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 thirty-second of hopefully 52 posts…
6Aug19 Sons of Kemet @ Industry City
Shabaka Hutchings is something special. Full stop. It’s not just that he’s very good at the saxophone (he is, although I’m sure you can find plenty of people that are more “technically proficient”), it’s that he uses his instrument like no one else I’ve ever seen. It’s like the difference between someone using their voice to sing and someone using their voice to rap. For much of the Sons of Kemet show last night, I envisioned Hutchings as a highly gifted rapper, the stuttering, non-stop flow of notes coming out of his horn, notes that seemingly only he can craft, coming out like a flow of rhymes, each one dripping with language and meaning, with anger and with hope. It’s a helluva thing.
Sons of Kemet is just one of Hutchings’ bands, but is unmistakably Shabaka. I’ve been listening t him for a while (RecommNed’d a ways back) and seen him now 4 times with both Comet is Coming and Sons of Kemet (now twice, saw them at Elsewhere last time they were in town) and there is something about his sound, the musicians he surrounds himself with, the level of energy, that don’t-know-what that only he possesses. For quartet, Sons of Kemet has multiple levels of oddities beyond just Shabaka’s otherworldly talent, with a double-drummer/tuba/sax lineup, you won’t see many foursomes like that. And for as much as Hutchings defines the sound, it’s hard to go to a show with two drummers like these guys and not get sucked into their rhythmscape.
The show last night was about 90 minutes with the encore and if turns out that they stopped playing for more than 60 seconds of that time, I’d be surprised. There were undoubtedly “songs” in that 90 minutes. How many of them I have no idea? They opened with a straight 30 minute stretch that could have been one piece and it could have been 10 and it really didn’t matter. The energy is punk rock, this is the double-drummer Oh Sees of Brit Jazz and I should say “jazz” because it’s the only term that might fit, but it fits horribly. Slamming, non-stop, no-rest, no-slow-songs, just-shut-up-and-dance, everything-up-here kind of shit that takes over everything… after a few minutes or so you aren’t thinking about anything else, your body isn’t doing anything else except for listening and moving to the music.
Along the way there were drum solos and tuba solos that broke up the freestyling stream, but mostly it was what it was for an hour and a half and it was glorious and overwhelming and so very fuck-yeah! The tuba player, Theon Cross, was equally as great, forward-thinking on his instrument. If Hutchings was the rapper, Cross was the beatbox. You should definitely check out Theon’s album out a couple months ago, highly RecommNed’d.
Towards the end Hutchings got on the microphone and said something along the lines of (paraphrased, correct me if I’m wrong) “we don’t talk much during the shows. the time for talking about things is over. it’s time to act and we hope listening to our music helps you to act to make the world better in some small way” and I think that pretty much summed up my feelings about the music pretty well, those notes flowing like words from his saxophone, all the tangible emotional energy in that non-stop rhythm.
They played one more song which brought them a couple minutes past 11 which I imagined to be their curfew. The crowd at this point was more or less the same size as when the show started — btw, the crowd was great, the space in front of the band was more or less full, but still comfortable — maybe a little more delirious and wild-eyed than they were at the beginning, dumbfounded by the relentless music, but the enthusiasm got the band back out for about lengthy song that was completely unnecessary, but welcomed all the same. Phew!
My only negative about the show is very old-man-complaint, but sheesh with all the bright lights in the eyes, please no, thanks.
7Aug19
Nice night of livemusic on Wythe Ave…
Ryley Walker, Howlin’ Rain, Garcia Peoples @ Brooklyn Bowl
Made our way through the rain to Brooklyn Bowl and caught the last bits of the Garcia Peoples set. This was my 4th time seeing GP in some part and I will admit my first time seeing them I was a bit lukewarm on the band. They felt like a well-intentioned facsimile of what they wanted to be. But a little more than a year later they’ve gigged a bunch, jammed out with some jammers and put out a pretty good record and that’s resulted a marked evolution of the band. Watching the last couple songs of theirs (in three guitar formation), was definitely watching a band comfortable with what they’re trying to do, clear focus on a sound and enough internal chemistry to make it happen. I like knowing that these guys can totally let loose and take things for a fraction-of-an-hour jam-out, but they don’t have to do that to be compelling. Definitely a band to keep your eye on.
That was a good warm-up, but the highlight of the night was clearly the Ryley Walker set that followed. Walker played in a trio with Ryan Jewell on drums and some named Scott (Holberg?) on bass. The hourlong set had (almost) everything you want in a Walker show. Great songs, killer guitar playing, tight interband jamming and oh, that patented RW banter!! He opened with “Telluride Speed” and right away, you could just feel the energy from the stage. If you follow Ryley on social media, you get, well, you get a lot of things, but one of the things is you get a very good appreciation for the music he holds dear. He is a music fan first, quite clearly. Last night I was very much feeling his love of old Genesis, the way his best songs are built in this sort of jazzfolk’d version of old Genesis prog is kind of subtle, but there. So that’s the vibe and Ryley’s guitar playing was top notch from the start. His style is a mesmerizing left-handed thing, often strumming away at constant pace with his right hand and then his left hand is a blur of motion on the neck, resulting in a flurry of overlapping notes, seemingly multiple melodies and rhythmic drones all at once. It’s complicated to look at, but easy and immensely satisfying to listen to. I think they only played about 5 songs the whole set, with “Halfwit In Me” coming next. Almost every song was introduced with an extended instrumental bit, Walker plucking out something gorgeous, the trio responding perfectly, the pieces falling together, a deck of cards built into architectural 3 dimensions, higher and higher until Ryley counted off the song and the cards fell down into the song proper, continually surprising that such great songwriting and excellent singing can follow such intense improvisation.
Walker is a different-tuning-per-song kind of player, somewhat complicated machinations required between each song and so that led to some patented RW banter which really needs to be experience live. I mean the dude is funny. And not funny in a canned joke kind of way or goofy thing that you’re used to with most bantering musicians. He’s got legit improv comedy chops to rival his guitar playing abilities. Last night he did this thing I’ve seen him do a couple times (and also on Instagram) where he’ll just make up a song on the spot in the style of a completely different genre. While he was tuning last night he joked that it was a tuning he stole from an American Football song which led to a riff on “real midwest emo” which led to a perfect imitation of an emo song with legit (hilarious) lyrics that ended with “I got fingered watching the first Saw movie” and I don’t think I’ve WTF?! laughed that hard at a concert in a long while. Often when I’m at a show I’ll turn around to see if there are microphones to make sure someone is capturing the amazing one-of-a-kind music being played (knowing full well, I’m very unlikely to ever go back and listen), but last night I was checking to make sure someone was capturing all the banter, because that’s just one example of about 4 or 5 different “riffs” that Walker went on that were just funny and also very personal and occasionally dark. He also does great voices, I have to say. When you catch Ryley Walker on one of those nights, it’s a wild ride and I also find that he music and the joking seem to go hand in hand, when he’s in a good mood he’s chatty and also playing great.
And while I dwell on Ryley, let it be known that the whole trio was phenomenal last night. Walker and Jewell have one of those special bonds that’s great to see. Ryan Jewell is one of those guys I was sort of unfamiliar with a year or two ago and now I see him everywhere and would go out of my way to catch him. Not so easy to stand out in a city filled with unnaturally good drummer,s but Jewell does it in any setting, but his playing with Ryley is something special. Walker is a guy that can go from jazzed out playing to straight indiefolk to total feedback-distorted burn-this-fucker-down rock-outs, quiet and beautiful to angry and ugly and Jewell can track all that and sound just right, making Ryley sound better all the while and that’s not something that many drummers could do. The set ended with an awesome extended meltdown take on his “The Roundabout” which found Ryley on the floor messing with knobs and tunings and his amps, filling the room with noise, but somehow, almost impossibly, retaining the melodic thread of the song, a string of beauty in a destructive cacophony. That’s Ryley Walker.
Great, great Ryley Walker show.
Do you ever hit a different show in between sets of a show? It’s fucking great and Brooklyn Bowl and Rough Trade are set up so perfectly for this, so why the heck not?
Molly Burch @ Rough Trade
Walked in on probably the first song for a nice 45 minutes with Molly Burch. Burch is from Austin, TX and has this great voice that she’s perfectly paired with her songs that have this old school vibe, part lounge jazz, part birth-of-rock girlband, part soul. I don’t know what came first, the voice or the passion for that sound, but either way, the fit is really glovelike. I have to say, every time I walk into Rough Trade I never know what to expect in terms of crowd… sometimes a show you think should be packed is empty and sometimes quite the opposite and then there are some acts that I have no idea, like last night. Ended up being a pretty big crowd, not quite sold out, but definitely pretty close. There was also a sizable upstairs VIP crowd for whatever reason… ostensibly the show was a release show for a 7" she put out this week, maybe related, but who knows.
The set was really great. Partly because of that voice, partly because of the songs, but in large part because her backing band was really great. Two guitar, bass and drums with Burch occasionally playing synth and while they weren’t doing any blow-you-out-of-the-water jamming, far from it, but the group had the sound down and just enough freedom to keep things interesting. Sometimes the band just has that certain extra kick that’s hard to describe but can totally make a show like this and that was the case last night. She played a bunch of her release from last year and both songs off the new single and some of her older stuff and an Ariana Grande song (“Needy”) and it was all super enjoyable. I imagine she’ll be playing a bigger room next time she comes (although she claimed Rough Trade was her favorite place to play) and I’d totally check out that show.
…
Back up the three blocks to walk into the Howlin Rain set already in progress. At this point the Brooklyn Bowl was very nearly empty. Even at the peak crowd during GP and RW, the room was pretty sparse, with a grouping at the front and little elsewhere, but for the closing band of the bill, a couple Ubers could have taken a large percentage of the audience home. The fact of the matter, the Bowl wasn’t a very good fit for this show, though kudos to them for trying and I’ll just leave it at that.
For those in the house, though, they got some seriously kick-ass rock-out. Howlin Rain is a two-guitar rockband from San Francisco that I saw once before, somewhat impossibly 7 years ago. I don’t know that much more about them and am happy to report that they’re still out there playing music. Their sound is very classic rock, heavy duty guitar/bass/drums shit. They even kind of dress in period dress, like they’re playing a gig on a 4-band bill at the Carousel Ballroom in 1968 and not an empty Brooklyn Bowl in 2019. If you closed your eyes during the set, you might have been there, too, no sounds of bowling pins to distract you from the pure fire coming from the stage, part Crazy Horse, part Allman Brothers, part early-days Grateful Dead. Their second-to-last song must have been about 20 minutes worth of tree-falling-in-an-empty-forest guitar pound, really good shit.
8Aug19
Wednesday night was a great up-and-down Wythe Ave affair, last night was an awe-inspiring, face-slapper up and down 7th Avenue.
Bill Frisell Trio @ Village Vanguard (early & late sets)
I was going to attempt to hit Crumb @ the East River park to start my night, but a little bit of traffic and a dramatic downpour caused a mid-commute audible that found me walking into the Vanguard just before 8:30 and grabbing one of the last seats in the house. Not quite in the back, but doesn’t really matter for the music I was about to witness… Bill Frisell, Thomas Morgan and Rudy Royston. Before the set started, a guy from some international jazz writers association got up and handed Bill the award for best guitarist of the year or something and then proceeded to say that since they’ve been giving out awards, like 20+ years, Bill has won it 9 times and then joked something like “what happened all the other 15 or so years?” What happened, indeed? Who was better than Frisell? Certainly there are plenty of amazing guitarists out there that will tie your brain in knots, but BF transcends mere plays-instrument-unnaturally-well plaudits, his playing cracks some existential plane, points to platonic concepts of beauty and good and, like, what and where is your soul. Yeah, he’s that good and showed it last night (and every night, you should go, rest of this week and all next week and even the week after that). Bill took the microphone and joked about “speech!” and man, Bill doesn’t speak much, but when he does, it’s somewhat inadvertently profound. I saw him at the Vanguard once tell a short story about a guy, a mysterious friend of his parents when he was a kid, this guy who had this outsized influence in his life, his love and pursuit of jazz, of Thelonious Monk, and the guy didn’t know it and they somehow connected again, I forget the details, it was an amazing story. I wrote about it in another review somewhere. I’ve written about Bill Frisell a lot. A lot. He makes me want to write about what he does. So anyway, he basically says he graduated high school in Colorado in 1969 and his family immediately moved to New Jersey and the first thing he did, August of 1969, was come to the Vanguard. It was like a continuation of that other story, not on purpose, but it really was the same story. And like, August of 1969, NYC, moon landing and Woodstock and recent-high-school-graduate Bill Frisell’s first thing to do is come to see music at the Village fucking Vanguard and, as he says, how could he have guessed he’d be up on stage there, 50 years later, playing to this room, accepting an award. The guy is so humble and real and it comes out in his music and he’s a fucking legend. Show me a better guitarist. he should win every award, every year. He made some comment about how the world was fucked up then, too, and you just got to keep going… amen, Bill!
So, Bill opened his set with two chords. They weren’t particularly beautiful chords, they kind of sounded bad together, to tell you the truth, like someone getting up to recite Shakespeare and letting out a belch.. They didn’t seem to go together and they didn’t feel like the kind of way you’d start off a Thursday night, room-packed set at the Vanguard. This being Bill Frisell, those chords echoed from the stage, digital effects, but maybe just as easily ghostly spirits enchanting the room. He fiddled around with his guitar and all of the sudden, those two chords, weren’t two isolated chords, but the basis for something, more guitar spirits started floating around the room and the bass comes in and the drums, Rudy and Thomas, totally there to help Bill make magic, stir his potions, cast his spells. And then it’s not just this ephemeral thing, but it’s a song, like zooming out from an impressionist painting, all those random brushstrokes start to look like something. The song he’s playing is “What the World Needs Now Is Love.” Burt Bacharach wrote the song, it’s a great fucking song, but Bill Frisell owns this song now. Typically he finishes a show with it, his version is a transcendent thing, a thing that makes you understand that what the world needs now is love, sweet love, it’s the only thing that there’s just too little of. And I’m thinking of what Bill said right before the song started, how the world was fucked up then and it’s fucked up now and there’s little doubt that he had much more to say but he doesn’t really say things with his words, he says them with his guitar and so he opened with this song, his version of this song. His playing is so overwhelmingly beautiful and I’m on the verge of tears, like looking into the eyes of god, unbearably beautiful, ghosts circling the room, forward and backward zips of guitar loops. He usually plays this one near the end of a show because what are you going to play after that, it’s like Phish opening a show with Slave to the Traffic Light. The first fucking song. We’re in for it, man, I tell ya.
The set from there was non-stop, each song segued into the next. There were different ways that these transitions happened. Some were kind of song fizzles out/next song starts with a bang right before silence; some were more of the China/Rider thing, bits of one song gradually replaced with bits of the next one until, lo!, it’s a new tune… and then there were those magical segues where there were no songs being played, just pure blissful three-person improvisation, layers of guitar with bass/drums weaving around, a family of music out to picnic on the souls of the audience, pure aural delight. I wish I was smart enough to know the names of all the covers they played or to remember the titles of the originals, but it was all just perfection. The second song ended in a chopped up rhythm that somehow morphed into the syncopation of Monk’s Epistrophy without effort. I don’t think they were working from a setlist, I don’t think they knew what they were going to do, Bill would make the move and the band would follow without question. Over the years of seeing this guy play, he’s just gotten better and better and it’s not better in terms of his playing, which has always been professor-at-Hogwarts level wizardry, but more his ability to lead a band, the quiet confidence of a true leader, and the way the best musicians in the world are willing to follow him, his whimsical playing, his way of making something out of nothing and nothing out of something, there really is nothing better. That was what the room got last night. Listening to Bill play last night, it felt like my whole existence shut down, only those vital systems kept running — breathing, heartbeat, the centers of my brain that help me feel unconditional happiness — and everything else just went off, it’s an ecstatic hypnosis that only Bill Frisell can provide and your thoughts drift to some weird, wonderful, dreamlike places. My neck started to hurt. Usually when my neck hurts at a show, it’s because I’ve been rocking out too hard, but last night it was because my head was hanging at some unnaturally slack angle for too long, like C-3PO when he’s powered down. And the fact that they didn’t stop was perfect, like hopping from one fugue state to the other, no awkward songs-over-time-to-clap interruptions, I mean how could you merely clap for that, we should be down on our knees like we’re in church.
Toward the end of the set they played one of Frisell’s originals, one of his “groovier” tunes (yes, Bill can groove) and this thing was just powerhouse, nothing’s-better shit and then it entered that Frisell zone, that magic spot when he starts looping and driving the effects. He played this incredible improvised melody and then another and then another, 3 or 4 or 5 of these things that any writer would dream of coming up with and Bill spins them one by one and captures them, like fireflies in a jar, captures them and sets them all free so that not only are there a handful of these remarkable riffs floating in the air, but they are doing so together, overlapping to create some melodic superstructure. It’s as if you had made Jaws and E.T. and Saving Private Ryan, but you somehow made them so you could watch them all simultaneously and they made an even better movie that way. I’ve never seen anyone else do that with a guitar, totally blissed out. This “jam” settled into the set-closer which I convinced myself was “Blowin’ In the Wind,” but I don’t know that that’s right. It was pretty great, though.
What a set!!! And I lingered a bit because I know that sometimes they let you stay for the late set and I don’t think I was ready to say goodbye to Bill Frisell just yet. Sure enough, the livemusicgods smiled upon me and they announced you could stay for the late set for the low price of another drink (that overpriced Diet Coke never tasted so cheap!). It’s like if you had just gotten the best massage of your life and it’s over and they say, oh, you can have another hour for free. Except the massage was on your soul. The late set was more of the same, a bit more rocking than the first, a range of different emotions and explorations and songs and playing, but all mindblowing. They ended with that same Blowin in the Wind thing and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was both right and very wrong about it, but no matter. Bill Frisell plays all this week and next and it’s the best fucking thing in the universe.
Wayne Krantz, Evan Marien, Cliff Almond @ 55 Bar
There’s left brain/right brain, but that doesn’t quite capture the contrast from going to what I just described to what may be the best hour of improvisation I’ve seen this year with Wayne, Evan and Cliff. Top brain/bottom brain? Angel on one shoulder/devil on the other. This was one nasty fucking Krantz set. It had been 3 weeks since my last one, as long as I’ve had to endure Wayne-free this year and maybe it was the absence making my ears go fonder, but holyfucking shit, these guys were in the zone. I can’t imagine 3 guys playing balls-the-walls jammers like these guys were last night. All 3 of them were so pronounced in the flow, it was less a Wayne Krantz show and more a new version of K3, each guy taking the lead, each guy following the other two, all combinations and permutations, a freeflowing exchange of ideas, a dance party, a heavy-metal rock-out, a drill through the skull, straight the the pleasure centers, all that and more. Non-stop, relentless, everything was jaw-dropping. Like following up the best massage of your life by running a fucking marathon in record time and wanting to do it again once its over. They really should be charging more than $15 for this gig. I’ve written so much about this gig all year and there’s not much more I can say. This was one of the best of the year, no doubt.
9Aug19
John Zorn special…
John Zorn et al. (Vessel Orchestra) @ The Met Breuer
The Vessel Orchestra is, from the Met website, “s a musical instrument, a series of live performances, and an installation composed of thirty-two sculptures, utilitarian vessels, and decorative objects from the Museum collection. Selected for their natural pitches, which range from low C to high G on the chromatic musical scale, they form an arresting and unexpectedly versatile instrument, similar to an organ with multiple pipes.” Basically, artist Oliver Beer went through the Met’s collection of sculptress, vases, etc., figured out what pitch each was and then built what amounts to a pipe organ using the sculptures as the notes in lieu of pipes. Each Friday this summer a different group or musician has played a concert with this “instrument” and the last one was this past Friday with John Zorn playing. There were performances at 6, 7, and 8 pm and after some waiting-in-line shenanigans, I was lucky to get into the 7pm set.
The band was John Zorn (playing the instrument) with Sara Serpa (vocals), Sae Hashimoto (vibraphone), Kenny Wollesen (vibraphone), Ikue Mori (electronics), and Michael Nicolas (cello). The vessels span the length of a room which creates some interesting dynamics. I’ve written a bit about the context for a show and how concerts in museums somehow create this extra layer of depth. Well, this went one step further with the music actually coming out of the art itself. In a way it didn’t matter what the music was actually like, but it was interesting as well. It was very much an on-edge piece, uncomfortable… like the soundtrack to a horror film. In fact, once I got that idea in my head, that this was the sound to some suspenseful scary movie, a ghost story, that was all I could imagine. The sound from the vessels was totally immersive and the room had four speakers in the top corners, so that it was a real quadrophonic/surround feel for the other instruments. The vessels were all sorts of sculptures, from vases of different types to simple sculptures of heads to some weird abstract shit. It felt like an organ but also had a lot of lingering vibrations, like you could hear the things vibrating in a different way, each note with its own feel. Very interesting shit. Wolleson and Hashimoto were the other primary players, on their vibraphones, mostly mirroring each other, one on either side of the “stage” to complete the surroundsound feel. The two mostly played the vibes with a bow for a different kind of eerie vibration and then at one point, Zorn pointed to them and they finally struck their instruments with their mallets to give a dramatic ring into the room. Then, later, they picked up the “keys” to the vibraphones (slats? what do you call them?) and jingled them around on each other, creating a very ghosts-in-chains kind of sound. This weird eerie music was in such stark contrast to the fact that we were in this brightly lit, white art gallery, but that maybe made it even creepier, like why isn’t there a horror film set in an art museum, seems like a good spot for a ghost story.
The whole piece was about 20 minutes, the other musicians were more or less just adding a little extra sound to Zorn’s playing and the atmospherics of the vibes. It really felt more like an installation than a “show,” but a very cool one, an experience, the kind you can only get in NYC. So glad I put in the effort to make this one.
Ingrid Laubrock, Nels Cline, Ches Smith, Hank Roberts @ The Stone
My original plan was to try and and hit Happylucky after the museum, but it was pretty much impossible to make it, so I settled for my second choice at the Stone proper, the second to last night of Ingrid Laubrock’s residency there this week. I mean, when a line-up like this one (Nels Cline!) is your back-up plan, you’re definitely doing something right. It was an all-star line-up all around with an interesting set of instruments: sax, guitar, cello, drums.
One of the great things about the Stone and also one of the “worst” things about the Stone is you really never know what you’re going to get. You can look at a line-up and say “yeah, I like those musicians” but the nature of the game is that they could play the most awe-inspiring music you’ve ever heard of an hour of pure noise and all points in between. That’s the fun of it, though, the adventure of being a listener open to any and all outcomes, the thrill of going to a casino and having win-or-lose fun playing blackjack for an hour at the same time having the possibility for a grand payday, if you’re lucky. So, yeah, I knew all these musicians and knew they’d do something interesting, but I had no idea what to expect. The other thing about the Stone is you never know what to expect with the crowd, it doesn’t seem to track with day of the week or with musicians, some days it’s empty, some days it’s packed and, sure maybe you might expect more people when Nels Cline plays, and you’d usually be right, but not always.
And what did the cards come up with this past Friday? Well, the room was pretty much packed, I got one of the last seats in the house, certainly one of the last unobstructed-view seats. Always feels good when the room is full, it only takes 50 or so people. As far as the music is concerned, the set was 100% improvisation… and when I say “improvisation” that really means these guys just got up there and played. That’s what improv at the Stone means. They’re not “jamming” on a theme or a song or anything, it’s make-up-the-rules-as-you-go freeform. Of course, this can lead to some out there shit and it can lead to some musical epiphanies that you won’t find anywhere else… and often it means a little bit of both and all the shades of grey. Friday’s players are masters of improvisation and really showed it. Laubrock started with some nice long notes and Smith found a rhythm and they were off. I was happy for those long notes because a lot of short squonky blasts from a saxophone over the course of an hour’s worth of improv can be a bit much sometimes. Those opening notes really set my mind at ease going in. What I really enjoyed hearing from start to finish was how each musician listened to each of the other 3. It was just so apparent from what everyone was playing that what they were playing was in direct response to something they heard someone else do, birds in a small flock returning a song to each other. They played the first stretch for like 35 minutes without stopping, just a cascade of ideas, some short and unfocused, others finding some footing and locking in. It is always the hope that there will be moments of zen tucked into such conversation, deep-thinking revelations hidden in the high-level babbling. Friday’s set had many of these, often coalesced around a Ches Smith drum pattern that gave the other 3 something to stand on. Hank Roberts was a key element as well, communicating his cello’s unique place in the sonic range, able to find bass-like counterpoint as well as high-register stuff that almost sounded like another saxophone. Nels also seemed to play sax-like guitar, his tone really matching Ingrid’s nicely. Don’t worry, we got more than one “Nels moments,” of the scratch-your-head-in-amazement variety. The set seemed to get better as it went on as the comfort of the ensemble allowed them more leeway as things went on. The final third of the night found some really nice moments, Smith leading a downright groovy section at one point, Laubrock doing some cool three-note patterns on a soprano sax at another and Nels being Nels being Nels.
10Aug19 My Morning Jacket @ Forest Hills Stadium
The world is a depressingly increasingly fucked up place at nearly every level. We all have our ways of coping with this unfortunate reality and for me (as with many) that involves seeing as much fucking livemusic as humanly possible. There’s much solace and comfort to be found in a concert, the magic of human creativity and talent, the communal aspect of seeing a show with other human beings also doing their best to cope with their realities, the escapism of a concert and the pure bliss of listening, of dancing, of having your brain worked in a way that nothing else works it. It’s all there. Sometimes you have to find the comfort in the subtleties and nuances of a show, assigning extra meaning to a riff or a lyric than might have been there otherwise. It’s the equivalent to walking through a mist tent on a hot day at a festival, I mean, sure, it’ll cool you off of the world’s unbearabilty. Sure. But sometimes you don’t want a mist tent, sometimes you want to douse yourself with the good stuff, pour a bucket of pure soul-cleanse over your head and there ain’t no band that can do that like My Morning Jacket can. MMJ is like when you go to the waterpark and there’s this massive fucking bucket filling with water and when it gets full enough, an alarm goes off and it tips over and a gazillion gallons of water pour on your head, so much it feels like it should hurt you, but it’s the opposite of hurt. That’s an MMJ show. Thank the lord for the return of My Morning Jacket to NYC last night in Queens…
The show in Forest Hills indeed, felt like a long time coming and, no surprise, they had a gazillion gallons of that powerful MMJ Jim James soulcleanse for Queens last night. Before the show I was thinking back on all the times I’ve seen the Jacket in the past 15+ years, and of the 20+ times I’ve seen them how so many of them were like special shows in some way, above-and-beyond festival sets or cool venues or special runs of this sort or the other. They always know how to deliver on those special occasions, more than any other band I’ve known in my livemusic career, they do not fuck around. But, funny, it’s pretty rare for me to have seen just a regular old MMJ show, like last night and, make no mistake, last night was as standard-issue, shut-up-and-play-the-hits MMJ as you’ll get in this town and, daaaaamn, if their vanilla show isn’t a freak-of-nature, burn-the-place-to-the-ground affair like few others can deliver, it makes you realize that every single time they hit the stage is something to marvel at.
There are few guys in rock and roll who can strut around with a cape on for one song and with a towel over his head for another and jam without irony on a Flying V guitar and make it all so goddamn cool like Jim James. Not just cool, but like superchurch-pastor magnetic, like “Jim James tell me what to do and I’ll do it” level front man. This is the guy who tips over that massive bucket, who takes a great rock show and somehow makes it a religious experience. In between songs last night, bringing some somber and uplifting thoughts, love and understanding, making it flow naturally from and within the music. That’s some special shit.
What a perfect venue Forest Hills is for MMJ, with its big, easy General Admission floor and wrapped-around bleachers crowd. It feels big and it feels intimate all at once, that’s what you want for an MMJ show, that’s the way they make it feel, big and small, close and personal with a higher purpose. I also love how the show started in the vestiges of daylight and then ended in the darkness of night. The day/night thing is symbolic, sure, but it also reflects the sound of My Morning Jacket. I mean, if you get to hear “Golden” during the golden hour of a Saturday and then a couple songs later, all daylight gone, the tribal call-to-arms of “Victory Dance” at night, and then the artificial starlight spiraling around the venue from the disco ball later into the set, well, the show didn’t need that extra drama, but why not??
I imagine that everyone has a song or two they’d have loved to have seen, but they truly played so many of the heavy hitters, there was very little arc to the show, no sign of we’re-building-to-a-peak. The whole damn show was a peak, a giant bucket of adrenaline to go with the giant bucket of love. What’s going on outside the walls of the Stadium right now? Honestly, I don’t give a shit, let’s rock out to Magheetah and Gideon and Off the Record and that meltdown show-ending Steam Engine > Phone Went West. Band’s played barely any gigs in the past two years and, like, no big whoop, we’re still better than anyone in the business. Prove us wrong, prove us wrong.
Jim James howling at the existential plane during “Worldless Chorus” and the whole place going predictably apeshit for the show-closing “One Big Holiday,” no one in Forest Hills having any clue when they’ll see a show-closing “One Big Holiday” again, making it count and hoping that the next time that big bucket tips over is not too far off.
