Category: “Hey, Fred!”

“Hey, Fred!”

An idiosyncratic, biased look at what this blog’s author most recommends this week.

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"Hey, Fred!" live music theatre

Things I’ve Been Digging – 02/15/2021

Livelabs: On Love by Mfoniso Udofia presented by MCC Theater 

I saw a reading of Mfoniso Udofia’s In Old Age in a Chelsea rehearsal space as part of a Page 73 reading series. I’ve never been so glad I made one choice over the carnival ride multiplicity of delights on a New York City afternoon; within five minutes, I knew this is one of the great voices of my time.

For all its troubles and difficulty, this enforced streaming age – at its best – makes these voices available to a wide range of people all at once. MCC’s Livelabs series does a great job bringing new work at affordable prices through its youtube channel. I got reacquainted with Udofia’s crackling writing with its layered depth of feeling via On Love, expertly directed by Awoye Timbo.

These vignettes turned the prism of love around and played with different refracted light, between Eros and Agape, from Ludus to Mania, exposing the very different impressions these loves leave and how thin the barriers between them are. With a crackling cast spanning superstars like Keith David to Broadway heroes like Anastacia McClesky and rising Off-Broadway mavens Antwayn Hopper, everyone delivered.

Using perfectly carved moments. On Love opened us to these characters hinted at whole worlds and lives. There wasn’t a person I met for these few minutes I didn’t want to know for a full-length play. I want to see every person in this – especially those new to me – in something else. And more than anything else, this made me hungry for more of Udofia’s writing.

Tim Easton, taken from stream and edited

Tim Easton – The Truth About Us 20th Anniversary

In early 2001, Columbus’s treasured son Tim Easton made his entrance onto a wider national stage with his second solo album, The Truth About Us. For this debut with ascendent alt.country label New West Records, Tim Easton recruited an all-star lineup, including producer Joe Chiccarelli (Lone Justice, Steve Wynn, Oingo Boingo) and the core of Wilco at the time (multi-instrumentalist Jay Bennett, bassist John Stirratt, and drummer Ken Coomer as the backing band. 

Easton and Chiccarelli augmented that sturdy core with guests of the highest order – Mark Olson and Victoria Williams singing on one track, Petra Haden’s haunting violin, Bruce Kaphan’s pedal steel, Kat Maslich on vocals, and local confederates like Chris Burney (who’d been playing bass for him on the road and would soon lead underrated Warner Brothers rock act The Sun).

Like many songwriters, Easton uses this pandemic to webcast from his home – including trying out new songs and dialoguing with old friends like JP Olsen. Last week, in honor of its 20th anniversary, he revisited The Truth About Us from front to back. He peppered the set with reminisces about its making – including fond recollections of everyone who worked with him on it.

That hour and a half was a powerful nostalgia trip, remembering trudging through the snow to Little Brothers for the release show – great Cleveland band Rosavelt backing and opening for Easton – with my roommate at the time. It also reminded me how well the songs hold up two decades later.

At its best, The Truth About Us grapples with the very concept of truth and its value. Trying to understand people’s motivations, and his own, to get out of the writer’s own way, while also trying to find their place inside an “us.”

Around the time of this record, I saw many shows – frequently local – and listened to a lot of records with my friend Heather, now based solidly in LA. Easton’s deceptively easy-going manner and charm put her off, feeling like its truths weren’t as hard-fought as her favorite writers: “It’s all good, but it comes too easily to him.” 

The one song she made an exception for was the second song on The Truth About Us: “Carry Me,” a plea for forgiveness and an accounting. The tune hides a knife in its gentleness: a catchy, fingerpicked lilt that drifts from “People love you like a diamond in their hand, but they don’t know that diamond like I do” through “It was selfish to think you’d be better off just ‘cause I wanted to be further along,” into “Here comes that old devil midnight and I have not slept in days.” Hearing him do this one again, with just that acoustic guitar, chilled my blood.

“Happy Now,” always one of my favorite hooks Easton wrote – in a period he wrote more jangling, haunt-your-sleep choruses than anyone else in town – reasserted a psychological weight I didn’t give it credit for at the time. I’d never seen a Rauschenberg combine when I heard that song, and I’d barely graced the surface of cut-ups as a form, so the accretion of collaged emotional details took me a while. Stripped from the Byrds chime of the guitar and the grooving Kinksish organ on the record, the depth of feeling hit harder. 

Verses paint people in crisis, a tattoo parlor owner’s wife screaming at him, “You’re ruining me somehow”; a man jumping a roof to find the same callous disregard in death – “He wanted them to miss him, that was part of the plan, but nobody ever even gave a damn. Are you happy now? They were laughing as you went down;” a woman in her front yard praying with the prayers answered by, “Nobody knew what to do or what to say; the traffic light changed, and we just drove away.” s the chorus taunting “Are you happy now” with the sinking suspicion the narrator’s turning on himself.

The obsessive ramble that always recalled Elizabeth Bishop to me, “I Would Have Married You,” retained its keening, searching power in this format. Easton rightly called out the magnificence of Petra Haden’s violin – this was the first I’d heard of her, and her playing drove me to pick up my first That Dog record – Maslich’s harmonies and Kaphan’s moaning steel.

Easton’s affection for people and memory for detail is the not-so-secret engine that’s powered his career and created the longevity he enjoys. This evening was a reminder of that joy, as much as the record is. Nowhere does that manifest more than in his long-running friendship with JP Olsen. The two songs on The Truth About Us not penned by Easton come from Olsen: “Bad Florida,” a standout on my sleeper pick for best Columbus album, Burn Barrel’s Reviled!, and last-call promise from Olsen’s band The Beetkeepers, “Don’t Walk Alone.” The latter closes the record and imbues Olsen’s razor-sharp words and sly melody with a greater earnestness as he  bolsters the anthemic qualities of the chorus with surging backing vocals and my favorite Haden string parts here. That anthem recast clings to his arrangement, even with the elements stripped away.

This is still viewable on Tim Easton’s official Facebook page.

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"Hey, Fred!" live music

Things I’ve Been Digging – 02/08/2021

Gretchen Peters and Barry Walsh, taken from the stream and edited

Zeppelin Productions Tribute to Natalie’s

Unlike most of what I write about, this is still up through February 28. Donate and watch here: https://nataliesgrandview.com/events/zeppelin-productions-benefit-for-natalies/

I unabashedly want every venue to make it through to the other side of this. I want the places in my neighborhood that are clubhouses for other musicians, for loudmouths like me, where I’m likely to randomly stop in and discover something thrilling, like Dick’s Den and Ace of Cups to still welcome us all with a heavy pour and friendly faces. I want the places that make me feel old and bring stuff that’s setting kids’ hair on fire to keep giving us all hell – Cafe Bourbon Street, No Place Gallery (give to their fundraiser to relocate), all the house shows.

But it’s no secret there’s a special place in my heart for the Natalie’s family, Natalie and Charlie Jackson, but also their fantastic staff. As soon as they opened the first location in Worthington, this was a model of venue we just didn’t have in Columbus: the closest comparisons were to City Winery (at the time only in NYC) or the Jazz Standard, where sound and the listening environment were given the same kind of care as excellent food and service. 

And within six months, it became apparent we were on the roadmap of acts that hadn’t come to town since Dan Dougan’s Little Brothers closed: Big Sandy, Robbie Fulks, Scott Miller, Barrence Whitfield. Artists raved about it to other people. Soon, they established synchronicity with another booker I’ve talked about as the only reason Columbus is such a strong market for the kind of storytelling roots music I love: Alec Wightman and his Zeppelin Productions.

I’d follow what Wightman books anywhere, and I have, through the uncomfortably tight Columbus Music Hall to the booming Mannerchor, dancing with ghosts in the Valleydale Ballroom, all some of the best shows I’ve seen anywhere, in any city. But there was a unique and comfortable magic when he started bringing things to Natalie’s, even when I had to be on my game to ensure I wasn’t shut out of a seat.

Natalie’s was also hit harder than many venues because the pandemic came only a few months after they expanded into a second, larger, more flexible location. And while there were a few new-venue jitters, seeing a Zeppelin show – Chuck Prophet solo acoustic – early in 2020 made me hungry to watch this venue grow into the same kind of love I have for their Worthington room.

The pivot to live streams has been well-done in this climate, keeping the high sound and production values standards we know and love from their venues. And it speaks to the sterling reputation of both booker and room that Zeppelin assembled a who’s who of towering figures in roots rock and Americana to donate a short video to help out Natalie’s. 

These songs usually came accompanied with sweet words about the space. Many artists – including Tom Russell, who started Alec Wightman booking shows – brought brand new work. Artists did huge hits: Kevin Welch with a song he wrote for Chris Stapleton in a stripped-down, tough, and lovely version. Artists known for their high energy rocking, like Sarah Borges and Rosie Flores, brought more nuanced, shaded sides of their personae.

A couple of artists brought gleeful, surprising covers. Chuck Prophet and Stephanie Finch did “The Little Black Egg,” known to most music fans for its inclusion on Nuggets but with extra resonance as Ohio was one of the few markets it was a real hit. Ward Hayden and the Outliers romped through a joyful, winking version of Ernest Tubb’s “Thanks a Lot.”

And it’s maybe not surprising the performance reverberating in my bones a couple days later as I write this was by Bruce Robison and Kelly Willis. They did Robison’s song “Lifeline” off their first duo record, Cheaters’ Game.

Bruce Robison and Kelly Willis, taken from stream and edited

 As soon as I heard it, it was one of my favorite songs in a catalog packed with contenders. It’s prime Robison, a story song with enough left unsaid for magic to get in, about the ways we connect, like it or not – “There was a crackdown in the street tonight: the stars and the boys ended up in a fight. One step over the line, he says that his Daddy knows mine.” The ways we hunger to connect, “True love comes in the dark, by the rocks and the trees and the rocks in the dark.” The ways we fail to connect, studded with indelible images, “She used to curl up like the steam from a train.”

The taunting darkness as the last verse ends and the final chorus opens were what stuck with me, the tricky balancing act of hope as an act of survival. The way Robison and Willis sing “So damn hard to find…” with a delicate enjambment change the meaning into “Find you” then repeat “Find you” until the previous line almost falls away, getting louder and more powerful, no longer “Find a little lifeline but “Find you a little lifeline – a little bit of hope. In the deep, dark night, need a little bit of rope.” None of us can wholly save each other, and we can’t save ourselves alone, but we can all provide a little rope, in one way or another. 

Thank you, Natalie and Charlie and Alec – and Bruce Robison and Kelly Willis and all the other artists – for reminding me of that. I hope my small contribution added to that hope.

From left: Joe Lovano, Tyshawn Sorey, Bill Frisell. Taken from stream and edited

Tyshawn Sorey/Joe Lovano/Bill Frisell at the Village Vanguard

I’ve waxed rhapsodic about the live streams coming from the legendary Vanguard before, but this weekend’s performance exceeded even my outsized expectations.

I discovered tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano and guitarist Bill Frisell when I was in High School, a solid 15 years into their active careers. They hit creative strides – Lovano on Blue Note Records and Frisell with Nonesuch, as leaders – that period. My burgeoning love for their work led me to the first time I ever heard the drummer Paul Motian: a trio record in this same location that came out a couple of years earlier when I was 15.

This trio date at the Vanguard links these two giants with one of the brightest lights in jazz and chamber music on drums. Tyshawn Sorey’s playing carries the torch of Motian along with a hundred other influences he distills into something fresh, astonishing, and unmistakable. 

The same childhood friend who hipped me to Frisell, Mike Gamble, turned me onto Sorey right after college. I was an immense, drooling fan – anyone who’s read my work has seen him dot year-end lists in almost any year I managed to overlap an NYC trip with a performance of his: Fieldwork at the old Jazz Gallery with Gamble and our other High School buddy, poet Dave Gibbs; Paradoxical Frog at Cornelia Street; as a leader at the Vanguard.

This set vibrated with the spacious, organic magic that’s a trademark of these players. I frequently have a more challenging time paying attention to a live stream than being there in the room – too many distractions – this set had the opposite effect: I couldn’t pay attention to anything else except to write some notes down.

Moments that left my jaw agape, and me gasping came in torrents and also with the perfect, mesmerizing placement of a night’s sky full of stars. Sorey hitting three notes on the vibes, playing off Frisell’s comping, between some skittering, delicate and intense cymbal work, changed the whole texture of Lovano’s dark, lush melody. An unaccompanied Lovano rolling around a theme to amplify the right textures until the band comes in with a clatter and the tune turns into a tightrope knife dance.

A breathtaking set as good as I’ve ever seen anywhere, and something that makes me lucky for the few pleasures we have in these times, and so fortunate people make art despite it all.

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"Hey, Fred!" dance live music visual art

Things I’ve Been Digging – 02/01/2021

Soul Rebels Brass Band, taken from stream and edited

Soul Rebels Brass Band featuring Roy Hargrove at Brooklyn Boowl, presented by FANS

FANS’ streaming arrangement with Brooklyn Bowl and jamband outlet Relix has given many of us the opportunity to see killing archival sets and throw some money at hurting bands and venues right now.

This 2015 end of a three-night run that paired New Orleans funk titans the Soul Rebels with trumpet master Hargrove was sticky, sweaty rapture. Nothing’s ever as good as being in a room with those slurred, fiery notes washing over a crowd that feels like one undulating body but the sound and videography here gave a hell of a taste.

Watching this, I flashed back to a visceral, burning memory of seeing Soul Rebels Brass band take the Newport to church opening for Trombone Shorty, on a December night, as they raged through tunes like Michael Jackson’s “Rock With You,” D’Angelo’s “Spanish Joint” and originals like “Turn It Up.”

From left: Lance Johnson, Hakim Callwood, Moxy Martinez, and Nina West; promotional image provided by Columbus Museum of Art

Wonderball at the Columbus Museum of Art

For the last few years, Wonderball has been one of the best parties in town. The CMA is setting the standard for museum fundraisers with integration of the work in the galleries, multidisciplinary performances, and outreach to the various corners of the vibrant Columbus scene.

Their digital pivot this year, born of sad necessity, had the same homespun charm and brilliant execution of past years and I was overjoyed to watch it in the backyard of a couple good friends. Fantastic co-hosts Hakim Callwood and Nina West (in a jaw-dropping Felix The Cat Clock dress) kept the show running live with Lance Johnson doing a live painting and Moxy Martinez providing beats.

Mixing live and pre-recorded pieces, they treated us to a gorgeous poem by Cynthia Amoah. They filmed myriad genres of dance throughout the galleries including Amelia Gondara & Micaela Gonzalez, Griset Damas-Roche, and my favorite, Shades of Color with Donald Isom and Brianna Rhodes dancing a duet to Jason Moncrief’s flute playing in dialogue with one of my favorite Kehinde Wiley pieces.

As one of the friends we were in person with said, “An advantage of doing it this way is you can really watch a full performance. There’s no pressure to get out of people’s way to let them see or feeling like you have move on quickly so you don’t miss something else.” And it really was a great side effect of this change.

Many of the DJs who make Wonderball such a terrific party brought their A game. Trueskillz and Aloha spun a vibrant worldbeat set. Heatwave’s DJ Adam Scoppa and DJ Lady Sandoval tore through some classic soul 45s. Ty “Nordiq” Williams laid blissful, throbbing electronica on us.

Nothing is the same as when we can all be together but anything that lets us mark these important events while staying safe is to be applauded. Anything that does it with this kind of aplomb, grace, and sense of fun is a damn miracle.

El Futuro Imposible, taken from stream of The World Around Summit 2021

The World Around Design Summit presented by the Guggenheim

One of my favorite things is hearing smart people take on the world, especially in a field I know very little about. The Guggenheim put together an international virtual festival of architecture and design and it made my heart soar to watch people actively engaged with where we are and where we’re going.

Lines from this sent me to my notebook and kept nagging at me throughout the weekend.

Alice Rawsthorn said, “By sharing constructive design issues on Design Emergency, we can persuade more people, decision-makers especially, to see design as we do: as a powerful tool to address social, political, economic, ecological challenges and to place it at the forefront of the post-pandemic reconstruction. Design isn’t a panacea for any of [our] challenges but it is one of our most powerful tools with which to tackle them if – and it’s a big if – it’s deployed intelligently, sensitively, and responsibly.”

That attitude that everything can be a tool to address the world and make things better for people with creative thought is something I try to carry with me and I’d never had it crystallized like so clearly.

I’ve thought about the Anthropocene a lot lately, it showed up in the Under The Radar pieces I wrote about a while ago, and Feral Atlas added fuel to the fire with “The great programs for the conquest of the Earth promised modern ease and happiness but in their inattention gave us a heap of terrifying, if unevenly spread disasters.”

How do we see things at the level of impact they are without crumbling into despair? I don’t know an answer but I know we have to. I’m still unpacking these three sessions and luckily they’re on Youtube indefinitely, another side benefit of all of us being stuck in our homes:

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"Hey, Fred!" live music theatre

Things I’ve Been Digging – 01/25/2021

Blue Ridge from the Atlantic Theater Company website

Blue Ridge by Abby Rosebrock, directed by Taibi Magar, presented by Play Per View

Play Per View made their name earlier in the pandemic with some of the best Off-Broadway plays of the last few years, often reuniting their original casts. They scored another winner with Rosebrock’s Blue Ridge, assembling the stellar actors of the Obie-winning Atlantic Theater’s 2018 production for a Zoom reading.

Blue Ridge singed my damn eyebrows off. Marin Ireland’s Abby is a heartbreakingly relatable character – a portrait of someone getting in her way, so good at some things it lets her not acknowledge her toxicity radiating into the people around her. Whip-change moves underpinned by simultaneously a steely reserve and tragic desperation.

Under Magar’s direction, the rest of the cast crackles, with Kyle Beltran’s Wade, a fellow resident of the sober living house to which Abby was court-appointed, and Kristolyn Lloyd’s Cherie, Abby’s close friend and further along in her path to sobriety. Those two characters’ take the program’s lessons seriously, and their struggle is easier to relate to without the main character’s causticity. But Rosebrock is too canny a writer to let the audience rest in the easy moralistic dichotomy; everyone here is a person, and we’re all broken with varying degrees of self-awareness.

This pitch-black comedy set in the tip of Appalachia grapples with the difficulty of getting help and the often Sisyphean task of getting better, of treating your fellow humans with the love it’s hard to even see ourselves as deserving. 

Questlove 50th Promo Picture from Youtube

Questlove’s 50th Birthday Stream

I was delighted to take a breath on January 20th for the Biden and Harris inauguration, and both Garth Brooks’ a capella “Amazing Grace” and Amanda Gorman’s stirring poem moved me. But when work ended and the night rolled around, the celebration I wanted to partake in from my couch – the closest representation of America I want, I have to choose, to believe in – was a celebratory birthday takeover of a scheduled Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson broadcast on The Roots’ YouTube channel.

Questlove’s been the heart and engine of some of my favorite music of all time. Without question, he was among the driving forces of most of my favorite music of college and immediately after. I’m in the middle of my third re-read of Creative Quest, trying to kickstart my brain out of a winter slump. His DJing is also rightly legendary – anyone watching him rock a massive crowd at Brooklyn Bowl knows we’re in the presence of someone hitting an apex of that form.

In the five or so hours of #Questo50 Anne and I were lucky to see a tribute to Questlove’s wide-ranging network of friends and influences on both sides. And each DJ – without trying too hard, they frequently overlapped a song or two – took up a distinct space. They treated that evening as a great party, even if we were all in our own houses. The latter also presented a heavier version of the usual Wednesday night problem: no waiting for champagne and whiskey that have already been paid for.

DJ Rashida’s infectious set played a greatest hits of Questlove’s work – classic The Roots, Erykah Badu, D’Angelo, Common – and his compatriots Q-Tip and Dilla. She served a burst of the best parts of memory, dancing to those songs in clubs and basements, probably not surprising since she’s within a month of my age.

DJ Sasara from Tokyo spoke to his international presence and the flow of ideas. She worked local floor-fillers like DJ Kawasaki into smooth ‘70s soul and hard-driving Colombian and Brazillian tunes. Stones Throw general Peanut Butter Wolf worked with the record nerd side. Having picked a crate of 45s he thought Questlove would enjoy, he chose them at random, delighting in the sensual, sometimes incongruity of the way they sparked against each other.

DJ Tara was that modern East Coast party, smoothly and seamlessly beat-matched and the perfect mix of stuff I already knew and loved and great surprises that all made me want to move. And the headliner, as only seems right, was Philly giant DJ Jazzy Jeff.

Like a real club night or warehouse party, I wanted to check in and still have a full night’s sleep for work. I couldn’t turn away – I was happily hooked on this until 1:00 am.

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"Hey, Fred!" live music theatre

Things I’ve Been Digging – 01/17/2021

Immanuel Wilkins Quartet, from left Kris Davis, Daryl Johns, Immanuel Wilkins, Kewku Sumbry; taken from stream and edited

Immanuel Wilkins Quartet at Smalls

I mentioned APAP in last week’s writeup. Generally, in one of these years when I’d be in New York for mid-January, soaking up the remnants of arts presenters’ bounties, I’d be catching between 6 and 20 sets over a few days of Winter Jazz Fest. WJF’s excellent pivot of panels and performances is going on through March, but I caught a few streams that gave me some of that feeling.

The set that gave me the heftiest dose of that energy came from a stalwart of the classic NYC clubs and at the vanguard of this new digital era, Smalls. Immanuel Wilkins (also a standout on Joel Ross’ astonishing record last year) and one of our finest alto players, lead a striking quartet with Kris Davis (who closed out my previous New York trip with an explosion) on piano, Daryl Johns on bass, and Kweku Sumbry on drums. 

The group wove together songs into unbroken suites, building landscapes and shifting them. Simmering, glistening ballads jostled with ecstatic classic fire music. Long, screeching cries curled like smoke into gorgeous melodies. Textures played out and expanded, then splintered and came together. 

This set was everything I want from a band coming out of the jazz tradition. It made me miss New York, it made me miss walking down to Dick’s Den on a good night, and it made me miss being in the room; at the same time, it reminded me how lucky I am to have this option.

From left: Vijay Iyer, Arooj Aftab, Shazad Ismaily; taken from stream and edited

Love in Exile at Jazz Gallery

Jazz Gallery continues to present a wealth of fascinating programming in its streaming iteration and I was enthralled by their trio this week of pianist Vijay Iyer, multi-instrumentalist Shazad Ismaily (both of whom I’ve seen many times) and vocalist Arooj Aftab whose name pricked my consciousness when she played a Big Ears but I’d never seen.

This was an astonishing, glowing hour of music. Mostly working in these slow, unfolding oceanic tempos, the trio displayed an uncanny telepathy. On one piece, Iyer’s exploded flurries of his classic diamond hard-and-glistening attack into spaces left by Aftab’s silky melodies and Ismaily’s circular, hypnotic bass. Another used that tempo to expand into a rich, cinematic, baroque ballad, riding accumulations into a majestic cascade. 

Other pieces had Ismaily bringing in a droning keyboard tone to underpin a dual longing between Aftab and Iyer. Beautiful and beguiling.

Espíritu; shot taken from stream and edited

Espíritu at Under the Radar

Caught up on the rest of the previous week’s Under the Radar and my favorite piece, Espíritu, came from the Chilean company Teatro Anónimo and the pen of Trinidad González. 

It focuses on – mostly young – people grappling with the deep sickness of ennui and hopelessness. As one character says early on, “We are just a group of useless people with a great plan to stop the destruction of the world.”

That plan staggers and stumbles, people are wracked by cruelty and driven into impoverished fantasies that pass that cruelty on through jagged vignettes. Lines like “People yell at me and that makes them happy…Sometimes they think they’re making love but it’s something different from love. Do they dream?” and “If I were your father I’d burn that notebook and send you off to fight a war,” haunted me for days after seeing this.

If I were managing a company, I’d program a double bill of this with Matt Slaybaugh’s The Absurdity of Writing Poetry but there are probably dozens of plays about fighting despair with art, even, especially, when it feels hopeless, this would productively spark against. It made me miss UTR, made me miss NYC, and made me miss the theaters where I first loved work like this in the Wexner Center and at Available Light.

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"Hey, Fred!" live music theatre

Things I’ve Been Digging – 01/11/2021

My TimeHop reminded me that last year, and three years ago, I was in NYC for festivals around APAP, which is always one of the most invigorating parts of any year I work it in. 

From left: Kirk Knuffke, Gerald Cleaver, James Brandon Lewis, taken from stream and edited

James Brandon Lewis, Kirk Knuffke, and Gerald Cleaver at Arts for Art Inc, 01/06/2021

Of the overlapping black music traditions, relatively few hands dig into the fertile intersection between R&B and free jazz. Arts for Art – a storied non-profit that hosts the annual Vision Festival among other services to the culture – kicked off their 2021 with one of the finest examples of the sparks that fly when those two forms hit one another: a trio of sax player James Brandon Lewis, cornet player Kirk Knuffke, and drummer Gerald Cleaver.

As Lewis said in the post-set discussion, “Charles Gayle and Grover Washington, Jr. both came from the same place I did, Buffalo.” This trio wove excerpts of the Bill Withers classics “Ain’t No Sunshine,” and “Just the Two Of Us,” the latter a collaboration with Washington and a massive hit, along with Donny Hathaway’s “Someday We’ll Be Free” into an unbroken 45-minute meditation and exultation.

Lewis’s liquid tone and Knuffke’s sharp, jabbing punctuation aligned on deep hooks like the revolving “I know” section of “Ain’t No Sunshine,” building up the tension and exploding that feeling into a bonfire of abstraction. That jousting coiled into a mournful funeral march before clicking into a more urgent, insistent gear.

Through all of these changes, Cleaver’s drums commented and steered the ship. The one section where he slid into head knocking funk beats felt like an unexpected blast of sun cracking velvet clouds, then as soon as I grasped it, he and the trio were onto something else. 

Everyone in this trio intimately understood both musical forms and used the tropes for their cathartic power as well as misdirection. They didn’t shuffle free playing and dance music; they burned them into something fresh and personal.

Under the Radar, presented by The Public Theater

One of the brightest lights in my personal APAP – and the conduit for many of my favorite things at the Wexner Center every year – is the Public’s Under The Radar fest. This international sampling of moving, riveting performance art and theater pivoted brilliantly to online this year. I’ve checked about half of it so far and there hasn’t been a dud in the bunch. 

Best of all, these are available on demand through the 14th, at https://publictheater.org/programs/under-the-radar/under-the-radar-2021/

Highlights for me so far:

From the innovative Instagram component of Rich Kids

Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran by Javaad Alipoor

This two hander – which won a prize at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival – featured Alipoor and Kirsty Housley narrating – with dazzling imagery the self-destructive microcosm of the idle rich in Tehran. In doing so, they draw out heartbreaking truths about the decline of civilizations, the scars of colonialism, and the blur between long-term consequences and immediate decisions. 

Full of poison-dagger lines I was still chewing over days later like “There isn’t an anthropocene that connects us, there’s a scar that divides;” vaporwave summed up as “A ghost made of bits and pieces of a past that never quite was;” and a description of Dubai as “It’s like long generations of the past returning eternally to party with them.”

From left: Jason Moran and Alicia Hall Moran. Taken from stream and edited

the motown project by Alicia Hall Moran. 

One of our finest American singers, plumbing the rich terrain between Opera and popular music, Alicia Hall Moran assembled a ferocious band for this, including her husband Jason Moran on piano, Reggie Washington on bass, LaFrae Sci on drums, and Thomas Flippin on guitar, alongside fellow powerhouse singers Barrington Lee and Steven Herring.

Moran drew connections between the Motown songbook and classical “art music,” giving both sides equal weight without sanding down either’s essence, and wove them into a crushing portrait of desire. An aria from The Magic of Figaro sparked off the Holland-Dozier-Holland classic “Sugarpie, Honeybunch.” A torturously slow “Heat Wave” was a languid blast from better seasons. A “Signed, Sealed, Delivered,” drew every nuance out of that Stevie Wonder classic without bogging it down. If I see something better this year – even after theatres open – it’s been a good damn year.

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"Hey, Fred!" live music

Things I’ve Been Digging – 01/04/2021

Welcome back, anyone still reading this. I appreciate the kind words about the year-end wrap-up posts more than I can ever say, and I always appreciate all of you. Hoping we’re only a few months away from easing into my bending some of your ears in person, but I hope and intend to keep this up even when most of the things I love in a week are back out in the world. Keep the faith, stay safe, burn your lanterns of hope.

I started 2021 strong on the New Year’s Eve weekend with three shows that reminded me that music and storytelling are frequently social forms. Instead of making me despair at being so far away from the people I’d be seeing shows with – and the bands I’d be dancing to – it made me feel warm and close to that vibration.

Jason Isbell, Amanda Shires, Derry deBorja, taken from stream and edited

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, Brooklyn Bowl Nashville, 12/31/2020

I prepped for a round of Zoom New Year’s Eve celebrations by getting dressed and dancing in the living room to Isbell’s finely tuned band’s perfect mix of rocking wistfulness, ass-shaking melancholy, soulful empathy, and hope for the world.

Isbell’s 2020 record Reunions played with cleaner, shimmering textures and rhythms than his last few and continued the more open arrangements and space for the band to make their mark started with The Nashville Sound. For many of us, even those of us who are sick of that sparkling Dire Straits guitar, those tones cut a distinct tunnel to nostalgia, and Isbell used that with a perfect set of songs about his (and our) growing up and also about living in the world now.

For someone who’s written so many stirring crowd-pleasers, I enjoyed seeing how these new songs held their own and made space in dialogue with tunes we’ve been singing along to for years. Wrapping the encore with his surging anthem to questioning and rejecting complacency, to the implacable sense we can all always be doing better, “What Have I Done To Help,” felt like a perfect hymn for the coming year. It also felt like the character’s direct evolution from his breakout hit “Cover Me Up” played right before.

The melancholy of nostalgia and longing for absent friends in songs like “Dreamsicle” and “Only Children,” bloomed in three dimensions, a reminder that memory and paying witness are celebrations even when we’re sad. The surge of the rhythm section helped keep anything – even songs in a quieter space like “Something More Than Free” – from being staid or stiff, and there was always air for the melodic flights of Amanda Shires’ violin and Sadler Vaden and Isbell’s dueling guitars to spark off one another. 

Weird as it was seeing the full Brooklyn Bowl light show cut through the shadows of their cavernous, empty Nashville outpost, this never felt like a rehearsal. Nothing seemed phoned in or rushed, nor was it too slick. This set reminded me of the promise of a great, muscular rock band on a good night. It made me hungry to be in the room for the real thing but grateful for this marker until we can do that.

Maceo Parker, Bruno Speight, and Will Boulware, taken from stream and edited

Maceo Parker, SFJAZZ, 01/01/2021 (archival from 2015)

Maceo’s horn has defined American music from the early 1960s on. I was lucky enough to see him with Prince, with Ani Difranco (in a double bill that still feels like the most fun I’ve ever seen two bands have on stage with one another), and tearing up the Scioto Mile on a ferocious free summer set. 

I’ve rhapsodized about the SFJAZZ streams for members in this space, and we were treated to an exquisite example from Parker’s 2015 NYE run. I marveled at the way Parker builds and sustains these relationships, how much gratitude he brings to this band, and in return, how tight they are as a unit, following through the kaleidoscopic range of moods and tones he calls out.

He reached back through pieces of his (and the nation’s) history in a tight hour and ten set. He briefly touched on the jazz of the booking’s name with a sweet duet on the Ellington classic “Satin Doll” as a duo with keyboardist Will Boulware. His JBs days got sultry, hard-edged workout on “Make It Funky,” featuring a flame-licked trombone solo from Greg Boyer (who he met in his days with George Clinton) and a closing tent-revival version of “Pass the Peas.”

Nikki Glaspie from Dumpstaphunk and the Nth Power kicked Parker’s classic Prince collaboration “Baby Knows” from Dial M-A-C-E-O into high gear with a crackling drum intro. She threw that same explosive energy into the slightly smoother shine of their arrangement on The Meters’ “Hey Pocky A-Way.” 

Her hookup with P-Funk bassist Rodney “Skeet” Curtis shone throughout the set, especially on moments like her perfect, surprising comping behind his melodic slap solo on the Parker original “Off The Hook.” The band worked just as well when the energy slipped into a simmer, especially on an instrumental cover of Marvin Gaye’s classic “Let’s Get It On” the let Parker show off that sweet but never too sugary tone in full undulating pillow talk mode.

In addition to shouting out the band and creating showcase spots for them, Parker even made time to shout out and thank the crew from the stage, many of them by name. That love for people lit up the band and the music, bringing a tear to my eye.

Lenny Kaye and the Lonesome Prairie Dogs, taken from the stream and edited

Various Artists, Hank-O-Rama, Bowery Electric, 01/01/2021

For the last 17 years, Brooklyn roots band The Lonesome Prairie Dogs have honored Hank Williams with a set on the day he died, making up for the Canton Ohio show he missed. This year, they marked the anniversary with a stream from Bowery Electric.

Lenny Kaye played pedal steel on almost everything. The Lonesome Horns (a trio of brass players from Antibalas led by Jordan McLean) augmenting several songs enhanced this hard-swinging four-piece core. This seasoned NYC institution tore through raging party classics like “Settin’ The Woods On Fire” and aching ballads like “Cold, Cold Heart” with equal aplomb.

A rotating set of other lead singers fleshed out the visions of Hank here, with East Village organizer and singer-songwriter Tom Clark, MC Lindy Loo, and Sean Kershaw all taking turns at the mic, along with Kaye stepping out from behind the steel for his tribute to Williams’ alter ego Luke the Drifter (from his 1984 Lenny Kaye Connection record) and the Lonesome Horns’  rotating lead vocals on “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.”

These Bowery Electric shows always remind me of what I love most about New York, the way scenes feel malleable and overlap and this sense of “Kids putting on a show” but with the highest caliber of musicians you’ll find anywhere. Even some technical rough spots – moments where multiple singers worked together, as the finale “I Saw The Light” exposed some serious monitor problems – made this feel like home.

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"Hey, Fred!" live music

Things I’ve Been Digging – 11/30/2020

The weirdness continued unabated in this season with distant Thanksgiving – which itself has problems, like everything in American society birthed in blood and torture and the positive feelings we’ve imbued it with come partially despite that history and partially resting on the pedestal of it – but I found things to love and hope you did too.

Probably the last of these for a while; my plan for the next four weeks is to put up my best of the year posts.

Patti Smith, taken from stream and edited

Music: Patti Smith, presented by Fans.

Weeks from the 45th anniversary of her landmark record that broke so much open for so many of us, Smith reminded me of her unique blend of the intimate and the expansive and took me to the church I desperately needed.

Accompanied by long-time collaborator Tony Shanahan and her daughter Jesse Paris Smith, Smith led us on an hour trip through highlights of her catalog, including readings of a new piece and a delightful chunk of Year of the Monkey, and one cover, a beautiful read of Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush” (with a nod to its own 50th anniversary and Young’s 75th birthday) that highlighted its fragility.

Smith found new contours, new crevices between the notes, new facets to shine her light of today through on songs she’s played thousands of times. “Dancing Barefoot,” dedicated “to the women” crackled with benediction and absolution; “Pissing In a River” circled its prey, building up to the incandescent flare-ups of “Come on, come on” and “What about it?”

The opening “Grateful” from maybe my favorite of her records, Gung Ho, set the tone – “Ours is just another skin that simply slips away” for a sunny afternoon of true gratitude, radical acceptance and taking stock, without blindness. That song faded into the righteous incantation: “Throw off your stupid cloak; embrace all you fear. For joy will conquer all despair in my Blakean year.”

She introduced “Southern Cross” with “This is a song about remembrance; it’s a song about life, really,” and more than anything else, this set reminded me that all remembrance can be, should be, must be, a celebration of life.

From left: Jason Moran and Nasheet Waits, The Bandwagon. Taken from stream and edited.

Music: Jason Moran’s Bandwagon at the Village Vanguard.

I’ve never been in NYC around Thanksgiving – not a parade guy – but I’ve always been jealous of many traditions for the locals, including that full week stand of the Bandwagon at the Vanguard. 

There are a handful of shows that burn into my memory and I still recall with surprising clarity Jason Moran on piano, with Nasheet Waits on drums, and Tarus Mateen on bass, blowing the top of my head off at the Wexner Center in 2003. With no exaggeration, those 90 minutes blew open what I thought jazz could be, it expanded my parameters for thinking about music. I was vibrating with excitement when I walked in – having been a fan of the records for several years – and I could barely hold my molecules in one gravitation field after.

In the ensuing 17 years, I’ve seen all three of them multiple times – Winter Jazzfest and Big Ears, back at the Wex and late night at Jazz Standard – but never quite managed to catch another trio set. So even through a screen from miles away, I almost cried.

This was the music of conversation, argument, emphatic declaration, at the highest possible standard. Jittery, powerful abstractions melted into standards like “Body and Soul.” They paid tribute to the legendary Geri Allen with one of her classics “Feed The Fire” and they tore into a greasy honky-tonk stomp. This was the kind of music that made the world make more sense and made gratitude swell up in me.

The Maria Schneider Orchestra – Taken from stream and edited

Music: Maria Schneider’s Orchestra at the Jazz Standard.

Another of those legendary jazz Thanksgiving traditions is the great Maria Schneider leading her Orchestra at Jazz Standard. This would have been her 16th year on this week at the Standard, and with possibly her best record Data Lords released so recently, I’m overjoyed she found a way to mark the occasion.

She put together a limited run stream of clips of her band from the past couple years – including trying out some of the dark, knotty Data Lords pieces like “CQ CQ, Is Anybody There?” – outtakes from the studio sessions, and a Zoom conversation capturing a little bit of the all-important “hang” that happens whenever that many musicians gather.

Like the Moran, I almost cried a few times. These perfect solos rising out of this massive, inviting but awe-inspiring architecture. The band breathing as one and fragmenting into the night’s sky or a city street.

Categories
"Hey, Fred!" live music theatre

Things I’ve Been Digging – 11/23/2020

From left: Alan Broadbent, Sheila Jordan, Harvie S. Taken from stream and edited

Music: Sheila Jordan Trio at Smalls Live

I’ve waxed rhapsodic here about Smalls constant creativity and persistence to bring musicians together to play. In the last few weeks, they’ve carefully and strategically brought in small audiences and I almost wept hearing – from my kitchen, many miles away, missing New York in a week where Timehop reminds me I was at least three of the last six years – the great Sheila Jordan celebrate her 92nd birthday in this storied club.

A direct line to Charlie Parker, Lennie Tristano, and Charles Mingus – one of few left – Jordan took us to school with this survey of the great American songbook and this reminder of the glory of following one’s interests, wherever they land. 

Backed by her longtime bassist Harvie S and New Zealand native Alan Broadbent, two of the most sympathetic vocal-accompanists alive, she reminded us how ineffable, fleeting, and indelible beauty can be in song. Definitive, forged in years of experience, versions of “Autumn in New York” and “I Concentrate on You” were highlights in this delightful rain of gems.

</remnant> presented by NYTW, screenshots taken from livestream and edited

Theater: </remnant> by Theatre Mitu, directed by Rubén Polendo.

What’s memory mean to us? How do we piece these fragments together? Where does religion fit? How do we survive war? How do we stay connected with ourselves and a collective humanity? Cacophonies of voices and images fracture and coalesce in Theatre Mitu’s </remnant>, presented with New York Theatre Workshop, burning fragments into my brain.

This riveting exploration of memory – including memory as a feeding trough for trauma and the evolution of PTSD over the last century-plus set a high bar for these new digital hybrids that still felt like theater, that I was in the dark with other people even if I couldn’t see them, and with the fiery immediacy of something happening now even with the degree of editing and post-production visible.

Seth Parker-Woods (foreground) with members of Seattle Symphony. Taken from livestream and edited

Music: For Roscoe Mitchell by Tyshawn Sorey, performed by Seth Parker-Woods and Seattle Symphony Orchestra.

Anyone with evening a passing glimpse of my taste over the years knows I’m an unabashed admirer of Tyshawn Sorey’s work as a drummer and composer. He continues a streak of astonishing large-format pieces with an astonishing cello concerto, For Roscoe Mitchell, performed by the Seattle Symphony.

The dazzling piece conjured Mitchell’s luminescent compositions without using any of his moves directly. Played beautifully by the orchestra and soloist Parker-Woods under the baton of David Robertson, I don’t even have words for how grateful I am for this remarkable series from Seattle Symphony in these trying times.

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"Hey, Fred!" dance theatre

Things I’ve Been Digging – 11/16/2020

Russan Troll Farm – From Upper Left, Haskell King, Ian Lassiter, Greg Keller, Danielle Slavick. Provided by TheatreWorks Hartford on their site.

Theater: Russian Troll Farm by Sarah Gancher, directed by Jared Mezzocchi and Elizabeth Williamson, presented by Theatreworks Hartford and TheatreSquared in association with The Civilians.

I still miss being in a theater, crammed around my fellow audience members, breathing as one, with an uncommon fire. But watching theatre artists – new jacks and veterans alike – mold today’s tools and limitations into beautiful things that feel like theater even split over different rooms. 

I saw one of my favorite examples of this 2020 alchemy this weekend. Long-standing champions of the new The Civilians teamed up with Fayetteville, Arkansas’ TheatreSquared, and Connecticut’s Theatreworks Hartford for a dazzling, incendiary romp through Sarah Gancher’s Russian Troll Farm.

Subtitled “A Workplace Comedy,” the play zooms in on a St Petersburg office to follow a team of trolls sowing discontent and confusion among Americans through Twitter. Former journalist Masha (Danielle Slavick) joins the established dynamic of laser-focused Egor (Haskell King), stunted throwback Steve (Ian Lassiter), and erstwhile artist Nikolai (Greg Keller), in the shadow of the manager: Soviet throwback Ljuba (Mia Katigbak). 

Gancher understands this low-level almost-tech job’s dynamics: the infighting, the jokes, the sourness, and sweetness. A vibrant scene of intense, flirtatious volleying between Slavick and Keller captures the adrenaline of being good at something, even something that feels both futile (from the inside) and evil (for those of us looking in), and Russian Troll Farm is littered with scenes this good. 

Gancher and her cast understand how similar the American and Russian psyches are but filter the characters through their environment’s specifics. Lassiter – recently very good in Gold’s uneven King Lear – has a ball playing the lusty, coarse Steve, bouncing off Slavick’s Masha and King’s brilliant, understated Egor. They create a world that feels like those little rooms for those of us who’ve done call center work or similar and makes us question how much of what we did for those hours and those years was just as morally questionable.

Directors Jared Mezzocchi and Elizabeth Williamson found ways to impose their stellar cast on one another with trickery that doesn’t lose its amateurish afterbirth completely but uses the seams we can see to its advantage. When Katigbak, in a heartbreaking soliloquy, says, “Are you even here? You’re the relic of a dying empire, the ghost of a glorious future that never came,” it snaps into sharp focus that we’ve been seeing ghosts all this time.

Russian Troll Farm was a triumph I’ll be thinking about for a very long time.

Bill Chats: Screenshot taken from livestream

Talk: Bill Chats – The Future is Present: A Casting The Vote Project. Bill T. Jones in conversation with Charlotte Brathwaite, Janani Balasubramanian, Justin Hicks, and Sunder Ganglani.

Bill T. Jones, through his New York Live Arts in association with Bard University, hosted a delightful, recharging conversation with four of the people behind The Future Is Present, a group running workshops at the intersection of performance and collective action.

It’s invigorating watching these ideas of what an artist means or even can mean bounce between people of color who came up in wildly different scenes, at different levels of outward acclaim and success. Jones said, “When I started in the art world, they said, ‘You wanna make art, make art. You want to do politics, do politics.’ And I thought the we was political…Trying to get to a ‘we’, many artists head for the door when that happens. An artist is trying to close the gap between this internal space here and the rest of the universe, and an artist finds a language, a form that lets them do that.”

That resonated deeply with me, who grew up steeped in the kind of late modernism Jones helped define before me, but I was enraptured by the way the younger people he’s talking to centered other people in the lens of their own languages. For instance, Justin Hicks said, “Even transcribing what [young people] want changed the ‘we’. I know lots of artists who don’t trouble themselves with the questions I do,” and “The concept of potential is much more important to us than certainty.”

After Jones posted the question “What are your dreams” to the panel, Sunder Ganglani said, “It’s not easy to imagine one’s self into a world in which you want to live. We have hopes, though,” and Janani Balasubramanian riposted, “You asked that question about certainty – I don’t think this project hinges on certainty, it’s actually present with discomfort, difficulty, and experimentation which is being cleared away in our society, through science, through catastrophe, through violence. In that space of clearing is a process of collective experimentation: sometimes difficult, sometimes joyful, sometimes both. I want to get to a place where people can verb it. Can ‘future’.”

Watching this clear-eyed group articulate a future worth fighting for and creating, while acknowledging the ambiguity it comes with, gave me more hope than anything I’ve seen, read, or heard, in quite a while. As Balasubramanian said, “Future making is about speculation but also about closing that gap between what’s speculative and what’s material – if we’re demanding something of the future, we’re demanding it of the present…Young people don’t need our encouragement for world-building.”

Theater: The Self-Combustion of a 30-Something-Year-Old Chet or, Icarus Tries to Catch the Sun by Keenan Tyler Oliphant, presented by New Ohio Theatre

Oliphant uses the raw material we all know about beautiful and damned Chet Baker and gives it new, molten life with Nicholas McGovern as the seductive wreck in a tiny apartment, old film clips playing on the wall like memories written on skin.

McGovern brings this his utter, unshakable commitment in the life Baker committed himself to, his ability to see magic where it confronted him – a gorgeous reverie about Charlie Parker “rising above us on corrupted wings,” snatches of songs – and his role as a self-identified truth-teller. His Baker is deep in the throes of “poetic self-destruction,” there to “remind [the audience] what it’s like to be awake.”

Somehow, in the crucible of this Zoom so intimate it’s like we’re eavesdropping these words distill into a hard crystal as the liquid boils off and they snap with the hard, sweet rhythm they need – with invaluable assistance from Jacob Robinson’s sound design. The text grows so large and thin we can see through it to the desire behind the words we’ve all heard too many times; the desire that’s all that matters here.

In lesser hands, this raving, this disappearing-ink last testament, could have been laughable, a plywood cartoon. But here it felt like that perfect tune on the jukebox as you order that one last drink you know you shouldn’t have.