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 forty-seventh of hopefully 52 posts…
18Nov19
Sylvan Esso @ Beacon Theatre
This show was just pure joy. Pretty much everything I want to say about it is in my review here.
I mean, what a band! It struck me that I’ve paid to see 4 of the members separately in their own bands in much smaller venues in the past year alone and to see them playing together in such a a setting of pure jubiliance was quite a treat. Loved it.
Locobeach @ Barbes
There are a few great Monday night residencies in town. I’ve only see Locobeach once and really enjoyed them and so decided to hit Barbes. When I got there it wasn’t clear they were coming back on, it was like 11:15 and there was no movement towards music. I think they finally shuffled on “stage” at like 11:25 and maybe made it to midnight. Those 30 or so minutes ranged from decent Santana-pop to electrifying psychedelic cumbia meltdown. There were like 10 scattered people in the room, everyone was dancing. Lots of fun.
19Nov19
Bill Frisell Trio (Scherr, Wolleson) @ Jazz Standard (late set)
Any discussion of the “best” guitarists is an absurd one from the outset, although I see why people make such lists. Any discussion of my favorite guitarists feels equally impossible, there are so many of them that touch me in so many different ways. Still, there are some that are on the shortlist without question. It’s fun to think about the “roles” they play in my music listening/appreciation spectrum. You’ve got Anastastio (spiritual guide), Metzger (reliable old friend not afraid to tell you the ugly truths when necessary), Lage (that good-looking genius athlete that’s obnoxiously good at everything but you can’t help but love him anyway), Krantz (late-night-hang buddy), etc. Any list of my personal favorite guitarists is absolutely going to feature Bill Frisell. Put him right near the top of that list, absolute first-ballot @neddyo Hall-of-Famer.
And what role does Frisell play? He’s that professor in college you’ll never forget, the best teacher you ever had, the one that you continue to learn from long after your college days have ended. And what subject does Prof. Frisell teach? He’s a philosophy teacher, no doubt, the one who asks the big questions without answering them. What is beauty? How do we know we know what we know? What is truth? In our post-truth age, where the threats to humanity are as much epistemological as existential, the truths that passed through my mind during the Frisell set, the things you think about while Bill and his trio-mates lecture in front of the class, those truths are immutable.
I’ve seen Bill Frisell nearly 50 times, they’ve all been magical. Last night was one of the best sets I’ve seen from him. What made it so special? Well, first of all, he was playing with his “standard” trio, with Tony Scherr and Kenny Wolleson. Bill is great in almost every setting, transcendent solo or backing a singer or duo or whatever. His magic transends the accompaniment. Even so, Scherr and Wolleson, in their age-earned comfort level, the mutual respect and admiration… they just know Bill and Bill knows they know him, the trusted teaching assistants who can run the class no problem on their own if they had to, and it comes out in the playing in ways both subtle and overt. So yeah, that’s a start. We barely managed to get in to the late set that was packed-house on a Tuesday, and got seated in what I would call a “partially obstructed” spot that was, nevertheless, close to the stage. It’s nice to see the guys play, but I realized about 10 seconds into the set that when I see Bill Frisell, I don’t really need to see Bill Frisell, because inevitably my eyes will be closed the entire time.
I wish I knew the names of the songs better, but on top of the trio being in top form, the song selection was brilliantly good. They opened with one of Frisell’s well-recognized originals, but quickly took it deep, leaving the song structure and doing some ridiculous full-trio improvisation. Kenny and Tony are comortable “stealing” the melodies from Bill to move the pieces along, leaving him to bounce his lecture around on the deeper questions of the universe. That opening tune was just flat out fucking amazing. Frisell attacked the jam with an array of effects and loops, and it really was a “jam.” His effects had a surprising Garcia-feel to them and, indeed, the improvisation felt like 1978 Grateful Dead squeezed into a nominally jazz guitar trio. The effect lingered throughout the opening section which saw a Scarlet/Fire-esque transition between the first two songs on the way to a 4-song suite of seamless transitions totalling almost 40 minutes in all. I mean, holy shit, this was a genre-defying masterpiece painted by a trio so in each other’s head’s you could practically pick up the Wi-Fi hot spot connection between them on your phone (if you hadn’t followed venue policy and turned it off, that is!). It’s a rare thing for me to think “I wish I had a recording of that!” I’m content to wait til the next one, but from that opening stretch to the end, there was some shit I’d like to hear again. I’m pretty sure they operate without a setlist, Bill meandering his way through the metaphysical, finding footing in some twisted-logic fit and then the band snapping in behind him, or maybe already anticipating the next song and just waiting for Bill to make his way there. Watching these three together is pure magic. Wolleson would quicken the pace during improvisational stretches, barely perceptible clicks in tempo, the other two conforming almost immediately. What a fucking thrill. The fulcrum of the set was a stunner version of “In My Life.” How does one take a song that’s perhaps one of the most beautiful pop/rock songs ever written and make it, like, more beautiful? How do we know red is red, my friends? How can we be certain of anything? I can be certain that this version blew me away, Frisell actually making something so pretty and delicate more pretty by adding a layer of tingling heaviness to it, making it more rocking. Not sure how you do that, but Bill is and that’s all that matters. And the whole time my mind is adrift, eyes closed, bliss, bliss, bliss. The whole set of music was like an anaestesthic, the guy comes in and puts drugs into your IV and the next thing you know, you’re waking up post-surgery amazed that it’s all over, that’s it?, blissfully unaware that your body has been cut open and your insides have been rearranged for the better while you were under. Bill, Tony and Kenny put me under and rearranged my inside, for the better, for the better.
The whole set was just perfect. Often Frisell sets are very good and then near the end there’s a sublime moment in which you see God and that moment is so good it makes the very good set something that, as a whole, made you see God and that’s the magic of Bill Frisell. But every once in a while, the set is good enough, from beginning to end, that you don’t just see God, you get to hang out with him a bit, ask him a few questions, make sure he knows that you’re doing your best and that you appreciate all the things that are beautiful in this world, objectively or subjectively, thank God for beauty itself. Last night was one of those. They returned for an encore and of course I whisper to myself “play ‘You Only Live Twice’” because if you get to see Bill Frisell play his version of “You Only Live Twice” live, no matter who he’s playing with, solo or in a big band, well, that’s something special, that’s acing the final exam of that high-level philosophy exam, it’s when you get to get it. There was no way the show last night wasn’t ending with it and the chills I got when Bill teased around the coda melody, a melody he didn’t write, for sure, but one that was written for him to make his own. When those notes twinkled out of his guitar like fireflies into the club, well, that’s why we evolved to get the chills every once in a while, for moments like that. Naturally, this was the end-all/be-all version of “You Only Live Twice,” three guys melted down into a single entitiy, music flowing through them, Frisell’s use of effects to fill the air with multiplying faeries of sound, splitting that melody into millions and millions pricks of light, was pure mastery. I’ve tried and I cannot describe it accurately in words, so let me just say fuuuuuuuuck, that was good.
Subtonics @ Letlove Inn
You get to a point where it makes absolutely no sense not to hit the Subtonics after and last week was so good and the timing was just right, there was no reason not to go back this week. We walked in right as the second set was starting, which was perfect. Costas actually was explaining that they were going to have a big holiday/album show at Berlin in Manhattan which I’d encourage you to go to, but it’s on 12/20 and I’m putting on a show that night which you should definitely go to.
Even though the band, club, bartender, day-of-the-week and time were more or less identical to last week, the show was much much different. Heck the “band” was much different. Last week Costas was sitting down on guitar, joined by guitar, keys and drums. This week he was standing, there was a keyboard on the opposite side of the stage from last week, I think the keys and drummer may have been different players (maybe?) and the sax guy was gone and there was a bassist who mostly sat down. A definitely-different sax player also joined in from off the stage for a couple solos through the set. The music they made was also much different. Last week’s set was a sit-down and let your brain go to places far flung. It was stunning. This week, due largely to the bassist, was more of a deepfunk machine thing, the kind of thing for late night dance parties and dark groove jamming. It was also stunning. Somehow both of these things are “Subtonics,” which is glorious in the same way Krantz playing something new and different with different dudes every week is glorious. There was a jam in the middle that felt like a funkfusion take on Eminence Front, Costas waiting for the band’s funk to subside before crafting a long, soaring solo that was freakin incredible. More and more, Astoria is looking like it’s “on the way home” on Tuesday nights. Get it on your GPS as well, you won’t be disappointed.
21Nov19
Jesca Hoop @ Mercury Lounge
There was about 30 minutes more traffic than I was anticipating coming into Manhattan last night, so I was looking to get to Mercury Lounge about 10–15 minutes after 8 which meant missing 10–15 minutes of Jesca Hoop. I wondered if it’d be worth the price of admission, potentially only a 45 minute set would mean missing like 1/3 of the show. After deciding to F it and just go, it only took about 15 seconds for me to know that it was the right decision.
This was, I believe, the third time I’ve seen Hoop before, but it was the first time that it wasn’t just her playing solo. Her songs are just so damn good and combined with her voice and perfect sense of humor, the other two times I’ve seen her have been truly wonderful experiences… obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t have come a third time. Last night she played with two other women on either side of her that each rotated through light percussion (frame drums, things to shake), and additional guitar, bass and/or keys. The extra accompaniment was all well and good, but what the extra bodies on stage really brought to the music were some truly stunning harmonies. These really added some extra oomph at select moments, adding color and punctuation to Jesca’s otherwise stand-on-their-own songs. It really gave the show a real Crosby, Stills, Nash feel, although more like if David Crosby was backed by the other two, Hoop’s songs with their dreamlike quality, bordering on surrealistic storytelling, matched with a subtle thread of social justice and humanity, really struck me as David-Crosby-like last night. Her humor is so natural and unforced… I imagine she tells similar stories/banter every night, she was at the end of a 7-week run with this group, it’d be hard not to repeat yourself, but it comes off so conversational, you really get a feel like you’re seeing what the real Jesca Hoop is like. Unfortunately, that energy also invites the audience to pipe up with ridiculously dumb (but, by and large, harmless) comments shouted back at the stage between songs. She handled them all like a good teacher handling a restless middle school English class.
She told a couple stories that came out almost like poetry or fiction, the words in the telling like the dreamy lyrics in her songs. And then she’d sing a song clearly inspired by the story, but the way the facts/lessons of the anecdote made their way into the music was so implicit and hidden it made listening to them like appreciating a fine piece of literature. There was one story about meeting a guy on the beach who, it turned out, was on psychedelics and I was struck how L.A. Salami, along with Hoop, one of the, in my opinion, finest songwriters of the day, who I happened to see last week, also has a song inspired by meeting a guy tripping on the beach and the wisdom he dispenses. Memo to young songwriters looking for a song: go to the beach and seek out the drugged. In Hoop’s story, the guy revealed (after she tried to fuck with him) that he was born with his heart outside his ribcage and that the doctors covered it with skin from his mother and then she sings this song that wasn’t about that at all, but was clearly about that. Pretty stunning moment, I thought. The songs, the ridiculous harmonies, the stories, even the goofy audience who didn’t want her to leave after her hour was up, the banter, Jesca Hoop, so very likely not on your radar, but absolutely should be. It was the right decision to go, no doubt. Looking forward to her next visit, solo or not.
Emerald Quintet @ Brooklyn Bowl
I think a lot about nostalgia in music, the tension between music reflecting some version of the past — places, people, emotions — and the inherent newness of listening and seeing livemusic. It’s kind of fascinating to think about, many layers. The idea that something is a nostalgia act is pejorative, sure, but why it’s perceived that way is a much more interesting thing to think about. Tribute acts, cover bands, reunion tours and the like all hit on this, but there’s much more to the question. Anyway, fun to consider.
Last night I saw Emerald Quintet. Emerald Quintet are not a nostalgia act, I don’t know that anyone would even begin to describe them that way. And yet, the feeling I had grooving the funk down to the band was one of pure nostalgia. Like the smell of fresh cut grass might take you to a certain place of your youth, or the blend of certain flavors might evoke a very specific time from the past, watching these guys on stage took me back. That in itself is strange because this is a band that’s played together only a few times and it was certainly the first time I’d seen them, in this iteration, at least. I’ve seen the individual musicians before. Lots of times. And I’ve heard the music they played together, either the specific songs themselves, but certainly the style and flavor of the music (NOLA/funk/groove/blues) brought me to a certain place. And if the musicians and the music wasn’t enough, I was surrounded by so many familiar faces, faces of friends old and new. Faces attached to bodies that I’ve danced to that music played by those people on stage, many, many times. If there were 200 people in the room, I do not exaggerate when I say I may have known half of them. Well, if that’s not nostalgia, nothing is.
So, the band is Skerik on sax, Stanton Moore on drums, Scott Metzger on guitar, Andy Hess on bass, Robert Walter on keys. That’s a fucking band right there. And they were more-than-sum-of-parts good last night, a superlative take on a well-worn genre. That genre is let’s party, by the way. I’ve seen those guys collectively hundreds of times, but if I trace it all back, that musical whiff of fresh green grass took me back to Tribeca 1997–2004. Tribeca is the “triangle below Canal,” technically. But if you were a livemusic lover in NYC during that stretch, the real triangle in that area of town was the points defined by the Wetlands, the Knitting Factory and Tribeca Rock Club. (maybe you could dispute the 3rd point, but that’s what I’m going with for my own personal journey). The first time I went to the Knit (I think?) was also the first time I saw Galactic, featuring Stanton Moore in 1998. Later, in 2000, when another Galactic show got cancelled due to weather, a Stanton-Moore-led midnight-til-wee-hours superjam, was an important milestone in many of the Freaks community “professional development,” a remember-if-you-were-there kind of event. It was an early example of many such “superjams” that proliferated in that triangle in those days. Quite possible the most memorable of these was when Robert Walter had his gear stolen and a benefit jam was assembled at the Wetlands that night. These things were all-night affairs, musicians of all types rotating on and off with little order or organization. The music inevitably shaded to the funky and the jammy, often in equal doses. A regular at these, perhaps even at the Robert Walter one (too lazy to look it up now), was Scott Metzger, the guitarist for Rana who played the Wetlands regularly until its demise, and then a ridiculous residency at Tribeca Rock Club a couple years later, at which point Andy Hess was playing with Gov’t Mule who were all over the scene, often in NYC. Galactic came back to town regularly with Skerik in tow and his NYC presence extended to jams at the Knit and beyond. It was all there in that stew. Half the people in the crowd at the show were at a bunch of those shows, 15–20 years ago. I was there with them. It was fucking awesome. Those were, as they say, the days.
Yeah, so that’s all kind of in the show last night, baked in the middle like a plastic baby in a king cake. But that’s not what this show was about. It was about how those guys, 15 or 20 years later, are all still doing it, I mean, they fucking made it and found each other for at least this short stretch and, lo!, are making some killer grooves. The show last night was a top-dog version of an old Wetlands superjam. Whether you recognized the songs they played or you didn’t, it didn’t really matter. The band features three supremely awesome soloists in Walter, Metzger and Skerik. Each of them took some killer long drives in the family sedan, letting her rip. It would be easy to pick 2 or 3 from each of them and dissect them. But for all those ridiculous solos, the thing about the show is that it was all about, all about the rhythm section. I don’t think I’ve seen a show with Stanton Moore on the drums where I didn’t think that’s the guy who’s leading this thing. It’s almost impossible for his drumming to not be the center of whatever music he’s playing. It’s not just that he’s funky. There are plenty of funky drummers out there. He’s just got that it factor and even on a stage with musical personalities, the talent and skill that was on that stage, there is no doubt that Stanton was the man amongst men. What a thrill it is to watch him and watch his band kind of absorb that rhythmic energy. Starts with a smile of recognition and then extends to those guitar-picking fingers or key-banging hands or sax-blowing lungs. My feet just started tapping just thinking about it. And yet. And yet. And yet. The real fucking hero was Andy Hess. Every time you see Andy Hess, you’re kind of astounded. He is what all bass players should aspire to be. It’s like Skerik is looking back at his solo and it’s represented by footprints in the sand and he says to Andy Hess, “why when the solo was just getting fucking sick are there only one set of footprints” and Andy Hess is like, “that, my child, is when I carried you.” But like every single time. The dude held down the groove, locked in with Stanton and also guided every solo from beginning to end like a fucking funksherpa and he does it every time you see him play in any band. And like, why aren’t we talking more about Andy Hess on a day-to-day basis?
The show was rife with highlights, I mean everything they played was great. They did a Wolf! tune which was fun. The power of the rhythm section was not just in their ability to keep it groovy, which they did and then some. But they also created an incredibly adaptable space for the soloists, such that many of the solos really came down to a quiet thing and then built up to a rather ecstatic peak. I mean, everyone loves a built-to-peak solo and if it makes you dance, all the better. There were a lot of those last night. The easy highlight of the night started rather innocently, Skerik rhetorically asking if it was alright if they played a new song. First of all, is this band writing music? I didn’t quiet capture what “new song” means to a group that is as transient as this one is. Anyway, so the “new song” portion of the show is rarely the face-slapping highlight of the night, but this one was, freakin’ amazing. Whether the jamming — and make no mistake, they left vamping on a groove and went full improv on this one — was part of the song, meant to be there, or whether it was something that erupted from the spontaneous collective joy of the band is not clear to me. But, damn, boys, that was crazy good. The thing went on for a long while and had multiple sections — a killer organ solo, Metzger doing that aw-shucks-I’m-amazing Metzger thing and then everyone bottomed out, went kind of quiet and it was Skerik and Hess from an almost standstill. The two weaved in and out, building from zero bit by bit, zero to one, one to two, two to three… building, building, building, the rest of the band knowing, just knowing when to come in. These guys are goddamn veterans. They cut their teeth in small clubs in Tribeca and more. They know when to come in. 7 to 8, 8 to 9, and instead of going right to 10, the whole band dropped into this serious psychedelic meltdown. I mean, you knew they could do it, they could do whatever they want. You just weren’t expecting it. Pure liquid awesome. Wow. That was a moment. Somehow they got out of it, finished up that “new song” (“oh yeah!”) and sheeeesh. Good shit.
I ducked out a short bit after that, maybe 11:10 or so. I had had my fill, but I’m sure the ending was good/great/amazing.
Wayne Krantz, Cliff Almond, Orlando Le Fleming @ 55 Bar (late set)
Whatever the exact time that I left Williamsburg was, it was exactly the right time. I arrived at 55 Bar, the band was on stage and the first notes of the late set were but a second or two away. Hey, I cut my teeth in Tribeca, too, I know what I’m doing here.
I’m going to be honest with you. I’ve seen Wayne Krantz play a gazillion times, almost every show he’s played this year, I’ve been there. This set last night was not the best. In fact, there were multiple “what’s going on here” biffs, Cliff Almond totally overheated on drums and somehow the whole trio not listening the way they do when things click. That being said, it’s all relative. The late Krantz set after a night of killer music is always good, it’s inherently awesome, in fact. It’s like you get an unexpected bonus check at work. Sure, a bigger check is better, but they’re all good, right?
It is funny how different this set was from last week. How purely visceral Almond is on drums, just purely powering through with unrelenting energy. It mostly works in his favor and the show last night featured some over-the-top rock-outs and an extra gallon of groove. “Heavy metal riff song” continues to be a source of awe-inspiring improvisation, a tale of two halves last night, an intro of quiet meandering, Wayne carrying the trio on his back with his playing, then rifffffage, then a wild, inside-out freeform the likes of which you don’t often see at 55 Bar, just unstructured weirdness. See, even when the Krantz band isn’t as tight as usual, it’s loose and off in still-mindblowing ways. That’s Wayne Krantz. That’s why you go. At least, that’s why I do. U Can’t Touch This was a highlight, the band settled on an easy groove and just shredded the thing to bits. A great capper on a great night.
22Nov19
Bill Frisell (solo) @ Jazz Standard (early)
Back to the Jazz Standard, who could resist another chance to see Bill Frisell play. The first two nights were trio sets, from all accounts each of the four sets were as astounding as the one I reviewed below. The next two nights were Bill Frisell solo sets. Thanks to Ben, we were sitting in prime real estate, almost nothing but a couple of feet separating us from the man himself. It was a nice change from our obstructed seats Tuesday, but the result was more or less the same. Within a minute or two, my eyes were closed and my mind was drifting, it was both far, far away from that guitar, from Bill making this bafflingly beautiful music, but also it was right there, crawled up in the fetal position resting right inside the guitar itself.
During the opening stretch of the show, a 40ish minute section that was a non-stop stringing of songs, ideas and otherworldliness, 40 minutes of the type that are perhaps uncountable by our standard time-measurement techniques, maybe minutes doesn’t quite capture the feeling that happens while listening to this music, time is some other substance altogether, maybe something you measure with an anemometer or maybe an electron microscope, during that opening excursion, my mind was brought back to elementary and middle school. Every once in a while, we’d have these relaxation exercises, a teacher ( I recall a music teacher doing it every once in a while, maybe there were others), would dim the lights and kind of talk you through relaxing your body and mind, tracing a “tingling sensation” of complete relaxation from the tip of your toes to whatever was going on in that youthful, minds-racing noggin of yours. Did everyone else have to do these? It was the kind of thing that always would get a groan out of you when it started , but once everyone quieted down and it was just you and that teacher’s voice, and then that voice kind of not even there at ll, your mind free to wander. Well, there’s a reason I remember that 30+ years later and probably forgotten almost everything else. That’s what I was thinking about during the first half of the set, Bill’s music guiding my body and brain through a complete and utter relaxation, until it was almost like I wasn’t hearing the guitar at all, not quite asleep, but definitely not there. And then I’m thinking about how it’s weird that that’s what I’m remembering, a weird memory to come forth and then I’m not thinking anything at all.
That opening stretch was a bit of a warmup. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the kind of thing BF does at home just to fuck around. He’d play a song or a theme, sometimes kind of recognizable, sometimes not, halfway between something and an improvised nothing, and, because this is Bill Frisell we’re talking about, he’s capturing parts of what he’s playing, clicking buttons at his feet that sample and loop and ephemeralize the music. (is ephemeralize a word? if not, I am making it up, it’s the word that best describes what Bill Frisell does to the sounds coming out of his guitar. He turns them into apparitions. And then he moved on to another song/theme/idea, but somehow the previous ideas captured in his digital ephemera box were the base of the next song, like climbing a ladder, the place where his hands were is now where his feet are and so he climbs, climbs, climbs, and all the same your mind sinks, sinks, sinks into a blissful stupor. There was something kind of strangely awesome about howBill turned this restaurant/jazz club, a place where waiters are weaving through tables to bring people their BBQ, a place where you’re just sitting at a table, a nice space, no doubt, the best jazz club in town, in my opinion, but still just a normal space — tables, chairs, lights, prepackaged ambiance, amazing that he turns this space into the most perfect meditation space. I saw a show in a “salt cave” earlier this fall, it was a space designed for relaxation and introspection, it was an amazing space to see music and the sound matched the vibe… I would like to see Bill Frisell play a solo set there. Or really anywhere that you’re reclined, lights dimmed, no distractions. Last night was actually the 50th time I’ve seen Bill Frisell play (!!!) and I still remember the first time, at the Blue Note, he played in duo with Ron Carter, it was the most gloriously soporific music I’ve ever heard before and all I could think of was that I wanted to listen to Bill Frisell play live next to me while I was lying in bed. That was my takeaway the first time I saw him and more or less the same thing I wanted last night.
About halfway through this, the mood changed, this meandering, thoughts-adrift thing became a joyous explosion of notes, gorgeous, gorgeous notes. You could feel the audience energy change. It was like their minds had been playfully banging a pinata and then the final blow hit and the pinata had broken open and suddenly there was candy where previously there had been no candy. Just raining down on you, the sweetest somethings you could ever want. And it was sweet, my friends. Each note out of that guitar, all the ones stored in the Bill Frisell cloud storage, just candy-coated deliciousness. I mean, you could literally feel the collective smile that appeared on everyone in that room’s face at this point. The rest of the show, the second half of what had already been a masterful exercise in beauty and contemplation, was just pure, unadulterated, musical bliss. Joy, joy, joy, just pouring out of that guitar.
The second half of the show, which included the last 3rd of that opening 40 minute stretch and then a second suite of songs that included a show-ending pairing of solo versions of “In My Life” and “What the World Needs Now,” was good. And by “good” I don’t mean that it was played well or that it was enjoyable. “Good” wouldn’t cut it, I think the music Bill Frisell made during this second half was some of the best pure guitar playing I’ve ever heard from him, inventive, blissful guitar playing filled with gorgeous improvised melodies and geniusly deconstructed themes. Good is an understatement. No, that second half was good in the sense that it was the exact opposite of evil. Like take anything and everything about this world that’s awful, terrible, upsetting, sad, etc., take all that shit and put it over there. Now turn around 180 degrees to look at what’s purely good in this world. That’s what we got to hear during that final 30+ minutes, those of us who made the wise decision to attend that show, got to see pure light and good in musical form. The kind of shit Yoda teaches you about. I mean, just those two covers to end the show, it feels like no accident that he plays those songs. They’re played instrumentally, of course, he savors the essence of the melody in each of them, makes them something uniquely new and awe-inspiring, but at the end of the day, you know those songs, you know the words and you know that those songs are, as purely as can be, about love. No accident.
So good.
Pip Blom @ Rough Trade
Afterwards, we caught Pip Blom at Rough Trade. I feel a little bad for this show because it’s smack in the middle of a week and a month filled with, already, a lifetime’s worth of sublime livemusic experiences. How can it compare? But that’s dumb. The show was awesome, stood up just fine on its own and I am damn glad I went.
In the likely case that you are unaware, Pip Blom is a young woman from Amsterdam who put out a moderately acclaimed debut album, Boat, earlier this year. I would put the music in a sort of Courtney Barnett school of modern day rock and roll. Grunge punk indie rock with a thread of sweetness running through. The thing is she was 22 when recording it and 23 now and, judging from the reaction she got at the show last night, may be in for a nice rise to fame. She plays with a band of folks that all feel like schoolmates, kids who went to kindergarten together and still hang out. Indeed, the guitarist is her brother. No one in the band looks like they should be in a rock band. And yet, ain’t that the way sometimes?
The show was just one of those starts-strong/ends-stronger affairs. The room was maybe 1/2–2/3 full, a good sized crowd. You know that there’s some buzz by the number of photographers vying for space up front to get their shots in, I think I counted 8 of them, which is a number at a place like Rough Trade. When the show started there were a couple people moving to the music; by the time it ended, most of the room was dancing/rocking out/etc. The band is a quartet with Blom on vocals/guitar, her brother also on some vocals and guitar and then drums and bass. The drummer was of the type that I couldn’t keep my eyes off her, she was so fun to watch, huge smile on her face, a bouncing energy that infected the entire sound coming from the stage. There weren’t really any solos in the songs, but they created some great dynamics through the changes, each song, simple, thrashing, awesomely-rocking songs, each one had at least 2 or 3 sections and the change from one to the other created all sorts of interesting dynamics. This was fueled largely by the drummer, shifting tempos and amplitudes, her energy was put to good use in this band. There’s no much else to deconstruct here: they were a killer young band that rocked the fuck out, were having a helluva lot of fun on stage, all pretty great together, with a drummer that was a treat to watch play. I mean, that’s more than enough to be a thing and they are definitely a thing. This was, it turns out, their first show in NYC, they were geninely loving the moment. They came back for an encore even though she said they usually don’t. Imagine being a 20something Amsterdammer playing to a raucous crowd in Brooklyn… I can’t imagine it, but I can imagine that the look on my face might be something like the ones on theirs. Really great. I tweeted something about the show and the tweet was like by someone clearly from Amsterdam and I thought maybe it was the drummer. I googled the name and it turns out to be… Pip Blom’s mom, who is a) probably very close to my age, b) tour manages the band sometimes and c) proud-mom searches social media for posts from their debut NYC show, at the very least. Which is all just… awesome, and makes me like these guys even more.
Anyway, check out Pip Blom and I’ll tell you I told you so next time they come through.
23Nov19
It’s been a very good livemusic week, friends, very good. And it ended in prettyfuckinggreat fashion…
Live From Here @ Town Hall
In some ways this was a big kahuna version of Live From Here. I mean… Paul freakin’ Simon was the musical guest. On the other hand, it was just another Live From Here broadcast from Town Hall. I say it week in and week out, but it really doesn’t matter who the guests on the show are. It’s always average-great or average-amazing. In fact, it doesn’t even really matter what songs they play. Last evening, more than any LFH I’ve seen, I didn’t really know almost any of the songs played. Even the songs Paul Simon played, were, for the most part, not the “big hits” (save for a crowd-pleasing Kodachrome that include Simon doing a youthful shimmy). Yesterday’s show had me thinking the whole time about why it’s always good, always worth it no matter what.
And the answer is quite obvious. No, it’s not Chris Thile, although his talent and dorky, hammy charisma certainly don’t hurt. No, it’s the house band & the guest vocalist that make the show what it is. The guest stars, they’re the icing on the cake. They make the dessert look good, make it appetizing and maybe beautiful or cool or colorful. But when you put your fork into that piece of cake, you want that spongy, moist, flavorful cake in your mouth. You want substance. That’s what the band brings to the show. I mean, we’re talking about a band that not only admirably backed Paul Simon, played a Joplin rag, played a brand new song (rather awesome) that was just written last week, covered Amy Grant fercrissakes, played an obscure old time folk tune, and then, guided by Chris Thile, made up a song on the spot, an improvised operatic thing. I mean… what band can do all that with such ease, aired live into thousands of earholes week after week. Not only that, but the band isn’t even a band, it’s a bunch of guys who have maybe played together in some form, but not with this exact configuration before. I mean, the longer I sat there in Town Hall and contemplated it — the “musical director” Mike Elizondo wasn’t even THERE this week, he was replaced by NYC underrated all-star Chris Morrissey — the more I sat in total amazement. Like WOW!
I loved Anais Mitchell in the vocalist role. She’s got such a fun energy on stage, like the vibe of someone who has no confidence whatsoever, who is making it up as they go along, who is as surprised as anyone to be on stage. I’ve seen her play her own sets and she has that same kind of thing going on, but she always absolutely nails it, taking that fragile energy and funneling it into the music. She played a brand new song that was just wonderful and pretty much everything she touched, like the other duet partners on the show, was golden. I hope she becomes a regular in that slot. Has she done it before? I don’t think anything else really stuck out to me as above-and-beyond, it was all just run-of-the-mill awesome. Vagabon was the other music guest and she and her band kind of grew on me with each song they played. In her little banter with Chris Thile, she revealed that she was in school for engineering and didn’t start playing music until she was in graduate school and that little story made me like her even more. There’s something about seeing a band on Live From Here that feels very perfect. Most guests play two songs in the first half and two songs in the second half. It’s like the perfect dose: whether you love it or are kind of meh on a guest, 4 songs split into 2 and 2 across 2 hours is like a perfect dose. If you want more, you can always do a deep dive in the future, and if not, well, before you know it, the band will have moved on to some other dazzling display of unnatural talent.
Infinite Jets @ Nublu 151
Infinite Jets is a band that is Joe Russo, Scott Metzger, Sam Cohen and Jon Shaw. When it was being put together for the first probably-one-off gig, I got a text from my friend Jake who was putting together the show that was kind of like “do you think you’d be into a band with Joe, Scott, Sam Jon..” And I wish I could find my reply text, because it was something like “fuck yes” and “the name of the band should be Fuck Yes.” They didn’t take my advice on the band name, they chose a much better one. Also, I had to fucking miss that first show because I was out of town and man, I don’t know if I’ve FOMO’d as hard as I did when I found out I wasn’t going to be able to make that show. The thing is, that’s a band that’s made for me, I love all four of those guys and I had no doubt that it would be incredible. I was very, very happy that they decided to play again and very, very happy that when we arrived from Town Hall, they were still in the first “song.”
If you are a regular reader (welcome, regular readers!) you’re well aware that I caught Bill Frisell twice this week and that he more or less beautified my soul on those two occasions, playing some of the most soothing, gorgeous, life-affirming music of my livemusic year. In a strange way, the first set of the Infinite Jets show felt a little like an explosion of the Bill Frisell sound, the quiet, lovely, heart-achingly beautiful soul of BF”s music was amplified through this four-piece, the quartet moving so delicately through these musical themes. Even the echoing loops of Frisell’s effects seemed to come alive in the doubling of the guitars. Let’s talk about those two guitars for a second. I do not think that Sam Cohen and Scott Metzger have the same guitar style, not in the least. But, there is some overlap in their sound: if you made a sonic Venn diagram, there is a space of overlap in the Cohen/Metzger soundplane. The cool thing about the set last night, particularly the first set, was that the two guitarists kind of spent their whole time in that space of overlap, so much so that I had to occasionally crane my neck or move positions so I could see which of the two guys was playing what. There were solos that were started by one of them and finished by another, an amazing meld of talent, an utterly egalitarian musical relationship. What a fucking high it was to watch those two play together. I loved that first set, amazingly quiet music played in a dance club that was sold-out/comfortably-packed with people that were probably ready to dance. And to their credit, they allowed the band to explore the beautiful space. When I reviewed the other mindbending Joe Russo project Pirata that flabbergasted a couple months back, I noted how Joe does good by his musical friends, using his well-deserved fame to share the wealth, so to speak. It’s amazing and I applaud him for it over and over. But last night I think I may have sold the phenomenon short. It’s not just that he’s introducing his fans to awesome new musicians. It’s that he is constantly challenging his listeners. Yes, he takes things deep in JRAD and takes risks in his “main band.” But way more so, when you get him outside of JRAD, he is asking all these people that help sell out his shows to try something new: whether it be new musicians they don’t yet know or some leftfield weirdness or, as in last night, asking the crowd to be quiet and patient and to listen to the music. And listen they did. And why the fuck wouldn’t you listen up. This sparkling Frisellian soundscape was some of the best music I heard all week, month, year. So many dazzler moments, endorphin-releasing peaks, chill-inducing wow. And that was just the first set.
Here’s a question: were they playing songs? It really felt like songs, but also, how is this band playing songs? I was constantly thinking about Circles Around the Sun. How before they were “Circles Around the Sun,” the songs were just these little Neal Casal vamps, the original material, when you listened to it was so clearly influenced by the Grateful Dead, by specific songs, maybe even by single bits of melody from certain Dead tunes. This one sounds like that part in Fire on the Mountain, this one clearly influenced by Help/Slip/Franklin’s. The songs (or “songs”) that Infinite Jets played had a similar vibe. Like they were improvisational movements based on themes from certain songs or riffs or melodies. There was a lot of Grateful-Deadness in there, but the music never sounded like JRAD, it was a different side of the Dead (and others), a light-fingered meandering of Garcia at his most beautiful. I don’t know if it was intentional or not. But the sound was not confined by the Dead in any way, it gobbled up other things, Miles Davis Bitches Brew and the aforementioned Bill Frisell and more. It was, in a word, spectacular.
The second set was an aggressive reformation of the form. Russo’s restraint in the first set became Russo unleashed. It’s not that the second set was heavy or deeply funky or anything, the music was still light on its feet, but this was definitely the post-pubescent version of that light sound of the first set. It’s an amazing thing to see a drummer mix it up melodically with the other musicians and Joe did some ridiculous things, playing “melodies” on the drums that were picked up by the guitarists and vice versa. I mean, some next-level shit that’s only possible because these musicians are these musicians. “Comfort” doesn’t begin to describe the chemistry between Joe and Scott, they fit together so well now, as well as Joe and Marco did in the Duo’s heydey. They didn’t need to look at each other or acknowledge it, heck, maybe they were even consciously aware they were doing it, but the interplay between them last night was breathtaking. I haven’t even given Jon Shaw his due yet, but fuck yeah, the dude was a perfect foil for the guitars and drums. I spent a few sentences after the Emerald Quintet show blathering on about Andy Hess and his carry-band-on-his-shoulders bass playing. Shaw is like the inverted version of Hess, a groovy minimalist sponge that just keeps absorbing all the oozy, liquid awesome pouring out of the other three guys. So, like, yeah, this was one helluva band. The second set charged through some ridiculous peaks, I mean, some serious jams, of the let’s-see-what’s-left-in-these-knees variety. I can’t imagine a show played by musicians I love more that was as perfectly suited to my personal music aesthetic, like music that was engineered in a lab to specifically match the pleasure nodes in my DNA, a sound that was set forth in my genes aeons ago in a cave somewhere in what is now Africa, split and replicated billions of times between then and now to the point where the noises that those guys were making Saturday night that filled my chest with a warm joy and made the hairs on my arms stand on end. One of my favorite shows of the year.
Minglewood @ Nublu Classic
It seemed silly not to walk down the few blocks to the other Nublu, the dingy, dank, no-liquor/just-beer-and-wine, tree growing in the middle of the stage Nublu Classic to catch Minglewood play Dead covers. All great shows should have a Dead cover band playing a few blocks away in a place such as Oldblu, just in case the moment strikes you. And based on the number of Dead cover bands in this city, it’s a good bet that there is one. These guys were fun. A perfect place to come down from a show after which you didn’t really need another show. You don’t need me to fully review a Dead cover band playing after midnight, but the monthly late night Dead shows at Nublu Classic are a great idea and I imagine always a good time, so keep an eye out. I also should say that this show ended up being my 365th of 2019. You know what that say, a show a day keeps the…
Nuts.
