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Best Of live music

Best of 2024 – Shows

Stunning year of shows this time – in the usual suspect cities as well as a more than welcome return to Chicago. As you can probably expect, Dick’s Den featured most prominently in my show-going this year, with 26 as I write this (had to cut it off to give myself a break at year’s end, but I’ll probably be there twice more before the 31st) and Natalie’s coming in second at 20, followed by Cafe Bourbon Street at 14, and Rumba Cafe at 11.

As usual, everything listed is in chronological order, all photos are by me, and everything is in Columbus unless listed otherwise. Openers are listed if they added to my impression as I thought about this list.

The Barbarians Reunion, Radegast, January 2024
  • Tony Barba and Friends, Radegast Hall, NYC – A surfeit of credit card points allowing me to do it on the cheap made for a last-minute trip to Winter Jazz Fest in January 2024. I saw great shit there, as well as theater and exhibits, which I’m going to talk about in the Festivals portion of this wrap up… but the single thing that made me decide, “Fuck it, I’m going,” was a Facebook announcement of a reunion in the Brooklyn beer hall Radegast on Sunday night of one of my all-timers, a band of some of my dearest friends that helped define Brooklyn to me when I was first going there often in the early 2000s: the Tony Barba-led, hook-drenched The Barbarians. I rolled into this dark, cavernous room for two sets, wrapping the vintage Barbarians lineup’s mini-set of five stone-cold classics with older and newer material of Barba’s playing with other friends like Noah Jarrett, Conor Elmes, and Dave Treut that made me get off my stool and dance, that knocked me against the bar, that made me regret having a flight that left five hours after I stumbled out into the street, and that put a flag in the ground that said “This is going to be a good fucking year.”
  • Worthington Chamber Orchestra with Ucelli, Worthington United Methodist Church – I’m on record as thinking Mark Lomax is one of Columbus’s very finest composers and the more of his chamber music I hear the stronger that impression gets. I didn’t even know the Worthington Chamber Orchestra existed until I heard about this Sunday afternoon program themed around the underground railroad’s presence in Worthington (a good reminder in the wake of more recent white supremacist news around this suburb), and I was blown straight back in my seat. Lomax’s concerto used the cello quartet Ucelli at its spine to create a different form of cello concerto than I’d heard and, with the WCO under the baton of Antonie Clark, a wild, shifting, stormy narrative that opened up into these gorgeous sunlight textures. Anne and I talked about this for half an hour over dinner after.
  • Benefit for Dre Peace, Natalie’s Grandview – This show was a reminder of one of the things the Columbus music scene has always done very well: show up for each other. And a sterling reminder of the good work Natalie’s does providing stages to support this showing up. While the discussion from someone else with a kidney transplant at this benefit to get singer Dre Peace a new kidney was the single most moving moment of the evening, I was also gobsmacked by beautiful songs from Talisha Holmes, Ebri Yahloe, Starlit Ways and the Liquid Crystal Project. A Night that made my heart feel a little more full.
From Left: Talisha Homes, Ebri Yahloe, Starlit Ways; Natalie’s Grandview, February 2024
  • Nickel Creek and The Staves, Mershon Auditorium – Only got to the venue in time for a few songs from The Staves but their harmonies and barbed songwriting blew me away. Nickel Creek I was later to the party than other roots fans of my generation – I had to back into it through my love of Chris Thile and Sara Watkins’ later work – so this was the first time I’d seen them as a unit. Cataracts burned off my eyes – this was one of the best, most energetic live bands of any genre I’d ever seen: the beautiful tension and floating quality of encore-closer “Holding Pattern,” where Thile’s high-and-sweet tenor took on a flood of shadows as he sang, “Hold me, darling, while the world burns down,” is still stuck in my throat nine months later.
  • The Sleeveens with Goblin Smut and the Whiteouts, Cafe Bourbon Street – Irish-born Stef Murphy’s Tennessee-based supergroup (featuring members of Sweet Knives and Cheap Time) The Sleeveens blew my mind with catchy, crunchy riffs and grooves that recalled my favorite parts of the Stiff records catalog without feeling like just a throwback. And reminded me of the joyous, snotty power of longtime friends/faves The Whiteouts while turning me onto jubilant Goblin Smut. One of my most satisfying nights of rock and roll all year.
  • Hurray for the Riff Raff with NNAMDI, Skully’s Music Diner – I’ve been a fan of Hurray for the Riff Raff for a while – my fandom solidified with a stunning Twangfest set in 2016 followed by their masterpiece The Navigator (my favorite record of theirs until this year’s record of the year for me, The Past Is Still Alive). This set – with a killer opener from avant-R&B chameleon NNAMDI who also held down the bass chair in Hurray for the Riff Raff – did a couple of things I thought were almost impossible at the same time: doing a set of the entire new record that had come out in the last week or so, with one older tune included, for an artist with such an extensive and deep catalog, and having the crowd eat it up; and a set I didn’t move once during. Not to get another beer, not to talk to someone, not to use the restroom. The rare set that didn’t provoke any restlessness. The moment on “Snakeplant,” hearing a full room cheer as Alynda Segarra sang, “There’s a war on the people, what don’t you understand,” was as powerful a reminder I got of the connection between performer and audience as I had all year. Maybe as powerful as I’ve ever had.
Hurray for the Riff Raff, Skullys, March, 2024
  • Jeff Parker and the New Breed, Wexner Center for the Arts – An hour-plus of music whose seamless transitions and taste for ambience and texture – with an astonishing band including Josh Johnson on sax and keys, Paul Bryan on bass and synth bass, and Jeremy Cunningham on drums and sampler, Parker reaffirmed why he’s one of the great guitarists, composers, and bandleaders of my lifetimes, doing favorites of mine like “Executive Life,” the Steve Reich funk of “Max Brown,” and even dipping into forbears for that kind of elastic, electric group dialogue with a sterling read on Weather Report’s “River People.”
  • Seventh Son Anniversary, Seventh Son Brewery – Another reminder of the beauty of my community. Seventh Son – co-owner Jen has been a friend since I was 20 – open their doors and hearts to a lot of community organizations, artists, projects. Their anniversary this year coincided with Record Store Day and assembled some of my favorite people and acts in this town – including probably my favorite DJ duo The Coming Home, Natural Sway, my first time seeing Big Fat Head, and rare, welcome performances from the full trio version of Scrawl and Envelope that had a crowd of at least 1/3 people I wholeheartedly love singing along with me.
  • Scott Miller and Robbie Fulks, Thunderbird Cafe, Pittsburgh – I’ve been lucky to see these two of my favorite songwriters – and two of my gateway drugs to alt.country (whatever that is) – semi-often in the last few years, but this shared bill was tempting enough to schedule a trip to Pittsburgh around an art exhibit Anne wanted to see to overlap their date. And it didn’t disappoint – both singers, solo acoustic, have what feels like an infinite grasp on the history of American music and a wide, deep catalog to draw from. My heart vibrated like it was going to pound out of my chest from the first notes of Miller’s teenage looking-back-rallying-cry “Freedom is a Stranger” to the last downbeat of their shared Roger Miller encore.
Jeff Parker and the New Breed, Wexner Center, March 2024
  • Chicano Batman with Lido Pimienta, The Bluestone – I was blown away when I first saw LA R&B/rock powerhouse Chicano Batman at A&R bar back in 2017 and they’ve only grown in power – intense grooves and sweet harmonies, a kaleidoscopic sense of melody and an encyclopedic understanding of rhythm made a set I couldn’t stop dancing during. Lido Pimienta accompanied by an astonishing percussionist blew me away with poison-tipped songs and a voice that made my spine straighen.
  • Shannon and the Clams with Tropo Magica, Ace of Cups – Long one of the best live bands in the world, Shannon and the Clams brought their doo-wop tinged soul-rock back to Ace to promote their best, most painfully textured record yet, The Moon is in the Wrong Place, for a night of pure but never monochromatic beauty and catharsis. And they brought Tropo Magica who – back when they were still called Thee Commons as a four piece – Anne and I rolled the dice on at Ace almost a decade ago not knowing anything and walked away with a new favorite band, destroyed. An opening set I couldn’t imagine anyone else following, but, of course, Shannon Shaw, Hunx, and the rest of her band did with grace; making transmuting personal tragedy and quieter moments into anthems that feed the audience’s souls seem easy.
  • Contrary Motion, Urban Arts Space – More of this, please. A stellar chamber music program in honor of Pride Month spanning the spectrum from legends like Pauline Oliveros and Julius Eastman to the first great local contemporary composer I ever heard, Rocco DiPietro (who also worked with and wrote a great book on Eastman), to a striking new piece from co-director (with Sam Johnson) Noah Demland.
Chicano Batman, The Bluestone, May 2024
  • Megan Palmer and the Mezzanines, Rambling House – One of Columbus’s finest exports, Megan Palmer, has been setting the world on fire in Nashville for a while but we always benefit when she comes back through town. This collaboration with Dave Vaubel (The Randys) and Max Button’s delightful Western Swing/countrypolitan covers band The Mezzanines, augmented by the firepower of guitarist Brett Burleson gave fascinating rhythmic textures I wasn’t used to on Palmer songs I’ve been singing along to for years – a samba here, a rolling rockabilly riff there – and she’s always had good bands. Her adding rich violin textures to half of the Mezzanines repertoire was icing on the cake.
  • The Mavericks with Nicole Atkins, Rock the Ruins, Indianapolis – This double bill – finally getting to see the Nicole Atkins lineup with great Memphis guitarist/songwriter John Paul Keith on leads – in Indianapolis, a city Anne and I already love, was a no brainier. A beautiful summer night, The Mavericks changing up the set list in interesting ways – including frontman Raul Malo smiling more than I’d ever seen and finding the perfect balance between the dance party and the after party – and Nicole Atkins and band making those sometimes very intimate songs into anthems as big as the sky.
Nicole Atkins and Raul Malo, Indianapolis, August 2024
  • Meshell Ndegeocello, Wexner Center for the Arts – Meshell Ndegeocello has been on an artistic hot streak lately – following a masterpiece in a career strewn with masterpieces, Omnichord Real Book with an expansive, as-overflowing-with-ideas-as-its-subject tribute to James Baldwin No More Water – bringing the latter live to the Mershon stage under Wex auspices was breathtaking. Going to church in the best ways. The two shows from the Wex on here were – finally, after a while – just scratching the surface; the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Nathalie Joachim, and Tyshawn Sorey were all best-of-year contenders. It was just a stacked year.
  • Steve Dawson and Diane Christiansen, Hogan House – This was a reminder how good Fall is – Anne and I had to leave one of our favorite events, Art of the Cocktail, at the CMA early to make this; we’d also given up tickets for one of my favorite current jazz singers, Cecile McLorin Salvant, at the Wex because we’d bought those when Dawson and Christiansen were announced; all the same night. It’s also a tribute to Hogan House – a venue run by PJ and Abbie Hogan that brings these celebrations of the power of song to our town on a regular basis and constantly blows me away with its welcoming vibe, its remarkably good sound, and the friendliness and charm of its owners I’m lucky enough to call friends. Even with all that going on, within the first few notes of a set that reached back to Dolly Varden classics and leaned heavily on Dawson’s last two stellar records, Time to Let Some Light In and Ghosts, Anne and I both knew there was nowhere we’d rather be, and posted up at a bar halfway home to talk mostly about this set for an hour.
Meshelle Ndegeocello, Wexner Center, September 2024
  • Kris Davis Trio, Columbus Museum of Arts – A piano player who’s given me many of my favorite records and shows over the years making the trio record that stood above for me in a year of astonishing trio records, with one of the finest rhythm sections working, Robert Hurst and Johnathan Blake, hitting the highest heights in that CMA auditorium.
  • Davila 666 with The Ferals, Ladrones, and Las Nubes, Rumba Cafe – The same night as the Kris Davis Trio (what’d I tell you about fall?) brought back one of my all-time live rock backs, Puerto Rico’s Davila 666 for the first time in five years and they tore the roof off Rumba, partying like 2 am while the sun was still out and leading a stacked bill that introduced me to one of my favorite newish bands, Ladrones.
Ladrones, Rumba Cafe, October 2024
  • Dave Alvin and Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Natalie’s Grandview- I’ve been seeing Dave Alvin shows presented by Alec Wightman’s essential Zeppelin Productions since 2000; Wightman also promoted the first time I ever got to see another of my songwriter heroes, Jimmie Dale Gilmore. This appearance by those two fronting Alvin’s crack Guilty Ones band (Chris Miller, Lisa Pankratz, Brad Fordham) was a clinic in the power of songs – songs they grew up with in a lifetime of music fandom, songs that helped make their names like Alvin’s “Marie Marie” and Gilmore’s “Dallas,” songs by their friends (a jaw-dropping reggae take on a Butch Hancock song), and an example of how to balance an unflinching eye with belief things can get better and people can be better.
  • Jason Moran and the Bandwagon, Village Vanguard, NYC – One of my dream gigs for a long time has been to see Jason Moran and the Bandwagon in their standing Village Vanguard residency – a group that turned my head around when they first came to the Wexner Center under the auspices of Chuck Helm and who are still blowing me away in a variety of contexts – and luckily the last New York trip of the year allowed for just that. The final set of the week was dedicated to Duke Ellington with a side trip to songs he’d written for multi-media collaborations with Joan Jonas (the great artist was in attendance) and the bone-deep love of that music, the keen, active listening and responding between Moran, Tarus Mateen, and Nasheet Waits, and the ability to make it all alive was on full display.
  • Jesse Malin and Friends, Beacon Theatre, NYC – The reason we made that final New York trip and the icon of a saying Anne brings out regularly, “You can’t give yourself away.” Malin has thrown benefits, donated, opened the doors of the many bars he co-owns, for every benefit, every friend of his who was in need – and he’s friends with everyone in the music scene – and so it was only appropriate they all returned the favor. Even those of us who have but a couple specific memories flooded the Beacon Theatre with the kind of love I’ve talked about in this list – hell, in almost all of these lists – written large and in neon. I saw a few things after this – some great – but Malin and his band roaring through “Meet Me at the End of the World” and “Turn Up the Mains,” The Hold Steady exploding “Deathstar,” and Lucinda Williams doing their co-write “New York Comeback” are still echoing in my head.
Jesse Malin and Friends, Beacon Theatre, December 2024

Favorite Festival Sets:

Mendoza Hoff Revels in the bar mirror at Union Pool, NYC, January 2024
  • Winter Jazz Fest, NYC
    • Kaila Vandever, Zürcher Gallery
    • Marc Ribot and Mary Halvorson, Bowery Ballroom
    • Burnt Sugar with Vernon Reid, Brooklyn Bowl
    • Mendoza Hoff Revels, Union Pool
    • A Night at the East, Crown Hill Theatre
Shabaka, Bijou Theatre, Knoxville, March 2024
  • Big Ears Festival, Knoxville
    • Mary Halvorson’s Amaryllis, Tennesee Theatre
    • Jlin, The Point
    • Jason Moran and the Harlem Hellfighters, Knoxville Civic Auditorium
    • Chocolate Genius Inc, Bijou Theatre
    • Christian McBride and Brad Mehldau, Tennessee Theatre
    • Sexmob, The Standard
    • Charlie Dark MBE, Jackson Terminal
    • Shabaka, Bijou Theatre
    • Davone Tines and the Truth, Tennessee Theatre
    • Henry Threadgill/Vijay Iyer/Dafnis Prieto, Tennesee Theatre
Talisha Holmes, Columbus Arts Fest, June 2024
  • Columbus Arts Fest
    • Talisha Holmes
    • Soulutions Band
    • Trek Manifest and the Aye-1 Band
Faheem Najieb Quintet, Jazz and Ribs, July 2024
  • Columbus Jazz and Ribs Festival
    • Faheem Najieb Quintet
    • Milton Ruffin Quintet
    • Clave Sonic
Etran de L’air, Railgarten, Memphis, September 2024
  • GonerFest, Railgarten, Memphis
    • Pull Chains
    • RMFC
    • So What with Derv Gordon
    • Etran de L’air
    • Water Damage
Vernon Reid Conducting Burnt Sugar, Brooklyn Bowl, NYC, January 2024
Categories
Best Of live music

Best of 2023 – Live Music

Small bar, two dark haired white men playing guitars, one singing, one light haired white man playing piano and singing, one light haired white man playing cowbell and dancing so hard he's blurry
The Little Rockers (from left, Phil Cogley (if I’m wrong there, someone please post), Quinn Fallon, Joe Peppercorn, Jason Winner)

This may sound like a joke to most people who know me, but this year, I really felt the strain of trying to juggle too much. Some of that stress resulted from differently demanding jobs – especially switching companies around Memorial Day. Some of that feeling was mental health, including the fact that a bout of COVID and a recurrence of gout both threw my gym habit, which I’d really enjoyed the last two years, off hard. I’ve got some strategies, and it’s all about iterative improvement/a feedback loop I’d been steadfastly ignoring; we’ll see if I can get to a more balanced place of being open to really enjoying everything I head out for and not being so goddam tired.

That whining out of the way; I’m so glad I have a habit of doing these every year because I saw an amazing array of stuff.  Narrowing this down to 20 was extremely hard – even with another 20 of the best sets I saw at a festival. I saw about 170 shows over 12 cities – though a few of those cities were only for festivals, like Knoxville for Big Ears or Memphis for Gonerfest. 

In no surprise, I was at Dick’s Den the most often, with 25 appearances, and I never saw any bullshit music there. It’s not only my clubhouse; it’s where our finest musicians feel comfortable stretching out, trying new things, and checking new players. Not only our jazz scene, but I feel safe saying Columbus’s entire cultural firmament would be poorer without the constantly rejuvenating energy of Dick’s.

Natalie’s Grandview was next up; I was there 11 times (with two more scheduled after this intro – hopefully after this post, but we’ll see how long this takes – but before the end of the year). Beyond the dazzling show that did make this list, it had the most sweated-over, where-does-this-go shows of any venue in town. In another year, the Robbie Fulks (first time with a full band in a few years), the Sadies (who killed me as a trio when I didn’t think I’d ever get used to them without Dallas Good), Sarah Borges/Eric Ambel (who brought my favorite set list they’ve ever done from two artists who’ve never made a bad record), and Chuck Prophet and the Mission Express (who sailed over what’s always a high bar when he’s in town) all would have made this list handily. 

And I want to take a second to shout out something Natalie’s does that I think is important: residencies. Beyond their legendary extension of Bobby Floyd’s Sundays (to which I’ve been an intermittent visitor since they were held at the Lobby on the east side), they’ve made space to give established and up-and-coming artists recurring weekly space on their more intimate Charlie’s Stage to bring guests, workshop new material, and remind us all just how deep the bench is of talent in this town. I saw stellar examples of this by Lydia Loveless, the duo of singer Sydney McSweeney and saxophone player Terrance Charles, Hammond B-3 players Jon Eshelman and Tony Monaco, and the trio version of alternate-universe harmony maestros The Randys, and easily missed half a dozen I wanted to make. My cultural life is richer through the efforts of Charlie and Natalie Jackson; every year, they double down on that.

Speaking of, I want to take a second to shout out fellow Grandview venue Woodlands Tavern: every time I made it out for Colin Gawel’s monthly residencies, I had a fantastic Sunday; more than once taking out-of-town pals, enjoying the guests he’d bring on, especially his rallying for both democracy in general and reproductive rights in specific with two Issue 2 shows before the two elections.

Cafe Bourbon Street either continues getting its groove back, or I continue getting my head out of my own ass and noticing. Every one of the six nights I spent there could have easily made this list; the one show that made the 20 not only still reverberates in my head but also was worth getting COVID again. Ace of Cups, I haven’t been to as often, but the subtle improvements in sound and the bar, while keeping some of the great staff and the overall ambiance, always make me feel good. I especially appreciate the carrying the torch for bigger community building or reinforcing events – the two-day 20th anniversary of Lost Weekend Records and the fundraiser for Arturo De Leon, headlined by the return of the New Bomb Turks; both made my heart swell.

Everything listed below is in Columbus unless otherwise stated; everything is in chronological order. All photographs are by me. When I list an opening act, it’s because that opener helped nudge the show onto this list.

Black and white photo, dark skin woman singing, light skinned woman sitting and playing violin
Rhiannon Giddens, standing, and Katherine McLin, playing violin, from the Promusica Chamber Orchestra
  • Meshell Ndegeocello (Blue Note, NYC, 01/12/2023) – I’ve been a fan of Ndegeocello since hearing Plantation Lullabies in High School, but I’d never seen her live, so a week at the Blue Note when I was in town for the constellation of APAP side events was a no-brainer. She augmented the already tight usual band with guitarist Jeff Parker and keyboardist Julius Rodriguez. She opened by saying, “It’s rainy outside; we’re going for a mood,” and held me in the palm of her hand as the band slid from silky looseness to snapping wire-tight at precisely the right moments, all hovering around her voice and guitar or keys. They previewed songs from the at-the-time-upcoming The Omnichord Real Book, dipped into the catalog, and sprinkled the 70-80 minute set with a handful of beautiful covers, including a smoky, slow-jam take on the ‘80s George Clinton classic Atomic Dog. Not the first show of the year I saw, but this definitely set a bar for everything that came after.
  • Promusica Chamber Orchestra with Rhiannon Giddens (Southern Theater, 01/19/2023) – One of my favorite contemporary singers since first hearing Carolina Chocolate Drops, my fandom of Rhiannon Giddens exploded after seeing her solo at one of my first couple of Big Ears festivals in the Bijou Theater. She captured the spectrum of American music in Columbus’s intimate historic theater, working alongside our Promusica Chamber Orchestra at Promusica’s annual fundraiser alongside her musical foil, Francesco Turrisi and upright bassist Jason Sypher. With soaring, nuanced string arrangements from Gabe Witcher (often a visitor to the Southern as a member of the Punch Brothers), she tore into classics like Nina Simone’s “Tomorrow is My Turn” and Gillian Welch’s “Factory Girl” along with originals like “At the Purchaser’s Option” with aplomb and that crystalline tone. Just breathtaking.
  • Teeth Marks/Cardiel/Garbage Greek (Rumba Cafe, 02/11/2023) – It’s no surprise Garbage Greek is the only band to make this list twice. They are my people and have been my favorite straight-up rock band since stripping down and woodshedding during COVID. They always bring it whether they’re coming as a three- or four-piece (Adam Scoppa’s percussion and backing vocals add fascinating textures when he’s available). They’ve brought a strain of harder rock to Rumba Cafe. They’re bringing bands that probably wouldn’t play here otherwise. This example turned me onto beautifully unhinged Mexico City two-piece Cardiel – who fused furious garage rock with acid-tinged improv and even the depth and richness of dub reggae – and local band Teeth Marks, who had an appealingly raw vibe that immediately added me to their list.
  • Columbus Jazz Orchestra with Maria Schneider (Southern Theater, 02/12/2023) – I love our Jazz Orchestra, but sometimes the rep isn’t right up my alley. Obviously, there were no such questions with Maria Schneider, who’s been at the forefront of modernizing the big band language for decades. Watching her conduct a set of her deathless compositions was my favorite example of seeing how the muscles of this band can flex, be delicate, and powerful in the same breath.  
Dark skin woman sitting, playing acoustic guitar
Yasmin Williams
  • Yo La Tengo (Beachland Ballroom, Cleveland, 03/22/2023) – Speaking of delicate and powerful, alternating and at the same time, Yo La Tengo might be the touring band I’ve seen most often over the years, but I’ve never seen a better two sets than they brought to one of my favorite venues in March. Highlights for me included an opening “Sinatra Drive Breakdown,” a breathtaking “Center of Gravity,” a dazzling “Sugarcube,” and an encore starting with a cover from underground Ohio heroes Electric Eels.
  • Yasmin Williams with Tarta Relena (Wexner Center, 03/28/2023) – I’d waited a long while for Yasmin Williams. Canceled at least twice due to COVID, another cancelation and a year wait after I’d interviewed her and written a preview. But this makeup date affirmed everything I love about her records, gave me my first taste of my current favorite acoustic guitarist live, and introduced me to the astonishing Spanish singing duo Tarta Relena. Hymns not bound to a specific tradition, resonating notes tearing rips into universes. Once again, an astonishing show from the Wexner Center that served as a palate cleanser/amuse bouche for the glorious buffet of Big Ears.
  • Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit with Amythyst Kiah (Andrew J. Brady Center, Cincinnati, 04/29/2023) – Maybe the last leg of Isbell’s touring with longtime bass foil Jimbo Hart in a new big room in Cincinnati I wasn’t familiar with before heading down, he and his crack band hit every stage of his career, from the song that introduced most of us to him as a writer, DBT’s “Outfit” through a solid helping of Southeastern songs in the year of its 10th anniversary, and every record since Southeastern rehabilitated his image, including an encore that paired the devastating “Cast Iron Skillet” off not-yet-released Weathervanes with early DBTs standout “Decoration Day.” And Amythyst Kiah and band killed a tight nine-song set heavy on her terrific record Wary and Strange but also sprinkled with hard-edged takes on classics like her set-closing bring-the-house-down take on Vera Hall’s “Trouble So Hard,” which she also appeared alongside Gregory Porter on Moby’s recent revisiting of his “Natural Blues” that introduced many of us to that through a sample.
  • Promusica Chamber Orchestra with Caroline Shaw (Southern Theater, 05/14/2023) – Promusica has been one of our cultural treasures for (barely) longer than I’ve been alive, and their 2022-23 season closer brought Caroline Shaw, one of my favorite contemporary composers, to town finally after originally being booked in 2020. Three pieces gave a taste of the scope of Shaw’s work as a writer and writer-performer – Blueprint for a String Quartet, Is a Rose, and Entr’acte for String Orchestra – and they paired this section with a gorgeous version of the first Brahms symphony which Shaw sat in on in the back of the violin section. It was a rapturous night. I couldn’t believe I was lucky enough to see it.
  • Jerry Powell Experience (Lalibela, 06/14/2023) – I was intrigued when, over lunch at a favorite Ethiopian spot in town, Lalibela, I saw a table card advertising that Jerry Powell III, one of our finest jazz drummers whom I hadn’t seen in a while, had a Wednesday residency in the restaurant’s bar. A stripped-down version of his band, accompanied only by a great keyboard player, took us on a journey in two sets: some standards, some more traditional “dinner music,” and some surging extended afrobeat jams. A reminder to be open to what’s in every corner of your town; I end up in the same venues a lot, and it’s not a bad thing; they’re places that are easy for me to get to from my home and from other venues, and that book a large number of shows that align with my tastes. But it’s always good to be reminded how much terrific shit is happening off that well-trod path.
  • Joe Peppercorn/Little Rockers/X-Rated Cowboys/Garbage Greek (Little Rock Bar, 06/21/2023) – Quinn Fallon’s Little Rock Bar has been a locus for multiple groups of my friends; I’ve made friendships there, and I’ve strengthened friendships. I’ve had some of the best nights of the last ten years at its bar or on its patio. Their annual celebration is right before Comfest, so getting some returning out-of-towners is always a delight, but this year was special. Everybody playing, all current or former employees of the bar, brought it. A beautiful solo Joe Peppercorn set. Pickup band Little Rockers’s blazing set included both a gorgeous take on the ‘Mats “Swinging Party” sung by Peppercorn and a killing “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man” sung by Patrick Koch. Koch’s own band, Garbage Greek, continued their streak of burning down everything in sight. And Fallon’s own X-Rated Cowboys, with a great record out this year, continued their evolution into a leaner, meaner, more colorful band than the one I started seeing over 20 years ago. A tribute to one of the shapes community takes and much of what I love about this town.
Light skinned man in dark blazer and cowboy hat playing guitar, light skinned woman playing drums
Dave Alvin and Lisa Pankratz
  • Dave Alvin and the Guilty Ones (Natalie’s Grandview, 06/29/2023) – I got into Dave Alvin buying King of California when I was in High School. My fandom went into overdrive with the one-two punch of Hightone’s 1997 reissue of The Blasters’ debut album American Music and Alvin’s Blackjack David the next year (still one of my favorite singer-songwriter records of all time, and still a record I go to often, especially in the wee hours of the morning). I remember talking to Alec Wightman on the phone from my dorm room, getting tickets for the first time I saw Alvin at the Columbus Music Hall promoting Public Domain in 2000 – starting me down the road of following Zeppelin Productions, who I don’t think have had a year they didn’t make this list at least once since I started keeping track in college. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen Alvin over the years, at least 15, but – and I had a little trepidation given what I’d heard about his cancer battle recently – I don’t think I’ve ever heard him sing better, the richness of his voice almost knocked the drink out of my hand, and his guitar playing had a razor-cut crispness that more than made up for any minor losses in speed. Plus, he’s always had great bands. Still, this four-piece Guilty Ones was just perfection: Lisa Pankratz’s band-leading behind the drums as she elegantly worked every mood of the set, as good on a smoldering ballad like “King of California” as the gutbucket raunch of Big Bill Broonzy’s “You’ve Changed” and the soaring wistfulness of “Abilene.” Flexible and driving bass from Brad Fordham. And Alvin’s longtime guitar foil Chris Miller with harmonies and jousting, never too showy. Watching this, I was reminded of the purpose of a writer as a conduit for remembrance, for honoring moments that might not come back. In the American popular – whatever that means – music world, Alvin’s given us more shining examples of that mood, that form, than anyone else. He doled out many of my favorites in this show, reminding us that memory doesn’t have to be somber: the rave-up “Haley’s Comet,” the sexy-as-its-subject R&B of “Johnny Ace is Dead,” the Sam Cooke homage “Border Radio,” and the double-barreled reflections on youth and California “Dry River” and “Ashgrove.” A perfect night and a prime example of how good two guitars, bass and drums still sound. Anne and I decompressed, dissecting this in a bar a few blocks away, for hours.
  • Fred Moten/Brandon Lopez/Gerald Cleaver with Ingrid Laubrock/Cecilia Lopez (FourOneOne, NYC, 07/10/2023) and Big Joanie with Frida Kills (Baby’s All Right, NYC, 07/10/2023) – Once in a while, there’s a night that reminds me what enraptured me about Brooklyn in the first place. I was lucky enough to have a few of those nights this year. Maybe my favorite all-around started with a drink with Anne right off the Metropolitan Avenue L stop (following a long remote work day), dinner at still my favorite New York steak house St Anselm, jukeboxes and bar hopping down the street to a space I hadn’t made it to yet, FourOneOne for a set from one of my favorite saxophone players, Ingrid Laubrock, who Anne and I saw on one of our very first trips to the city together, in a mesmerizing duo with Cecilia Lopez on electronics, followed by one of my favorite writers and thinkers about music, Fred Moten, leading a burning rhythm section of Brandon Lopez and Gerald Cleaver. Then, with a debriefing drink on the walk back up the hill, saw righteous Brooklyn band Frida Kills open for UK powerhouse Big Joanie, who made one of my favorite rock records in a long time last year, turning out a packed house.
Punk rock trio - three dark skinned women - with a cheering crowd in the foreground
Big Joanie
  • Soul Glo with MSPAINT (Ace of Cups, 07/20/2023) – Another band who made one of my favorite rock records from 2022, Philly’s Soul Glo, paired with one of my favorite Gonerfest discoveries from the last decade, Hattiesburg’s MSPAINT – I’m not sure there’s a lyric Anne quotes more often than “Destroy all the flags and the symbols of man!” – was obviously a can’t-miss pairing. So much better than I hoped. Hardcore’s always been a genre I admired more than loved, with some exceptions, but I generally love when a band uses those colors as a foundation and color with the rest of rock history. MSPAINT’s gnarled organ-trio crunch has taken on additional flexibility and suppleness, featuring more dynamics than the epic piledriver we first fell for but with the same wit and fury. And Soul Glo was every single thing I wanted in a rock and roll band: a rhythm section that knows when to swing and when to pummel, a slashing colorist of a guitarist, and a frontman I couldn’t stop watching—a magical combination and a show perfectly sized and pitched for Ace.
  • Oneida with DANA (Cafe Bourbon Street, 8/16/2023) – Pal Fred Pfening getting back into booking in 2023 was a phenomenal delight and the barn burning avalanche of Oneida was a show for the ages, dipping into some of their longer dance forms – their krautrock tendencies even blossoming into flowers blooming in disco trenches – with an opening set from DANA who get looser and more vibrant while holding their crown of best rock band in town.
  • Waco Brothers with Jon Langford and the Bright Shiners (Big Room Bar, 09/22/2023) – The last few times we’d been lucky enough to see Jon Langford, one of the iconic songwriters and singers going back to helping invent British post-punk with the Mekons, were at the fantastic Hogan House venue. We still had the pleasure of seeing PJ and Abbie, proprietors/bookers of Hogan House, and doing as much for music that wouldn’t come to this town otherwise as anybody I can think of, but it was a pleasure to see the Bright Shiners in a bar and the Wacos in a room where we could dance. Their own crackling songs like “The Man That God Forgot” and “This Town” holding their own with covers from the real rock and roll canon like “Teenage Kicks” and “All or Nothing” – the best rocking dance party of the year. 
  • Johnathan Blake Quintet (Village Vanguard, NYC, 10/12/2023) – On the heels of a phenomenal record (you’ll see some evidence on this year’s playlists), drummer and composer Johnathan Blake brought the power of a volcanic quintet – Dezron Douglas on bass, Dayna Stephens on sax, Fabian Almazan on piano, and Jalen Baker on vibes – for a perfect set that went from Horace Silver (maybe the best “Peace” I’ve ever heard) to his own new tunes to classics from his father Ralph Peterson, Jr. A night that reminded me why the Village Vanguard stays one of the best listening rooms in the world.
Three dark skinned men singing, two light skinned men playing horns, one light skinned man singing and playing guitar, one light skinned man playing guitar
Harlem Gospel Travelers, Eli “Paperboy” Reed, and band
  • Eli “Paperboy” Reed and the Harlem Gospel Travelers (Union Pool, NYC, 10/14/2023) – I don’t always love a repertory show, but this was exactly how you do it. Eli “Paperboy” Reed used his 40th birthday to pack out the Union Pool room and tear into one of my favorite records of all time, Sam Cooke’s Live at the Harlem Square Club 1963, and for the encore, instead of dipping into his own catalog, brought up the Harlem Gospel Travelers and did songs Cooke was doing in concert contemporaneously. He didn’t even dip into earlier, better-known Sam Cooke songs like “You Send Me.” It was a tribute to scholarship but also to sensual delight – the looseness and good time everyone had on stage and in the audience lit me up from the inside on a day that also included the production of Merrily We Roll Along that made my theater list and a return to century-old Brooklyn classic restaurant Bamonte’s, plus always killer DJing from legends like Mr. Finewine as a nightcap.
  • Lady Wray and 79.5 (Brooklyn Made, NYC, 10/15/2023) – I’ve been a fan of Lady Wray since “Make It Hot” and her co-writes/guest spots on Missy Elliot classics. And I’ve seen a few R&B hitmakers who transitioned to classic soul sounds over the years. But I’ve never seen one do it with the kind of grace and wit Wray did here, honoring her earlier life with a scorching “Make It Hot” about a third of the way through the set and devoting just as much energy and enthusiasm to the newer work. Finally, seeing the reigning Brooklyn disco band 79.5 was as much a selling point as the headliner. They didn’t disappoint – sweated so much from dancing that my blazer stuck to me from sweat when we finally tumbled into the chilly Brooklyn night.
Dark skinned woman playing keyboards and singing, dark skinned woman singing, light skinned man playing bass, light skinned man playing guitar
Lady Wray and band
  • Los Rumberos (Cafe Marula, Barcelona, 11/11/2023) – First trip to Spain, especially Barcelona, was more focused on food and art than music, but after a fantastic dinner, Anne found at Restaurante Informal – some of the best sea bass I’ve ever had – where we didn’t have a plan except not feeling like heading home immediately after, we stumbled into Mexican band Los Rumberos, not just playing rumbas but son, cumbia, vintage disco, reggae, in a ball of sweaty, kinetic energy. Blew me back against the bar.
  • Mulatu Astatke (Fernán Gómez Centro Cultural de la Villa, Madrid, 11/17/2023) – I loved those Ethiopiques compilations, and my favorite was the volume dedicated to percussionist Mulatu Astatke that came out when I was 18. So, seeing he was playing the first night we were in Madrid was a no-brainer. And at 79 years old, fronting a septet of much younger players, he astonished me. Slipping between marimba, timbales, congas, and electric piano, he guided the band like a wizard redirecting a river.
Two light skinned men playing horns, light skinned man playing piano, dark skinned man playing marimba, light skinned man playing cello
Mulatu Astatke and Band

Festival Sets:

Dark skinned woman singing, dark skinned man playing trumpet, light skinned man playing saxophone, dark skinned man playing upright bass, cheering crowd in foreground
Irreversible Entanglements
  • Winter Jazz Fest (NYC, Various Venues, January 2023)
    • New Standards Songbook
    • Irreversible Entanglements
Light skinned woman playing bass and singing, light skinned woman playing guitar and singing, crowd in foreground
Scrawl
  • Lost Weekend Records Anniversary (Ace of Cups, February 2023)
    • Scrawl
Light skinned man, filming, light skinned man playing guitar, three backing singers - two dark skinned women flanking a dark skinned man, dark skinned man singing, keyboard player and horn section in the background, crowd in foreground
Lonnie Holley with Mourning [A] BLKStar
  • Big Ears (Knoxville, Various Venues, March 2023)
    • Lonnie Holley with Mourning [A] BLKStar
    • Terry Allen and the Panhandle Mystery Band
    • James Brandon Lewis
    • Trio Imagination
    • Staples Jr. Singers
    • The Jazz Bins
    • Rica Chicha
    • Peter One
Light skinned woman playing upright bass, crowd in foreground
Amy Lavere
  • Twangfest (St Louis, Off Broadway/Tower Grove, June 2023)
    • Amy Lavere and Will Sexton (Tower Grove Farmer’s Market)
    • Paranoid Style
  • Summer Solstice (Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, June 2023)
    • Barzuto All Stars
Light skinned woman singing, flanked by two light skinned men playing guitars
King Louie Memorial Family Band
  • Gonerfest (Memphis, Railgarten, September 2023)
    • Alien Nosejob
    • Virvon Varvon
    • COFFIN
    • Civic
    • King Louie Memorial Family Band
    • The Courettes
Light skinned woman singing and playing percussion, light skinned man playing drums, light skinned man playing banjo
Rica Chicha
Categories
Best Of visual art

Best of 2023 – Visual Art

What a marvelous year for Visual Art. 125 or so exhibits, over nine cities, giving me peace or disrupting that peace. Leaving me unable to speak or filled with an irrepressible urge to tell someone, everyone, about them, or sometimes both at the same time.

All photos are by me, with no claim made to the underlying rights to the artwork. Everything listed here is in chronological order based on when I saw it (or in some cases, like the Wexner Center, No Place Gallery, and Streetlight Guild shows, based on the first time I went). 

Woman in a white turtleneck sweater looking at an array of soundsuits made by the artist Nick Cave on a curved platform.
Nick Cave, Guggenheim
  • Nick Cave, Forothermore (Guggenheim, NYC) – I was overjoyed that my APAP/Winter Jazzfest/work trip overlapped with the last weeks of this dazzling retrospective of the American artist Nick Cave filling the side galleries of the Guggenheim. There was so much to love in this massive collection showing off the various sides of his work. My favorite part of this was the way it led the audience through the thornier, more jagged pieces of his work before the catharsis of the better-known sound suits which really underlined the sound suits’ beauty and joy as an act of resistance, of asserting his power and dignity.
  • Felix Gonzalez-Torres, S/T (David Zwirner, NYC) – Another more expansive look at an artist I’d been a fan of for a very long time. This retrospective took over three of David Zwirner’s massive gallery spaces, including finally assembling two pieces (both labeled “Untitled” with different subtitles) had had fully planned before his death. Gonzalez-Torres’ ability to transmute the basic objects of our lives, to abstract and expand, has never been as moving for me as it was on this blustery New York afternoon. Just recalling, it clicked through my bones like pins snapping into a lock.
  • Susan Phillipsz, Separated Strings (Tanya Bonakdar, NYC) – Susan Phillipsz’ film of the story of Pavel Haas, a composer who wrote and performed a piece while in Auschwitz and was killed anyway, played on a two-channel installation and a sound installation isolating the violin part on multiple speakers in a bright room upstairs, floored me. This is what I want from most installation art and only seldom get.
Mixed-media collages of two women on canvases, connected by a large cloth ribbon.
Tiffany Lawson, Streetlight Guild
  • Tiffany Lawson, Contemporary Colored Deluxe (Streetlight Guild) – Streetlight Guild is killing it in every respect. Music, poetry, education, but especially for visual art: this is the kind of permanent, visible home Columbus’s fertile black art scene hasn’t had for a while, and the crowds, whenever I come, seem to back me up at how much we’ve all missed it. I liked everything I saw here, but this concentrated dose of Tiffany Lawson’s witty, nuanced, narrative-informed-but-never-constrained collage work was one of my favorite discoveries (I know, I know, I should have known more of her work earlier – sometimes I’m slow) of the year.
  • AK Burns, Of Space we are… (Wexner Center) – All three of the spring exhibits at the Wexner Center worked for me, but the A.K. Burns – showing all four of his Negative Space films and building installations and ephemera around them, situating the storytelling in these moving, chilling environments – just stuck to my ribcage and never quite let go.  This as a whole – believe I came back to watch each movie in the galleries – fulfilled the promise I grew up searching for in science fiction and only found fleetingly.
  • Bobby T. Luck, Was it Your Trigger Finger? (Pizzuti Collection at Columbus Museum of Art) – This two-room installation skewered vintage US military recruiting propaganda, institutional racism, government bureaucracy, and so much else in a way that balanced its wit with tear jerking, landing perfectly placed piledrivers.
  • Sydney G. James, Girl Raised in Detroit (MOCAD, Detroit) – Another look into the past, both James’ personal past and a wider social and political past, balancing a tear-jerking and nostalgic installation with enormous and unsparing mural-style tributes. Breathtaking and bracing.
Blurry painting of Madonna impersonator on a white gallery wall
Caleb Yono, No Place Gallery
  • Caleb Yono, Impersonator (No Place Gallery) – Hoisting the torch for uncompromising art in downtown Columbus proper, No Place Gallery put out one stellar exhibit after another. My favorite was this – occasionally blurred – myriad of paintings of Madonna impersonators, drenched in atmosphere and pulsing with energy.
  • Claude Monet and Joan Mitchell, Monet/Mitchell: Painting the French Landscape (St Louis Art Museum, St Louis) – The scholarship at this spellbinding rapture of an exhibit at one of my favorite US Museums was second only to the rapturous beauty both Monet and Mitchell evoked. The connections between what each artist found in the countryside, far away from Paris and New York, are as intense as the different paths and techniques they deployed in the service of that building. 
  • Faye HeavyShield, Confluences (Pulitzer Art Foundation, St Louis) – The Pulitzer has always had a special place in my St Louis heart, basically, next door to the better-known CAM STL (also great), finding interesting connections to avant-garde artists of different backgrounds, time periods, and media. I had the pleasure of a phenomenal tour led by curator Tamara Schenkenberg, the perfect introduction to an artist I’m ashamed to say I knew nothing about before walking through the door. This wide-ranging retrospective was bursting with wrenching work that used highly modern techniques to get at the power and the pain of Faye HeavyShield’s overlapping histories and color the world in ways I knew but didn’t know and ways I knew but wished weren’t what they are. A show – and conversation – that still haunts me as I look back on this year.
Rounded sculpture, flat on the bottom, in beige, with pointed spines jutting out of its perimeter
Faye HeavyShield, Pulitzer Art Foundation
  • Various Artists, Irrepressible Soul (Urban Arts Space) – Iyana Hil (creator and co-curator with Dr. Terron Banner, Mario Hairston, and Christopher Hearn) did an astounding job here, bringing together artists whose work I already knew and loved, like William Evans, Cameron A. Grainger, and L’Ouverture Jones with artists I’d never heard of into a tapestry of black and Afro-Diasporic arts. As someone who’s been going to the Urban Arts Space since the building opened, I believe this may be the best single exhibit I’ve ever seen there. Plus – and it’s my eternal regret I didn’t get to the satellite events – tying the work here together with other Columbus black cultural institutions, from the King Arts Complex to Sole Collections, was a wonder.
  • Juane Quick-To-See Smith, Memory Map (Whitney Museum, NYC) – My first conscious exposure to Juane Quick-to-See-Smith was at one of my favorite public art events anywhere, Counterpublic 2023 in St Louis, so it was even more of a joy to see this enormous retrospective at the Whitney when Anne and I went to New York late summer to see Greg Cartwright play. The playful but deadly serious tones captured an America that was always on the surface for the people being oppressed, but it uses defiance as a path to hope, sunlight cracking through moldering walls.
  • Sahar Khoury, Umm (Wexner Center) – The Wex’s fall exhibits were also all extremely strong. Still, Khoury’s collaged sculptural and installation pieces inspired by the legendary Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum kept me coming back, always finding something new in the glitter and the scuffs.
Long Gallery room with a chalk drawing with names Hattie McDaniel and Bill Robinson at the end, less visible chalk drawings on the left wall, show flyers on the wall in the room visible to the left.
Gary Simmons, MCA
  • Gary Simmons, Public Enemy (MCA, Chicago) – A work trip to Chicago let me catch up with some dear friends, have some strategy sessions with coworkers and also catch a couple of astonishing art exhibits on lunch hours – the benefit of being right downtown. The MCA is always more than edifying when I get there – they turned me onto Doris Salcedo and so much more – and this Gary Simmons’ mixed-media grappling with racism and its after-effects, twisting every symbol just artfully enough that it wasn’t the version I expected, landed hit after hit.
  • Remedios Varo, Science Fictions (Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago) – The Art Institute of Chicago also blew me away with this early surrealist who relocated from Spain to Mexico City with the outbreak of WWII. Exactly the stew of midcentury elements I’ve loved but at an angle, I wasn’t expecting, in the first major museum I ever fell in love with.
A woman and her daughter looking at an arrangement of photographs on a gallery wall.
Various Artists, Columbus Metropolitan Library Main Branch
  • Various Artists, Columbus Metropolitan Library at 150 (CML Main Branch) – Not just here because our house was in one of the photos taken and selected by Dorian Ham as part of this exhibit, but that was the kind of surprise that won me over. The perfectly chosen artists for this – people I’ve been a big fan of for a while, like April Sunami, Rob W. Jones, and Tera Stockdale, and those whose names I didn’t even know – and the pieces were woven into an evocation of the sense of community I still love about Columbus, even when it pisses me off or lets me down. A flag-planting about the role libraries have played in that and still play. 
  • Various Artists, Black American Portraits (Brooks Museum, Memphis) – The Brooks does astonishing work; over the 10 years I’ve been visiting regularly, it’s become a must-see part of my Memphis trips. This touring exhibition, which originated at LACMA and was curated by Dr. Patricia Daigle and Efe Igor Coleman, took me through thematic rooms to shine a light on a shifting black experience that always rightfully resists being restrained or easily named.
Two large photos on the wall of the Whitney, one three black people arrayed (from left to right) a man in the background, a woman in the middleground, and a man in the foreground. The other, a man wearing a hat that says Hustle Forward and an orange and black striped shirt with a bowl with chopsticks in front of him
Henry Taylor, Whitney Museum
  • Henry Taylor, B Side (Whitney Museum, NYC) – Another hat tip to the Whitney – in a season where everything was good, from a look at one of my polymath inspirations Harry Smith doing the almost impossible to the finest wide-lens look at Ruth Asawa I’ve ever seen; to a gut-wrenching group show; this deep dive into painter Henry Taylor vibrated every nerve ending in my body. 
  • Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity (Reina Sofia, Madrid) – Most of what we did in Madrid and Barcelona wasn’t new exhibitions; first time in cities of course I’m spending a lot of time in the Prado and looking at Gaudi. But the Reina Sofia is the kind of contemporary art museum – and I love all the US versions, don’t misunderstand – I could really only compare to Centre Pompidou. I was that wowed. And I liked everything on display, but this extensive, almost exhausting, retrospective of Shahn’s work took him out of my previous understanding of his art in Diego Rivera’s slipstream and made it fully formed and three-dimensional in my brain.
  • Laura Ramírez Palacio, S/T (PlusArtis, Madrid) – Anne and I stumbled here when the other modern art gallery we intended to hit was closed. In a thriving gallery scene, this was the exhibit that wouldn’t let me go. Gone too young, Palacio crafts a mythoautobiography in drawings with clear referents, but I couldn’t ever quite put my finger on it. I staggered out of the gallery, pretty much only wanting to talk about this.
Loosely arranged selection of black and white drawings
Laura Ramirez Palacio, PlusArtis
Categories
Best Of theatre

Best of 2023 – Theater/Opera/Dance

Brother/Hood/Dance, photo by Ryan Muir, courtesy of the Wexner Center

What a great year for theater – seeing 53 shows over four cities, with particularly good batting averages on the three New York trips. Also, every company in Columbus was hitting this year. Some of the best work I’ve seen in years from MadLab, Opera Columbus, and Evolution, lined up with front-to-back strong seasons from The Contemporary (formerly CATCO) and Available Light, a renewed interest in dance and theater from the Wexner Center, Short North Stage stretching its wings, all added up to more I wanted to see than I could make happen. Even when I didn’t love some of the work, almost every single thing I saw, I admired the effort and the swing they took. It’s a good time to be a fan of theater in town, get out and see as much as possible,

Everything listed here is in chronological order and in Columbus unless otherwise noted. The companies provided all photos for promotion, either sent to me directly or taken from websites.

Wilma Hatton and Ricardo Jones in ‘Snowville Cafe’, photo by Steve Malone
  • KL II by Kaneza Schaal, directed by Kaneza Schaal and Christopher Myers (Under the Radar Festival, NYC) – I only made it to one thing out of the three I had booked at Under the Radar this year – one canceled early, one canceled while I was at the Public – but this reaffirmed what a great thing the festival is for those of us who love experimental theater. Kaneza Schaal braided the text of Mark Twain’s King Leopold’s Soliloquy with a personal history with Patrice Lumumba’s independence speech with personal history with so much else and fused it to a blue flame of a performance and fascinating design and direction choices.
  • Snowville Cafe by Julie Whitney-Scott, directed by James Blackmon (MadLab) – Julie Whitney-Scott, one of my favorite theater artists in town, had an astonishing year directing a regional premiere of Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Lynn Nottage, classics like Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun, leading her spectacular tradition of Columbus Black Theater Festival, writing her first novel, it was a dazzling record of work. But my favorite piece, the thing that I kept talking about months after it closed, was this luminous slice of life James Blackmon directed for MadLab. I called it “a poetic character study that also makes its setting a vibrant, fascinating character, with a real love for its characters but a sometimes unsparing eye for their faults. The empathy of the writing and direction are so perfectly in sync they almost seem invisible,” in my review for Columbus Underground.
  • Everybody by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, directed by David Glover (Available Light) – Available Light continued their astonishing streak this year. Everything they did had the unshakable feeling of “I can’t picture anyone else doing this.” David Glover’s stunning production and brilliant cast were up to the challenge of fusing the technical difficulty – the main five actors pull their characters out of a hat – to the piece’s deep themes and rich humor. I said it, “[highlights the shifting volatility, the danger of using our friends as a mirror of ourselves, but the absolute necessity of friends,” in my review for  Columbus Underground.
  • Afro/Solo/Man by Orlando Zane Hunter, Jr. and Ricarrdo Valentine (Brother(hood) Dance, presented by Wexner Center for the Arts) – The Wexner Center also pulled itself up this year, drawing on some local talent and some far-flung relationships, to put out work I can’t picture any other presenting organization bringing to town. This gut-wrenching dance piece by Hunter and Valentine, about generational trauma and internalized shame but also abundant, bursting-at-the-seams joy, had me babbling about it for weeks after seeing it.
Monica Danilov-Marquez, Maria de Buenos Aires, Opera Columbus; photo by Terry Gilliam
  • Maria de Buenos Aires by Astor Piazzolla and Horacio Ferrer, directed by Christopher Darling (Opera Columbus) – Opera Columbus continues killing it and this Piazzolla operetta lined up with my tastes with sniper-like precision. I said, “The parallel singing and dancing choruses also set the world of the play, accentuating the collage aspects and the surging drama and eroticism. This riff on an opera-ballet with tango feels simultaneously organic and surprising,” in my piece for Columbus Underground.
  • Seven Guitars by August Wilson, directed by Ron OJ Parson (Playhouse in the Park, Cincinnati) – Finally got to see the last of the August Wilson Pittsburgh cycle with this sumptuous production at one of Ohio’s shining theaters, Cincy’s Playhouse in the Park. Bryant Bentley’s Red Carter and Dimonte Henning’s Schoolboy Barton are performances burned into my brain.
Sue Wismar in foreground, Elizabeth Girvin and Sydney Jordan Baker in background, When We Were Young and Unafraid, photo by Cat McAlpine
  • When We Were Young and Unafraid by Sarah Treem, directed by Michelle Batt (eMBer Women’s Theatre) – eMBer Women’s Theatre has come into its own over the last few years, and this year they blew me the hell away with a gorgeous, knife-twisting look at shifting social mores, pervasive sexual violence, the need to connect – and the way that can be a source of strength or twisted into something terrible, with astonishing performances, especially by Sue Wismar and Matthew Sierra. I said, “[The] characters’ arguments about the times changing and the chilling prescient words “They’ll change back,” resonate long after the lights go back on the play,” in my review for Columbus Underground.
  • The Wolves by Sarah DeLappe, directed by Aviva Helena Neff (The Contemporary Theatre of Ohio) – The second production of Sarah DeLappe’s magnificent coming-of-age play The Wolves I’ve seen in a few years, and I’m still knocked out by the play and the synchronicity in coming together and splitting apart personified by the cast hear left my jaw in my lap with awe and broke me in the right measures. For Columbus Underground, I said, “[It] reminded me of its ability to surprise through the quality and sharpness of its execution. It’s hard for me to picture seeing a better production of this beautiful, life-affirming, heartbreaking play.
  • Machinal by Sophie Treadwell, directed by Ryan Naughton (The Sound Company) – Ryan Naughton and Jessica Hughes gave the Columbus theatrical scene a powerful shot in the arm in their few years here, teaching at OSU, and their crowning achievement was a powerful production of landmark expressionist play Machinal by their Sound Company. I said, This production is rich with jagged beauty and a perfect example of how irony can be used to make something hurt more, not less. How much more potent can abstraction be at evoking a feeling than spelling something,” for Columbus Underground.
Jessica Hughes, Machinal, photo by Blake Mintz
  • Beautiful by Doug McGrath and the music of Carole King et al, directed by Dionysia Williams (Short North Stage) – I didn’t see a bad production by Short North Stage all year, but this jukebox musical – which might have had the hardest go with me walking in, given the depth of my familiarity and love of the Carole King-Gerry Goffin songs and the milieu around them, and this captured it so perfectly, anchored by brilliant performances by Britta Rae, Corbin Payne, and Nick Lingnofski. For Columbus Underground, I said, “The book has enough pain and richness to give ballast to the material, but Beautiful never lets anything get in the way of the power and beauty of these songs.”
  • The Comeuppance by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, directed by Eric Ting (Signature Theatre Company, NYC) – Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is one of the playwrights I’ll see anything that comes out if I can at all make work. I was overjoyed that one of the last matinees overlapped with our middle trip to New York this year. I got there – after two hours a few blocks north of the Signature complex having some drinks and laughs at staple Rudy’s Bar and Grill- and was dismayed to find out the performance was over two hours with no intermission. I’m used to that meaning, “We don’t trust the material/we want to exert some dominance over the audience/people will leave.” But for 2:15, I was staggered, enraptured, blown away. Every tool Jacobs-Jenkins has carefully sharpened is deployed in heartbreaking, unsettling ways with a phenomenal cast in this mythopoetic riff on The Big Chill that tells a story about reckoning with youth, trauma, and who has the right to a story; to pain; that I haven’t heard before. I’m dying to see this again and have already pre-ordered the script in book form (coming out next summer). I saw a couple of things this year where I both immediately said, “This is the best thing I’ve seen,” and I still think that later in the year (you’ll see the other further down this list); this was one of them.
  • Sweeney Todd by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler, directed by Thomas Kail (Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, NYC) – I’ve seen a good number of the recent Sweeney Todd revivals, the first Sondheim I loved thanks to an introduction to the taped George Hearn/Angela Lansbury performance from childhood friend Matt Porreca, and I love the attempts at realism, psychological or otherwise. But it was an unalloyed joy to see this Thomas Kail-directed version that focused on the sumptuous music, playing the original orchestrations and with a dynamite lead from Josh Groban, in almost a sharp-edged comic book interpretation. And as with the Sunday Anne and I saw a few years ago, Annaleigh Ashford’s Mrs. Lovett runs away with the whole goddam show, just a dynamite performance.
The Comeuppance photo by Monique Carboni
  • The Inheritance by Matthew Lopez, directed by Joe Bishara (Evolution Theatre Company) – Evolution has been swinging for the fences the last couple of years, and, in my eyes, it’s really paid off. The ambition of this huge cast recasting of Howard’s End to deal with the aftermath of the AIDS crisis, which was the play everyone was talking about when Anne and I were in London (and I couldn’t fit it into the schedule), follows great work Evolution has done with Lopez’s writing like the intimate character-driven Poz and gets to luxuriate in this over two three-hour parts. I called it, “About how we tell stories, how stories bring us together, give us a framework for living, and in the same breath – and sometimes the same story – let us delude ourselves and others, build walls, and slowly (or slowly-then-suddenly) rot us from the inside,” as I reviewed Part 1 and Part 2 for Columbus Underground.
  • POTUS by Selena Fillinger, directed by Leda Hoffmann (The Contemporary Theatre of Ohio) – Fresh off Broadway, POTUS affirmed Hoffmann’s commitment to brand new work and stewardship as CATCO transitioned into The Contemporary Theatre of Ohio. It’s a crackling burlesquing of the highest hallways of power and riotous, hilarious entertainment. It may have been the hardest I laughed all year. I said the production was “A springloaded machine of everything getting worse in ways we see coming, but at just enough of an angle, the wind is knocked from our lungs as a precursor to the following laughs. Hoffmann and her cast excel at this, ratcheting in the tension up, weaving in call-backs (if there’s another inflection you can put on “ass play” we don’t see in this play, I can’t think of it) so they embed in our brains and still getting that jolt of surprise when they detonate, with just enough release to make the pace feel frenzied without being exhausting,” in Columbus Underground.
  • What the Constitution Means to Me by Heidi Schreck, directed by Dakota Thorn (Available Light) – Dakota Thorn, who I’ve long admired as an actor, hit it out of the park with her first – I think – directing and Available Light member Michelle Schroeder-Lowrey is the perfect fit for this funny, intensely moving snapshot of a slice of America from Heidi Schreck. I said, “Hilarity – starting with the 15-year-old Heidi talking about the constitution in bodice-ripper terms (“a sweaty, steamy document”), deep dives into specifics of language, and abject horror bump right up against one another, without feeling unbalanced. In the late-play discussion of Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales, the play draws a clear line between an abstraction being the point, the nitpicking of “shall” as a dodge, a way to avoid letting people into the argument being seen by the court, and the breathless, sometimes delirious love of words as a way to let people in, to truly see them, instead of shutting them out, as the play does,” in my review for Columbus Underground.
  • Infinite Life by Annie Baker, directed by James Macdonald (Atlantic Theatre, NYC) – I can’t think of a contemporary writer who burrows into the most banal – and simultaneously most intimate – spaces of modern life with more agility and a sharper knife than Annie Baker. This look at seven women in a spa/health retreat that’s not explicitly described is a master class in interweaving perspectives; the way we talk with the knob turned all the way up until it seems strange. Anne and I talked about this all the way down 8th Avenue to the Vanguard (see this year’s live music list), and I’m still turning it over in my head, trying to make sense of it in the best way.
Laurie Carter Rose, Arriah Ratanapan, Noelle Anderson, and Shanelle Marie, POTUS, photo by Terry Gilliam
  • Merrily We Roll Along by Stephen Sondheim and George Furth, directed by Maria Friedman (Hudson Theatre, NYC) – Everything you’ve heard about this is true. Easily the strongest, most fully realized version of this underdog of the Sondheim canon, directed with a sure hand and razor-sharp timing by Maria Friedman, who uses her storied history with Sondheim and her internalizing of those rhythms to make everything breathe and, crucially, peels back a little more of the onion on Franklin Shepherd (a stunning Jonathan Groff) to show the people pleaser quality at the heart of all that grasping – the first time I really believed that line, “I’ve only made one mistake in my life but I’ve made it over and over again: saying ‘Yes’ when I meant ‘No.’” Daniel Radcliffe kills me as the righteous purist Charley Kringus, and Lindsay Mendez, new to me, gives a more fleshed-out version of Mary Flynn, taking her out of the Dorothy Parker caricature while still nailing those lines than I’d previously seen.
  • Which Way to the Stage? by Ana Nogueira, directed by Edward Carignan (Short North Stage) – I didn’t realize how much I’d missed Short North Stage’s taste in non-musical plays until this breath of fresh air reminded me. It felt really good being back in the Green Room, laughing and thinking. In Columbus Underground, I said, “[It] treats these heavier themes with the gravity they need – how does this thing you love change, and what happens when it doesn’t? How do we look to other people? – but they never get in the way of the laughs. It’s a delightful comedy with a sniper-targeted sense of its audience.”
  • Ghost Quartet by Dave Malloy, directed by Drew Eberly (Available Light) – The other thing that stood out to me as the best thing I saw all year, a song cycle with theater running through its veins, that denied my easy understanding as much as it made me love it. For Columbus Underground, I said, “Malloy and the cast, under Eberly’s sure hand, dig into a purer emotional landscape, the way a song feels as it moves through you, and the late nights of wanting to one-up one another because you love the people you’re with so much; while still having all the insecurities and viciousness that makes us human.”
  • Good Grief by Ngozi Anyanwu, directed by Shanelle Marie and Alan Tyson (Contemporary Theatre of Ohio) – Shanelle Marie and Alan Tyson collaborated on directing this lovely meditation on loss, friendship, and growing up by Ngozi Anyanwu, a jewel in a very strong season from The Contemporary Theatre of Ohio. For Columbus Underground, I said, “The ability, starting in Anyanwu’s text and emphasized by Marie and Tyson’s direction, not to demonize anyone, to find drama without making anyone a villain, showing us people who are all doing their best is a rare gift and a pleasure I don’t get often enough in any medium.”
Amy Rittberger in the foreground, Katie Giffin and Jo Michelle Shafer in background on the bar, Ghost Quartet, photo by Kyle Long
Categories
Best Of live music

Best of 2022: Live Music

A Weirdo From Memphis, Railgarten, Memphis

This was the year of irrational exuberance. In a better light, this year was full of excellent examples of not skipping shows. I saw about 160 shows across 11 cities in two countries at around 70 venues. Next year I’m looking to travel more carefully and pay some of this exuberance off instead of racking it up, get back down to my usual ~100 range; a little too often, I found myself burned out and exhausted, not quite enjoying every thing as much as usual.

But that exuberance did pay off more often than not. I saw some amazing shit this year, of all genres. Big touring acts I didn’t think I’d ever see, acts I had tickets for in early 2020 who finally go to play, and joyous, joyous crowds everywhere. And this year, I had a couple festival sets that might have been the best shows I saw all year – Compulsive Gamblers at Gonerfest, Scrunchies at Dirtnap – so I added blurbs on my favorite sets, grouped by festival. The sets on here, every damn one of them, made the hassle of being there as close to worth it as possible. Most of the time, they made it worth slogging through rain and snow, two airports, surly bartenders, bullshit security theater, and salved whatever slight wounds with an hour or more of transcendence, but the kind of transcendence that makes me closer with the other people there. That makes me love the world a little more.

Honk Wail and Moan at Dick’s Den

Similarly to my theatre recap, these highlights are only a small chunk of the story. I’m overjoyed to see most of the venues I love made it through to the other side of 2020-2021 emboldened and still swinging. While Dick’s Den only appears once on the list, it’s where I saw the most music – by my count, 29 shows – and had the best time overall. It takes its place in the firmament of Columbus culture, not just music, seriously but not too seriously. It’s still where you’re likely to see new projects get formed and old friendships renewed and hear some of the best music in the world.

Natalie’s consolidation to Grandview makes an amazing amount of sense; I’ll miss that little listening room that’s marginally closer to my house, but I think optimizing the two areas of the venue for different listening experiences is great, and they cast the widest net of booking in town, with Charlie Jackson’s legendary ear supplemented by bookers like Alec Wightman’s Zeppelin Productions and Bruce Nutt’s Crazy Mama’s booking – as I write these very words, I’m thinking about having dinner to the dulcet tones of the Colin Lazarski organ trio tonight, already have tickets to a Zeppelin booking in 2023, and am fondly remembering talking about Bruce Nutt and Natalie’s with a bass player in Memphis a few years ago.

From left, Matt Benz, Pete English, and Bob Starker of the Sovines, Natalie’s Grandview

The Ace of Cups reinvention is still tweaking the balance of dance parties and various genres of music, but the bones of the venue – most of the great bartenders are still involved, the sound has improved slightly, the patio’s been refurbished in subtle but very good ways – and it feels (from the outside) healthier than it’s been in a while. A side effect of the new ownership and promoters is a few touring bands who often played Ace out of loyalty to Aleks or Marcy are now in rooms that are a little better sized for their actual Columbus draw, the Sweet Knives show at Bourbon Street and Jon Spencer and the Hitmakers at Rumba were more exciting in mostly full rooms than the last (also great) half-full crowds they played to at Ace. More exciting shows for bands with slightly smaller draws and freeing Ace up for the 300ish people shows it does better than anywhere else in town.

Rumba, in general, upped its quotient of rock and roll while still making time for the Americana and singer-songwriters it has always served better than any other standing room in town. Bourbon Street is finding its own equilibrium, and I had more great, leaving-later-than-I-planned nights there than in the last five years, which makes my heart sing about the bar that used to be my second living room. These are in chronological order and in Columbus unless otherwise stated. All photographs have only me to blame.

Jason Isbell, Amanda Shires, and Denny deBorja from the 400 Unit, Palace Theater
  • Rebirth Brass Band with Largemouth Brass Band (Rumba Cafe) – This steaming hot show on a bitter January night also marked my return to social life after my second bout with COVID. Largemouth Brass Band continues to impress me with every outing, playing songs off their very fine 2021 record with wit and charm. And Rebirth Brass Band reminded all of us why they’re one of the finest American institutions, cross-cutting Hank Williams’ “Jambalaya” with James Brown’s “Talkin’ Loud and Saying Nothing,” Fats Domino with Bobby Womack’s “It’s All Over Now,” in a righteous dance party that’s hard to rival.
  • Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit with Adia Victoria (Palace Theater) – Delayed a few weeks because of the Omicron surge; this has a special place in my heart because it was the last show Anne and I saw in town with our dear friends Heather and Adam before they moved to New York. But beyond that, the music was stunning – Adia Victoria turned the stunning, sparse, blues-soaked narratives from her A Southern Gothic record into smoldering live incantations, spinning them like a prism to the light of the audience. And I finally got to see Isbell do songs from Reunions, maybe his best record yet (I’m going to get tired of saying that eventually), and his covers record paying tribute to the state he spent so much time in, Georgia Blue, and continued to show his powers as a bandleader, and the stunning power and subtlety of the 400 Unit, as good a band as is working today. From the opener, “What Have I Done To Help,” those songs served as a balm and a reminder to be less hermetic, to engage, and to try. A favorite moment: doing one of my favorite songs from Reunions, “Only Children,” an elegy to a similarly talented friend who never quite broke through, with a nuanced delivery, conversational, weaving guitars providing texture underneath and then, after he delivers that heartbreaking bridge “‘Heaven’s wasted on the dead,’ that’s what your Mama said, as the hearse was idling in the parking lot. She said you thought the world of me, and you were glad to see they finally let me be an astronaut,” and a rocket launch of a guitar solo opens up the world of the song and underscores that pain of a dream denied and the beauty of that time you have with those people. And there were probably a dozen of those moments in this front-to-back stellar concert.
  • Bettye Lavette (Thirty One West) – One of the quintessential American voices, R&B royalty, taking us all to church and the juke-joint at the same time in a fantastic old ballroom. More than worth the 45 minutes out to Newark. With a crack band, Lavette traversed a set heavy on her great tribute to other songs made famous by women, Blackbirds (my favorite being an audacious, perfect “Drinking Again”), her gorgeously raunchy mission statement “Take Me As I Am,” a slow, acid pour of John Prine’s “Souvenirs,” and so much more.
Chad Taylor and Jaimie Branch of Fly or Die, Wexner Center
  • Lilly Hiatt (Rumba Cafe) – I’d been waiting for this since it was originally on the books in March of 2020, so I was ecstatic when this third reschedule finally happened – and in the meantime, Hiatt had put out two excellent records. She and her four-piece band hit my favorite moments off the new ones: a tribute to her sister, “Rae,” with a loose-limbed propulsive swing, the hard-won anthem “Walking Proof,” and the mournful chime of “Candy Lunch,” making the songs shine and live and emphasizing what a stellar bandleader she’s grown into since she came on my radar. A crash course in the power and necessity of songs.
  • Jaimie Branch’s Fly or Die (Wexner Center for the Arts) – One of my favorite interviews I’ve ever done and an artist I’ve spoken about rapturously, drawn in by the first few notes of the first Fly or Die record, turned to a full-on drooling fan with the first time I saw her live at Nublu during Winter Jazzfest, and mind was blown, all expectations exceeded bt this fiery show. This rose into the ranks of the best things I’ve ever seen at the Wexner Center – the venue that turned me onto so much of the music I love so much. And what a person we lost, following up that conversation with a big, sweaty hug after the set and a boisterous “What’s up, Rick?” when I saw her a little later.
  • Garbage Greek with The Harlequins and Shark (Rumba Cafe) – I liked Garbage Greek since I first heard them, but they didn’t move out of the shadow of Lee Mason and Patrick Koch’s earlier band Comrade Question until the first time Anne and I saw the three-piece – with powerful drummer Jason Winner’s pummeling swing highlighted – as shows started to resume last year and they’ve grown into my favorite new band. This record release show for their breakthrough record Quality Garbage not only knocked me against a wall, but it also turned me onto two of my favorite new bands, doom-surf-garage three-piece Shark and the infectious hooks and sharp edges of Cincinnati’s Harlequins.
  • Johnny Rebel Memorial Show (Natalie’s Grandview) – It depresses me that I can’t include any Th’ Flyin’ Saucers on my parting gifts playlists because they’re not on the streaming service I use – and a reminder of the peril of streaming in general, especially as it makes us think the plethora of options available is all that’s available. Because of that band, and singer-guitarist Johnny Rebel (Sean Groves), a fellow West Sider, always with a kind word and some great conversation, and one of the most ferocious bandleaders I was ever lucky enough to see. This tribute show, put together by his (and my) friends Jeff Eaton and Jeff Passifume, brought together his friends, inspirations, and those influenced by him in the scene, including my pals The Sovines (playing these songs together for the first time since Twangfest six or so years ago), local blues legend Terry Davidson, an ad hoc band with a bunch of old Flyin’ Saucers and Passifume that blew my hair back, and a lot of hugs and great stories. A reminder of the beauty of community in this town and that the best memorial always turns into a dance party.
Junius Paul and Makaya McCraven, Mershon Auditorium, Wexner Center for the Arts
  • Makaya McCraven (Wexner Center for the Arts) – McCraven’s records taking the time-honored postmodern practice of cutting up improvisations to form compositions have a sense of repetition that recalls modern composition and hip-hop/dance club music, but my favorite aspects come with the love he has for the improvisation as improvisation and the way the final version of the piece – often created in the studio – continues to evolve live with other players. This titanic performance, laying the groundwork in my mind for In These Times, with powerful playing by Greg Ward’s alto, especially everyone working as one mind, transported me.
  • Anais Mitchell (Brooklyn Made, NYC) – One of my favorite songwriters for years – a set of hers at Rumba Cafe about a decade ago wasn’t the first time I saw her, but still stands out in blazing memory. And I love Hadestown as much as anyone – look at my theatre list from last year and I think my records list from 2010 – but I’ve been a fan since hearing “Cosmic American” from an MP3 blog and immediately saying, “I need to hear more of this voice.” Promoting her stellar eponymous record – I think “Felix Song (On Your Way)” is my most played song of the year, with “Bright Star” and “Brooklyn Bridge” right behind – with a tight four-piece band, back in her old stomping grounds since relocating to her home town in Vermont, this was a reminder of everything I love about a songwriter, that shifting sense of character and setting that’s so finely chiseled and crafted out of hearts and memory, with that voice like hearing the stars sing. Direct communication but not simple.
  • Kris Davis Quintet (Village Vanguard, NYC) – Among my favorite piano players, and a core part of how much I loved the last Winter Jazzfest with her stellar closing set of Diatom Ribbons, so it felt appropriate seeing her at my first trip back to the Vanguard. She assembled a killer band, with a crunching, subtle rhythm section of Terri Lyne Carrington on drums and Trevor Dunn on bass, Val Jeanty on turntables and electronics, and Julian Lage on guitar, and – appropriate to the hallowed room – grappled with the history of the music, with mesmerizing takes on Eric Dolphy’s tribute to Monk, “Hat and Beard,” Roland Shannon Jackson’s “Alice in the Congo,” and a dazzling read of Geri Allen’s “A Dancer” along with her own stellar compositions.
  • James McMurtry (Skully’s, NYC) – A case study of someone who gets better and better, McMurtry came through touring his magical last record, Horses and the Hounds, for the first show I’d been lucky enough to link up with in about 10 years, and the mix of storytelling and dancehall joy was just right. A tight four-piece band adding color and muscle, highlighting his weathered voice on classics and newer material like the beauty-of-remembering, tumbling narrative “Canola Fields” and the potent anthem of acceptance in the face of a world you know too well, “If It Don’t Bleed,” to an audience that felt brought together by those stories.
Don Was All-Star Revue, Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit
  • Roland Johnson (Whiskey Ring, St Louis) – There was scarcely a moment I didn’t love about my return to St Louis, culminating in John Wendland’s wedding to Jenny Heim. For the bachelor party, organized and ring-led by Wendland’s best friend and fellow DJ and music writer Roy Kasten, Kasten outdid himself by bringing one of the last of the great St Louis soul singers, Roland Johnson, to the back patio of one of my favorite bars of all time, the Whiskey Ring. A combination of beautiful originals and classic covers like “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” and “Take Me to the River,” Johnson’s supple voice took us to church and to the stars. The after-party at the Royale with DJ Landy Dandy was also spectacular – see her if she’s spinning when you’re in the STL – but that first brush was hard to beat.
  • Don Was All-Star Revue with Alejandro Escovedo (Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit) – I feel confident that if the Bikini Kill concert we were in Detroit for the weekend of Anne’s birthday hadn’t been postponed again, I feel confident it would have made this list. As it stands, I was extra glad I made the case for going out a day early for DIA’s Festival of Colors. Finally getting to see one of Detroit native Don Was’s all-star groups paying tribute to Michigan rock and roll innovator Iggy Pop, with members of Was (Not Was), Detroit Cobras, Dirtbombs, and so many others, was the best kind of this sort of tribute show. Alejandro Escovedo’s warm opening act – and appearance at the finale of the tribute trading verses on “I Wanna Be Your Dog” with Mick Collins – was the icing on the cake.
  • Death Valley Girls with LA Witch (Natalie’s Grandview) – Natalie’s has long had some rough and rowdy rock and roll as part of their musical diet, but it became a little more prominent in 2022, and my favorite example was this stellar double bill with two bands I’ve liked playing at the top of their games. The organ-drenched swing of Death Valley Girls complimented and contrasted the barbed-wire shoegaze power trio of LA Witch in a room that made both of them sound exactly as good as I’ve always thought they could.
Damon Locks’ Black Monument Ensemble, Lincoln Theater
  • Reckless Ops (Vanderelli Room)/Dirty Dozen Brass Band (Scioto Mile)/Sweet Knives (Cafe Bourbon Street)/Honk Wail and Moan (Dick’s Den) – These “a night in the life of” entries used to be a staple of these year-end lists but I think I’ve gotten away from them. This year granted me such a prime example I couldn’t not talk about it. As Anne was out for her usual girls’ weekend, and the couple of compatriots I’d roped in for part of this had to bail, I found myself with no one else’s schedule to account for and a determination to make as much of the plethora of good options as I possibly good. Starting with Franklinton Friday, what’s become one of my favorite traditions in town – and take advantage of it soon because it’ll go the way of Gallery Hop before we know it – I caught my pal Billy Heingartner’s new band, where he plays drums with longtime collaborator, and one of my favorite songwriters in town, Bill Wagner, Reckless Ops. Duane Hart’s thick, hardcore-tinged bass lines and Heingartner’s drums gave a crunch and a stoner-rock menace to some of Wagner’s finest and most delicate songs (I think a few were older Bygones songs, some were new, but I wouldn’t swear to it). From there, I walked across the bridge to see another installment in the best Rhythm on the River lineup in recent memory (though it felt strangled by the lack of a beer vendor, limited food trucks), a rousing set by American institution Dirty Dozen Brass Band. I headed to my old stomping grounds, Cafe Bourbon Street, for a few great songs by the D-Rays who have evolved into a more nuanced rock band over the years, and then a delightful reunion of old friends to watch the best Sweet Knives set I’ve ever seen, from a band I’ve never seen be less than great. The addition of a keyboard player and backing singer added additional weight and texture to some of Alicja Trout’s finest songs without blunting their spiky impact. I wanted to see my favorite Columbus band, Dana, but I had a limited amount of energy and wanted to get to Dick’s for Honk Wail and Moan. HWM is one of my favorite institutions; a band I saw (I think at the Jazz and Rib Fest, but it could’ve been something else outside) around the same time I first saw Scrawl, Haynes Boys, and TJSA, but so together and so different from what I was expecting I didn’t think they were local at first. I was lucky to catch the second of three sets, going through a series of great Brian Casey (RIP) compositions, with discursive and enlightening introductions by Steve Perakis and a series of guest stars, including singer Michelle Ishida. It was a beautiful tribute to one of our great composers and a tribute to the friendships that feed the soil of the music I love so much here.
  • Damon Locks and the Black Monument Ensemble (Wexner Center/CAPA) – Damon Locks’ Black Monument Ensemble ties together dance, hard funk, free jazz, and contemporary gospel harmonies into a magical tribute to being alive, even when it’s complicated; to trying, even when it’s fucked up. A powerful band that takes on today with all its challenges, all its large and small devastations.
The Comet is Coming, Bowery Ballroom, NYC
  • The Comet is Coming (Bowery Ballroom, NYC) – I’d already been lucky enough to see this band a few years ago – but after a blistering set by Shabaka Hutchings’ other bands, Sons of Kemet, I wasn’t going to miss this on our second trip to NYC in 2022. And it exceeded expectations by a mile – a surging dance party in Bowery Ballroom, after a terrific meal with good friends Heather and Adam and a play that also made my year-end list, Anne and I danced till we were sore and trekked up to East Village standby 2A to talk about it for another two hours (in the eye of the crushing hurricane of young people).
  • Los Carnash (Sonido Necrotico, Mexico City) – On a great Mexico City trip, we saw some wonderful music that just happened to appear – a dulcimer-led trio in La Opera, a mariachi band singing Dean Martin on the way back from Teotihuacan, a great New Orleans trad jazz group at Zinco Jazz Club – but the one thing we sought out, a garage-punk evening led by Sonido Necrotico, was an indelible memory. We couldn’t even get in the performance space. Los Carnash (90% sure, but based on the process of deduction) delivered a catchy, crunching set that shook Anne and me watching downstairs from the bar. A reminder of the power of youthful rock and roll.
  • Jon Langford and the Bright Shiners (Hogan House) – I saw a few other very good things after this (including running into the gracious Hogan House hosts PJ and Abbie twice more in the same week), but this new project from Jon Langford had such a sense of mischief and communal joy, stringing together songs from a variety of Langford’s projects from the Mekons (a magical, wistful “The Last Dance” and an appropriately righteous “Memphis, Egypt, Etc Etc”) to brand new songs in lockdown, and a couple perfectly chosen covers from Grant McLennan, The Kinks, and Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros. There was a sense of nostalgia – that to live is to miss people, but also a deep sense of being grateful and making each moment matter.
Nubya Garcia, Mill and Mine, Big Ears Festival, Knoxville
  • Big Ears Festival (Knoxville)
    • Tift Merritt with Eric Heywood – A singer-songwriter who’s given me as many songs I’ve loved in the last twenty years as literally anyone with her partner who redefined how I thought about the pedal steel guitar, doing a duo set in the most intimate venue of Big Ears, drinking a whiskey I’ve never seen before (thank you, bartenders, at Jig and Reel) and weeping, it was so beautiful.
    • Sons of Kemet – The fact that I could walk from that set above, across a set of railroad tracks, and go straight into this set, which stands among the best dance parties I’ve ever been to, justifies my getting to Big Ears every year I can make the money and time work out.
    • Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah – Finally got to see someone I’ve wanted to for a while, and chief aTunde more than delivered. A set that made me move and love the world and also reconsider a lot of long-standing preconceptions about the audience-performer dynamic.
    • Nubya Garcia – Someone else whose records I’ve loved for a while and is on the cusp of breaking through to a larger audience, playing a set with just a lean four-piece band, organ, bass, drums, and the purest saxophone tone I’ve heard in a very long time.
    • Andrew Cyrille and Marc Ribot – The first meeting of two of the instrumentalists who helped form the way I think about their respective instruments took on the whole of American music and sent me into the night with stars in my eyes.
Scrunchies, High Noon Saloon, Dirtnap Festival, Madison
  • Dirtnap Record Anniversary (Madison)
    • Scrunchies – If this set had been a standalone show, it would have been one of the two or three best rock and roll sets I saw all year. This band came more into their own with this year’s sophomore record Feral Beach, and live, they’re a force to be reckoned with and a powerful reminder of how much Dirtnap Records is still giving us.. If they come to your town, do not miss.
    • Fox Face – I’d been waiting to see this Milwaukee band since falling in love with their record End of Man in 2021, and they exceeded those sky-high expectations live.
    • Sugar Stems – I’ve been proselytizing for Sugar Stems’ blend of ’60s girl group and vintage punk since they blew me away at Gonerfest several years ago, and I had to buy everything. Hearing these songs again in this reunion set felt like the last call on the best Saturday night of your life, even though it was early afternoon.
    • Bad Sports – I love anything Orville Neeley, and this Bad Spots set was a perfect example, a quintessential example of what I’m looking for in a rock band.
    • River City Tanlines – Probably my favorite band from one of my favorite songwriters, Alicja Trout; this power trio left a pile of smoldering rubble in their wake. It had been too. goddamn. long.
Dana, Nelsonville Music Festival
  • Nelsonville Music Festival (Nelsonville)
    • SG Goodman – One of my favorite newish singer-songwriters, I was already enamored with her 2022 album Teeth Marks, and seeing her live with a perfect four-piece band reaffirmed everything I love about that genre and the specificity of these songs, making every detail ring out into the woods.
    • Tre Burt – With my recently-jacked-up ankle and wrist, I only made my way down into the semi-hidden wooded part of the new NMF site once, but I picked the right set. Tre Burt’s stunning solo set came the closest of anything I saw all weekend to make the hassles and first-year growing pains of the new site into conjuring the magic so many of my friends who love the festival so much talk about.
    • Dana – My favorite Columbus band proving they can own a big outdoor stage just as readily as a late-night club; their songs have the heft and power to translate.
Willie Phoenix, Hot Times Festival
  • Hot Times Festival
    • Willie Phoenix – I was already blown away by Damon Locks before Anne and I walked down to see the towering figure of Columbus guitar rock, dominating easily the best of the longer-running outdoor festivals. Still in great voice, still an unmistakable guitar tone.
    • The Four Mints – Columbus R&B loyalty with a fuller band behind them than we’re usually lucky enough to get and a beautiful multigenerational crowd soaking it in. This summed up everything I love about Hot Times and much of what I love about Columbus.
South Filthy, The Lamplighter, Memphis
  • Gonerfest (Memphis)
    • Compulsive Gamblers – Similar to Scrunchies, if this had been a standalone show, it’d be one of the couple best shows I saw all year. I never thought I’d get a full band version of this early Greg Cartwright/Jack Yarber collaboration, and while I loved the stripped-down quartet version that came through the Beachland, this almost made my heart burst out of my chest. The deep, warm sadness and empathic darkness of “Two Thieves” through the swaggering, grim boogie of “Rock and Roll Nurse” made me feel like I could fly.
    • King Khan and the BOlivians – A testament to the power of the community that’s grown up around Gonerfest, King Khan was forced to go alone as BBQ was ill, so he drafted old friends Greg and Jack Oblivian for a (probably) once in a lifetime set of their mutual songs.
    • South Filthy* – Asterisked because it’s not actually part of the festival but a side day show at the Lamplighter, but I don’t think it would have happened were Walter Daniels not drafted for the Compulsive Gamblers show. A Texas/Memphis supergroup who put out a couple of my favorite filthy roots rock records kicking up sparkling dust in the back room of one of my favorite bars in the world.
    • A Weirdo From Memphis – With members of his Unapologetic crew, AWFM owned the stage, the rigging above, and the sign overlooking us with a sprawling set of big hooks, righteously angry shouts, and dense, hypnotic arrangements.
    • Sick Thoughts – A classic. If you asked me what “Goner” music sounds like, I’d point to Sick Thoughts, but this year – with their new record and this killing victory lap of a set – they hit a new level full of songs I couldn’t get out of my head, played with extra fire.
Categories
live music theatre

Stitching our Wounds with Golden Threads of Past, Future, and Self

The piece of salt given me at The Public Theatre’s production of salt.

My Friday and Saturday of this New York trip fused unseasonable physical warmth with the warmth of watching communities intersect, share, and watch out for one another. 

Hit six sets of the Winter Jazzfest Marathon Friday, trying to dip in on things that had been on my list and bands I had no experience with or expectations for. Three burned cataracts off my eyes, would not let me stay jaded or sit there with folded arms.

Hypnotic Brass Ensemble

I walked into SOB’s – the site of some of the finest R&B performances I’ve ever seen anywhere – smack into the last third of a dazzling performance by The Era, a Chicago footwork crew. The Era blended virtuosic pushing the limits of the body forms with a sense of shared experience, and empathy for their fellow dancers and their community, spoken word, clips of a documentary, and vital social commentary. Solos highlight the artist as an individual but build the greater whole.

For the last few minutes, as The Era introduced each other and took bows, their fellow Chicagoans Hypnotic Brass Ensemble took the stage, with the drummer laying down a beat and the horns – seven of whom are songs of the great ecstatic jazz artist Phil Cohran – coalescing behind them. That sense of community and love set the stage for Hypnotic Brass Ensemble’s righteous, riotous explosion of joy. The finest funk wah-guitar I’ve heard live since Skip Pitts; thick bass lines and an almost unequaled rhythm section hookup set up blow-your-hair-back horns, gang vocals, and the dance party that’s unheard of at 7:30.

Rode that enthusiasm up 6th Ave to check in on one of my favorite bands I hadn’t seen in many years – since the week of my dear friend Mike Gamble’s wedding, I think – Steven Bernstein’s Millennial Territory Orchestra. The 20th anniversary of this assemblage of downtown NYC jazzers was a tribute to refining and expanding an approach, to taking what matters to them from the past and never being afraid to fuck with it. 

Steven Bernstein and Catherine Russell sharing a look during MTO’s 20th Anniversary set

A paean to the joy of approaching standards like “St. Louis Blues” and “Careless Love” simultaneously as though they just heard them last week and taught them to one another and with all the historical knowledge of every great version that’s come before them. Just as strongly, it was another tribute (you’ll see a theme here) to their community. As he introduced every member of the band – including Catherine Russell, a vocalist for whom “special guest” isn’t even close to adequate – Bernstein had a witty story about how they came into each other’s lives and his palpable love for every person on that stage glowed even brighter than the blistering, surprising solos: “Curtis Fowlkes on trombone! I replaced Curtis in the Lounge Lizards, when he left I got that one solo;” “Peter Apfelbaum and I have been playing music since I was 11 – well, we didn’t really start making music till 12, that first year we were bullshitting;” “They told me I’d love [Matt Munisteri, electric guitarist] who played trad banjo; I said I don’t want to meet some motherfucker who plays trad banjo!”

That same sense of communal bond and simultaneous gazes on the past and the future suffused drummer Makaya McCraven’s Chicago-rooted supergroup. McCraven’s been making noise as one of our most exciting drummers who trusts improvisation enough to run it through a cut-up filter and expose it to every other tool at his disposal. I love his heavy, organic records. But I expected nothing to blow me away as much as the live set.

Makaya McCraven’s band with Marquis Hill soloings

Chicago’s always been one of the principal jazz scenes and they’re having a moment – big records out in the last year from what felt like every member of this Octet, off the top of my head: Junius Paul, Joel Ross, Greg Ward, Brandee Younger, Marquis Hill. This set helped coalesce that coming-out party, extended pieces full of tension and joy, grins exchanged between players but attacking the musical material with an enviable intensity. I texted a friend and said, “This is the kind of awesome, multi-layered groove machine I was led to believe Tortoise would sound like,” but this band doesn’t sound like anything except themselves.

Joel Ross’ machine-gun vibraphone arpeggios took a hi-hat heavy McCraven intro and built a bridge into a volcanic Hill trumpet piece, then subsumed by the whole horn front line at once. The entire band gathered around Brandee Younger as her harp washed over all of us. Ward and the tenor player (I apologize, he was spectacular, I just can’t read my damn handwriting – someone post in the comments so I can correct?) bubbling up uncanny harmonies between their horns. Every few bars brought a wholly surprising and perfectly right turn after turn. Friends and peers who built this language together, like the Yehuda Amichai poem, that baked in the same sun and froze in the same cold, lighting a path straight to the future.

Saturday, both plays I saw were excellent but salt stuck with me and resonating in time with everything else of these two days. Written by Selina Thompson and performed brilliantly by Rochelle Rose with razor-sharp direction from Dawn Walton, salt traces a journey into Thompson’s family history as an adopted black woman grown up in Birmingham, England.

Crowd at Drom for Secret Planet

That journey back to Jamaica and to Ghana excavates old wounds and finds new wellsprings of joy. Ugly slights and horrific mistreatment but also putting her story in the world’s context at large. Better than any performance I think I’ve ever seen, salt understands the crushing repetition of oppression, the way the boring and the horrific take each other as eager dance partners. And, though most of 2019’s year-end list for me dealt with why do we live and what we owe each other, nothing I’ve ever seen has done it better than Thompson, Rose, and Walton do it here. I walked out into the sunlight a blithering idiot (okay, more of).

Later that night, one of my favorite APAP adjacent showcases, Secret Planet, took over one of my favorite clubs, Drom, for the best version of it I’ve ever seen. Cochemea – who I knew best from his sideman duties with Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings – kicked us into a frenzy with instrumental soul, his variety of reeds backed by a band almost entirely composed of percussionists. Seven or eight people building riffs into surging tidal waves and delighting in the sense of play with one another.

Cochemea

That thread got picked up and danced with by Sunny Jain’s (from Red Baraat) new band Wild Wild East, merging featuring Jain at a trap drum kit instead of his usual dhol, fusing spaghetti western tunes, Indian pop, and thick ‘70s psychedelia with a band of sax, guitar, sousaphone, and dueling man-woman vocals. A tribute to exploration and migration wrapped up in a wild party.

Sunny Jain’s Wild Wild East

Alba and the Mighty Lions turned up the psychedelic salsa elements for giant, catchy songs in a rhythmically intense, barbed, rocking package. I didn’t stick around for the whole set only because I realized not eating in 7 hours and running on dancing and whiskey would go badly but I’d watch them again and again.

Alba and the Mighty Lions

Another full day I’m walking into, to badly paraphrase the Andrew Hudgins poem, “As if I’ll only – fat chance – live it once.”

Categories
live music

Two Sides of the Big Band: Ryan Truesdell’s Music of Bob Brookmeyer and Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society

Ryan Truesdell and band, Jazz Standard
Ryan Truesdell conducting The Music of Bob Brookmeyer

Curation is an act of love, when you’re doing it right. Trombonist John Mosca, longtime comrade of Brookmeyer said, while introducing “Ding Dong Ding,” which he played with the Mel Lewis band during its triumphant late ‘70s run, said “There’s no better curator or champion for Bob’s [Brookmeyer] music than Ryan [Truesdell].” 

Truesdell and his crack 18-piece band proved that again and again in their final set of a two-night run at Manhattan’s Jazz Standard on a blustery January night, a belated 80th birthday party for Brookmeyer, the great composer, arranger, and player who changed the shape of jazz, especially large group jazz, since the ‘60s. As much as jazz is the first American art form, the big band feels like a peculiarly American animal.

The music is a masterful evocation of what a big band could be at its heights, fresh and alive, and warm. Rippling shocks of chromatic heat revealed sublime beauty, more than once I felt I was peering into a blast furnace full of precious stones. But that visceral, massed sound always parted for the primacy of some of the sweetest melody you’ll ever hear – Scott Robinson’s river-of-life bass clarinet on “Django’s Castle; ” Drew Gress’ funky flamenco bass runs on “Verticals; ” John Mosca and Riley Muhlekar’s dance-battle brass on “The Fan Club; ” Gary Versace’s lilting piano, insistent on the intro and light as a lullaby at the end of “Ding Dong Ding.”

Truesdell wove a thread through pieces of Brookmeyer’s dating back to the Gerry Mulligan Concert Band until not long before he passed away. He gave us enough of that ranging sound world to feel like we got it. And, as a renowned arranger himself, he highlighted Bob’s ability to let people shine in his own compositions and to bring out the key facets in others. I’m a Cole Porter freak who grew up with a grandmother who idolized Sarah Vaughan. It’s no exaggeration to say I’ve heard 100 versions of “Love For Sale” – that might be conservative. The version of “Love For Sale” they closed with, with the exquisite Wendy Giles on vocals – I missed Brookmeyer’s late Standards record, to my chagrin – made me feel like I was hearing it with fresh ears. I won’t say I was crying but I wouldn’t deny it under oath.

Beyond the musical mix, Truesdell nailed the mix of personalities in the instrumental blend, their connections to each other, and Bob as a person.  He let the players introduce songs with rambling, hilarious personal anecdotes, and cultivates an atmosphere that feels as though we’re lucky enough to be at a real birthday party, even including Brookmeyer’s widow. May we all be so lucky to have people who love us as much as the love in that Wednesday room.

Darcy James Argue and (part of) band
Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society

Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society shone a bright light on another angle of the promise and beauty of the big band the next night at Jazz Gallery. I’m an unabashed stan for Argue’s work, discovering him through his blog and responding to Infernal Machines, seeing two premieres at BAM and hitting my year–end list many times. Appropriate for the week of APAP, he and his co-conspirators ran us through a whiplash-dazzling deep dive into the band’s rich catalog.

The band tore into this material with an uncommon passion and fire, fused to the wisdom of players who know the tunes in at a cellular level and the camaraderie that doesn’t come easy. Early gems like “Dymaxion,” brand new pieces including “Ebonite” commissioned by his hometown Vancouver Jazz Festival, “The Hidden Hand” from his epic Real Enemies, every pitch sailed over the fences.

Argue’s debt to Ellington paid off with tailored, perfect solos rising out of the landscapes he sculpted as though they couldn’t come from anywhere else. Highlights in that regard came in Carl Maraghi’s rippling bari work on “Dymaxion,” and Alexa Tarantino’s tough and supple soprano on “Ebonite.”

The highlight for me came with the most direct Ellington homage – Argue’s response to “Diminuendo in Blue,” “Tensile Curves.” This was my second journey through that piece, riddled with astonishing playing with particular attention to Ingrid Jensen and Matt Holman’s trumpets, Sam Sadigursky’s clarinet, and Sebastian Noelle’s guitar. It’s the rare tribute with heavy conceptual underpinning, where knowing the technical aspects deepen your appreciation without being required and the even rarer 40-minute composition that never flags or lets your attention drift.

Similar to the Brookmeyer (one of Argue’s teachers), the stage overflowed with love and respect for the players as people. My time following that band has turned me onto as many great players as those Ellington and Basie records I grew up with – Nadje Noordhuis, Jacob Garchik, Ryan Keberle, Sam Sadigursky, people whose other work I’ve sought and loved. These two shows got this trip off to the righteous start it needed, plugging back into the battery after some dark months.

Categories
Best Of visual art

Best of 2018 – Visual Art

“Attention is the beginning of devotion.”
-Mary Oliver

Delacroix, Metropolitan Museum of Art

This has been a year of incredible highs and incredible lows, the latter all self-inflicted. Wearing myself so far down I was susceptible to a week in the hospital with pneumonia. To spraining an ankle so hard I was in a boot for two weeks. But one thing that always helps center me, that lights and maintains the fire called wanting to go on, is attention. And no cultural activity centers me more, nothing puts me in my place, nothing bows the strings in my soul like trying to focus on visual art.

And I will say this in all three posts but the best macro-gratitude exercise I undertake every year is keeping track of what I see/listen to (I need to be better about tracking what I read) and going over it at the end of the year. I took in around 75 exhibits this year and narrowing it down to 20 was hard. I am, always, very, very lucky.

Anyone else sparked by this or who bothers to read these, I appreciate you . Drop me a line, let’s talk about what we both saw or what I’m an idiot for leaving off. Everything here is in Columbus and any photo is taken by me unless stated otherwise.

Mickalene Thomas, Afro Goddess Looking Forward, 2015, Courtesy of the artist via the Wexner Center, Copyright Mickalene Thomas / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

1. Mickalene Thomas, I Can’t See You Without Me (Wexner Center for the Arts) – I can’t think of an artist who better epitomizes taking all of art history and synthesizing it into a voice utterly, unmistakably hers, than Mickalene Thomas. The bounty of riches presented with I Can’t See You Without Me was like tapping into a deep vein and realizing it’s full of stars: completely personal, in touch with the world (and worlds behind the world) and full of monumental, magic beauty. Everything I love in art was in this show and while I visited it five or six times, I regret not seeing it seven or eight more.

David Wojnarowicz, Whitney Museum of Art

2. David Wojnarowicz, History Keeps Me Awake at Night (Whitney Museum of Art, NYC) – Dispatches from one era when the world was on fire still shone brightly in this dazzling retrospective of one of American art’s foremost poets of ecstasy and rage.

3. Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirrors (Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland) – I still remember the first time I saw one of Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms, at my first Whitney Biennial. It was an eye-opening reminder of the power of repetition to unlock a world and a potent mix of serenity and discord. I came to love the permutations of her varied work over time, most prominently in a stuffed, ranging retrospective at the Whitney. but this hyper-focused touring show was a concentrated dose of the mix of sensations that first drew me in.

4. Kerry James Marshall, Works on Paper (Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland) – An epic-scaled domestic scene in panels fragmenting it like a comic strip and also recalling large Renaissance triptychs, was surrounded by other drawings in this tight, sharp show of an artist who only gets better.

5. Various Artists, Trigger: Gender as a Tool and Weapon (New Museum, NYC) – This ferocious trip through depictions of gender ended a January New York trip on a head-spinning succession of high notes, including Ulrike Muller’s jagged abstractions, a dazzling Mickalene Thomas video collage. This summed up everything I love about the New Museum when it’s clicking, work within the last 10 years – without cheaply valorizing youth – that summed up and exploded 40 years of the institution. A good sign for the future of the Wexner Center as the curator of this spectactular exhibit is the new director to succeed Sherri Geldin as director.

6. Hilma af Klint, Paintings for the Future (Guggenheim, NYC) – This hypnotic, transfixing, spiritual show cemented another contender for an originator of abstraction and opened my eyes to a voice I knew almost nothing about. A paean to the magic of drilling down into oneself with specific instructions not to show most of her work until 20 years after her death, working on instructions from spirits she communed with through a seance group. You couldn’t write af Klint’s story in a way that seemed believable but the art was as accessible as layered and elusive.

A Color Removed, SPACES Gallery

7. Michael Rakowitz with Amber N. Ford, M. Carmen Lane, RA Washington, and Amanda King with Shooting Without Bullets Youth Photographers; A Color Removed (SPACES Gallery, Cleveland) – Rakowitz in collaboration with a variety of local artists created an assemblage of the color orange, underlining the irony of trying to blame the deaths of children on the warning color or lack thereof. And it was one of the most devastating things I’ve ever seen in my life. A quiet temple to absence, loss, and rage.

8. Mary Corse, A Survey in Light (Whitney Museum, NYC) – I walked into the Whitney that sweltering July day knowing I loved Wojnarowicz, steeped in him since I was a teenager. I had no such knowledge or preconceptions of Corse and her deceptively simple canvases pulled my breath right out of my body. Working with the most fundamental element not just of painting but of sight – light – she made me look at it in a different way that recalled the meditative work of so many earlier artists but was still like nothing I’d seen.

9. Eugene Delacroix, Delacroix (Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC) – This presentation of one of the old masters I knew the least about was refreshing in a way art of that vintage doesn’t usually affect me. The breadth of his literary influences and the wide range of stylistic techniques were dazzling; a self-portrait casting himself as the main character in Scott’s Bride of Lammermoor led me to dub him the creator of the cosplay selfie. And it was not just the Musee de Nancy frame that led me to say, and my companions to repeat the rest of the weekend, “Delacroix is lit.”

9. Charles White, A Retrospective (Museum of Modern Art, NYC) – Another artist I wasn’t as familiar with as I should have been, a 20th-century American, this selection of White’s work was the perfect thing to see upon first arriving in the city. Enormous, dazzling, powerful and rich with the contradictions and terror still reverberating through the fabric of daily life. Almost impossible to take in but refusing to let me go, demanding and not letting me off the hook.

10. Various Artists, Inherent Structure (Wexner Center for the Arts) –  The Wex hit a home run with this vibrant look at the ways contemporary artists continue to suck the marrow out of traditional concerns of abstract painting while tweaking and subverting it. One of the best-arranged exhibits I saw all year, where every corner I turned revealed something else about what I’d seen and what I was about to see without pandering to the obvious. Artists I already loved like Amy Sillman illuminated a gateway toward those I knew less (Angel Otero) and those completely new to me (Channing Hansen).

11. Carolee Scheenman, Kinetic Painting (MoMA PS1, NYC) – This expansive retrospective, going back to the ’50s, was a lesson in how not to weaken in rigor, in curiosity, in feeling. Scheenman did almost everything and did it all with blinding heat and depth that continually revealed itself. Shaming and inspiring and astonishing.

12. Marlon de Azambuja and Luisa Lambri, Brutalismo-Cleveland (Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland) – Another piece in the fantastic Front triennial, this collection of local materials in an iteration of de Azambuja’s ongoing series investigating Brutalism paired with Lambri’s photographs in something that was unsettling and perfectly in keeping with its surroundings (not just the Breuer wing of the CMA but Cleveland itself).

Phyllida Barlow, Hauser and Wirth

12. Phyllida Barlow, Tilt (Hauser and Wirth, NYC) – There was no shortage of art I saw this year that grappled with the way we in more privileged vantage points have realized the world doesn’t sit on its axis as comfortably as we once thought. Very little did it with the same arresting punch as British artist Barlow. A queasy circus singing a melody in its own voice, a voice that haunts me weeks later and I want to hear more of. Seeing the nods to Brutalism in these pieces transported me to the de Azambuja earlier on the list and the way those two artists of different nationalities exhibiting in different cities and different seasons spoke to one another in my head was a tribute to trying to see as much art as possible.

13. Sarah Lucas, Au Naturel (New Museum, NYC) – There’s a recurring theme in what shook me this year: artists I damn sure should have known better. Sarah Lucas epitomizes this, storied career as a sculptor I mostly knew as a name, one of the Young British Artists, with Hirst and Emin. This intense, witty, beautifully vulgar retrospective was everything I want art to be – speaking not just truth to power but a specific, personal, idiosyncratic truth.

14. Junya Ishigami, Freeing Architecture (Cartier Foundation, Paris) – Most of my first trip to Paris was spent doing exactly what you’d expect – the Louvre, D’Orsay, Centre Pompidou, Shakespeare and Company, wandering boulevards, drinking wine, all spectacular. So I was surprised by how affecting I found this show of a visionary Japanese architect. Breathable open spaces that feel like the future; echoes of ’70s science fiction movies like Silent Running but also evocative of the flowing purity of a Basho line or the meditative canvases of Agnes Martin. I wanted to live here. Paris, sure, but also inside these models.

15. Cyprien Galliard, Nightlife (MOCA, Cleveland) – I’ve been a fan of Galliard’s since the Wex showed his photographs but I’ve never been as enchanted as by the swirling dive into the after-dark of this video installation. Rodin’s The Thinker shattered by a bombing (the version in Cleveland), a tree planted to celebrate Jesse Owens also in Cleveland, fireworks over the site of the 1936 Berlin Olympics where Owens, shuddering plant life around Los Angeles streets, all throbbing to a looped sample of the Alton Ellis classic Blackman’s Song, the original chorus of “I was born a loser” melting into the re-release of “I was born a winner.” I could have stayed there for hours

16. Martha Rosler, Irrespective (Jewish Museum, NYC) – Martha Rosler’s acerbic retrospective at the Jewish Museum was the kind of fresh air and reawakening to the atmosphere of terror around us I needed. Steeped in language and sharply aware of the limitations and obfuscations of every vocabulary, this was as immediate and accessible as a slap in the face but also layers upon layers.

17. Susan Phillipsz, A Single Voice (Tanya Bonakdar, NYC) – Phillipsz is the master of the subtle, disorienting environment and one of the finest artists at using sound in a gallery setting. An installation with film of a violin player playing a snatch of score from a Karl-Birgir Blomdahl opera, with 12 speakers bouncing the violin tones through the room and surrounded by canvases caked in salt and named after the Lachrimae. Defying description and intoxicating at the same time.

18. Jennifer Packer, Quality of Life (Sikkema Jenkins & Co, NYC) – Packer achieves a balance of the intimate and the explosive that’s unlike any work I’d ever seen. These breathtaking canvases all had an interiority that I found beguiling, coupled with potent colors and surprising juxtapositions that grabbed me by the collar and forced me in off the street.

19. Ernest Withers, A Buck and A Half A Piece (Brooks Museum, Memphis) – Everything at the Brooks Museum this trip reminded me why it’s a must-stop in Memphis, the Jaume Plensa work very nearly made this list. But that slice of Memphis photographic history on the main floor wouldn’t let me go. Withers was a master at documenting cultural life (like the photo of Rufus Thomas and Elvis Presley above), civil life (with arresting images of the civil rights movement like the SCLC conference) and day-to-day “ordinary” life the way we should always see them: as parts of the same fabric, not discrete plants grown in their own pots.

20. Various Artists, All Too Human: Bacon, Freud, and a Century of Painting Life (The Tate, London) – It’s no surprise Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud were massive to me from the moment I was first aware of them; so seeing this retrospective on their home turf in my first trip to London was amazing. But more than that, this retrospective accomplished the tricky feat of showing these names as the nucleus of a burgeoning movement without overly inflating or denigrating the lesser-known student works. It painted the kind of picture that normally I’d have to buy the catalog to come close to.

Categories
Uncategorized

01.11.18 – Variations on Themes from Lost and Found: Scenes from a Life and other works by John Bernd

How much of remembering is an act of love? That question suffuses every molecule of Variations on Themes from Lost and Found: Scenes from a Life and other works by John Bernd, the unequivocal highlight of my first day in New York this trip.

The first time I saw Ishmael Houston-Jones it was like the first time I heard Monk or Joni Mitchell; the first time I heard Amiri Baraka; the first time I saw a Rauschenberg combine. So I went into this revival presented by American Realness barely knowing anything about John Bernd, to whom tribute is being paid, and only a little more about Houston-Jones’ co-director Miguel Gutierrez. That instinct didn’t disappoint.

The cast of dancers is perfect, Toni Carlson, Talya Epstein, Alvaro Gonzalez, Charles Gowin, Madison Krekel, Johnnie Cruise Mercer, and Alex Rodabaugh. They feel like they like each other. Physical chemistry is paramount and abundant but there’s a warmth that’s much harder to capture. For a show about communion and tending to one another that sense means everything.

Sweet moments of singing syllables that boil down to “Oh, hi, heya” stretching out and sparkling like stardust (Nick Haslett beautifully reworks Bernd’s original compositions) master the supple stillness of being together many of us only strive for. There’s a gorgeous, subtle glow in the way these bodies slide through the original music; themes build, go through a chrysalis, then spark between the dancers.

Toni Carlson’s warm intensity, especially in concert with Charles Gowin, is a highlight; they ground the more abstract sequences in a heightened, best-selves version of the world we know too well.

Photo from American Realness website, by Ian Douglas

There’s a delightful slapstick edge here, most prominent in a sequence about fighting illness by “Taking control of [your] diet” making a parody of a smoothie. This shifts into a thesis statement as everyone puts their hands on the blender like a sorcerer’s talisman and chant in tones equal parts defiance and desperation words of hope like “I will not die before I do justice to my gifts.”

The use of pre-existing songs here is remarkable, with nary a cop-out crutch or easy wink for miles.

Copland’s “Hoe Down” section from Rodeo gets jubilant irreverence. This only piece from a traditional ballet gets razor-sharp use of that post-Balanchine narrative dance language but also the childlike play at Cowboys and Indians and some frankly erotic “playing at cowboys.”

Prince’s Dirty Mind grows out of the kind of hard triplet stomping Houston-Jones says is a signature of Bernd, a thudding, sensual shudder that’s a call to attention that could turn into “Walk this Way” at any moment. With this Prince song, the dance vocabulary that served as a quicksilver carrier for many moods, flowers into an electric bacchanal. Pairing off, tossing each other around, finding space for one another’s body. The highlight for me was Epstein, split off from the others, dancing in shadow back by the audience, twitching like a power-line violently ripped from its moorings; the kind of intense, erotic defiance of gravity and death it takes this much craft to look natural. I blushed and wanted to look away but I couldn’t take my eyes off her. New Order’s Age of Consent captured the bursting joy and melancholy of that song in a way I’ve never seen any movie or TV use pull off.

The coup de grace (double-entendre sting on “grace”) came with Lou Reed’s Street Hassle. Circumventing what most people gravitate toward in this song, the hustler narrative, Variations drops us right into Part C. We get strings already growing lush and Springsteen’s cameo before the sweet, keening melancholy of “I need you, baby. Oh please, baby… Please don’t slip away.”

I know how reductive this is for such an intense and complex work. But what I left with was: no energy is wasted. Bernd was an unlikely candidate for the canon but his friends made a zine 10 years after his death in tribute. 20 years after that an oversold crowd had the privilege to sit in a church built in 1799 and marvel at all the work in this recreation.

I don’t want to get all “Can I get an Amen” on you, but… May we all be so lucky to have someone love us that much. To love even one thing we made that much. To be some small part of reflecting or amplifying that love in some small way.