Man, this was a great month for recordings. There’s also far more stuff that is a contender for my year end list that didn’t make this – my rule for instrumentals is they have to work with the larger song-based contexts, I’ll almost never drop a fifteen minute movement of an extended minimalist suite in here; it never feels like it works.
Like most autumns, I find myself drawn toward the reflective and the melancholy even a little more than usual. I tried to keep this from being monochromatic but time and you will tell. Thanks for listening. Continue reading for notes on each song.
Fall is benefitting from more seasoning to groups trying to make work in this difficult time and time to adjust to the new tools and circumstances. Almost like a real October, I was excited by more than I had time to fit in even if more of it was on my own couch. This week does not look to let up. What are you all enjoying?
From left, Bobby Floyd and Byron Stripling. Screenshots taken from stream and edited
Music:One Night Only, an annual fundraiser for the Jazz Arts Group
I don’t go to the Columbus Jazz Orchestra as often as I probably should, but every year brings a reminder of what a stellar organization we’re lucky to have. As the current director – great trumpeter, damn fine bandleader, and one of the best cheerleaders for jazz or any music any city is lucky to have – Byron Stripling said in his introduction, Ray Eubanks created a fantastic nonprofit that’s benefiting this city with its relationships with touring artists, composers, and soloists and especially its world-renowned education program.
Usually this great event either falls on a Pink Elephant Friday or when we’re out of town so taking part delighted me – and the execution warmed my heart. It’s hard to beat a house band like the Bobby Floyd Trio. They provided muscular and delicate support to Stripling on swaggering classics like “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To” and “When The Saints Go Marching In.”
Fruits from the educational arm of JAG provided highlights throughout the program. Floyd played jubilant, three-dimensional organ behind young phenom Micah Thomas (who I saw bring the house down in a CJO performance with John Clayton and Joshua Redman and has a debut album collecting raves this year) on “Maple Leaf Rag.”
A tight quintet of Columbus Youth Jazz Orchestra alums who are setting local stages on fire these days, including George DeLancey and Reggie Jackson, tore through Hank Marr’s epic late-night anthem “Greasy Spoon.” Another nod to Columbus history came with vocalist-on-the-rise Sydney McSweeney blowing the roof off on the Frank Loesser standard “Never Will I Marry,” whose definitive version came from legendary Columbus diva Nancy Wilson.
This was a stunning reminder of the beautiful jazz scene nurtured in this town, where it stands right now, and will be whenever we come out of this and can all be together.
From left: Laura Benanti, Antonio Banderas and Orchestra, IMAKEMADBEATS. Screenshots taken from stream and edited
Music: Tuesday Communing: Musicians for Marquita presented by Third Man Records and Moving Forward by the Public Theater.
My favorite season still drenches me in a little taste of the Fall FOMO. With that, I flipped back and forth between two streams that epitomize what music and theater can do at their best, a sense of community, connection, and transcendence.
Third Man Records in Nashville threw an old-school telethon, replete with cheesy counting board, phone bank, and an enthusiastic host in Cocaine and Rhinestones host Tyler Mahan Coe, to benefit Senate candidate Marquita Bradshaw.
Between raising over $15,000, they packed these three hours with a dazzling cross-section of current Tennessee music, poetry, and comedy. Standards and classics made an appearance, including Kathy Mattea’s nuanced take on Tom Paxton’s “Whose Garden Was This,” Steelism’s gorgeous pedal steel-driven instrumental cover of “People Get Ready,” Logan Ledger’s stirring read of “Walk Through This World With Me,” and Lolo’s epic “Ooh Child.”
Hip-hop, probably the most prominent genre people my age and younger associate with Tennessee, showed up strong, including the fun, disco-tinged instrumentals of Memphis’ IMAKEMADBEATS, an excellent tune from Daisha McBride, and others. I regret not catching the name of the first act – drop it in the comments if you were more on the ball? – another instrumental hip-hop act started the evening off with one of its highlights: a cut-up of Bradshaw’s speeches interwoven with toffee-sweet-and-crunchy synth lines and stutter beats.
One highlight of this was the proximity of the artists, and the leveling the telethon interspersed superstars like Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell, Robyn Hitchcock and Emma Swift, or Margo Price with lifers like John Paul Keith – who brought the house down with his topical “I Don’t Want to Live in a World Like That” – freak-folk stalwarts The Cherry Blossoms and the duo of John McCauley and Vanessa Carlton.
These artists rubbed (virtual) shoulders with on-the-rise acts like the singer of Thema and the Sleaze, Caitlin Rose (who I’ve been a massive fan of since The Stand-In and her new song “We’re Only Lovers and They’re Only Lies” made me even hungrier for a new album), Caroline Spence, and Birds of Chicago.
Everything about Musicians for Marquita was so charming and so well done that I felt a pang when I flipped to the other good choice that evening, but I got rewarded when I did.
It’s a rare year when The Public doesn’t make my year-end list – this year’s going to be no exception with some stellar stuff from Under The Radar in January. Their more polished benefit was full of sincere gushing – from stars like David Hyde Pierce, John Leguizamo, and Phylicia Rashad – we all feel in our hearts.
The Public also made time to acknowledge what we’ve lost in time and gathering, with a lovely song from The Visitor (which was in rehearsals when the order came down) and a preview of Under the Greenwood Tree, which would have revived its 2017 production for all of New York at the free Shakespeare in the Park series.
The music was less the focus here, but everything was brilliantly done, including Antonio Banderas and Laura Benanti’s duet for the ages on A Chorus Line; Sting with “Practical Arrangement,” a witty ballad from his own Public-aided musical The Last Ship; and a heart-wrenching closer I missed the performer’s name on, from a musical adaptation of Disney’s Hercules, with the echoing line “Though it hurts to be human, count me in.”
From Left, Colin Gawel with Sam Brown; Marcy Mays with Andy Harrison and Sam Brown
Music: Marcy Mays and Colin Gawel at Ace of Cups.
Pulling along that thread of “count me in,” went to see my first live music (aside from a few songs for Anne’s birthday the Stockweliots’ back yard) since the shutdown, on the patio of the last bar I was in before everything closed (and the home of the most shows I’d seen before lockdown), Ace of Cups.
It was slow going before local hero Kyle Sowash stepped up to book some shows on Ace’s patio and this went a long way to provide a template for safely throwing shows for intimate crowds in these times (I’ve also heard very good things about Natalie’s efforts in this direction). We caught two great friends who also did a lot to represent Columbus music to the outside world in the mid-’90s.
Marcy Mays, Ace owner and one of my favorite Columbus songwriters, opened with a set of raw magic on her electric guitar, backed for about half of it by veterans Andy Harrison on guitar and bass (doubling on sound) and Sam Brown on drums. Mays hit Scrawl classics like “Please Have Everything” (which she announced was inspired by the late D. Boon) and “Your Mother Wants to Know” along with tunes by her more recent bands like The Damn Thing and a blistering song by her underrated hard rock juggernaut Night Family (featuring what Harrison called “a dose of cock rock ridiculousness” on a perfect over-the-top solo).
Gawel picked up Mays’ smoking gauntlet, and gave us one of his best, most focused solo sets in recent memory. Opening with new material could be a risky move with as beloved a catalogue as his, but his opening gambit, “Sensational Things,” was as good a song as he’s written, finding a sweet spot in the kind of paean to finding peace and stability that’s even harder to write than it is to live. Most of the other new songs were also winners, especially “Standing On the Rocks” with a big, infectious hook I still have in my head writing this the next day.
Gawel filled the rest of the set with Watershed crowd-pleasers including his tangy Kinks riff “Small Doses”, “Mercurochrome”, and aching ballad “Over Too Soon” and highlights of his Lonely Bones/Bowlers’ work with “Superior”’s undeniable hook and the cajun shuffle “Chemotherapy.”
He also sprinkled some brilliant covers through the set. “Over Too Soon” turned into a humid version of one of the best Replacements’ songs, “Swinging Party.” An appropriately caustic version of The Kinks’ “Property” prompted “God, I have to do something sweet after that.” And his encore started with a righteous version of Columbus rock godfather Willie Phoenix’s “Hey Little Girl,” returning Sam Brown to the drums.
Jack Oblivian and The Sheiks, taken from livestream and edited
It’s no secret that I’ve had massive festival fatigue the last few years. I don’t think culture’s primary or best purpose is as a destination vacation. The music – film, theater, books – we love should be part of our day-to-day lives, the food we eat, the air we breathe, and especially the conversations we have.
But as with anything, there are exceptions. At its best, a festival adds to that community; it enriches those lives. A good festival draws tribes together, it celebrates the good work they’ve done, it makes connections, and it plants seeds to grow back in our own communities.
I’ve been lucky to know several of these festivals but my favorite is Gonerfest, deep in Memphis and run by the estimable record store and label Goner Records. With an eye to keeping us all safe in this pandemic, like so many festivals have, they pivoted to digital.
In doing so, my favorite music festival cut a template for any other festival. Gonerfest did the best job I’ve seen in these 6 months of lockdown: they captured everything I wanted from the festival except being in Memphis. And they almost got that!
Dick Move, taken from livestream and edited
One of my favorite things about this switch to online is it amplified the one thing all of us being in the room doesn’t give us: a look at how we’re living. The creative use of everyone’s home turf made my heart swell in my chest: Toads’ punky exuberance on their home turf at Oakland’s 1-2-3-4-Go record store; Nick Allison’s set in fellow Austin band Golden Boys’ art gallery; Columbus heroes Cheater Slicks in a college auditorium beautifully filmed by Guinea Worms’ Wil Foster; Oh Boland in the grass of Galway.
And my favorite, New Zealand taking advantage of their well-managed take on the crisis by throwing a real show: five bands in an actual club (Whammy Bar that’s on my list if I ever make it close to that part of the world again). Two previous Goner favorites delivered and cemented my love for them: Bloodbags’ muscular, thoughtful rock, and the intoxicating dual-vocal swirl and slicing acid trail guitar of Na Noise. The other three bands brought it, Ounce’s twin drummer Sabbath-fried choogle and Dick Move’s swinging rhythm and witty, clipped songs made them among my favorite new bands, as Guardian Singles’ searing pop vibrated the molecules all the way here.
Michael Beach, taken from livestream and edited
It’s not Gonerfest if I don’t discover at least a handful of new favorite bands. Beyond the Kiwis mentioned above, I fell hard for the crispy-edged Stonesy Americans of Michael Beach and Nick Allison & The Players Lounge and the skewed anthems of The Exbats, a trio with a dazzling lead singer behind the drums.
The regulars also came out swinging hard. Jack Oblivian and The Sheiks kicked things off with a rugged, sultry set from the beautiful twilight panorama of Midtown from the rooftop of Crosstown Arts. Zerodent bit off twitching, aggressive postpunk. True Sons of Thunder set a surging baseline and got me excited for their new full-length on Total Punk. Aquarian Blood continued to grow into their beautifully textured take on moody British folk.
Toads, taken from livestream and edited
Goner has always done a great job with side activities and they excelled here with a chat room, Zoom “bars” and a killer slate of films and talks. My favorite was the footage of the documentary on Memphis-centered civil rights group The Invaders with one of central participants and the soundtrack composer King Khan (who played the first Gonerfest, MC’ed Saturday’s day show, and introduced excellent sets by his daughters, Saba Lou and Bella and the Bizarre) but I was also entranced by This Film Should Not Exist, about a shambling Country Teasers/Oblivians tour, and Tyler Keith’s (Apostles, Neckbones, Preacher’s Kids) deep dive into Hill Country gospel and blues with jaw-dropping footage of Shardé Thomas, RL Burnside, and Rev. John Wilkins.
The thing I hope most for – on that secondary list after staying healthy, employed, warm – in this moment is that collectively we’re able to meet in person and feel the heat of music together next year. But I’m also warmed by this feeling of being less alone and getting to do something with my friends. Even from our own houses.
A grey sky and a choppy sea, like I’ve been feeling
It feels like not a week goes by that doesn’t give most of us a reason to go, “It’s a dark week. Things look bleak.” Losing Justice Ginsburg was one of the hardest of those hits in this fucked-up time. A beacon of how to live, passionate about your work but also the greater world and your friends and your greater community and a way to harmonize all of those things I constantly strive for and frequently fail at. One of the best of us and another reminder to keep trying. Keep working.
As always, one of the biggest things that pulls me back from those whirlpools of despair is art. The other is friends. I hope you’re also finding something that gives you light in this darkness and my sharing this is always tied to the hope you’ll share those things with me and your own community.
From left: Wayne Shorter, John Patitucci, Teri Lyne Carrington, taken from livestream and edited
Music: Wayne Shorter Quartet at SFJAZZ.
I’ve waxed rhapsodic here a few times about SFJAZZ’s essential work and their breathtaking pivot to digital with their site closed due to the pandemic. Their monthly Wayne Shorter tributes have been a key part of this – the first four monthly, featuring a different frontline each time backed by Shorter’s rhythm section of Danilo Perez on piano, John Patitucci on bass, and Brian Blade on drums were all special.
This week, they ended with maybe even more of a bang: a 2017 performance of Shorter with his quartet featuring Teri Lyne Carrington on drums instead of Blade. Shorter’s universes beguiled me almost since I knew what music was, his intricate compositions that feel like nothing I’ve ever heard at the same time they feel as familiar as the blood in my veins, his ability to write for specific band contexts that still work generations removed.
This presented an example of one of the great working ensembles with that uncanny communicative empathy that jazz is based on, that conversation so many of us use as a metaphor for collective improvisation, everyone building up a situation by listening to one another and finding a new angle on whatever’s happening.
As Herbie Hancock said in the YouTube chat (if I haven’t mentioned it before, one of the excellent things SFJAZZ does is engage artists and listeners in the chat while the video plays) during their hypnotic dive into Arthur Penn’s early 20th century standard “Smilin’ Through,” there’s a great, shifting parallel quality with Patitucci and Carrington dialoguing on a related but separate plane to Shorter and Perez. A rich, swirling take on the Fairport Convention-popularized folk standard “She Moves Through the Fair” detonated landmines of surprise and delight. The entire set beguiled and charmed and sometimes baffled me in the best way.
Kate Hutchinson, Lonnie Holley, Immeasurable Explosions – taken from Livestream and edited.
Music: Immeasurable Explosions (Knoel Scott and Marshall Allen), Chiminyo, Lonnie Holley, and Kate Hutchinson, from the Boiler Room with Night Dreamer and Worldwide FM.
The Boiler Room – known for hard-hitting, cutting edge DJ nights – has become a vital livestream player in the last few months and is always something I’m glad to see pop up on my YouTube subscription reminder. This week’s was a truly delightful surprise. On a sunny afternoon with the first chill of the season in the air – anyone who knows me knows how much I love Fall – they put together the perfect lineup for straddling these seasons.
Kate Hutchinson kicked off the night with a perfect DJ set hitting on light reggae, tropical house, throwback disco, horn-drenched drama, electro hip-hop… summer beats with just enough of a chill. Just enough dashes of melancholy, enough grit in the oyster (or cynar in the fizzy champagne) for a tribute to the sunshine and the long shadows. Hutchinson also contributed excellent, insightful introductions to the broad spectrum of artists.
Lonnie Holley gets a lot of praise for the spiritual, incantory quality of his work, and the use of the materials of his life in a way that merits comparisons to his work as a sculptor; all of that remains true and was clear here. But there’s also an autumnal quality, a sense of honoring people around him and the people who’ve gone before, the changing of seasons in a lot of senses, that felt rich in this short set. Anytime I see him, even over a screen, I feel like I’m bullshitting and need to try harder.
Chiminyo previewed a marvelous record out later this week – I Am Panda – with a combination of tracks and live percussion: light dub, classic spiritual jazz, and early 80s synth textures flow together into roiling, stormy anthems. Sun Ra Arkestra alums and longtime friends and collaborators Knoel Scott and Marshall Allen teamed up for a mix of poetry and multi-instrumental duets that recalled nature and cracked the thought of nature open to the “Other worlds they have not told you of” in their old bandleader’s parlance.
Aoife O’Donovan, taken from livestream and edited
Music: Aoife O’Donovan at the Church of the Sacred Heart in Barrytown, New York, presented by Dreamstage
Anyone who’s ever read any of my writing – best of lists, etc – knows what a massive fan I am of Aoife O’Donovan. This stream, on a new-to-me platform called Dreamstage, took excellent advantage of a gorgeous-sounding church in the Hudson River Valley that let her voice and guitar (and piano on a couple numbers) breathe.
O’Donovan might be our finest current songwriter of the key decision, that moment when a character is on a precipice that will change their life. She has a fine eye and ear for those details when everything about to change, how it feels in the moment and how it feels when recollected. Prime examples of that here were the opening one-two punch of “Hornets” with its cautious reassurance “I’ll be there to have and to hold you” on the chorus but also the verse, “Turning back’s the only way to go;” and “Porch Light,” maybe my favorite of her songs, with the weary, imploring taunt “You want to live a life of loneliness? Baby, so do I. I want to sit under the porch light and watch the yellow moon rise.” Just a devastating as the first time I heard both those songs, maybe more, as her voice has found new contours and places to shine the light in a few years of touring them.
She also hit songs from previous bands of hers: a lovely, rippling, Sometymes Why tune, “Clover,” and two standards she did with her first widely known band, Crooked Still, “Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down” and “Lakes of Ponchartrain,” in new arrangements. That knack for rearrangements also shone in her settings of Peter Sears poems, “Night Fishing” (dedicated to the late Justice Ginsburg) and “The Darkness.”
The centerpiece of this dazzling hour of music was two of the lustiest songs in her catalog. “Ryland,” which she performed in the supergroup I’m With Her, with its silky chorus “Just let me lie, under the apple tree, I planted for my love and me.” She segued that – with a laughing, “Of course I pair the song about apple cider with the song about bourbon,” – into the aching, affectionate standout from Fossils, “Oh Mama,” with its infectious sing-along chorus: “Oh Mama, sing me a love song, pour me some bourbon, and lay me down low.”
George Cables Trio, taken from livestream and edited
Music: George Cables Trio at Village Vanguard
In the wake of Gary Peacock – one of the great bassists, especially in a piano trio format – an exemplar of classic post-bop piano jazz George Cables played a Vanguard set with nothing to prove and everything at his disposal, backed by as good a rhythm section for this kind of heart-filling music as you could hope for, Essiet Okon Essiet on bass (who I last saw live with the late, great Harold Mabern, one of Cables’ few peers in this lane) and the almighty Billy Hart on drums.
Cables took us on a mesmerizing journey through the history of modern jazz piano with a rapturous version of McCoy Tyner’s “You Taught My Heart to Sing” with tumbling darkness threading the chords, a righteous dive into Wayne Shorter’s “Speak No Evil,” and a version of Sonny Rollins’ “Doxy” that made me forget every other version for a little while.
He also restated his unshakable command and glittering crown on standards, with jaw-dropping versions of “All The Things You Are” and “Body and Soul.” Just as good as those unassailable classics were originals of his like “Traveling Lady” with fiery propulsion underneath its deceptively light touch and the touching elegy “Farewell Mulgrew,”
Jason Moran, screenshot taken from Livestream
Music: Jason Moran Cecil Taylor Tribute at Harlem Stage
For fans my age, Jason Moran did more to turn us on to a spiky, rich legacy of jazz piano that felt in danger of being sidelined or marginalized in the early ‘00s: Geri Allen, Jaki Byard, and especially Cecil Taylor. He’s still one of my favorite players, as evidenced by him appearing on several of my favorite sets at the last Big Ears I made it to.
Almost as valuable as live streams in this isolated age are institutions digging into their archives and this Harlem Stage tribute to Taylor they brought back the Moran set from is an event I distinctly remember wanting to go to and the logistics and timing of travel just wouldn’t work. It’s not as good as being in a concert hall but sitting here watching the sunset out of my office window, I feel the magic in this brand of witnessing and giving thanks.
Maybe the greatest night of jazz I ever had in my life was watching Taylor lead a large ensemble on my birthday at the Iridium. Moran conjures that impossible-to-replicate quality while sounding like himself. He makes the piano sing with nods to Taylor, the way those spikes are flecked with a romanticism that’s born of being in touch with a greater mystery. The cracks in the very sky. It’s a breathtaking 15 minutes that made me end a long day (an exhausting 11 hour workday, an excellent meal) feeling like I was flying.
Red Baraat, taken from livestream and edited
Music: A Friday Night Despair Reprieve (or Turning Despair Into Gold): Red Baraat, archived from SFJAZZ Fridays at Five; Lucero Livestreamed from Minglewood Hall with Jade Jackson and Laura Jane Grace streaming from venues near their homes.
Even for those of us who (in the before times) try not to live our lives desperate for Friday or a vacation or some great disruption, who know it’s important to include joy throughout the week, Friday night feels sacred and that specialness has eroded some with most of us having another night we only see the members of our household after getting off a zoom call with the same people from work.
Had a little frisson of that specialness this Friday, logging off of work and tuning into bands who mine their past and even when they look at uncomfortable truths, they never, ever despair. Started with the weekly Wussy broadcast – one of these days I’ll do a deep-dive on these regularly scheduled streams that make my heart sing and whose joys aren’t as easily summed up looking at any one episode, but this was a particularly good installment.
I bounced after an hour of Wussy to the essential SFJAZZ Fridays at Five series that’s shown up here before. This time was the great Red Baraat, which stirred a lot of personal feelings for me – they played one of my best friends’ wedding years ago, and I was texting that friend earlier in the day, worried about the fires in Portland.
Led by Sunny Jain – also on the personal tip, I was glad I made it out to see his electric Wild Wild East band in NYC for APAP in January – Red Baraat plays ecstatic, spiritual party music that’s rich in community. Melding long rock guitar lines with traditional bhangra, Latin claves, and go-go, they’ve found a way to honor the differences in these various dance musics and cultures without ever feeling appropriative or like they’re using something as garnish. In a rippling set, they hit all their major hits from “Tunak Tunak Tun” to “Gaadi of Truth” to “Shruggy Ji” including a dance competition in the middle of the latter. If you get a chance – in whatever form the aftertimes looks like – to see Red Baraat, don’t miss it. It will make your heart full.
Another band that digs into their own history and kept their eyes open, but even when they confront disappointments and disillusionment their songs always leave room for hope and possibility. Lucero’s the rare band that got more interesting to me as they added elements, keys and horns, as they took on the burdens and benefits of their Memphis lineage, giving Ben Nichols’ voice (the raw tonal quality of his physical instrument and also his history-drenched songwriting).
Lucero, taken from Livestream and edited
Part of what makes Lucero interesting is their perpetually open ears, and this show drove that home with the openers. Northern California’s Jade Jackson’s set took the sharply observed and lived-in songs off her two records and sent them into the world with such authority I’d be shocked if kids in bands aren’t already playing them in their garages, especially “Motorcycle” and “Bottle It Up.”
Against Me!’s Laura Jane Grace gave us the stunning intensity she’s known for on classics like “True Trans Soul Rebel” and brand new songs that already sound like classics, including “The Mountain Song” which was a lilting lullaby for a life going wrong with tenderness for the choices taken and the choices never offered, and the chunky, dancing “Apocalypse Now and Later.”
This stream, playing a fan-chosen set list, prompted witty banter “Apparently, our fans don’t think most of our fans know what they’re talking about” as they went through a cross-section of exactly what makes them beloved in a perpetually replenishing ocean of bands born out of the raw material of The Replacements and Social Distortion.
Surprises for me included a lovely cover of Jawbreaker’s “Kiss The Bottle” and two of the songs that always feel like Memphis to this regularly visiting outsider. “Smoke” roared through its keening, empty-streets melody as Nichols exhaled that for-the-ages dialogue in the chorus: ‘He said, ‘Lesser men than me have put up better fights.’ She said, ‘We’re doing pretty good if we can just get out alive.’” “Downtown” featured Brian Venable’s guitar playing that sticky horn riff, giving the lyric’s pleading at the start of the night a foreshadowing of a party going out of control.
This was a night – including a stop at Goner Records’ Goner TV with a reading by the great Ross Johnson from his new memoir – that reminded me there’s good if you’re looking, it’s not all always dire.
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.
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.
“It’s hard to fight torpor.” That line popped up in Paul Schrader’s much-anticipated return to non-franchise filmmaking First Reformed and, to mangle Bob Dylan, both “rang true and glowed like burning coals” while I watched the film with my pal Rob. The movie wasn’t an official “thing I dug,” more “thing I’m glad I saw for the interesting nougat when it got out of its own way.”
But what spoke to me was the questions it posed about the point at which we’re no longer worth forgiveness; the way shitty means of coping build up and rust over for us like dumping Pepto Bismol in a glass of scotch (one of my favorite gross-out images from the film); and how difficult it is to break out of a rut before we’re ground just that smooth.
Lighter load this week because much of it was catching up with old friends, in town for the Origins Game Fair and elsewhere. The bookend photos come from these long nights of laughter.
Brett Burleson/Josh Hindmarsh/Doug Richeson (Dick’s Den, June 13, 2018)
The tradition of turning a Wednesday over to one artist for a residency at Dick’s Den is one of my favorite things in this town. In a no-pressure setting, someone can worry over new material, reform old collaborative groups, work with people they don’t usually, bring friends up on stage, or do all of these. That tradition is a prism refracting the light of everything I love about Columbus and especially everything I love about the nexus that is Dick’s Den when you get an artist with the kind of ranging tastes in material, style, and players as Brett Burleson.
From left: Burleson, Hindmarsh, Richeson
Brett Burleson and Josh Hindmarsh have a tradition of playing gypsy jazz songs – and other tunes in that style best known for Django Reinhardt. Wednesday, they rounded the trio out with Grammy-winning bassist Doug Richeson. Jazzcolumbus impresario and great friend Andrew Patton and I stopped in expecting one round and half an hour of pleasant entertainment. I staggered home at 1:30am after two full sets. Picking my jaw off the floor.
Richeson’s expansive warmth provided the perfect backdrop for those two guitars and the handful of guests. It was immediately easy to see why vocalists kept the bassist in demand, including Tony Bennett. In that same spirit, the word that kept springing to mind for everyone on stage was conversational.
Burleson almost reminded me of Keith Richards here, his unshakable rhythm shifted from a straight up-and-down in line with the period they recalled through something more organic and modern, teasing textures from Hindmarsh’s leads and occasionally unfurling solos that were shocking in their grace and concision.
From left: Burleson, Hindmarsh, Kahn, Richeson
In the full, proper Dick’s spirit, unannounced guests enlivened the proceedings. Michael Kahn, on his way from another gig, brought his soulful soprano. He painted with glowing color, in step with the other three musicians but drawing them out into the less-chartered water. Local DJ, promoter, and singer-songwriter (as Whipped Dream) Laelia Delaney Davis sat in on vocals for the Gershwins’ “S’wonderful” that balanced lushness and restraint like a cool breeze on a sticky evening.
The trio-plus ran a gamut of classics in the style. Their take on Reinhardt’s own “Minor Swing” that felt like a beautifully restored piece of clockwork. Their “Take the A Train” vibrated the room with a propulsive bounce. Their Monk was a sensual, spiraling puzzle. The originals held their own against these time-forged tunes because nothing was played with a preciousness; again and again, we were reminded this was neither museum nor mausoleum.
Coming Up: Dave Alvin and Jimmie Dale Gilmore (Valleydale Ballroom, June 22, 2018; tickets here)
Courtesy of davealvin.net
When two riders of the river of American music, Dave Alvin and Jimmie Dale Gilmore, teamed up a couple years ago it was one of the most no-brainer collaborations most of us could possibly imagine. These two share an encyclopedic knowledge of everything roots music, marrow-deep empathy for people, and a love of sharing stories.
Their first collaborative record features a couple excellent new originals – including the title track, like a couple of winking outlaws filling out a declarations form at the border – and more of the stunning interpretations they’ve both become more known for over the last few years, giving classics an intensely personal spin. Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee – Plane Wreck at Los Gatos,” features one of the most aching melodies of the 20th century played for maximum impact. Lloyd Price’s R&B classic “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” and the Memphis Jug Band’s “KC Moan” get lusty juke-joint treatments that take Gilmore’s high lonesome voice into new terrain with some of Alvin’s best guitar on record.
Both of these artists have a storied, special relationship with Alec Wightman’s Zeppelin productions. Alvin’s appearances at the Valleydale, especially, are always something special. If you’re in town, don’t miss this.
I’m far from the first person to say it but Big Ears Festival is special. After a year off – but je ne regretteSick Weekend – I returned to this booming, bustling college town to reconnect with deeper listening and jump off the merry-go-round for a minute.
Started slow on Thursday but I needed that easing in. Wandered the downtown, filling my lungs and feeling the vibrations of this place. A couple great meals – Chivo Taqueria and Myrtle’s Chicken and Beer – and reacquainting myself with Old City Java.
Stopped at Public House for an apertif to the sensory feast: Postmodern Spirits release party for their (damn good) first single malt Tennessee Whiskey at a party at Public House. I overheard one of my favorite refrains: a stylish regular who works at another bar (I gathered) said about Big Ears: “I dig the crowd, I get it. It brings people from everywhere. I just want them to know culture happens here too.” I’ve said it; I’ve heard it at Gonerfest and Anime Weekend Atlanta. It’s people like her who make that happen: loving your town so much it’s infectious.
Went straight from there to my first set of the festival: ICE (the International Contemporary Ensemble) playing Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s majestic, luminous “In The Light of The Air.”
In the round, most of the audience seated on the floor, the ensemble lit Thorvaldsdottir’s piece from within, shaping and shifting. Motifs rise and repeat, changing their DNA while remaining recognizable. Percussion plays an omnipresent, mercurial role here: clattering and clicking like ash in the air around the bubbling lava of piano; slashing transition color from a bowed marimba; growling propulsion not only moving the piece forward but in every direction.
Glacial accumulation of detail and material dances with the light installation, effectively underlining as when the bulbs surge bright with deep bass throbs. As delicate and dramatic as life. The music is so engaged with the world it absorbed and played with the setting sun, the howl of passing trains, and omnipresent redevelopment.
The pedal steel guitar is one of the most evocative, purely American sounds I’ve run across. No one fuses that unmistakable sound to as pure and personal a language as Susan Alcorn. Alcorn’s vocabulary isn’t the result of eschewing history – she knows her Speedy West, her Leon McAuliffe, her Don Helms, and her Aubrey Ghent. That sound comes from a burning desire to see what else she can say with that vocabulary and unerring taste across the spectrum of music.
The first time I came across Susan Alcorn was her 2006 album And I Await The Resurrection of the Pedal Steel Guitar. In the sleek dance club environs of The Standard, Alcorn dazzled a rapt crowd with that title track and a story about its genesis: trying to arrange Messiaen’s Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum (a World War Ii elegy for wind orchestra) for steel. In those limitations, she found something that vibrates with history but is no one else’s.
Throughout her rapturous set, Alcorn made that guitar snarl and cry, turned it into a barrelhouse piano, a seductive dancer, nature painting, and a chorus of bells. She nodded to Giacinto Scelsi and tango. A profoundly American artist with the simultaneous thirst for the new and love of everything that got us here, Susan Alcorn exemplified Big Ears.
The icing on this delicious Thursday was two guitarists I’ve loved for as long as I’ve loved music. The minute you hear Marc Ribot’s Chuck-Berry-wrapped-in-barbed-wire guitar you never forget it. You hear it everywhere. David Hidalgo’s guitar, accordion, deceptively easy mastery of what seems like every other instrument, plus his spicy honey voice, make every record he guests on that much better – before we even get into his work as the cornerstone of one of the premier American rock bands, Los Lobos, co-writing most of their best songs. So as word trickled out these two titans were playing together it shot to the top of my list to check out. Thursday night at the Tennessee Theater was my chance.
The two men in chairs turned that cavernous stage and massive theater into a living room or a back porch. With the easy charm of old friends who don’t have a goddam thing to prove except to themselves, they lit up the history of American music. Lefty Frizzell’s “I Never Go Around Mirrors” was gifted a gorgeous high-lonesome voice and finger picking from Hidalgo punctuated with hot knives from Ribot. “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie” got a dry vocal wringing all the hurt out of irony from Ribot as the two painted an expansive, devastated landscape with their guitars, deconstructing and rebuilding. Wilson Pickett and Paquita Del La Barrio and Los Cuatreros were the framework for hard-won and deeply personal voices forged from experience and love. Looks at permeable borders and the way we let each other down.
My favorite moment came with their revitalized take on “A Matter of Time,” the Los Lobos classic from their breakthrough Will The Wolf Survive record written by Hidalgo with Louie Perez. Stripped of horns and thirty plus years since it’s first appearance, the story and Hidalgo’s Sam Cooke-recalling vocal shine just as brightly as ever. The way we want to be better and keep reaching even when we know that “better world” might never be ib in our reach. They dedicated a note-perfect Ventures tune to Nokie Edwards with Hidalgo saying, “When we were kids, that Ventures stuff turned us all on. It was the shit.” Chuckling, he caught himself, “I guess it still is.”
Adam O’Farrill’s Stranger Days – photo courtesy of Wexner Center
I hope the handful of you reading this got the three-day weekend to rest up because there’s enough unmissable stuff this week to kill the weaker of constitution.
Starting off on Wednesday we see one of the early blendings of new Performing Arts Curator Lane Czaplinski and outgoing curator Chuck Helm. Helm booked, in collaboration with CCAD, NYC artist Neil Goldberg for his one-man show Inhibited Bites fresh off two performances around APAP. Czaplinski makes good on his commitment to connecting the Wex beyond its four walls by bringing the show to Franklinton’s Idea Foundry. There have been happy hours related to Wex events before, but this at Land Grant is one of very few we’ve had steps away from the show. I wrote a preview for Columbus Underground.
Neil Goldberg’s Inhibited Bites – photo courtesy of the Wexner Center
Thursday, the Ogún Meji Duo kicks off a six-month residency at Art of Republic. One of our finest composers, Mark Lomax II, and my favorite saxophone player in town, Eddie Bayard, bring their fiery, flexible. Each of these residencies features a special guest and this week’s is very special: visual artist Bryan Christopher Moss. Friend and editor Andrew Patton previewed this for JazzColumbus.
Friday, one of our finest record labels, Heel Turn, celebrate their third anniversary with two showcases of our best rock and roll on the Old North High Street corridor. The appetizer at Dirty Dungarees features Bloody Show – never have better Stooges-style songs graced our town – with Mr. Clit and the Pink Cigarettes and the new Outer Spacist/Terrestrials offshoot Psychotropic. Facebook event. And the main event is headlined by my (and pretty much everybody else’s) favorite Columbus band right now, DANA, with Burning Itch from Knoxville, and Messrs and Raw Pony also from Columbus. Get there early, you don’t want to miss Raw Pony if you know what’s good for you. Facebook event.
Saturday, one of the finest young trumpet players from NYC, Adam O’Farrill brings his quartet Stranger Days to the Wex. I had the privilege of interviewing O’Farrill in advance of this show, and this is the kind of pure jazz that can move people who aren’t necessarily interested in jazz and leave those of us who already drank the Kool-Aid high for days. I previewed this show for JazzColumbus.
Later Saturday, Spacebar brings an unhinged rock extravaganza from near and far. I’ve barely been able to stop listening to London band Shame since they hit my radar before an NYC trip last year. Their first full-length Songs of Praise delivers on all the snotty, gleeful promise of their early singles with ingratiating post-punk grooves and snarled hooks that draw you in at the same time they’re pushing you away. Pittsburgh Sub Pop signees The Gotobeds have a slightly poppier shine to their stiletto sharpness but anyone who saw their Big Room show a year or two ago knows how hard they can rock. Local up-and-comers Kizzy Hall and Roof Dogs open, both of whom I’m looking forward to checking out again. Facebook event.
Screen of Distance 