Brooklyn Bowl – Screen of Distance

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:

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.