On March 10th, I saw “The Brothers” play at Madison Square Garden. A big, arena rock show with a big arena crowd. It was a great show, a lot of fun, and the band killed it, but it also just didn’t feel right. The pandemic had already made its way to New York City and even though we didn’t “know” it 100% yet, we all knew it to be true, enough for many (most?) in attendance to be uncomfortable in the crowd.
That was the 60th show I caught in 2020 and within a month or so of hunkering down in place, it wasn’t entirely clear whether it would be my last show of 2020. Even as late as early August I wouldn’t have made a bet that there was more livemusic in my year, although as New York seemed to emerge from the scary darkness, signs of life in the city’s music world began to poke through, the first shoots through the snow after an unexpectedly frosty metaphoric winter. Honestly though, even as there was music to be had, I didn’t feel a primal urge to hop in the car and drive to see just anything resembling a show. Kind of strange, actually, but I was content to wait for the right moment, knowing it would come sooner or later.
That moment came on August 28th, 171 days from March 10th, by far the longest drought from livemusic that I can recall, maybe even going back to high school? That’s a long, long time for someone who averaged more than a show a day for the entire previous year. {cue Obi Wan Kenobi saying “a looooong time.”} That night we headed to the parking lot next to the Plaxall Art Gallery in Long Island City, Queens. A strange place to see a show, but in this New New York (NNY), terms like “show” and “venue” seem to have metamorphosed to encompass something much different than anything like “Allman Brothers at MSG” and in the ensuing couple of weeks since then, I’ve discovered that the entire city’s livemusic culture has cracked open its cocoon to be something much different than it was back in the winter. And what a wonderful, many-splendored, show-must-go-on thing that is.
The group that night was James Buckley Trio, featuring Buckley on bass, Jonathan Goldberger on guitar and Jeremy Gustin on drums. These guys are guys, artists, bits of paint on the palette that is the NYC scene, musicians who blend well with others on the canvas that was rooms like LunAtico and Barbes and Nublu, the colors that have made up many a masterpiece in the city over the years. This was a worthy trio to break the drought with and they did not disappoint. Playing mostly Buckley originals, songs he often referred to as having originally played with a trio back in Minneapolis, they took a song or two to find themselves and then locked in. Moments of trepidation made way to moments of transcendence. The music was good. But as I sat and took it in, I found that it didn’t matter if the music was best shit ever category. One hundred and seventy one days later and it didn’t quite matter what the flavor of the liquid was that hit such parched, parched lips, it only mattered that it was wet. Savor it like the first time, friends, like the first time. What mattered was that it was happening again, yes, but also how it was different than before. To say the band was relaxed wouldn’t quite capture it, these guys in shorts and masks, in front of a stage that was actually a pick-up truck in a parking lot in Long Island City. I believe that was the first time I’ve seen music in LIC, perhaps only the 2nd or 3rd time I’ve been to LIC and not just driven through on my way to something else.
And that was the thing, the places that you used to pass through to get to the place were now the place. The guys who wanted to play so badly they played with everyone were now the guys playing for crumpled bills in a passed plastic tub, if asking for anything at all. As thinkpieces were published declaring the city to be a relic, the ashes had already begun to spring phoenixes. Yes, multiple phoenixes sprouting up all over the city. Since then I’ve seen a private backyard folk concert in Flushing, under-the-radar blissjazz shows between stoops in Carroll Gardens and funkrockjazz shit in someone’s front yard in Ditmas Park, bluegrass on a stoop in Park Slope and freeform weirdness in a Red Hook parking lot I had no idea even existed. I’ve livemusic’d in New York long enough to see the center-of-gravity of where the shows are move many times, from Tribeca to the Lower East Side to Williamsburg and, before the pandemic hit, to East Williamsburg and Bushwick. In the last two weeks, that was all moot. Wherever there are cracks in the pavement, that is where the grass is figuring out it has to grow.
For some, it’s a scary time, but oh, the glory of it all! The scene has become a musician itself, improvising and innovating, short surprising blasts of sound, perhaps longform pieces to follow. All the while, music is technically prohibited in the city, except as “incidental” at restaurants. This makes all of these “shows” feel illicit, like bathtub gin in a speakeasy during prohibition. Is this the new roarin 20’s, right here in New New York?
Every time I’ve seen music over the past couple of years I’ve felt especially lucky to be able to experience it. Truly there is something golden about each and every performance, so much to love even in the most pedestrian show. Now, though, it’s on another level, the thing I couldn’t imagine ever being taken away went away… for 171 days, gone without hope. Now that it’s back, I find myself drawn even more to the strangeness and unpredictability of the NYC scene. The smaller, the weirder, the more ad hoc, the better. As drive-in concerts pop up beyond the state’s borders, I have little desire to buy tickets and immerse myself into such facsimile.
Some highlights:::
Catching Bill Frisell Trio on two separate occasions a week back, was devastatingly awesome and I am so very thankful I got to catch these sets, Frisell with Scherr and Wolleson. The first week of March I was actually supposed to travel to work to Denver and Frisell was playing out there and I had planned to see him. Alas, the trip did not happen, but I actually laughed out loud when I found out BF would be playing when I was there, some sort of deep connection between my soul and his music that seems to manifest itself in strange ways over the years. Truly the first goosebumps I would get during this new age of music would have to be from the sidewalk in front of a couple of Brooklyn apartments, watching these three play for the absolute thrill of just playing. That first show, a Friday afternoon, was one of the craziest sets I’ve ever seen. We got there around 5:45, they had started about 30 minutes earlier. I was bummed, thinking we had missed most of what I imagined would be a 45–60 minute set. We ended up catching 2+ hours of music. Quantity is one thing, but it was what they played and how that made this so sublime. They literally just didn’t stop, stringing one song after another after another, for a stretch it felt like each song was a take-you-to-heaven set-ender, all those burn-the-house-down chills-inducers you maybe get to see one of when you pay to see Bill play, well they just kept playing them one after another, including songs I’ve never heard him play, like “Imagine” and “My Favorite Things” on top of “What the World Needs Now” and more. As the city percolated around us, a small crowd, a lucky few, the sun slowly sinking in the Brooklyn sky, a literal golden hour with the most golden-hour musician on the planet. Chills and tears and smiles. You could feel the temperature of the city, the world, in all its awful turmoil, you could feel the temperature just come down, one degree at a time as these three guys, guys who have played together countless hundreds of times, played together there on the street simply because they wanted to, had to, needed to, needed it as badly as I needed to be there to see that music get made. The following Monday (perhaps this was Labor Day?), we got the word that the trio would play again. Marvelous again, it’s amazing how different this set was, jazzier, with pauses between songs, but just as enjoyable in its playfulness and groove and not without its share of utter beauty and ridiculous three-as-one musicianship. How could there not be? I spent every damn show I’ve seen for years savoring every bit of meat on every damn bone I got served, but these two I swallowed whole.
On the other end of the spectrum, caught Yonatan Gat on Saturday. Whoah, that was a wild one. I’ve seen Gat many times over the years and it seems like he’s gotten progressively more aggressive and experimental, but Saturday was a whole ‘nother level of only-in-NYC strangeness. His band consisted of drums, bass (dude from Swans), a woman playing a bicycle (!?) and Red Medicine playing a pow wow drum and chanting. It was loud and weird and wonderful, rather hair-raising at moments, indescribable, but like hopping on the treadmill after a period of going flabby, it exercised muscles I forgot I had and, oh man!, did it feel good. In New New York, you see a fun bluegrass jam session in Park Slope as the sun sets and then head to Red Hook to see the real weird shit go down. The old DIY in town has nothing on the new DIY in town. Gotta love the “light show” = a guy creating shadows of a bicycle or bassist on the warehouse behind the band, almost literally inverting the tone of the musicians and making them larger-than-life size in silhouette. What a nice metaphor for this state of the scene, a makeshift visual that heightens the drama of the used-to-be-ordinary, giving it the outsized importance it now has. What was once a parking lot is now a venue. The Stone is now asphalt.
Somewhere in between is Operation Gig, a wonderful series in Ditmas Park, turning lovely porches on is this really Brooklyn beautiful houses into impromptu clubs. We caught the Jim Campilongo Trio at one of these, you know, that sick trio with Chris Morrissey and Josh Dion backing, another one of those trios, like Frisell’s, that has played so many times together they can just find each other at some random address in Ditmas Park and sound like it’s just another Monday night at Rockwood 2. I joked that these DP porches are “Rockwood 5,” grimy hardwood now a patch of grass, that 9pmish start now a sunny-day hour. What a treat to be there as these guys play again for the first time in months, to be there when the brown grass of winter turns green again before our very eyes and ears. And what a treat it is to see musicians of this caliber just click, even the between-song banter felt like home. Breathe it in and savor it… ahhhhh.
It’s not clear to me what happens when the summer ends, when the sun sets early and the lovely weather we’ve been lucky to have turns to cold. If you’re asking me, these weird, wonderful, soul-affirming things should continue indefinitely. Let us all bundle in parkas and hats and enjoy world class music. The apocalypse needs good music, no? Until then, may every parking lot, patch of grass, stoop or sidewalk become a place where music is made…
