For the last few years, I have aspired to write about every show I see. In reality, I have not even come close to doing so, I have barely written anything, which is a shame… for me, at least. So, I’ve tried to recalibrate my expectations of myself and am going to try and summarize each month of livemusic’n, hit some of the high points and try to wrap it up in a single theme that captures both the music and my thoughts on music and whatever. We’ll see how it goes!
ICYMI: October 2023: Nostalgia Acts
November kicked off winter weather season here in New York City. Winter weather seasons means a wardrobe shift, which means beanies, which, for me, means one of four hats: 4 different colored versions of the same Newport Folk Festival beanies. Yes, in November I literally had folk on the brain. And it’s a good thing, because my month of livemusic was full of not just folk music, but all the siblings and inbred cousins of the folk world: country, bluegrass, Americana, and various combinations thereof. I saw 30 shows in November and nearly half of them fit into this category, including the Brooklyn Folk Fest smack dab in the middle of the month. Something about the time of year, the Veterans Day/Thanksgiving corridor, the crispness of the air, the falling of the dead leaves, and the crunch of these on the ground… something about November just seems to call for the cozy warmth of roots music.
That got me thinking about what makes this music so compelling, these old, older, oldest sounds somehow feeling just right here in the post-modern moderness of 2023. What is it that makes me want to own 4 different NFF beanies? I guess there’s no one good answer to that question. Part of it is the naked honesty of it, the stripped down acousticness of the music, unadorned strings that feel just as relevant today as when string instruments were first invented. Listening to the songs of Valerie June, Thao, and Rachel Davis at the Opera House in Williamsburg fleshed this out, the different ways a simple banjo, a voice, and just heartfelt, honest emotions, can move you. Yeah, in a lot of ways, it’s about the songs and songwriting: Kevin Morby opening up for Nathaniel Rateliff at Kings Theatre is the best example of it, every time I see him, I feel like I could write 10,000 words about his songcraft. Ben Chapman, a new one for me, opening up for Brent Cobb at Bowery Ballroom on November 7th, just an acoustic guitar, his voice, and his thoughts and stories loosely formed into classic-sounding folk songs made him one I’ll be keeping an eye on.
That Brent Cobb show highlighted another great thing about this kind of music: the way it helps us see how the music we listen to today came from the folk music of decades or even centuries ago. It’s archaelogy, anthropology, genetics, and history all in one, a way of digging back into the past. Seeing where old timey music became folk became country became rock and roll became…. it’s neat! And to see it with artists who know some piece of the past while still creating their own in-the-now art, well that’s better than a book or going to a museum. Cobb at the cusp of where country and rock converged/diverged, Deer Tick, playing at Warsaw, straddling the worlds of folky singer/songwriter and drunken rock and roll, S.G. Goodman a student and lover of Outlaw Country and a forward-looking songsmith herself was entertaining and passionate at Music Hall of Williamsburg early in November.
Some artists take the history thing deep into their being and turn their acts into a sort of musical classroom, but less boring than that. I caught Michael Daves twice in the month, a free show at a cool spot in Forest Park in Queens in duo with mandolinist Andy Statman and then at Barbes in Park Slope with mandolinist Jacob Jolliff. Not only was the bluegrass tasty as all heck, but the historical placement of the songs, often explicitly fleshed out over the course of a Daves set, makes it especially fascinating. My favorite practioner of this style of folk’n is Nora Brown who anchored a full day at the Brooklyn Folk Fest, held annually in the Church of St Luke & St Matthew in Brooklyn Heights. Brown is almost savant like in her ability to know everything about a song’s history, often traveling 100 years back or so, all the way up to where she learned the song herself. Her channeling doesn’t stop there, though, she betrays her 18 years with her soulful playing and time-traveler singing of these songs she cherishes and cares for so deeply.
I rarely miss an opportunity to see Brown play and also rarely miss an opportunity to make it to St Luke’s for the folk fest. Typically, the festival has a diverse lineup, stretching its definition of “folk” to include the music of the diverse cultures of Brooklyn itself. This year, though, an anniversary year, the fest stuck closer to the more traditional definition of tradtional music. Still plenty of great songs to be had, I really enjoyed the sets from Kyle Tigges and the Harry Smith at 100 set and David Johansen and the Harry Smiths and Wyndham Baird’s set.
I’ve seen Baird a few times, he does a damn good Bob Dylan and he provides a good segue to Skinny Dennis, the club I’ve seen him at those previous times. If you’ve never been or heard of it, Skinny Dennis is a honky tonk bar, an honest slice of Nashville and/or Texas, incongruously sitting plumb in the middle of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The scene there is… a scene, in so many ways, but the acts you catch there exemplify another thing about this music, this country/folk/bluegrass thing, which is just that we love the songs we love, these songs that are just part of the fabric of not only our pasts (nostalgia!) but also woven directly into the fabric of America itself. That’s the vibe at Skinny Dennis and I was there twice this month, once on a Friday night for National Reserve, a band that feels to be woven right of the cloth of American country rock and roll, perhaps my favorite bar band in the city. Never not a spectacle seeing these guys on a Friday at SD. I also caught Alan Lee & the Whiskey Bumps one afternoon in November. Saturday and Sunday afternoons are often the best time to hit Skinny Dennis, and Lee and band were just perfection when I saw them. Country songs and non-country songs played like country songs and plenty of delicious pedal steel. An act I’ll be going back to see.
But for all the old standards and history lessons and nostalgia folk music has at its core, what makes it so compelling here in 2023 are the youngs continuing to innovate in the form and breathe fresh air into the old lungs. For the best example of that, I do hope you were in attendance when Molly Tuttle and Golden Highway ripsnorted her here-and-now bluegrass for a sold out, packed house at Brooklyn Made last month. Tuttle is one of several larger-than-life figures in the new bluegrass world and she seems to be growing even larger by the gig. Everything was on display in Bushwick that night: her awesome guitar prowess, her I’ve-got-a-sick-band bandleader skills, her compositions, her postive-vibes-meets-humble energy. She’s the real deal, a scion of the form, bringing old magic to new places and new magic to old places.
While on the topic of young energy, I found myself in Boston for work at the end of November and naturally went searching for music to be had. As November logic would dictate — my Newport beanie feeling a little closer to home in the New England chill — the music I found turned out to be a perfect concluding paragraph to this essay. My first stop was at a place in Cambridge called Lily P’s, which hosts a bluegrass jam every Tuesday night. On this night in particular, the “jam” was actually a showcase of kids from Berklee School of Music, kids who have been learning to play bluegrass all semester and would now be taking the stage to show off what they’d learned. I mean, you couldn’t script this any better and the kids were a delight of rough-but-ready talent and appreciation for some classic material. There were a couple real stand-outs, maybe the next Molly Tuttle in there, ready to invigorate and reinvent a genre that continues to feel fresh. From there I went to the Lilypad in Inman Square, a spot I just love the heck out of. A place where music at the verge is welcome, that smells like the stale patchouli like a warm, nostalgic whiff of your college buddy’s apartment, that just has that certain vibe that certain rooms have. On this night there were two acts playing in the late slot, a crowd of 10 or so sitting on makeshift cushioned benches, me being, by far, the oldest person there. The first band was called Saltare, apparently not the normal lineup, but on this Tuesday consisting of a piano, a bass, a fiddle, and accordion. Their music leapt from the instruments, compositions that found DNA in folk, but folded and cross-bred with classical and jazz, Chris Thile as directed by John Zorn. This was folk as some vestigal fragments, subsumed and redefined by creative blending and reimagination. Oh man, did that set hit me in the sweet spot! The final act was a duo, guitar and a korean stringed instrument. Surprisingly, they played old blues and country songs, made wonderfully surreal by the mix of instrumentation and their offbeat energy, a sort of meta-folk, unexpected and gloriously weird, before putting on my beanie and heading back to my hotel.
November roundup:
30 shows = $30 donated as part of #livemusicchallenge to Coalition for the Homeless.
Five star shows seen in November:
! Molly Tuttle @ Brooklyn Made
! Jason Moran & the Bandwagon @ Village Vanguard
Reviews written (for Bowery Presents) in November:
Valerie June, Rachael Davis, Thao @ The Opera House
