Another excellent month for records and I remain glad I’m doing this. I hope a couple of you enjoy the playlists and find one or two things you didn’t know existed. Next monthly hodgepodge is tentatively slated for January but I’m going to work up a playlist to go along with my favorite records of the month blog post sometime in December. Be well.
Continue reading for notes on the songs.
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.
Screen of Distance 