Category: live music

Categories
live music theatre

Things I’ve Been Digging – 09/07/2020

IDLES, screenshot from livestream

Music: IDLES live from Abbey Road.

All praise to Anne for turning me onto London’s IDLES, one of the freshest, most exciting rock bands out there. I was laid up with pneumonia when they first came through Columbus, but I made up for it the next year at Beachland.

For such a live machine, you can sense the palpable frustration in the tour for their record being delayed. These three streamed shows from historical Abbey Road studios gave a potent but tiny glimpse of the power they find in coiled stomps and wild catharsis.

Classic subverted agitprop lines like , “I got new shoes ’cause I mean business” and “Never fight a man with a perm” have the punch of recognizing an old friend. The new tunes painted their kind of righteous fury in new neon colors like the throbbing mutant disco of “Mr. Motivator,” rotating on singer Joe Talbot, snarling “How’d you like those clichés?” in a way that didn’t deflate the previous verse but kicked it like a champion footballer over the stands right into the sun.

They paid tribute to some rock history with a brilliant, glistening dirge take on The Ramones’ “I Want To Be Sedated.”

Barbara Fant, screenshot from livestream of Rhapsody and Refrain

Poetry: Streetlight Guild’s Rhapsody and Refrain, featured reader Barbara Fant.

It’s no surprise to anyone who’s known me – online, in person, or any mix – that Scott Woods has been one of my inspirations for over 20 years, and I’ve been proud to know him for at least 15 – I remember the moment we first talked, at Larry’s on a Monday, but I couldn’t tell you what year it was. When he opened his venue, Streetlight Guild, expectations were high, and he has exceeded them so handily he makes it look easy without ever hiding the amount of work it takes.

So it’s no surprise Woods has made the most out of the moment’s forced pivot to online work. My favorite example of that right now is his sequel series to 2019’s mind-blowing Rhapsody and Refrain series, one poet a month for the 30 days of September. This week, I was lucky enough to catch the great Barbara Fant, whose voice it had been too damn long since I’ve heard.

Her melodious tone – frequently inserting singing – feels like a culmination of all the spoken word artists who made me fall in love with the form as she rained gems that made me with I could stop and play the tape back, spinning out riveting images like “Prayers fall when we open up our mouths like caskets,” or “We have been this magic before.” Melting these deep images into sticky hooks without ever sacrificing the mystery of the form.

If you want a reminder of the phenomenal poetry scene we have and how great we can be if we support people doing that excellent work, you owe it to yourself to check out Rhapsody and Refrain. And if you weren’t tuned in for Fant’s set? See her next time.

Screenshots from WWOZ Virtual Groove Gala livestream. From left: Irma Thomas, John Boutte, Samantha Fish

Music: WWOZ’s Virtual Groove Gala

There’s no shortage of cities I love, but New Orleans is special. New Orleans felt like magic that first moment I stepped off the plane. Even having a stroke at the end of my second trip didn’t diminish my unbridled affection for that town. I was just thinking this year it had been too long and then all travel stopped.

Among the things I’ve directed money toward since there’s no going out includes becoming a supporting member of New Orleans’ phenomenal public radio station WWOZ. That’s paid off with an amazing weekend of archived Jazzfest sets and, Thursday, an online version of their annual gala (additionally bittersweet because of their 40th anniversary this year). At the end of a long day, I’m not sure anything could have been better to cast on my porch.

This stirring cross-section of Nola joy hit generations, genres, and simultaneously stoked my missing the big easy and soothed that longing. Kermit Ruffins and band brought a stripped-down version of their jazz party with tunes like “Sunny Side of the Street.” Amanda Shaw and Rockin’ Dopsie Jr teamed up for a righteous dance party crowned by a fiddle-drenched take on the Hank Williams classic “Jambalaya.”

John Boutté with a silky duo of piano and bass behind him, swooned through a delightful Nat King Cole tribute with “Straighten Up and Fly Right” and “Nature Boy” before leaning into his original “Sisters” like putting a cherry on top of the cake. Samantha Fish’s own sharp, gritty songs like “Bulletproof” hit the back of my skull, but my favorite was the slow-burn blues “Need You More.”

And, of course, the crowning set was the legend Irma Thomas. Accompanied by her pianist, she treated us to a slinky read of her “Anyone Who Knows What Love Is,” a keening “For the Rest of My Life,” and a jaw-dropping, definitive version of one of the great New Orleans songs (high on the biggest Mount Olympus of all American music), Percy Mayfield’s “Please Send Me Someone to Love.”

These institutions are important – those of us who are weathering this better financially should try to support what’s important to them, but that doesn’t let the government off the hook.

Categories
live music theatre

Things I’ve Been Digging – August 31, 2020

Andrew Cyrille Quartet, taken from livestream and edited

Music: Andrew Cyrille Quartet, The Village Vanguard 

Drummer Andrew Cyrille, who I first became a fan of with his exciting work with Cecil Taylor, led a mysterious, beautiful Quartet this weekend from the Vanguard. 

Cyrille’s supple feel with bass player Ben Street buoyed these songs like an abstracted nature painting. Throughout, the interlocking front line of David Virelles on piano and Bill Frisell spun wildly original and wholly organic melodies and harmonies. Highlights included Cyrille’s shadowy ballad “Special People” turning into crashing waves; Frisell’s tantalizing slow-burn “Worried Woman;” Frisell’s “Drink” with its slinky melody, moves from a leisurely build to a classic 60s saloon groove littered with spikes and a barely sublimated frenzy.

Screenshots from livestream of The Jacksonian

Theater: The Jacksonian by Beth Henley, presented by The New Group

With this New Group production in 2013, Beth Henley proved her sharp, sweltering take on the South is as sharp as her heyday with Crimes of the Heart. As a benefit directed by Robert Falls, reunited most of its cast for a riveting return to the poisonous swamp of the human heart in 1964.

I can’t think of an American actor who does a better downward spiral than Ed Harris and Perch, the disgraced dentist making one last swing at getting his life together in the eponymous hotel, is a remarkable role for him to sink into. Amy Madigan as his estranged wife and Juliet Brett as his neglected, confused daughter are powerhouses. Bill Pullman, riffing on Flanner O’Connor’s Misfit, finds the sadness in a lifetime of malevolence, and Carol Kane (stepping into the shoes of the late, great Glenne Headly) is a vibrant, exciting foil. 

The Jacksonian is a classic potboiler with teeth and language that crackles and steams; this reading increased my regret at not catching it on a New York trip that year tenfold.

Optic Sink, Screenshot from Livestream

Music: Goner TV episode 3, featuring Optic Sink

Goner Records looms large in the landscape of music I enjoy. Through their record label and store, their friendships with and promotion of Columbus bands, and their annual festival, they’ve been my gateway to Memphis as a tangible reality I love every bit as much as the mythopoetic Memphis I grew up with as a vision and a dream.

They’ve done spectacular work keeping this international community I’m on the fringes of but love so much connected in these distanced times: teaming with other labels like Slovenly for day-long blowout livestream marathons and, more recently, their every other Friday Goner TV broadcasting from the store and giving us a glimpse into Memphis and what’s coming next on the label.

This week’s was my favorite yet, previewing the debut album from Optic Sink with a live in-store. In NOTS, one of my favorite, most exciting, cerebral without being dry, bands of the last 10 years, Natalie Hoffman’s guitar and vocals lead the band’s cracking, dark narratives and off-kilter, surprising, prickly earworms. 

With Optic Sink she moves to keys and the cracked-mirror science fiction vibe from the NOTS mix comes to the fore with longer, slower, murkier songs. But these new tunes still have a dancefloor punch and pop nougat wrapped in their intriguing mystery; based on this evidence, I’m very excited to hear the record. 

This Goner TV also featured Hoffman’s Optic Sink bandmate Ben Bauermeister in his solo electronic guise A55 Conducta which was even more what I didn’t expect from Goner – though I know the mutual affections run deep with Bauermeister’s work in bands like Magic Kids and Toxie – but it was a fucking party.

This also featured video from longtime Goner cohorts Quintron and Ms. Pussycat, multidisciplinary Memphis artist Don Lifted, and made me miss the city it’s based in terribly.

Categories
dance live music theatre

Things I’ve Been Digging – August 24, 2020

Selection of Screenshots from the August Bang on a Can Marathon

Music: Bang on a Can Marathon

Bang on a Can’s founding composers (Julia Wolfe, David Lang, Michael Gordon) have put on a marathon of new work since the mid ‘80s and the current climate changed the marathon’s form but didn’t diminish any of its vital joy, intensity or defiance.

This, the third version I think, was as full of magic as anything I’ve been lucky enough to see since we’ve been shut inside. Highlights included Olivia de Prato’s dark and holy read of Missy Mazzoli’s Vespers for Violin, singer-cellist Layla McCalla’s songs inspired by Langston Hughes, Ken Thompson’s fiery world premiere of Nicole Mitchell’s A Much-Deserved Ass Whooping, and Jodie Landau’s beguiling version of Jacob Cooper’s Expiation.

Patterson Hood, screenshot of livestream

Music: Patterson Hood

I think I first heard of the Drive-By Truckers when I was in college through the one-two punch of No Depression magazine and niche CD site Miles of Music (also where I got my first Marah records), around the time of Pizza Deliverance. I first saw them around 2000-2001 when I was down for an Anime Weekend Atlanta and it stands as one of the most electrifying live shows I’ve ever seen – for years I don’t think I missed them any time they were even close to me.

My fandom for DBT has ebbed and flowed, but they won me back big in the last two records. Patterson Hood (and partner/only other constant member Mike Cooley) has not only built one of the most consistent catalogs of songs, but he’s lit an example of how to grow up in rock-and-roll. He’s stayed true to his impulses and interests, but he left room for them to expand. He’s grown into his curiosity and let his empathy grow instead of shrink. His home-recorded livestreams during this pandemic have been a balm, like hearing from an old friend reporting back.

That said, it might make me an enormous hypocrite that my favorite of these streams so far and the one that nudged me to add it here was his delve back into “The Heathen Songs.” As he and Cooley were gestating their breakthrough Southern Rock Opera, they also wrote a flood of songs for what ended up being the next two records, Decoration Day, The Dirty South, and Hood’s first widely distributed solo disc Killers and Stars.

That was my favorite period of the band, when they shrugged off some thought-it-was-a-joke-song classic college rock feint of the first two and opened up the aperture of their view of the south, and only indulged the big guitar jamming sporadically, with songs that ripped my heart out at the same time I was partying with my friends on the dancefloor.

This trip back down memory lane had a clear eye for what those songs meant to him at the time – particularly on his “divorce trilogy”: “Hell No I Ain’t Happy,” “(Something’s Got to) Give Pretty Soon,” and “Your Daddy Hates Me” – and what the songs mean now. That delicate balance between catharsis and wryness gained new, slippery facets on the driving-hot-nails elegy of “Do It Yourself,” “And some might say I should cut you slack, but you worked so hard at unhappiness. Living too hard just couldn’t kill you, so in the end you had to do it yourself.”

The long – almost two hour – set hit his winking nods on “George Jones Talkin’ Cell Phone Blues” and “Uncle Disney” and a hilarious shaggy dog story wrapped around a talking blues about an early tour involving one of the Columbus’s greatest bands and my dear friends (and, clearly, Hood’s) The Lilybandits.

Hood also put in a plug for Lilybandits singer Todd May’s current gig with Lydia Loveless and spoke with love about Wes and Jyl Freed, the recently deceased Carl Dufresne and Todd Nance, and other friends – famous and not. That love littered the set like the confetti from the war we all should be lucky enough to fight and luckier to survive.

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, from the artist’s official website

Dance/Theater: Chameleon: A Biomythography by Jaamil Olawale Kosoko

Kosoko was in Columbus in late 2018, touring his hypnotic epic of intimacy, Séancers, at the Wexner Center. While in Columbus, he took advantage of a Wex residency grant to help develop his new piece Chameleon. When I interviewed Kosoko for a preview of Séancers, we talked at length about Audre Lorde, a mutual inspiration of ours.

That inspiration flowers in Chameleon, subtitled a biomythography in a nod to Lorde’s Zami and delving into his ancestors, the pain and joy of his background and the vital chimerical work of making art and surviving as a queer, black man in the toxic nature of America. The power of memory, but also the vital, tragic tonic of forgetting.

Talking about his uncle, Kosoko reflects, “Once he told me, ‘The past will always leave a footprint,’…After his funeral, no one wanted to go inside; it was much easier to pretend he never happened. Although I had been the one to feed him, to clean him, to brush his hair, I was afraid. Not so much for him as I was for myself: for how fast my concerns shifted from keeping him alive to removing every infected memory of his existence. What scared me – and still does – is how successful I was. No one speaks his name: his voice, his laughter, are all questions; a black-bodied amnesia taken back by the ethers. Was he ever really here? On this earth? In that stank room? In that stank, angelic body? Was he ever here teaching me something about love?”

But the work isn’t just its lacerating words, it’s a melting, roiling collection of indelible images cracking the world open. And alongside that, Kosoko fully engaged interactivity, the internet and the moment, taking the snatched-away opportunities for this to premiere at Princeton and Tanz with a combination of Vimeo and Discord, context and community and dialogue. A masterpiece that left me looking for my throat and heart on the floor of this second-story room.

Categories
live music theatre

Things I’ve Been Digging – August 17, 2020

Screenshots from the broadcast of Antigone in Ferguson

Theater: Antigone in Ferguson by Sophocles, translated and directed by Bryan Doerries with music by Phil Woodmore, presented by Theater of War.

Theater of War uses classical plays to essay contemporary social issues and their adaptation, by artistic director Bryan Doerries in collaboration with Phil Woodmore and a diverse choir, of one of the great tragedies of systemic power unchecked, Antigone in Ferguson had been on my radar for a while but this Zoom version was my first chance to see it as part of the moved-online 6th annual Michael Brown Memorial Weekend.

A stellar cast, led by Oscar Isaac as Creon and Tracie Thoms as Antigone, burn through this excellent take on Sophocles, modern enough without feeling like, as Anne summed it up, “You’re rapping to the kids about Shakespeare.” The production also made beautiful use of the contemporary choir, with soaring, earworm songs, in the place of the Greek choir.

Bokanté, screenshot from SFJAZZ Broadcast

Music: Bokanté, presented by SF JAZZ as part of their Fridays at Five Archival Series.

For me, getting glimpses into institutions, scenes, locales I either can’t visit or can’t visit as often as I’d like has been one of the few but big silver linings of this pandemic. High on that list is San Francisco’s SF JAZZ Center dipping into their recorded programming to present slices of their monumental work to the world at large for an extremely reasonable subscription fee.

Maybe my favorite of these end-of-the-work-week shows aired this week with the electrifying, joyous, and mysterious band Bokanté. Fronted by Guadaloupean by way of Montreal singer-songwriter Malika Tirolien with a crack band put together by Snarky Puppy’s Michael League, these hooky, dynamic songs highlighted the promise and glory of mixing elements with the song itself as your guiding light.

Roosevelt Collier’s snarling, sparkling lap steel guitar and a trio of percussionists including Jamey Haddad and Weedie Braimah were the main second voices throughout songs, weaving around and punctuating Tirolien’s French and Creole lyrics with thick grooves supplied by League and the Snarky Puppy guitarists. None of these felt like experiments or a cobbled-together mishmash. Everything hung together with beautiful tension and unity.

Screenshot from the broadcast of The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity

Theater: The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity written and directed by Kristoffer Diaz, presented by Play-Per-View.

Obviously no one can keep up with every single thing, even in art forms we feel like we specialize in but I was extra chagrined that this 2010 Pulitzer shortlisted play had missed me so completely. But going in cold, with just that knowledge and the reputation of Play-Per-View who have been a lifeline and a guiding light for high-quality theatre translated to this new virtual time, added to my unbridled delight.

Diaz’s play takes on the promise and limitations of America, art, and the grinding terror of late-stage capitalism through the lens of professional wrestling. It features crackling performances, most of whom were involved in the Chicago premiere or the New York run. 

The work orbits around an astonishing, hilarious and heartbreaking Desmin Borges (You’re the Worst) as Macedonio Guerra, a true-believer wrestling fan who can’t seem to rise above the jobber level until he finally gets the chance as part of a racist double-team where his character is turned into “Che Chavez Castro,” sombrero and all, with fellow Brooklyn native VP (Usman Ally, full of crackling, witty energy) recast as “The Fundamentalist,” and given a shot against the reigning champ of the title (Terence Archie, with a perfect blend of self-awareness and ego run amok).

Two hours passed like nothing as I was completely enraptured by this smart, intense play, that keeps getting more relevant as safety nets get ripped away and inequality gets harder and harder to look away from.

Categories
live music record reviews

Things I’ve Been Digging – August 10, 2020

Recorded Music: The Anthony Braxton Project by Thumbscrew

I’ve been thinking a lot about teachers and passing music down. There’s magic in folks removed from the source remaking material and finding their way, but there’s something special about people who have played with and studied with a composer. There’s no greater living American composer than Anthony Braxton – and precious few even in the same league – and his ensembles and classrooms gave legions of the finest genre-bending musicians to the new music scene.

My favorite of the tributes in time for his 75th birthday is this concise look at rarities from the Braxton book by Thumbscrew, a collective trio balancing sharp originals with a keen command on jazz history, featuring two members who worked directly with Braxton (Mary Halvorson on guitar and Tomas Fujiwara on drums and vibes) and Michael Formanek on bass.

Only two tracks on this project – honed in a residency at Pittsburgh art space City of Asylum – break the seven-minute mark and they cram twists, turns, and an almost overwhelming sense of delight into that space. “Composition No. 68” features thick, juicy arco playing from Formanek while Fujiwara’s high-wire vibes spark off Halvorson’s flurry of barbed guitar. “Composition No. 35” also stakes out space for the vibraphone, especially in a joyous cat-and-mouse intro.

Throughout, Thumbscrew highlights Braxton’s approachability, his sense of infectious melody, without ever dumbing down or selling out his idiosyncratic vocabulary. “Composition No. 14” threads the record as a solo showcase for each player. “Guitar” projects a wide-screen constellation of Halvorson’s signature melodic string-bending. “Drums” leans into Fujiwara’s sense of understated drama, drenched in an almost symphonic mood. “Bass” showcases Formanek’s sense of space and texture.

It’s hard to go wrong with The Anthony Braxton Project as an introduction to either Thumbscrew or Braxton’s compositions. It’s my favorite thing to write to for the couple weeks it’s been out, and it works beautifully on an intellectual and visceral level.

Adonis Rose Sextet, screenshot from livestream

Live Music: The Adonis Rose Sextet, presented by the New Orleans Jazz Museum and Jazz at Lincoln Center.

At the end of a long workday – I was logged back in at 6:30 pm when they started and went well past their hour set – this unknown-to-me band was the perfect, refreshing tonic. Loose-limbed, intense classic hard bop led by Rose’s exciting, suspenseful drumming. They covered classic repertoire (including a burning take on Horace Silver’s Jazz Messengers classic “Ecaroh”) with a singular focus and passion, mastering the balancing act this mid-century American music requires to breathe and live:  a fine-tuned interlocking machine of love for the world.

Blacks’ Myths and Wendy Eisenberg, screenshot from live stream

Live Music: Movement In Stasis, Day 2, presented by Experimental Sound Studios and Sonic Transmissions Fest.

Experimental Sound Studios, already one of Chicago’s treasures, has filled a much-needed niche in these COVID times by providing a steady streaming home for experimental music of all stripes, often teaming with other players in the scene like Ken Vandermark or Corbett V. Dempsey gallery.

This collaboration with Austin festival Sonic Transmissions Fest single-handedly justified my (scheduled earlier) mental health day from work. I caught three sets (out of four, I sadly missed Mars Williams).

Ingrid Laubrock and Tom Rainey, broadcasting from their home, showed off the continuous refinement of their unique language and telepathy. The first piece, with Laubrock on tenor, danced through growling almost-R&B, nudged by Rainey’s jostling, lively drum part then dropping out for Laubrock to lean into almost Brotzmann-esque stuttering and disruption of the gorgeous melody. The latter piece with soprano used instrument’s vocal textures to devastating effect with Laubrock’s unmistakable tone, Rainey’s drums almost acting as hypeman and instigator.

Wendy Eisenberg played an undulating solo electric guitar piece with a subtle rhythm track by the reservoir she stood next to. Glowing crystalline cells of melody stuck in my blood, then dissipated into a foam of something confounding and even more beautiful. Eisenberg built this piece on the glory of disjunction, on the surprise and delight of nature and humanity, and reminded me what keeps me hungry for new music.

Blacks’ Myths, the DC duo comprising Luke Stewart on bass and Warren G. “Trae” Crudup III on drums, streamed an intense, enticing duet from their respective homes. Painting surreal landscapes with the colors of a traditional rhythm section, their set was as surprising as it was deep. In Crudup’s hands, rolls and ride time exploded into flurries reminiscent of Sunny Murray, Stewart used string noise and mutes to create a rich negative space and long, organ-like tones of distortion to provide narrative propulsion.

Categories
live music theatre

Things I’ve Been Digging – August 3, 2020

Deva Mahal and Son Little, Mavis 80, screenshot from broadcast

Music: Mavis 80, Mavis Staples’ 80th birthday celebration taped at the Ace Theater in LA and rebroadcast as a benefit for the Newport Folk Festival Foundation.

It’s hopelessly reductive to say any single voice is America but sometimes the temptation is irresistible. Since the 1960s, Mavis Staples has earned that voice if anyone has. Bringing gospel music into the contemporary world, enlivening rock and soul, and still making outstanding record after outstanding record, still hungry for the best new songs and the best players, she’s an inspiration on every level.

I got a lot of joy this weekend out of tuning into the Newport Folk Revival weekend streamed through WFUV (also giving me pandemic life with Binky Griptite’s Saturday slot), a perfect reminder of how great this institution has been for so many years and argument to archive everything.

I heard so much great stuff but the crown jewel was this rebroadcast of the third of Staples’ 80th birthday concerts, with a cross-section of great American voices approaching one of the finest canons in 20th century music with exactly the right amount of intensity, reverence, and play, and, course, even in such a stellar lineup – highlights for me included War and Treaty and Deva Mahal and Son Little – Mavis Staples wiped them all out of our minds within three notes.

We Need Your Listening screenshot

Theater: We Need Your Listening by Velani Dibba, Ilana Khanin, Elizagrace Madrone, Stephen Charles Smith, presented by New Ohio Theatre as part of the Ice Factory Festival.

Despite the sudden proliferation of Zoom readings and similar real-time grappling with the question of how to make theater in our new time of plague and worry, this tribute to human connection and study in “radical listening” came the closest to delivering on the age-gifted new double meaning of Aretha’s late-period classic “Who’s Zoomin’ Who.”

They ushered each viewer from the digital waiting room that irritates most of us into breakout sessions – after time scanning the slightly shabby West Village space where the New Ohio recently moved (that made me extremely nostalgic). Unseen hands led us through a solo journey (represented in space by a tablet or computer) from one other computer to the next, featuring a member of the ensemble: Hilary Asare, Alex Bartner, ChiWen Chang, Sam Gonzalez, Alice Gorelick, Julia Greer, Nile Assata Harris, Annie Hoeg, Sam Im, Bri Woods.

That fantastic ensemble, for a couple minutes, interacted with me, the viewer, to a greater or lesser degree (most impressively, one woman played an abbreviated “20 Questions” with me) while muted. There are layers of discomfort in not being able to say your piece and a heavy re-figuring toward listening, absorbing what the person is staying that was difficult to adjust to (even for those of us who have exercises and think we’re better at it, this puts the lie to that – addressed to my fellow men, mostly, probably).

These snippets of conversations – some responding to the same prompt: were two different people meant to talk about the three memories they’d take to a desert island or did someone get confused on the order – are provoking in themselves, for me the character who had a family friend say, “The least we can do is show up.” at her father’s funeral, a delectation-soliloquy about favorite sounds, and a fantasia about “Doing a knife dance to Nina Simone’s ‘Take Care of Business For Me’” all hit me hard.

But these vignettes accumulate weight, like a combine, from the objects in immediate proximity. And that underlined how we all accumulate meaning and resonance from one another. The hum of other conversations that periodically came through the edges made me so lonely for other humanity I almost cried.

There’s also an interesting, rough-hewn visual poetry in the movement. The not-perfect rise and walk when we’re picked up. The blur of lights and shaky faces, the theatre lit only by that blue light that will wreck all of our sleep.

I’ve had some wonderful one-person experiences – most prominently I remember a COIL Festival show called Hotel Goethe – and I’ve seen some brilliant theater since the lockdown. But this was the closest thing I’ve seen to feeling like I’m at the theater. And I can’t thank the company enough for it.

Beginning Days of True Jubliation Promo Photo from New Ohio Theatre site

Theater: Beginning Days of True Jubilation by Mona Mansour, directed by Scott Illingworth and conceived with SOCIETY, presented by New Ohio Theatre as part of the Ice Factory Festival.

Mona Mansour further cements her status as one of our most exciting playwrights, engaging with these confusing, melting-ice-floe times, with an expansive look at start-up culture Beginning Days of True Jubilation.

With a huge cast and sharp satire, I couldn’t help but picture what this would have looked like on a stage – and I hope that chance comes sooner than later – but Mansour’s voice and the brilliant players leaned into the format of Zoom (also tied in with the tech company they give us a cross-section of) and found diamonds throughout.

Monsour and the company conjure the implacable but easy-to-forget truth that a company is made up of people, and she carves the start-up here with sympathy for the burst of creativity at the heart of this cannonball and the people who end up as its cannon-fodder.

Categories
dance live music theatre

Things I’ve Been Digging – July 27, 2020

Ethan Iverson (piano), Ben Street (bass), Nasheet Waits (drums) – screenshot from Smallslive stream

Music: Ethan Iverson trio, Small’s

Small’s continues to excel at providing a wide-open and informal showcase for some of the best jazz music being made. Monday, turning on their stream after a long, exhausting work training, Willner’s club transported me. Like all good art, they threw the world into relief and made the minor irritations recede into the distance.

In an interview upon leaving The Bad Plus, Iverson said he missed playing “pretty music,” and he proved again how deep that vein goes. His selection of beguiling compositions here rippled with hooky melodies, deceptive intricacies, and vibrant surprise. The canvas for these tunes came from a perfect rhythm section – Nasheet Waits, who’s been blowing me away since I saw him with The Bandwagon in 23, on drums, and Ben Street on bass.

Iverson, Street, and Waits took me to school on conversational, intense feeling on a Monday night when I desperately needed that injection. One highlight followed on the heels of another. “Praise Will Travel” rode steady building tension between Street’s suspenseful bass and Iverson’s questioning chords rising to a cry, an exhortation, limned by detonating drum work from Waits. “Hymn to the Old” paid tribute to Johnny Mandel with earworms buried inside baroque constructions and fluidly played. “You Will Never Be Mine” was an atmospheric ballad for the ages, like a dripping candle on a corner table at last call.

Music/Dance: 30 Feet Together, 6 Feet Apart – A Benefit For Chicago Tap Theatre

This benefit, streamed from Chicago’s Athenaem Theatre was a testament to the vitality and necessity of dance and a tribute to the creativity and indomitable spirit of the Chicago scene.

A tight, supple three piece band of guitar, bass and keys, played for and with the small groups (duets, trios, quintets) of tappers on beguiling instrumentals like “Birdland” and “Upstage Rumba” but came to three dimensional life when one of Chicago’s finest singers JC Brooks (also the show’s host) set the party off on vocals.

One of the most rhythmically ingenious singers of his generation, Brooks was the perfect choice for blending and nudging the polyrhythms of these dancers. Opening with a new original, “Six Beats Apart,” that showcased the kind of searching, restless, melancholy he owns, the rest of the set list was comprised of brilliantly chosen covers.

He and the dancers soared through a righteous take on fellow Chicagoan Lupe Fiasco’s “Superstar.” He led a raunchy church service on the Janis Joplin classic “Mercedes Benz” backed only by the rippling tap. He highlighted the bodily longing and keen hope pulled out of heartbreak on the Queen classic “Somebody to Love” as the show’s closer.

This was everything I love and miss about Chicago and about interdisciplinary collaboration, sparks flying when people get in a room together.

Music: Idiot Prayer, a Nick Cave solo performance

Nick Cave has transitioned into elder statesman status more successfully than most artists I grew up loving as a teenager. As he’s done that, he’s also reinforced the falsity of the conventional wisdom that age means we get smaller and more self-interested – Cave grows outward, he’s refashioned his mission to one of deep empathy and expansiveness.

This solo piano retrospective underlined that empathy and did it with no banter, nothing other than the songs (and some gorgeous lighting and cinematography).

From the opener “Idiot Prayer” from his ballad classic The Boatman’s Call, cast in the echo of that great palace as an ars poetica and mission statement, through the moving, robust and baroque “Galleon Ship,” Cave drew us with him on a 21 song retrospective including the beautiful new tune “Euthanasia.”

Tension and resonance bounced between old classics and very new songs. Cave nestled “Girl in Amber” from the devastating Skeleton Tree between two tunes from his Grinderman project, “Palaces of Montezuma” and “Man on the Moon” and all three acquired new textures and intensity bouncing off one another. More traditionally, the sweet desperation of Let Love In‘s “Nobody’s Baby Now” melted into Boatman’s Call‘s “Are You The One That I’ve Been Waiting For” like the honeyed light of dusk.

A showcase of the magic of song and an inspiring path to finding the light inside ourselves and in the people we love. That’s about as good as it gets.

Categories
live music theatre

Things I’ve Been Digging This Week – July 20, 2020

As this the Anne Courtney Birthday Week edition, I have to start with happy birthday to my better half, my favorite culture and travel companion, and the person who always makes me want to be better. I love you, baby.

National Theatre’s Amadeus, Lucas Msamati as Salieri, taken from the NT’s official website

Theatre: Amadeus by Peter Shaffer, directed by Michael Longhurst, presented by the National Theatre.

I haven’t kept up as much as I should on NT’s stellar dive through their archive in response to the pandemic. My failing there was thrown into sharp relief as I caught the finale of their YouTube series, a jaw-dropping, perfect revival of Amadeus filmed in 2018.

I’ve been in love with the material since I saw the movie (probably younger than I should have) and it’s hard to picture a better take on Shaffer’s tragic hero of Salieri than Lucas Msamati here. Msamati conjures the character’s iron-willed belief in a just world and a forgiving god, and the shattering, destructive crash when it’s not so.

This Salieri’s judgmental nature poisons everything he touches, ultimately rotting himself from the inside out. His raging monologue at the end of act one and his final declaration, anointing himself to that holy pantheon as “patron saint of mediocrity” are as devastating as I’ve ever seen them. Beyond the stellar acting, Longhurt’s choice to have the Sinfonia on the stage playing the music amidst the actors adds to the mythic, widescreen feeling of this intimate epic.

Amadeus airs through July 23 on National Theatre’s YouTube channel.

Johnny Thunders, taken from Bowery Electric’s website

Music: Johnny Thunders’ Birthday Bash, streamed live from Bowery Electric

As expected, I’ve been missing New York bad as spring turns into full-bore summer. Clubs coming to life with full bands broadcasting into the ether instead of just someone in their apartment (though I’m grateful for that too) are helping salve just a little of that ache.

One of my favorite things about the city is the close proximity of people and one of my favorite immediate manifestations of that energy comes in bulging, riotous tributes. No one does those better than Jesse Malin (with help from Diane Gentile and others) and this online edition of his annual Johnny Thunders tribute at Bowery Electric was some of the most fun I’ve had on a couch all pandemic.

With a tight backing band consisting mostly of Malin’s players (including Derek Cruz on guitar and Danny Ray on sax), for about two hours they reminded us why Johnny Thunders still matters – as Bob Gruen said from his home upstate, he was “kind of Chuck Berry” for that post-74 generation.

MC Steve Krebs – who also closed the night with joyous takes on “Who Are the Mystery Girls” and “Too Much Junkie Business” – kept the well-oiled night moving. Younger acolytes partied through classics like Strange Majik doing “Personality Crisis”, Diane Gentile’s “Sad Vacation” and Kelley Swindall’s “She’s So Untouchable.” The previous generation showed up with stellar, lived-in takes on the catalogue from Keith Streng of the Fleshtones’ majestic cry on “I’m a Boy I’m a Girl” to Steve Wynn and Linda Pitmon’s swampy, minimal “Downtown” to Gilby Clarke’s trio rampaging through “Born to Lose.”

The icing on the cake was Lenny Kaye – who as Patty Smith’s first accompanist has the same kind of claim to “first barrage of punk rock” as Thunders and his Dolls bandmates, perfectly essaying the glittering melancholy of “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory” before kicking into “Gloria” with the mid-song rap directed toward the memory of Johnny.

In many ways, this made me miss the shows even more but it also reinforced that spirit that we’ll all make it out of this. And we’ll remember not only the people we lost but how good it feels to be in that room together.

Caroline Davis Quintet, screenshot from Smallslive stream

Music: Caroline Davis Quintet livestreamed from Small’s

Spike Willner’s club Small’s has led the charge getting real jazz played in clubs. Small’s is always a treasure, the highest quality of classic jazz in a funky, real setting. A bar that’s always made me feel good to be alive whenever I made it there – even though usually it was those nights when I wanted just a little more music, after a ticketed show somewhere else.

They’ve perfectly preserved that vibe on this series, the warm chatter of musicians setting up before playing, the great sounding but low-fi video. I’ve been averaging three or four a week – another charge Small’s led for years was recording and archiving all their shows and this finally pushed me over the line to become a monthly subscriber – and they get better and better.

This Saturday’s Caroline Davis Quartet left me in awe, firing up those pleasure centers jazz has a direct line to. Davis is one of the finest alto players working and a stunning writer, and this band was on fire from the first moment. Her front line with trumpeter Marquis Hill had a rare empathy from sinewy ballads to burning protest songs, tossing back and forth with the exquisite rhythm section of Julian Shore on piano, Chris Tordini on bass, and Allan Mednard on drums.

This and all Small’s show are archived at http://www.smallslive.com. It’s more than worth the cost. Each show is also available free for registering when it plays live at 4:45 pm every day.

Categories
live music theatre

Things I’ve Been Digging This Week – July 13, 2020

The Few, Gideon Glick (l), Michael Laurence (r), taken from the Rattlestick website

Theatre: The Few written and directed by Samuel D. Hunter, Play-Per-View in conjunction with Rattlestick Playwrights Theater

Play-Per-View has jumped to the front of the line providing electifying readings of acclaimed Off-Broadway plays for one night. This past Saturday they reunited the original 2014 cast of Samuel Hunter’s The Few with proceeds going to its original company Rattlestick. This was on my radar but the timing didn’t work and I was overjoyed to catch up with it here.

Bryan (Michael Laurence) washes up at the offices of the newspaper for truckers he helped found with QZ (Tasha Lawrence) and left her holding the bag years ago two days after the funeral of their third founder and best friend. In the intervening years, QZ turned the paper into a legitimate news source and even (marginally) profitable.

The triangle’s completed by the paper’s newer employee Matthew (Gideon Glick), a true believer on the run from a toxic homelife and broken in ways QZ and Michael know all too well. The Few is the kind of cry into the void I’m a particular sucker for. A paean and a ritual for human connection even in the face of all the pain tied up with it.

It’s beautifully acted: Laurence’s increasingly desperate pleas that “It’s all bullshit” and the anguish at what his old friend was capable of. QZ’s simmering rage at the disrespect she faces at doing the best she could and being played over and over. And Matthew’s youthful hope that he can use this paper to mean what it meant to him as a lonely kid. The writing is finely honed and lived in, with recordings of personal ads used as punctuation.

I’m glad when anyone makes theatre in the face of the requirement to stay apart from one another and I’m glad to see productions given new life in a way that doesn’t turn into the devalued nature of the sea of streaming.

Live Music: Nief-Norf Virtual Marathon 2020

I first became acquainted with Nief-Norf through their partnership with fellow Knoxville New Music institution The Big Ears Festival. Taking a page from similarly hiatused summer festival Bang on a Can, they threw a remarkable party drawing together composers, instrumentalists, alumni, performing new and classic work.

The charming interviews didn’t just add context, they reminded the audience of the role community plays in any art scene. The most crucial thing that’s in danger of being lost if funds dry up and institutions (from university programs to the bar down the street that hosts a jam session every Tuesday) go out of business are these connections, these memories, the sense that new generations want to be involved because it’s fun and fulfilling.

And the music, the main course, was astonishing. Highlights in the three hours I was able to catch included cellist Ashley Walters’ rolling, crackling tensions in her riveting take on Nicholas Deyoe’s Another Anxiety; Andrea Lodge’s meditative, warm reading of Annea Lockwood’s Red Mesa; and Joshua Weinberg and Philip Snyder’s glittering look at Flutronix’s Brown Squares.

Categories
books live music theatre

Things I’ve Been Digging – July 7, 2020

Three months into this quarantine with no end in sight, I think I’ve found kind of a sustainable routine. At least for a while. So I’m going to try to resurrect this brief category in the blog set up for when I had a week with no paid writing. In general, trying to post on Monday or Tuesday and it’s three things I was wowed by in the last week. Also in general, looking for a book/article/art exhibit, a record, and some kind of livestreamed performance.

If you’re reading this – I’m looking for what’s keeping you going too.

Book: Uncanny Valley: A Memoir by Anna Wiener (buy at Gramercy Books).

Holds I requested from the library system before everything closed down showed up with the frisson of happy surprise over the last week or two. My favorite of this first batch is a riveting tech memoir from the New Yorker writer Anna Wiener. Wiener does an excellent job analyzing the tech startup world from the inside out. She incisively flays open the culture of catch phrases and co-opted psychology talk with a fine blade, casting a harsh light on that world’s funhouse mirror take on intersectionality.

The techniques I had a hard time with at first – avoiding proper nouns and the easy connotations of naming restaurants, films, companies – worked their magic on me, making this memoir feel less indebted to a time and place while the use of sensory details put me in the feeling of that place. Uncanny Valley left me with a lot to chew on about my own relationship to work, my coworkers, my friends, and empathy.

Lovano photo by Craig Lovell, provided on Joe Lovano’s official website; Village Vanguard photo by Wikipedia Commons

Music: Joe Lovano’s Trio Fascination livestreamed from the Village Vanguard

It’ll never replace being in a room but the creative responses to the current situation, the ways music steadfastly refuses to say “No, you can’t do that” while mitigating risk as much as possible, warms my heart.

In particular, jazz venues have been strategizing and come out of the gate with some of the most potent offerings. Spike Willner’s Small’s is leading the charge – I’ve been watching at least three of their nightly offerings a week, look for a highlight here soon – but other venerable institutions like SFJAZZ, The Jazz Gallery, and the Vanguard are also coming out strong.

Every one of the three Vanguard broadcasts I’ve seen features remarkably good camera work and makes me misty about the fantastic sets I’ve seen there. This past weekend was my favorite, by a group of legends: Joe Lovano’s Trio Fascination with Ben Street on bass and Andrew Cyrille on drums.

Growing up when I did, Joe Lovano was my favorite all-around living saxophone player. His Blue Note records in the late ’90s and early ’00s were gateway drugs to high school and college me, firmly in the tradition and perfectly in his voice, turning me onto great players like Paul Motian, George Mraz, John Scofield. I’ve never heard a bad Lovano record and he’s always blown me away live.

I discovered drummer Andrew Cyrille around the same time when my first Cecil Taylor purchase was his ’60s Blue Note big band firestorm Unit Structures. As I pieced together – I’m still working on it – that beguiling music unlike anything I’d heard before, the drumming hit me first and kept me grounded. I couldn’t begin to count the number of records I bought specifically because Cyrille was listed as drummer, or killer players I checked out on my periodic trips to New York knowing nothing other than he was in the group. If someone asked me what I want jazz drumming to be – the wild surprise, the propulsion, the use of color – I have a list but it always starts or ends or both with Andrew Cyrille.

Ben Street’s work I didn’t know quite as well but he’s always impressive and he’s the perfect melodic, grounding foil for this set of fascinating excursions, bone-deep ballads, and cooking, sultry scorchers.

This glorious set made the wound of this empty club throb with life, the pain of not being there made more acute and salved at the same time. This was a perfect jazz set, a conversation writ large.

Next up in this excellent series: pianist Eric Reed leads a quartet with Stacy Dillard on saxophone, Dezron Douglas on bass, and McClenty Hunter on drums this weekend. Tickets are available at https://villagevanguard.com/

John & Jen, from left: Hunter Minor, Dionysia Williams. Photo by Edward Carignan

Theatre: John & Jen, Short North Stage

Alongside jazz, I miss theatre most of all. I’m incredibly grateful for the companies that have been able to work with licensing groups to release archival copies (favorites include Lydia Diamond’s Toni Stone from ACT and Jocelyn Bioh’s School Girls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play at The Goodman) and I’m heartened by companies who aren’t taking “we can’t do this” for an answer, led locally by Krista Lively Stauffer and Tim Browning’s Virtual Theater project (which let me catch Douglas Whaley’s transfixing Turkey Men which was my biggest regret in missing last year).

Short North Stage raised the bar on production values (which I described in my preview for Columbus Underground) with their Edward Carignan-directed adaptation of the Andrew Lippa and Tom Greenwald Off-Broadway classic John & Jen.

First and foremost, the production sounds great, with Lori Kay Harvey’s musical direction and piano rich and full but never overpowering and the dynamite voices of Dionysia Williams and Hunter Minor are a joy. The actors get the playful nature of the characters’ relationship and smoothly shift gears between joy and heartbreak in exactly the tone the play demands.

Carignan’s direction and videography make excellent use of the production’s homespun qualities, creating a show bursting with charm. John & Jen‘s gorgeous, sticky melodies shine here, any fans of Lippa’s later work or Short North Stage’s smaller chamber shows will do well to catch this during its week of streaming.

John & Jen streams on vimeo through July 12. Tickets are available at https://www.shortnorthstage.org/johnjen