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-fourth of hopefully 52 posts…
20Aug19 Nels Cline 4 @ Le Poisson Rouge
To me, the most exciting place in the history of western music is that spot where jazz and rock meet. It’s nothing new — if Miles Davis didn’t establish that territory 50 years ago, he certainly made it more hospitable for musicians to settle there — but it is in a serious heyday right now, particularly around NYC. Perhaps no musician of the day bridges the jazz/rock nexus quite like Nels Cline who is the lead guitarist in arguably the great American rock band of this young century and someone who is a leading light in the world of jazz, improv and experimental music. And perhaps no ensemble quite captures that spirit, that fusion of styles and motifs, quite like the Nels Cline 4, who played both sides of the coin last night in a ridiculous, nearly two hour, set of genre-shredding ridiculousness.
Now, Nels Cline is a big part of this group, obviously, it’s his, but it’s really the “4” that makes it so special. The band is Nels on guitar, Julian Lage on guitar, Jorge Roeder on bass and Tom Rainey on drums. That’s a killer band. It’s a band built on a duo, the Nels/Julian duo who have played together and recorded an album together. There are many extra layers of context to the set last night. Julian Lage. There are three points that define the plane of Julian Lage’s guitar playing to me, three duos in fact: with Chris Eldrige, Gyan Riley and Nels Cline. I’ve seen those three pairings multiple times and I’ve never seen more symbiotic guitar playing than the way Julian plays in duet with those three guys, all playing a very different style and mood. So, it was kind of fascinating to me to see last night’s show, built from the Nels Cline/Julian Lage duo work, so soon after seeing the show on Sunday, the Lage/Riley/Frisell set which was built from the Gyan Riley/Julian Lage duo. I won’t go any further into that whole thing, because we’d be here forever, but in the back of my mind the entire show last night, mostly subconsciously, in the back of my mind the music of Sunday’s matinee set at the Vanguard was still bouncing around, lingering in that space between short and medium term memory, squeezing the last bits of joy and awe out of my soul before becoming “something amazing I saw.”
Anyway, the music from last night! HOLYFUCK it was good. Within 30 seconds of the first notes each of the four musicians had made their presence felt, felt in a damn, that guy is good kind of way. The opening salvo was a hint of what was to come, Nels and Julian back and forth, bopping around like two boxers in the ring before the bell strikes, eyeing each other, shadowboxing a few jabs here and there. Then a flip over to Jorge who gave a sneak preview of the kind of bass he’d be playing for the rest of the night and then Tom bopping a short solo, the hidden-in-plain-sight weapon of the “4.” You can’t sit at the nexus of rock and jazz without a drummer who can feel both out and pass between them like a stealthy double agent and Tom Rainey, somewhat unassuming sitting there behind the kit, that dude can pass and then some.
The first tune took shape and it was off to the races, almost literally. The time for warmups was over and hoooeee! Julian and Nels, Nels and Julian, like two squirrels chasing each other around a tree, but who’s chasing whom and what happens when he catches his pursuit? You’ve never seen two guitarists play with such speed and dexterity and skill and somehow still make music of such high caliber. There’s really only one way to react to such a feat and that’s to just laugh out loud. That’s what we did, over and over, all night long. I joked before the trio show on Sunday that I needed to be in a seat where I could see the guitarists’ hands, but last night I realized that I really just want to see their faces, especially Julian’s. His fingers are a blur, but the expressions on his face, the way he looks at Nels and reacts to what Nels is playing, the way he looks at Roeder, somehow taking what his bassmate is playing and also directing him to follow. There is music in the expressions of Julian Lage’s face that is in perfect harmony with what’s coming out of his guitar.
The set was a bounty of guitar mastery of the highest order. It was like watching the Olympics. Sometimes you’re just impressed with the technical feats — and there was plenty of technically impossible guitar playing that went down — which are impressive and amazing, but then, but then, but then, but then there are moments of such extreme grace, beauty, agility, mindblowing how the fuck they do that? kind of shit, the kind of shit that makes you trace back evolutionary lines from the first single-celled organisms to the present day, the moment where you are standing watching two (supposed) human beings make music like that and it puts all of it into clear focus. Holy shit! Sometimes this would come in a short burst — there was a moment where the two were isolated into a straight duo, back and forth, up and down, who’s on first?, two-man-mind-meld and then the band kicked in in full and Julian played a spurt of notes, barely a second or two worth of music, but those notes, man, those fucking notes were the name of god.
But on top of those moments, there were three legs of the stool of that 2 hours of ridiculousness that pushed beyond, that got my cheeks hurting from smiling so much. The first was that opening number, a dizzying mindfuck of two-man guitar volleying, the kind that had me wondering in amazement, as I often do, you can just walk in off the street and see this. Midway through the set they played a song called “Pacific Pines Song” and it was a glorious, fully-band, major-key masterpiece, like a Dead/Allmans mashup except played by a slapping quartet in a basement club in the West Village with a couple hundred lucky souls finding simultaneous bliss on a Tuesday night. The previous 2 Nels Cline 4 shows were sit-down shows and this was the first time they played to a mostly SRO crowd and it really made a difference, being able to move and to feel a part of a crowd and for that energy to permeate the room and feedback to the musicians. Yes, some of the music was weird and pensive and abstract, in all the right ways, but not necessarily dance music. But when they hit those moments like Pacific Pines Song, it was good to be unencumbered by a chair or a table or a drink minimum or distracted by waitresses circling the room. There was only you and the music and the audience feeling the same. That was a great one. Finally, the set ended as their shows do, with “River Mouth Parts I & II” and it’s really the “part 2” that is an absolute perfect piece of music, a nexus of jazz and rock and so much more, it’s happy and intense and mindblowing. To watch the band play this is that moment when you’re watching the Olympics and Simone Biles completes that triple double ain’t-human-level thing, four limbs — guitar, guitar, drums and bass — defying gravity and anatomy. Unbelievable. How the fuck do they do that?
Laugh out loud, indeed. A great show.
22Aug19
Julian Lage/Kris Davis @ Jazz Gallery (early set)
In my line of work it is quite often the case that I’m in a room with colleagues and am the least smart person there, trying to follow the conversation and incredibly satisfied leaving the meeting having understood 10% of what everyone was talking about. That’s about how I felt listening to Julian Lage and Kris Davis have a music conversation for guitar and piano last night. The set was certainly not what was booked for the opening act at Madison Square Garden this week, but it was a few blocks away and timed perfectly and was infinitely more interesting than anything they could have booked in the arena… plus, it’s Julian Lage Week! don’t you know? I had no choice but to hit this set.
I’ve mentioned Julian’s work in 3 distinct guitar duos, and I think his work with Davis is in the same conversation, if not the fourth wheel on that car. They’ve played a bunch together and like his relationships with Nels and Gyan and Critter, Julian has a unique language that he speaks with Kris. I’ve seen them once (or maybe twice?) before and it’s a different kind of magic, but magic all the same. Last night’s set came off like an incredible-to-watch head-on collision between two cars traveling in different directions down a single-lane road. One vehicle was the straight jazz show with its familiar material and motifs, a vintage mid-60’s Mustang, the other one was pure abstraction, full-on formless improvisation, maybe doesn’t even look like an automobile at all, but it’s coming down the road nonetheless.. The audience, a full room at the Jazz Gallery, sat right in the middle of this collision, picking through the wreckage, large pieces of recognizable jazz music here and hunks of out there shit over there, but mostly a mess of metal and rubber all mixed up and impossible to differentiate.
So, you had a setlist that included traditional standards, some Thelonious Monk and even a Stravinsky piece as well as one original each from Lage and Davis, but they played out gnarled and twisted just as often as they did “straight” and often both at the same time. What was astonishing was how easily the two dipped in and out of these different modes or overlapped them or infused one with the other. Things went from recognizable and easygoing to wild and weird and tense within a measure and yet it was all so fluid and natural, it all tied together perfectly. The several times I’ve seen Davis she’s done a lot of prepared piano, but last night there was only one song where she stood up and got her hands into her instrument, manipulating its sound palette. I thought a lot during the set about how the piano is called the “piano” its dynamics a defining characteristic from the start and how both Davis and Lage used the spectrum of quiet-to-loud to bring so much color to their playing. Lage is a master, of course, he was not just soft/loud, but also fast/slow, overly simple/incredibly complex. You watch his hands and try to correlate the sounds coming out of the guitar to what he’s doing — he utilizes practically zero effects, an amazement unto itself in this day and age — and it frankly can give you a headache. At one point he had his hands close to each other, his left hand low on the neck, both hands curled almost into fists, his fingertips hidden on the strings; you can see the hands moving, sort of, but the notes coming out, the notes of two, three or four guitars at once, I mean… how he do that?? His playing last night was remarkable, but it’s all the more so in the context of what he’s already played this week. Triples are cool, but even cooler when they’re part of a cycle, and with a few more days left in Lage Week, he may just get it.
Tame Impala @ Madison Square Garden
Who is the Julian Lage of correctly predicting the weather? That’s the gal I want to see in action, because there was a WTF? uncalled-for deluge coming down when we got downstairs. MSG was but a few blocks away, but the downpour slowed my roll a bit. Waited about 5 minutes in the lobby, thankfully the rain let up just enough to make a go of it and I made it into the Garden, onto the floor with about 5 minutes to go before showtime and not too wet, all things considered.
It’s both weird and kind of exhilarating to see a band other than Phish at MSG, I’m so used to the rhythm and energy when those guys play that room, their home base. I had floor seats and when I first got there, it felt kind of empty towards the back, but by the time lights went down, the place didn’t feel empty at all, almost all the seats felt full and the floor had a nice crowd to the soundboard. Still, plenty of room to move around and dance. I think I’ve seen almost every Tame Impala headliner show in NYC since 2012, watched them rise up from clubs to theaters, their sound and production evolve and grow and mutate and playing MSG was not only no surprise, it felt natural. Felt right.
Right up: I loved the show. I am all in on Tame Impala. I have seen a few people mention that the show/band has become too pop for their tastes. I kind of laugh at that, because if Tame Impala sounds like pop music, it’s because pop music has spent the last 5 years trying to sound like them, not the opposite. The growth in sound from guitar-driven psych-rock to a groovier synth-focused neopsych has been a natural evolution and I think anyone that’s seen them over the past couple years would recognize that. They’ve clearly become something that is popular enough to fill an arena (for two nights) playing the music that they want. (and by “they” I mean Kevin Parker, of course). My daughter went to the Wednesday night show and loved it (“best show I ever saw!”) and I loved hearing all her comments and observations about the show, but the thing I kind of smiled about was how she said that every song was like 10 minutes long and all these “long jams” and having now seen the same show (and seen them like 6 or 7 times), every song is definitely not 10 minutes long. But I found that this was her impression of the songs fascinating and won’t delve into that any more.
Anyway, the show! They opened with “Let It Happen” arguably their biggest “hit” and damn, that’s a way to kick things off and make sure everyone is all-in from the get-go. The last time I saw these guys was 2016 at the Bandshell and that show felt like the end of an era in terms of their production. From the earliest I’d seen them to that show, their “light show” was centered around a very cool oscilloscope visual that they used very well and matched the sound nicely. That kind of evolved over time, mostly by going from all green to more colors, but it was basically the same for many years. I have no idea what they do for their festival headlining sets, maybe the same as what we saw last night, but I don’t think so… last night’s production felt very tailored for playing at MSG. The stage was big and tiered and was backed by a gigantic screen that rifled through all sorts of seriously psychedelic imagery. There were plenty of lights above and below, of course and then there was this ring of lights directly over the band that, as the show went on, would go up and down or kind of rotate around. That was cool. Finally, the fucking lasers! YES! Who doesn’t love lasers? The lasers kicked in about midway through when they kicked into “Elephant” and were awesome and used perfectly. If I hadn’t seen Chemical Brothers a few weeks ago, I would have pegged their production as one of the best I’d seen in a while. Like the Chemical Bros visuals, they were synced up to the music really well and were a value added from start to finish.
I’m not sure I’d go so far to say that the show was a “greatest hits” set, but they played pretty much their standard set of every-song-we-have-is-awesome repertoire. They probably play the same set more or less every time and, why not, it is a perfectly-calibrated, full-on psychedelic dance party. “Elephant” fucking rages like it always has. “Mind Mischief” is a deep, hypnotic mindfucker and “Eventually” was a showered-in-lasers sing-along masterpiece. I mean, everyone loves those songs because they are fantastic songs and they’ve been playing most of them for like 3 or more years and they sound polished and awesome. A times they were an arena rock band, at times they were a disco party band, at no time did I feel like they did not have complete control of the room. The two new songs they have are as good as anything and hopefully they’ll have more where those came from… and if not, I’d still go see them. A great live act, even in an arena.
23Aug19 Julian Lage/Marc Ribot @ Happylucky No 1
What’s your dream guitar pairing? Is it Derek Trucks sitting in with Trey Anastasio (or vice versa)? Well, looks like you’re in luck this weekend. On the other hand, if, like me, it’s Marc Ribot joining Julian Lage, well… if you were at Happylucky No 1 last night, then you were also in luck. Very, very, very lucky. For the uninformed, Happylucky is a gallery in Crown Heights that hosts shows curated by the Stone on Friday and Saturday nights. When the listing for “Julian Lage” became “Julian Lage and Marc Ribot,” well, I marked my work calendar and took the afternoon off, making sure I left enough time to get to Crown Heights and guarantee I got into the room for this. Because, there was no fucking way I was missing Marc Ribot, perhaps my favorite guitarist of all time, play with Julian Lage, perhaps the best guitarist I’ve ever seen, and also one of my favorites. I could think of no better way to end Julian Lage Week than catching this first-time-ever pairing of two masters of their instrument.
Not just masters, but guitarists who can emote with their instruments like the best method actors, real feeling coming out of those 6-strings. On top of the skill and the passion, Julian and Mark are remarkable for their abilities across nearly every genre you could think of. Already I’ve seen Lage go from classical-like composition playing to fusionjamrock to freejazz and be best-in-show in all of them. Ribot is similarly someone who laughs at whatever lines you’d like to draw around his music. So, like most things at the Stone, I had no idea what we were going to get, but even more so than usual. There is nothing they could have played last night that would have surprised me, but I expected to be surprised nonetheless. My expectations were high, but I also, somehow expected my expectations to be exceeded. Heavy man.
And, like, yeah, they didn’t really exceed my expectations as much as pour gasoline on them and burn them to cinders. First of all, they both played acoustic guitars, which, from the start, I was excited about. They ended up playing 4 songs in the set, 4 very different pieces that gave ample room for both guitarists to blow my fucking mind. The first “piece” was very likely just improvisation, although if you told me it was actually some “song,” I’d be like, sure. Let’s get it right out there, they opened with a piece that went almost exactly 30 minutes without stop. In my review of the Kris Davis/Julian Lage show from Thursday night, I described the music as a head-on collision between straight jazz and straight freeform abstraction. The first 30 minute “jam” of the Ribot/Lage set last night was also a collision of sorts, this time between Americana music and free improvisation, but instead of a tangled, burning mess of the two styles, the collision was more like two lovers running into each other’s arms and embracing somewhere in between. The music bounced around all these different themes filled with country and folk and other old-timey motifs, sometimes barely recognizable, sometimes very overt, and then these themes would get smeared around in extreme guitar calisthenics and gee-whiz wizardry and improvisation. Julian doesn’t have that we’re-speaking-our-own-language chemistry with Ribot (not yet, at least), it was their first time doing this (as far as I know), but that didn’t hold back the music at all. On the contrary, it may have made it more interesting and all the more impressive. Two masters going back and forth, solos and complements, over, under, in and out, tying knots of 12 guitar strings at the highest level imaginable. Getting out there, but never losing footing. At times it felt like Dave Rawlings crossed with Wayne Krantz or something, straight acoustic amazement swirled up in high-level free play. Sustaining that for 30 minutes was impressive, along the way they must have real-time “composed” dozens of new melodies and ideas for songs. One thing that struck me during that half hour was how strong willed Julian was, in his jovial way. This was not a conversation like he has with Gyan Riley or Nels Cline. Ribot doesn’t converse like that. Quite often he imposes his will on a show that he’s playing in; he’s got a strong personality both “real life” and with his guitar. This is not a criticism, it’s a good thing. It’s the best thing. Marc Ribot don’t fuck around and there’s no reason to, he just goes out there and plays and always, always crushes it. But Julian didn’t let Marc impose his will on the show. And he didn’t gain his footing by fighting back or by being aggressive, it was more like the catch-more-flies-with-honey approach, Julian’s laid back personality, but “real life” and with his guitar, is seductively kind and sweet and, I imagine, difficult to resist if you’re another guitarist/musician on stage with him. And so Julian and Marc were equals on stage last night and the music was a glorious two-man symphony featuring two of the all-time greats playing as well as you could imagine. Playing acoustic guitars as well as you could imagine them being played. The 30 minutes concluded with an absolutely gorgeous little riff from Julian, 20 or 30 seconds of a little something that I want tattooed on my soul for perpetuity, it was that good. That was a hell of an opening “number.”
The rest of the hour was filled with 3 more songs and these were definitely songs. The first was a jazz tune, kind of a swing jazz era kind of song, I’m sure someone who is smarter than me in these things would know the name of the song. The next one was a ballad. And they finished with the standard “Summertime” which is certainly in the conversation of all-time best songs and is always welcome in any form. I loved how they split up the show like this. The duo certainly benefited from the structure of the songs and while they weren’t as freewheeling risk-taking, they did provide some anchors for the audience’s minds, which had been floating adrift for so long, to stay in one place. It was great that it wasn’t an either/or proposition, not just free-jamming or riff on some standards. We got both and both approaches showed off different angles on the infinitely-faceted talents of our two protagonists. And while they were working from set melodic themes, that didn’t mean there weren’t adventurous forays, there was plenty of improvisation throughout the second half of the show. It’s just that this jamming had some themes to thread through them and also a home base to touch down. The difference between the first and second halves of the show is like swimming out in the ocean and swimming in a swimming pool. Plenty of fun to be had doing either, but a very different experience. The last two songs really felt like the best-of-the-show to me, perhaps because they were the last two songs. The ballad was slow and gorgeous and seemed half-around-the-globe from the opening jam. It kind of messed with my mind, going from before the show when I was open to absolutely anything — I mean, there was a good chance that the show was an hour of pure, unformed noise, that was a distinct possibility walking into the doors and paying admission, a challenging, melody-free blur — going from all possibilities to this ridiculous bout of Hogwarts-graduate-level improvisation, to this absolutely lovely ballad… that was a weird kind of rush. The thing is, Lage and Ribot can get out there and can do the jazz thing and the rock-yo-face thing and all, but at the heart of it, deep down inside, they are both the sculptors of beautiful art and playing that slow-mover, quiet piece deep in that set, giving them both a chance to tickle the silence of the room like that, a few shades grayer than nothing at all, not just show us how gentle and quiet and gorgeous they can be, but doing it together, four hands working such high detail into the same piece of clay, that was something special. And then that “Summertime.” I mean, an absolutely stunning version of a song I’ve probably heard a hundred versions of. A perfect choice, for the mid-August date, for the room, for the moment in that set, but mostly for those two musicians. The recognizable theme was just a basis for some of the most engaged back-and-forth improvisation of the night. Whatever is beyond “next level,” that’s where these guys were for that set-closer, not so much bending the tune into shape, but more like bending space-time around the standard so that it appeared to our simple, mortal ears, like something brand new and not-of-this-world. The set was like watching a lifelong friendship form in real time, so that by the time they got to that final 10 minutes or so, all boundaries had both been established and crashed down, the mutual respect and musical love was flowing and the audience was treated to some sweet, sweet I-would-die-for-you-brother shit. Wow, that was good. A definitive version of the song for me.
The two hugged at the end of the set. Julian is a hugger. Ribot a reluctant huggee, but the embrace was real and meaningful and, frankly, completely necessary after a set like that. We were all just watching that hug, but we were watching what we were feeling and so we were a part of it, too. We called them back for an encore and, having deconstructed most of the classic American musical canon, from country to jazz, standards and new inventions, it only made sense that they tackled a blues tune. Or bluesy tune. Whatever it was, they cuisinhart’d it like everything else they did. This was we’re-just-fucking-around territory, two “old” friends showing off for each other, shooting three-pointers with a blindfold on, behind-the-back, through-the-legs Harlem-Globetrotting our feeble Washington-Generals minds.
Make no mistake about it, the two greatest guitarists I know played together Friday night and it only took a drive to Crown Heights to see it. So very, very lucky.
