at all) then back to the head for a bit more full-band scampering. Finally to an outro and, dang!, how long was that?
To catch something of that caliber in that room seems unfair to everyone not there, but that’s Thursday night in livemusic paradise for ya!
Wayne Krantz, Orlando le Fleming, Josh Dion @ 55 Bar (late set)
Doesn’t matter if you’re in Bed-Stuy or in Suffolk County, if it’s Thursday night, 55 Bar is always on your way between wherever you are and the end of your night. And so… to 55 Bar!!
Surprise, last night’s Krantz set was great! Like, really freakin’ great. I hadn’t sat down at a WK show for a while and something about sitting and that sort of seasonal purgatory we were in where it’s warm enough to put the A/C on, but it’s not on that made it a kind of warm, drowsy, almost hallucinogenic Krantz experience for me. Which is to say, as rocking and as funky as it was, I was extremely zoned out during the set. And surprisingly, I found myself zoned right in on le Fleming’s bass. This was, by far, his most impressive performance that I’ve heard. He’s been getting better and better in that all-important bassist roll, but last night was a major leap. The set opened, as they often do, with “Once In A Lifetime,” not quite a cover, more of an inspired by, like a crappy biopic is not necessarily true, but merely inspired by true events. That’s a great way to describe a Krantz cover. But the thing is, when they’re really on, when the band is really clicking, you can still trace back where the far-flung jams came from, still find hints of that riff or feeling from the original material. Like the theme is some sort of prehistoric Pangaea, and the improvisation the tectonic shift of the continental plates, a geological dispersion of melody and rhythm that you can kind of still see where they came from, how they used to fit together. Yeah, that. Sometimes it happens and the Once In A Lifetime last night had that, largely due to le Fleming. It’s very often you see members of the audience laughing, a guy the next table over started laughing immediately after the OiaL cracked its first earthquake-inducing shift. It’s rare you see a member of the band laughing, from the music at least. Le Fleming let out a laugh midway through this jam, like holyshit this is good… and I’m a part of it! kind of thing. That was cool. Speaking of having a good time, Josh fucking Dion! I mean, there are musicians that are meant to do what they do and there are musicians that love what they do and sometimes you can be both, but not like Josh Dion is both. He plays drums like he can’t believe that he’s doing it, that he can do what he can do and my word, this is fuuuuuunnnnn!!
Look, if you hit the late set, there’s a damn good chance you’re going to hear Once In A Lifetime to start and Manic Depression to end and Back In Black and U Can’t Touch This and Another One Bites the Dust somewhere in the middle and also that one that goes {air guitar heavy rock riff} and the kind of “slower” one that has that cool melody that branches into a kaleidoscope of psychedelic excursions. And that’s what they did last night, totally befogging my Thursday night brain. Very sad to be missing next week, but you should go and take good notes…
25May19
Low Roller @ Skinny Dennis
Well, it wasn’t the National Reserve, but we were out hanging with some friends in Greenpoint yesterday and heading to Skinny Dennis for the 3rd week in a row seemed like a no-brainer. Caught the 3rd set of Low Roller which is more of the typical country band that you’d find at SD and they fit the room quite nicely. Mix of covers and originals, they played Waylon Jennings Only Daddy That’ll Walk the Line and Neil Young’s Unknown Legend and a few other oh-this-song-is-great that you can expect to hear at Skinny Dennis. Good harmonies, a dude playing a double pedal steel guitar (what’s the difference between the two?), just good enough for the half-listening/half-socializing crowd, pairs well with cold $4 Lone Stars on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. Good times.
The band is playing again on Memorial Day with Grateful Dead live cuts DJ’d between sets, should you be interested in such…
Julian Lage/Jorge Roeder, Margaret Glaspy @ The Owl Music Parlor
From there we capped an excellent day in Brooklyn by heading over to the Owl. The venue’s website had a Margaret Glaspy gig on their calendar for last night for a few weeks now, but sometime in the past 10 days or so, the listing changed in a significant way when it was listed as a double bill including Julian Lage and Jorge Roeder. As Lage’s star continues to justifiably rise, it’s nice that he’s still playing gigs like this in the city’s unheralded awesome rooms like the Stone and the Owl. Not for nothing, the last time I saw Glaspy she was singing solo in a set at Brooklyn Steel, it was an opening set, but the stage there is easily several times larger than the entire Owl Music Parlor… so this was a serious underplay. I had no idea if it was going to be packed with a line out the door or empty due to the under-the-radar nature and the out-of-the-way location and, of course, the holiday weekend. It was decidedly on the empty side, no one had any trouble getting in or getting a good seat for that matter. Nels Cline was there in the audience with a little dog which definitely added to the ambiance… have you ever been at an intimate gig in Brooklyn and occasionally turned around to see Nels fucking Cline goofily placating a small dog in the back of a room with a dumb-dog-daddy grin on his face? I have.
Lage and Roeder opened up and to say this set was magnificent would be an understatement. It was laugh-out-loud good from beginning to end, Lage writing pure melodic poetry with this guitar. It’s gigs like these where you really get to see the passion and love he has for music come out. I mean, the technical talent is there regardless and it was out in full force last night, plenty of Lageian tricks, more aw-shucks-it’s-nothing arpeggios than my brain could process, the kind of magic they probably learn in music class at Hogwarts. I get dizzy trying to watch his fingers and correlate it to the music coming out of the amplifier. Laughing, laughing, laughing. But really, to see him not just play like that but to kind of watch little beautiful bits of his soul emanate out of the guitar, a personality meant to play this music and his whole body, his whole being, kind of radiating the music is really a sight to behold. I mean… WOW, that was good. Even with all that, the revelation may have been Roeder who seems to be getting better and more confident each time I see him. The previous one was when he played in thew New Masada Quartet and seemed to energize with each John Zorn gush aimed his way. You could really sense his absorbing the praise and making it part of his skill set. Last night was the next phase, it felt, his playing almost equal to to Julian’s. I’ve seen Julian play in many duos before, but always guitar/guitar duos, including with Nels, the kind of wonder-twin-powers-activate superhero shit, with Julian giving and taking in equal measures, better because of his partner and making his partner better in turn, pure resonance. It’s amazing to watch, I think Julian operates best in these duo formats. But to see that same phenomenon with a bassist, his longtime running partner, Jorge Roeder, a great player, but not Nels Cline, to see the two of them feeding off each other, making each other better, rising to the level of each other, playing as equals. Bravo Jorge, that was a gear I didn’t know you had in you. Really one of the more impressive sets of bass playing I’ve seen in a while. In the conversation for best sets I’ve seen this year, I would love to see more Lage/Roeder duo. The second song they played, “The Garden” was some serious transcendence, beyond jazz, it was almost like prog-roc, orchestral and majestic, but also personal and quiet beautiful. If you can’t tell, I really enjoyed that set.
A very short break and Margaret Glaspy came back up, backed by Lage and Roeder and Tim Kuhl on drums. She played about 45 minutes of brand new material. She said for the first time, but possibly we saw one or two of them at that Brooklyn Steel set. The songs were really great. There was one or two that were just superb. Glaspy was just wearing a t-shirt and these baggy pants and looked like she kind of woke up and just kind of was like, hey, let’s go play some music in front of an audience today. Of course, the show was on the calendar for a while, so that wasn’t the case, but it was an extremely informal feel… nto that it matters what she wears, but it was definitely indicative of the vibe in the room. As it should be. What a city where someone like Glaspy or Lage can just get up and play amazing world-beating music for 25 people in a room as cozy and intimate as the Owl. They don’t even serve ice at the OMP. Like, it’s not in the budget or what, I don’t know? But that may be the most Brooklyn thing ever. Also, having Julian Lage and Jorge Roeder just chillin’ in your backing band must be quite the luxury. Looking forward to seeing where those songs end up.
Done by 10pm on night I didn’t want to be out too late and man, what a perfect 2 hours of music, all for whatever you want to toss in the bucket. What a city! What a treat!
26May2019 Ethan Iverson solo @ Crooner’s, Minneapolis, MN
I’m out in Minneapolis for work this week and had at least one free night Sunday, so was happy when my is-anyone-playing search dug up not just something, but a musician I’ve seen dozens of time and am very fond of playing a short car ride to the outskirts of town. Thankfully it worked out that I could make it. The venue is called Crooners which has 3 spaces, a full restaurant, a “jazz club” that’s one room of the restaurant and then an outdoor space that’s kind of new. The building is a sort of nondescript restaurant on a major road, doesn’t look like much. The place is kind of a dingy lived-in restaurant that gave me the vibe of an old dining room at a country club, the kind of place my family would eat Mother’s Day brunch with my grandmother when I was a kid. The venue space was in a room that had windows all around, looking out onto a lake and the entire show happened more or less while the sun was still out (7:30–9ish), which only enhanced the effect. The place was maybe 2/3 full, but even if it was sold out, it wouldn’t have felt that crowded. Unlike a NYC jazz club, there was a lot of space between tables and plenty of space at the table I was at with 3 other guys. It really couldn’t have felt any different than a NYC room, so it felt a little weird, but also refreshing.
If you don’t know, Iverson was a founding member of the Bad Plus but has left the group, about a year ago, and is now engaged in a range of activities, the pianist in several groups as well as one-offs. He’s also been working with Mark Morris on the musical part of his Pepperland show. What I realized last night is that Iverson really was made to be out on his own. He has added more than just music to his plate, writer, historian, cultural critic, etc… he fancies himself a polymath, a niche intellectual, and he’s probably right. He seems to be thriving on his own and this rare solo gig really had him in a fun comfort zone, even though he said he doesn’t have a big solo repertoire and hardly ever does shows like this.
He split the long set into two pieces, first playing about 5 or 6 originals. Even though it’s been over a year, I still see Ethan through the Bad Plus lens, I mean I saw them dozens of times and that how I know him and so that’s how I really thought about those originals. One of the (many, many) things that fascinated me about TBP was the 3 different voices of the musicians, how their compositions were so different from each other, easily identifiable, and yet how, over time, their songwriting influenced each other. This was fun to think about last night, as some songs felt like “Reid Anderson songs” (beautiful, progressive melodic things) and a couple felt like “Dave King” (rhythmic, almost-rocking) songs and, of course, the rest feeling very much like Ethan Iverson songs (criss-crossed with complexity and deconstruction of familiar jazz tropes). The first piece was called “North Shore” and was pure Iverson, a free-flowing deconstructed boogie-woogie that kept left-turning into new themes, never returning to the previous ones. In between songs he told short stories about the origins of this piece or that, one story about Ron Carter preceded “Just Like the 70's.” The songs were all great, but the final original, called “Showdown” was maybe my favorite Iverson composition ever, better than anything he brought to the Bad Plus. Long musical storytelling, starting dissonant and angry and ending in triumphant chords, it was a real stunner.
A note about the crowd: I loved the audience for this show. First of all, it was a very old crowd. If I wasn’t the youngest person there, I was definitely in the youngest 2 or 3. It takes something to get people out to see music on the Sunday before Memorial Day, especially as you could see how absolutely gorgeous the day/evening was through the barely-shaded windows while the music was playing. It takes a certain person to sit in a dingy “club” on a night like this and it was clear that everyone in the room didn’t let chances to see A+ jazz pass them by. Before the show I overheard people chatting about upcoming shows and planning drives to Iowa for some jazz festival there and it made me appreciate even more how much music I have at my relative fingertips in New York, how missing an Ethan Iverson set would be a very can’t-see-em-all situation for me and how for the people in the room last night, it would’ve sucked. There were a lot of closed eyes when the music was going, deep listening. People were reminded not to talk during the show, but I can’t imagine a single person in the room would have dared chit-chat while Iverson was playing.
So, after his “mini set” of originals he professed his solo repertoire was limited and he had decided (as he had tweeted earlier in the day) that he would be taking requests for the second half of the show. BUT, there were ground rules, which he laid out, basically asking for standards only, with some other caveats. He was very conversational the whole night, his banter very relaxed and funny, but not because he was trying to be funny, he felt like he was having a chat with everyone in the room and he really was. People started calling out songs and he was writing them down, commenting on some, good choices, bad choices, don’t fit the criteria, I actually know that one, so I’ll play it. He writes down about 10 songs and then shook them into an order that worked and he basically did a single “en suite” improvisation bouncing from one request to the next, more or less working it out as he went. In some regards, this is what Standards players do, but on the other hand, it was super impressive. He opened the run with Night In Tunisia, and you could tell right away everything he played from then on was going to be great, making it his own, bouncing around the theme, embellishing but never getting too weird. The segues in between each were fun, like you could hear the wheels in his head turning as he tried to get from one to the other while keeping things going smoothly. The highlight run was when he went Take the A-Train > Autumn Leaves > Summertime, each a complete departure from the previous, A-Train rather straightforward, then turning minor-key until it became a rather postmodern version of Autumn Leaves, heavy dissonance couching barely-recognizable melody. By the time this unfolded into Summertime, it was like a triumphant coda, he played it all up on high register keys, an absolutely beautiful version for this the unofficial start of summer.
