A Month’s Worth of Nightcrawling, Part Two

Funny how this blog started out covering live music almost exclusively, then within weeks the torrents of albums began and never stopped. Remember when everyone was saying that the album was a thing of the past? Now you can record an album with your phone, and everybody’s doing it. There’s a pile – or a virtual pile – of more than fifty of them patiently waiting their turn here. And they’ll have to wait another day because today is part two of catching up on all the shows from the past couple of weeks or so.

Lorraine Leckie is as comfortable with elegant, brooding chamber pop as she is at unhinged noir Americana rock. Her most recent show at the big room at the Rockwood last month featured the former. Then headlining Sunday Salon 26 at Zirzamin this past week, Leckie and her band the Demons were at the absolute peak of their game, slashing and burning through a mix of retro glamrock, surreal downtown NYC narratives and an unhinged version of Ontario, her sideways Canadian gothic salute to her birthplace. At the Rockwood, pianist Matt Kanelos added a nonchalant menace to several of Leckie’s collaborations with Anthony Haden-Guest (from the duo’s recent, excellent collaboration, Rudely Interrupted), especially on Bliss, a cruelly sarcastic portrait of a marriage gone irreparably wrong. At Zirzamin, guitarist Hugh Pool fired off machinegunning riffage that evoked Hendrix without being slavishly derivative or drowning out the vocals. Harmony vocalist Banjo Lisa amped up the songs’ allusive menace, blending bewitchingly with Leckie’s ever-increasingly full-throated wail.

The following Saturday night, Kanelos was at Littlefield playing in his duo project, Ghosts in the Ocean with Coney Island noir siren Carol Lipnik, who continues to move further toward the avant garde. One perceptive musician in the crowd likened their hypnotically minimalist performance to a cross between early Jane Siberry and Philip Glass, and she was right on the money, other than that Lipnik has a four-octave range and uses every inch of it. The two reinvented Leonard Cohen’s Gypsy Wife as Radiohead-inflected art-rock, then Lipnik employed a magical theremin-like vibrato on a mesmerizing version of Harry Nilsson’s Lifeline. They brought out every ounce of menace in Dylan’s Man in the Long Black Coat, turned Nick Drake’s Black Dog Blues into an even more haunting, skeletal sketch – that dog is a lethal predator – and moved through Richard Thompson’s The Great Valerio with a bell-like, funereal pulse, Lipnik going down into the sinister depths of her low register. But it was the originals – the catchy, anthemic Sonadora Dreaming, the defiantly insistent Crows and the disarmingly sarcastic Oh the Tyranny – that were the most memorable. They’re at Zirzamin after the Sunday Salon this coming June 16 at 7 PM

Pete Galub followed them, playing the album release show for his fantastic new one, Candy Tears. Galub brings world-class, dangerous guitar chops to classic powerpop, with an often frenetic, menacingly noisy edge – the Steve Wynn influence has made itself more and more clear in his music in recent years. Appropriately, he had Wynn’s guitar sparring partner Jason Victor as a guest on the album’s next-to-last track (they played the whole thing through, in order). And counterintuitively, after he and Galub had reduced the song to a toxic, molten mess of overtones and raging reverb, Victor led the band back in with gentle washes of major chords. Before that, the songs ranged from what sounded like Yo La Tengo doing XTC, Roscoe Ambel doing the Beatles, Guided by Voices doing Syd Barrett, and on a suspensefully skeletal version of the album’s gorgeous title track, Wire doing Big Star. In over an hour onstage, Galub made his notes count, choosing his spots – space is just as important in his music as the actual notes. Guest Karen Mantler played plaintive art-rock piano on the bittersweetly psychedelic 300 Days in July; Greta Gertler lent her soaring multi-octave voice to one of the later numbers. Drummer Chris Moore swung the backbeats while bassist Tom Gavin varied his attack from growly and slinky to a deep, anchoring pocket that held the center while Galub plotted where he was going to go next. Galub is at Zirzamin after the Sunday Salon on May 19 at 7.

A Month’s Worth of Nightcrawling, Part One

Don’t you just want to smack people upside the head when they say ignorant things like “There’s no good music in this city anymore?” Obviously, those people are either spending time in the wrong neighborhoods (Bushwick), or they aren’t paying attention. This past month has been amazing as far as live shows in New York are concerned. What’s the likelihood of seeing Katie Elevitch and Matt Keating back to back, for free? It happened, after Sunday Salon 23 at Zirzamin. She was the special guest to play after a characteristically lively exchange of tunes bristling with puns, double entendres and catchy hooks from the likes of Walter Ego, LJ Murphy, Lorraine Leckie, Tamara Hey and other usual suspects. Keating was a last-minute booking.

Elevitch’s music is more about setting a mood and building to a feral crescendo, or a quieter, more mystical ambience; Keating’s songs are narratives set to catchy changes that build to a similar angst-fueled intensity. While Elevitch’s music looks to soul and jazz and Keating draws on Americana for his tunes, ultimately they both reach back to punk rock for their energy. Keating is a cynic; Elevitch finds hope against hope despite crushing reality (during last year’s hurricane, a tree came crashing through the roof of her house and caught her on the head – she seems none the worse for it). Keating has a cult following across the country and in Europe; Elevitch plays the Hudson valley circuit and is well liked there.

What were they doing in Manhattan? Having fun. Elevitch played solo on acoustic guitar, stripping down a mix of new material and songs from her previous album Kindling for the Fire to their skeletons. From a sultry whisper to a full-on roar, she worked her way through pain and exasperation and emerged triumphant and sweaty from the workout. Likewise, Keating ran through a mix of slowly unwinding favorites like Lonely Blue and The Fruit You Can’t Eat as well as a handful of more soul-influenced songs from his latest album Wrong Way Home. But the highlight of the set was a LMFAO cover of Twist and Shout, done as Lou Reed would do it, Keating said. And he nailed it. It’s as good a song to parody Reed with as you could imagine: where the melody jumps around, Keating did just the opposite. It wouldn’t be fair to give away any more of the joke – when the video comes out, it’s going to go viral. Watch this space for future Elevitch shows in NYC; Keating is back at Zirzamin at 8 PM playing after the Dog Show’s equally lyrical, intense Jerome O’Brien on May 13.

The following Saturday night, Dawn Oberg played her second-ever New York show (the first one was the previous night at Desmond’s). A popular draw in her native San Francisco, she’d come to do the dives of New York. Somehow she’d found herself at the dreaded Bar East (the former Hogs and Heifers space on the upper east), playing solo on electric piano. What’s the likehood of getting what was essentially a private show from someone so entertaining? Well, it happened – only in New York, folks. Much as her new album Rye may be one of the year’s best, Oberg is even better in person: she airs out her vocal range, she’s a terrific gospel/soul pianist and she brings her intricate torrents of wordplay, endless puns and literary references to life with more energy than you would expect, considering how subtly and carefully rendered the studio versions are. And for someone whose music is fueled by a seething anger spun through layer upon layer of sardonic humor, she’s more lively and upbeat in person (it’s tempting to call her vivacious or even sweet, but she might take exception to that). She opened the set with the deviously funny Old Hussies Never Die, a track from her previous album Horticulture Wars (she cannot resist a pun, ever), then later did the wry (pun intended) title track from the new one along with the unselfconsciously wrenching, doomed, elegaic Cracks and the wickedly catchy, personal-as-apocalyptic alienation anthem End of the Continent, working its earthquake metaphors for all they were worth. From here she went on to far better-attended shows in Nashville and Austin before winding up her tour in her hometown. Here’s hoping she makes it back to town sometime.

The following night, salonniers John Hodel and LJ Murphy kicked off the feature set at Sunday Salon 24 with nonchalantly slashing songs about imperfect strangers who should avoid each other no matter what, and also the kind of crowds you find in bars on a typical Tuesday morning: not pretty. But the music afterward was. Americana songwriter Sharon Goldman had been booked for a solo show, but fortuitously, her pals Nina Schmir and cellist Martha Colby were in town. Back in 2009, Goldman and Schmir released a tremendously good, eclectic album as the Sweet Bitters, so this was a rare NYC reunion of sorts. Both Goldman and Schmir are brilliant singers – Goldman being more crystalline and Schmir more misty – and gave the sound guy a workout as they switched back and forth between mics, necessitating constant tweaks to make sure both voices were where they needed to be in the mix. The harmonies were exquisite, especially as Colby grounded the songs with a moody, haunting sustain. The show reached a peak with Goldman’s haunting, ominous Clocks Fall Back, a chilling early winter narrative set to a ringing, funereal guitar melody. “Women in gowns sparkle downtown as the tired crowd walks their route,” the duo sang, painting as evocative a portrait of current depression-era New York as anyone has written. Finally getting a chance to hear this song live was arguably the high point of the year, concert-wise. The trio also made their way nimbly through the machinegunning vocal gymnastics of Schmir’s Tom Thumb (On Brighton Beach) as well as Goldman’s nonchalantly ominous 9/11 memoir, Tuesday Morning Sun. Goldman will be at the First Acoustics Coffeehouse in downtown Brooklyn on June 1, joining her co-conspirators of the Chicks with Dip songwriters’ collective in their celebration of their remake of Joni Mitchell’s Blue.

Hem Plays a Show to Get Lost In at Bowery Ballroom

Chauvinistic as this is to say, Hem always seem to play their best shows in New York. As frontwoman Sally Ellyson was quick to acknowledge Saturday night at Bowery Ballroom, it didn’t hurt that they had a full eight-piece contingent onstage including drummer Mark Brotter, pedal steel wizard Bob Hoffnar and violinist Heather Zimmerman along with keyboardist Dan Messe, guitarist/mandolinists Steve Curtis and Gary Maurer, bassist George Rush and guest Dawn Landes on backing vocals, glockenspiel and percussion. Midway through their current tour, they seemed happy (well, as happy as this band gets) to be back on their home turf and rewarded a hushed, adoring crowd with an almost thirty-song set that went on well past the two-hour mark.

Enchanting as Ellyson’s voice is on the band’s new album Departure & Farewell, she reminded that she’s even better live, transcending some hiccups in the Bowery’s usually reliable PA system during the first three songs. She sent a shout out to her Brooklyn homwtown with a poignant version of Tourniquet, Hoffnar lighting up Hotel Fire with a simmering steel solo as he would do on most of the other more country-flavored material. Reservoir built vividly to a soaring, harmony-drenched chorus out of Curtis’ nimble fingerpicking. Ellyson led the band into a plaintive, longing turnaround, reinventing Johnny Cash’s Jackson as early 60s noir.

Zimmerman’s edgy lines were a welcome presence, especially on bittersweet takes of The Seed and Strays, while Curtis fired off one of the night’s best solos on acoustic guitar on the “self-deprecatory love song” Stupid Mouth Shut. Ellyson and Messe teamed up for rapt, gorgeous duo versions of Traveler’s Song and Almost Home, while the whole band ramped up an epic art-rock intensity on the new album’s lush title track as well as the last of the encores, So Long. The night’s most intense moments came midway through, “the death segment,” as Ellyson called it: a brooding take of My Father’s Waltz, anonchalantly chilling version of Walking Past the Graveyard and then the murder ballad Carry Me Home, rooted in Messe’s gospel-infused piano. The high point of the night, appropriately enough, was Not California, its narrator ill at ease with the wave of clueless second-wave gentrifiers hot on her tail, foreshadowing total annihilation. The band also debuted We’ll Meet Along the Way, a new number – “our death metal song,” as Ellyson termed it – with the night’s most brooding, overtly menacing melody. Hem return to the road on June 1 at the Sinclair in Cambridge, Massachusetts before heading further south. Keep up with Hem’s archive.org channel to see if any enterprising soul had the presence of mind to record the show: if so, it’s a keeper.

Big Lazy Returns with a Vengeance

With a big echoing crash and then a swipe of toxically reverb-drenched guitar, Big Lazy were back like they’d never left. If memory serves right, the world’s darkest noir instrumental band’s last gig had been a record release show in June of 2007 at Luna Lounge in what would soon afterward become the Knitting Factory space. It was the loss of a drummer (Tamir Muskat leaving to join Gogol Bordello and then lead Balkan Beat Box) that did them in. In the wake of the breakup, guitarist Steve Ulrich composed for film and tv, and joined forces with Pink Noise’s Itamar Ziegler, with whom he eventually put out the best album of 2012, the luridly menacing if prosaically titled Ulrich Ziegler. Friday the 12th at Barbes, the back room was packed, a mix of neighborhood folks along with what’s left of the band’s cult following from when they were a regular weekend attraction at Tonic.

Second and third versions of bands are usually pale imitations, but this lineup might be Big Lazy’s best ever  – and they had the brilliant Willie Martinez, the band’s original drummer, guesting on bongos on several songs. The new guys seemed to be jumping out of their shoes to be playing Ulrich’s material. Who knew that drummer Yuval Lion (another Pink Noise alum) could swing as hard as he did? And it figures that Ulrich would have to go outside the rock world, in this case, to the Greenwich Village Orchestra, for their first-chair bassist Andew Hall. Amped as high in the mix as Ulrich’s guitars, Hall anchored the songs in a murky yet precise pulse, adding an occasionally wrathful, pitchblende wash when he played with a bow. Meanwhile, Lion was having a ball with his hardware, pinging and rattling away when he wasn’t swinging a country backbeat or a nonchalant funk groove.

In practically two hours onstage, the band began with the brand-new Bernard Herrmann-style 6/8 blues Swampesque and ended with a typically out-of-breath, desperate Princess Nicotine. In between, they played mostly new material: Ulrich may not have been doing many shows lately, but he’s hardly been idle. Don’t Cross Myrtle blended monster movie improvabilly and purposeful Mingus swing, Lion riding the traps. Lunch Lady chugged along, shedding jagged chromatic sparks, followed by the Lynchian highway anthem Minor Problem, Ulrich’s lapsteel swerving eerily like Eraserhead behind the wheel.

Another new grey-sky highway theme, The Low Way unwound apprehensively, paving the way for a murderously spacious take of Skinless Boneless, a standout track from the band’s second album. Ulrich never stops reinventing his songs – no disrespect to Bill Frisell or Marc Ribot, but there is no more intense guitarist in the world right now. Martinez came up to join them and underscore the murderous tiptoe insistence of Gone, from the band’s third album, and then the rapidfire chase scene Just Plain Scared. The highlight of the second set was Uneasy Street, a morose classic from the band’s first album, Hall unleashing a river of ultraviolet ambience when Ulrich let his lurid, tremoloing lines fade out and handed over the melody. Big Lazy are at the Gutter bowling alley in Williamsburg on May 3 at atound 10 with Sexmob’s Steven Bernstein guesting on trumpet: if dark sounds are your thing, this is a show not to miss

Bahar Movahed Makes a Stunning New York Debut

In her sold-out New York debut last night at Symphony Space, Iranian-American singer Bahar Movahed held the audience rapt, taking them on a tour of classical Persian music from the 14th century to the present. Leading a trio with the brilliant tar lute player Ali Samadpour and violinist-percussionist Navid Kandelousi, she began with a warmly bucolic, circular Kurdish song from her acclaimed debut album Goblet of Eternal Light and encored with an intense, stormy original by Samadpour, instruments and vocals joining forces on its incisively rhythmic, swaying, biting melody line that veered closer to the western minor scale than the major.

Movahed’s presence was demure but unaffected. Seated with the instrumentalists throughout the show, she began the first song with her eyes closed as if fused with the music. A little later on, she explained that the medieval blend of Persian music and poetry sought to become “a new language of feeling.” Clearly, she and the band achieved it. In the beginning of the set, she kept a tight focus, matching up with Samadpour’s nonchalantly frenetic tremolo-picking, agile hammer-ons and elegant filigrees. As the show reached a peak with a series of darkly majestic, anthemic Samadpour originals, the two seemed to reverse roles as he took over the music direction. Kandelousi began by  tapping out a gracefully dancing, boomy beat on tombak drum, then as the show went on switched to kamancheh fiddle and played pensive, sometimes hauntingly sustained lines, sometimes in tandem with the other musicians (and switched to viola on one early 20th century song for verisimilitude with the original version, which had been played on western orchestral instruments).

Movahed is the rare artist who can bring to life any feeling from across the entire emotional spectrum. For the most part, she worked the more shadowy regions of her lower register, rising with an otherworldly, glimmering microtonal ornamentation as the songs swelled and peaked. She saved her raw power for the end of the show, finally cutting loose on the last number with a plaintive, spine-tingling wail. But pyrotechnics are not her game: nuance is. The high point of the show was a stately dirge, a diptych of sorts with a long tar-and-kamancheh interlude, Movahed finally coming in with a hushed suspense and almost imperceptibly raising the energy from a simmer to a smoldering intensity. Just like western scales, Persian musical modes vary from warm and easygoing to more biting and acidic, and Movahed moved from one to another with ease yet with careful attention to microtonal detail (and Farsi lyrics – she joked with the crowd that since she’s been in the US for a couple of years, and that the crowd was largely Iranian expats, she had to make sure to get the lyrics down perfectly).

As the songs moved from the 19th century forward, rhythms grew more complex, individual composers taking the place of traditional melodies and classical poetry. Movahed acknowledged a 20th century neotraditionalism, and then the fireworks – gentle, subtle ones, but fireworks nonetheless – began as the eerie intervals most traditionally associated with the Middle East made their way into the music.  A couple of Samadpour anthems leading up to the close of the show worked variations on crescendoing, ominously descending eight-bar patterns, and it was there that Movahed was able to most hauntingly blend light and shadow. Whether hushed and breathy, poignant and imploring or finally, at the very end of the set, allowing herself an unselfconscious, triumphant smile, she revealed herself as a frontwoman of the highest caliber – a role that she never would have been allowed to take in Iran. Currently pursuing a postdoctorate in dental surgery at the University of California at San Francisco, the multi-talented Movahed (also a strikingly whimsical and wryly amusing caricaturist) seems to be here to stay, at least for the time being. In this case, Iran’s loss is our gain.

Brazda Mesmerizes the Crowd at Barbes

“I lost my youth and my looks to a man who smoked too much cocaine,” Brazda frontwoman Shelley Thomas explained to the crowd at Barbes Friday night. She was offering an English translation of the lyrics to a Greek rembetiko song from the 1930s that she’d just sung with a plaintive, microtonally chilling unease. Obviously, crack was as wack back then as it is now. Thomas did that all night – translating, that is, after pretty much every song she’d sung in several languages including Bulgarian, Greek and Romanes. She’s a nonchalantly riveting singer with a warmly organic, dulce de leche voice that’s unusual in Balkan music (she also has a background in Indian music and sings with the exhilarating New York Arabic Orchestra). Joining her, mostly on low harmony vocals, was Black Sea Hotel’s equally formidable, eclectically intense Willa Roberts. Together they soared, smoldered and wailed through a series of broodingly ornamented, bristlingly microtonal laments about rebel soldiers fighting off Ottoman invaders, guys having trouble with their moms who want to marry them off and mothers who won’t let them near their daughters, as well as nightingales to whom you offer wine at night but poison in the morning because you don’t want them to wake you up. They began slowly and gently, voices mingling  austerely with Connell Thompson’s moody minor-key clarinet lines, Francesco Marcocci’s steady, pulsing bass and the 9/4, 10/4, 11/8 and various other hypnotically labyrinthine rhythms of the two percussionists.

The show quickly picked up steam. “We’re going to get really villagey now,” Roberts announced with a a grin, then the two women ran through what was essentially a long medley of old Bulgarian songs packed with tricky trills and otherworldly close harmonies. Thompson picked up the pace as well with fiery doublestops, fang-baring chromatic runs and slinky modal vamps, Roberts swaying, eyes closed, completely lost in the music. At one point late in the show, it suddenly seemed that there was a second horn onstage, but no: Thomas had simply decided to improvise a low, cool harmony line against the clarinet. The high point of the show was a lush, moody, poignant anthem about a woman freedom fighter in Bulgaria battling the invading Turks, Roberts and Thomas exchanging long, hauntingly resonant tones. Beyond the goosebumps generated by everybody in the band – including a jaunty gypsy jazz bass solo on one of the closing numbers – was the fact that they were missing both their accordionist and violinist. They’re at Korzo on May 21 at 9. Roberts and Thomas are also taking part in the vocal celebration of Titania (the Shakespearean heroine from A Midsummer Night’s Dream) that’s happening at the Hive in Bushwick (20 Cook St. off Metropolitan Ave., J/M to Flushing Ave) on April 27.

More of the Sunday Salon and Such

In a lot of ways, New York Music Daily’s Sunday Salon at Zirzamin is a misnomer. It’s a sophisticated scene, but it’s not exactly sedate. There’s no telling what’s going to happen. A lot of the time there’s something during the parade of performers leading up to the 7 PM featured set that upstages the headliner. Drina Seay covering LJ Murphy’s Waiting by the Lamppost for You was one of them. On one hand, watching her sing “I’m hungover and showing my years” was just plain funny (she looks about grad-school age: if you were a bartender, you’d card her). But that didn’t matter: she can wail when she wants, but she hung back and gave it a poignancy and dignity that you wouldn’t expect in a portrait of sheer dejection and despair.

Then there was Charming Disaster  – Kotorino’s Jeff Morris with Elia Bisker – doing a jaunty yet absolutely creepy four-handed ragtime piano piece and managing not to claw each other, Bisker’s moonscape resonance over Morris’ deadpan romp. They headlined Salon number 22 with a menacingly charming duo set with Morris mostly on guitar and Bisker on ukulele. She’s got the distant femme fatale persona down, dead cold, the perfect foil for Morris’ brooding gypsy and swing-spiked bounces and waltzes. They did not one but two songs about murder conspiracies gone wrong, a similarly failed twin grifters’ tale as well as moody, nocturnal material from each others’ catalogs. They make a good team, and they play a lot of shows: watch this space.

Lorraine Leckie followed them on a rare doublebill. This time out she had Calum Ingram on cello playing ominous low register ambience, with Banjo Lisa adding her stark, scary-beautiful otherworldly vocal harmonies. You would think that Leckie would have used this configuration to air out the darkest side – which is very, very dark – of her recent chamber pop songs, but instead she flipped the script and took a lot of her more upbeat rock catalog down into the abyss. What once had a T-Rex feel in this configuration sounded a lot more like Ziggy-era Bowie but with better vocals. She’s at the big room at the Rockwood on April 22 at 8.

To backtrack a little, Serena Jost headlined Salon 19 a couple of weeks previously . The multi-instrumentalist bandleader/chanteuse had a Joe’s Pub show to warm up for, and counterintuitively, instead of bringing the band and doing what would have been an open rehearsal, she went to a similarly stripped-down configuration featuring the eclectically brilliant Amanda Thorpe on slide guitar, keys, wood flute and also stark, scary-beautiful harmonies. Jost gets props for her cello work, but she’s also a brilliant singer – hanging out with Thorpe all these years has rubbed off. Through lithely jangling chamber pop, stark cello-and-voice tableaux, a stately 6/8 art-rock anthem, she radiated a lowlit allure with her precise, measured vocals, ripe to the point of drawing everyone in without falling off the vine. Then at Joe’s Pub, she and her full band – Julian Maile on guitar, Rob Jost on bass and horn, Rob DiPietro on drums, a keyboardist, and Thorpe and Greta Gertler on harmonies – soared and occasionally roared through most of the songs on her sensationally good new album A Bird Will Sing. The high point of the show – and maybe the past month, in terms of sheer sonic bliss – was the trio of high harmonies on an irresistibly pulsing, crescendoing version of Sweet Mystery, a song that could not have been more aptly titled.

The star of Salon 20 was Seay, who brought a full band featuring Eric Seftel on drums, Monica Passin a.k.a. L’il Mo playing bass as if she’d been doing it her whole life (she had about a week’s worth of practice, it turned out – who knew). “Is there a better guitarist in New York than Steve Antonakos?” one audience member wondered aloud as Seay’s lead player fired off keening pedal steel-style lines, cooly menacing Nashville gothic riffs and soulfully intricate jazz leads. Sassy, sophisticated country songs like the catchy shuffle Whatcha Gonna Do and the soul-infused, stop-time bounce Can’t Fight Falling in Love paired off against the absolutely gorgeous, minor-key Waking Up Crying, an absolutely evil, slide guitar-driven, oldtime swing-flavored All For You and the torchy, Julia Haltigan-esque Where Is the Moon Tonight. The high point of the set was when Seay segued from a slow, slinky, absolutely lurid take of one of her best ballads, Chase My Blues Away to Francoise Hardy’s Le Temps de L’Amour and gave that one a New York noir edge, singing in perfect French. A week later, Antonakos  would be the headliner at Salon 20 with his own tuneful, sardononically humorous songs, joined by Seay who this time added harmonies as she did so memorably back in the day at Banjo Jim’s before she started her own band.

The regular cast has had more memorable moments than can be counted. The Salon’s own Lauraly Grossman’s Cat Power-ish narratives edge closer and closer to noir, shadowy blues. LJ Murphy kicked off Seay’s set with a ferocious, bluesy intensity, hot on the heels of his careening trio performance at Hank’s Saloon the previous Saturday with Professor Jim Porter guesting and adding a whole other level of creepy surrealism on washboard. And this past week, Amelia Belle-Isle graced the stage with her ridiculously tuneful oldtime swing-flavored songs and subtle, alluring voice.

There have been plenty of other great shows happening around town, literally too many to chronicle here. The last week of the past month, the Wu-tang Clan’s Raekwon delivered a nonchalant, impressively tight, seemingly endless medley of his 90s hits at the swanky new Stage 48 way over past 12th Ave. on 48th Street. The place was packed with a mix of older people who knew every word and practicallly drowned out the vocals (the sound here seems to be a work in progress), and kids getting their first look at one of the icons of 90s East Coast hardcore. The Chef began with Cash Rules Everything Around Me and just got hotter from there.

Violinist Courtney Orlando and cellist Lauren Radnofsky’s performance of Luciano Berio sequenzas at the Miller Theatre last month deserves a mention. These pieces are like wartime: frenzied, anxious, cruelly frantic cadenzas that suddenly give way to still, suspenseful ambience, and while neither musician made it look easy – that would have been impossible – just getting through them without breaking strings would have been a triumph. That they were able to mine those weird juxtapositions for genuine emotion made the concert all the more worthwhile. That, and all the free beer the theatre was giving away.

The night of the Drina Seay show at the Salon, New York Junk played one of those oldschool New York punk bills at Bowery Electric. On one hand, their tunefully growling, glammy early 70s style isn’t covering any new ground, but just like the Dolls and Lou Reed, they’re catchy and they have the sound, and the wry, black humor-driven, black leather-clad doom and angst down cold. The bassist – formerly of 80s punk legends the B-Girls – bopped and pushed the songs along with catchy riffage underneath the Stonesy roar of the two guitarists.

This past week had a trifecta of good shows. Tom Warnick & World’s Fair played their usual gallows humor-driven mix of blue-eyed soul, horror surf, Doorsy jamrock and New England noir at Freddy’s Saturday night. Jerome O’Brien, late of the great Dog Show played a mix of his endlessly entertaining, literate rock tunes solo on twelve-string guitar at…where else…Zirzamin. And Maynard & the Musties brought their mix of wry oldschool country and dark highway rock to Cowgirl Seahorse down in South Street Seaport, Naa Koshie Mills’ violin/viola lines soaring over Dikko Faust’s trombone and Mo Botton’s richly twangy guitar. Frontman Joe Maynard writes some of the most nonchalantly poignant, richly tuneful songs around: it was a treat to hear him and the crew swing their way through the dark-sky, Neil  Young-ish expanse of Lightly Honest and the gorgeous yet utterly twisted Elvis Museum.

Catching Up on Concerts…Again

The point of this blog’s Sunday Salon at Zirzamin is to create a scene. There are other good scenes in New York: all the good things happening at Barbes; oldtime Americana at the Jalopy; latin jazz at the Jazz Gallery, Jan Bell’s country and blues thing at 68 Jay St. Bar, Alexandra Joan‘s thematic classical series at WMP Concert Hall. But there’s no central rock scene in New York, unless you count the loser indie rock thing, whatever that is, in bush-WECK, as the gentrifier children there say in their funny accents. Because this blog’s focus is global, it’s been awhile since there’s been any report here on all the under-the-radar happenings at Zirzamin and elsewhere around town. So here we go!

Eclectic Canadian songwriter/chanteuse Lily Frost and her brilliant multi-instrumentalist husband Jose Contreras (not the guy who inadvertently springboarded the phrase “evil empire“) began their  most recent show at Zirzamin by cranking up Contreras’ phone, setting the mood with a delicious mix of vintage Hawaiian guitar tunes. Much as Frost had her sultry voodoo lounge voice in full effect, she was a whirlwind onstage, alternating between vocals, guitar, keys, percussion and theremin. She and Contreras gave a southwestern gothic menace to hazy Mazzy Star jangle, did Billie Holiday as gypsy jazz and Pink Floyd’s San Tropez as the cruel proto-Margaritaville satire that Roger Waters didn’t have the range to pull off. But Frost’s originals were the most memorable: lush Gainsbourg/Birkin style psychedelic pop, the deceptively biting if sugary bounce of Do What You Love and an especially menacing, noir cabaret-infused take of Grenade, the darkest song on her latest album. At the end of the set they channeled the Dream Syndicate and encored with an unexpectedly carefree Buddy Holly cover. Frost has been making frequent return trips here: let’s hope she makes it down again soon.

The featured artists at Sunday Salon 17 were Black Sea Hotel and they were as breathtakingly haunting and otherworldly as always. The trio of Sarah Small, Corinna Snyder and Willa Roberts have made a name for themselves in Balkan music circles for their original arrangements of large-scale Bulgarian choral works: that these Americans were invited to perform at the Bulgarian consulate pretty much speaks for itself. Small’s register-smashing range, Roberts’ wild ornamentation and Snyder’s powerful, soul-mutating wail matched against each other with eerie close harmonies, minutely gleaming microtones, rapidfire lyrical gymnastics balanced by lushly sustained passages. When Roberts announced that one of their songs had been featured in a horror film, that came as no surprise. They took care to explain the songs’ topics, from the idea of shoes as ghetto bling among the peasantry, to strange, shapeshifing, lethal dragon-men, to the town of Zborinka which apparently drew all the guys in centuries past since it was rumored you could always get a girl there. The more things change, etc. The trio closed with a new song which included a verse translated to English, and a brand-new arrangement with slinky polyrhythms and interwoven harmonies so tight they could have been a string section. Their debut album from a couple of years back is amazing, and they’re working on a follow-up. Canadian gothic songstress Lorraine Leckie – who’s been the most consistent star of the Sunday Salon since it debuted right after the hurricane last year – kept the lushly haunting intensity going with a stripped-down trio performance highlighted by several numbers from her most recent chamber pop album, Rudely Interrupted, a collaboration with social critic/journalist/personality Anthony Haden-Guest. And she and her band the Demons are back at Zirzamin on May 5 at 7.

The following Saturday at the National Underground, powerhouse ragtime pianist Jack Spann opened with a sizzling solo set of originals ranging from the haunting Roly-Poly Man – a chilling story of murder and karmic payback – to an unexpectedly pensive, catchy ballad written by his wife. Spann then joined lyrical rocker Walter Ego, amping up one of his bluesier numbers. Walter (to call him “Ego” just doesn’t sound right) was similarly on his game, running through a set that ranged from a morbid art-rock piano number told from the point of view of a subway motorman who’s just hit someone on the tracks, to the gorgeously, cruelly metaphorical I Am the Glass, to a couple of catchy guitar tunes that evoked influences as diverse as the Kinks, Elvis Costello and of course the Fab Four (this guy knows the Beatles like few others). The best of these – it’s hard to choose – could have been a sardonically catchy, jangly number about minimizing one’s life, to the point where the womb and points even lower on the evolutionary scale begin to look appealing. Walter Ego is at Zirzzmin after the Salon on Apr 28 at 7.

Raquel Bell headlined Sunday Salon 18 with her Mesiko bandmate, guitarist David Marshall  joining her for a characteristically uneasy, electric Neil Young-flavored tune. Bell has a history of brilliant collaborations: she co-led Norden Bombsight, an art-rock band who will be legendary someday when they’re rediscovered; lately she’s been singing and playing keys with violist Jessica Pavone in Normal Love, as well as fronting Mesiko with their dusky Americana menace. Bell has grown into an adept guitarist, playing solo on electric, shifting from distant jangly ominousness to an unexpectedly cheery, funky pop song titled Harry Partch. Then she switched to her vintage analog synth, sounding like a young Patti Smith backed by Tangerine Dream. The occasional moments where the synth went out of tune only added to the creepily carnivalesque atmospherics. Her voice lept and dove as the loops pulsed; she ended her set with a brooding, Marble Index-ish tone poem of sorts. She and Mesiko are at Zirzamin every Sunday for the remainder of April at around 10:30 PM.

Cosmopolitan Hungarian Gypsy Band Budapest Bar Plays a Thrillling US Debut

Budapest Bar made their North American debut last night at CUNY’s sonically superb Elebash Hall just north of the Empire State Building. They’re playing Drom tonight at eight. If gypsy music – the real, raw, unadulterated thing – is your thing, this is a must-see show. Be aware that last night’s concert sold out, so you may want to get to the club early.

Budapest Bar work evoke a cosmopolitan gypsy vibe, as opposed to a rural one, meaning that they play a more concert hall-oriented mix of styles which include both jazz and classical music. They outdid Nick Cave at noir, did the “most famous Hungarian song ever,” Gloomy Sunday, as an elegant funereal instrumental, and covered Haydn and Lizst, including the latter’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 complete with rapidfire cimbalom solo by Mihaly Farkas. A bit later on, the cimbalom virtuoso ended his solo with a blindfold on and didn’t miss a beat: it was the biggest crowd-pleasing moment of many.

Frontman Robert Farkas began with a boisterous number that he spiced with some droll flourishes, pulling a string over the bridge of his violin for some creepy horror movie door-closing tonalities, switched to guitar a couple of times midway through the show and ended with a high-spirited series of birdsong voicings on the final encore. Keyboardist Karoly Okros wore a path into the stage, alternating between piano and accordion – if he’s not the only guy who’s equally adept at Liszt and noir Americana, then Hungary has something on the US. Bassist Richard Farkas (this seemed to be a family event, no surprise in gypsy circles) held the careening monstrosity to the rails, whether with a terse minimalist pulse on the gypsy numbers or nimbly walking the scales on the jazz tunes. The speed, virtuosity and soul these guys and women channeled makes most American gypsy bands pale by comparison.

The band brought two singers. Juci Nemeth sang the higher, more ethereal numbers; Tania Saedi, with her sultry alto voice, handled the jazzier material with a sassy aplomb worthy of Ella Fitzgerald. But it was Nemeth who took the most spectacular flights of the night on a rapidfire, diabolical shuffle right before the encores. Gypsy bands in Budapest bars from the turn of the 19th century through the Nazi invasion played a vast spectrum of music from the dead-serious classical pantheon to the wildest jazz: this concert, with its tangos, swing tunes, explosive cadenzas and expert showmanship brought that world alive again in all its pyrotechnic glory.

Indian Music Fans Sell Out Shivkumar Sharma’s Town Hall Show

[ File this under "you missed a good one," if you weren't there - repost from sister blog Lucid Culture, as the April concert calendar update continues...]

For a player who aspires to mystically become one with the music on any given night, Indian santoor virtuoso Shivkumar Sharma is one funny guy. At his sold-out show last night at the Town Hall, he and percussionist Zakir Hussain egged each other on, trading deadpan riffage, goosing each other with trick endings, pregnant pauses and a tongue-in-cheek Bollywood or folk music quote or two all the way to a mad dash for the finish line at the end of roughly two hours onstage. While most of their jokes were musical, Sharma isn’t above messing with the audience. He wondered aloud if the numerous toddlers in the house would prove to be sonic competition (they were), and in tuning his 86 strings, turned what could have been an ordeal into a lively, even plaintive melody. Hussain played bad cop to Sharma’s poker-faced good cop for most of the concert, firing off a series of long launching-pad tabla solos that began as total buffoonery and were then toned down a bit. But the most irresistibly comedic moment of the night belonged to Sharma, when he finally decided to outdo his sparring partner – and Hussain was there in a split second, as usual, this time to play straight man as Sharma ramped up his solo with a muffled, muted, over-the-top bombast.

In between jokes, the concert was 180 degrees from that. Sharma is to the santoor – the Indian hammered dulcimer, godfather to the Egyptian qanun, Hungarian cimbalom and the many zithers – what Les Paul was to the guitar. As a young prodigy, Sharma revolutionized the instrument, expanding its range and giving it a sustain that made it compatible with ensembles larger than the small groups employing it for traditional Kashmiri vocal repertoire. Bollywood – which he stoically made fun of, notwithstanding the fact that he’s one of the music’s founding fathers – wouldn’t be the same without his influence. At 75, his fingers are no less nimble on the hammers than they were forty years ago: if anything, he’s even subtler now, judiciously improvising from a steady march to a dancing, rippling, ringingly anthemic energy and alternating fiery pedal-note lines with whispery glissandos as the concert wore on. His first alap (jam) picked up steam when Hussain entered with a stately 4/4 beat that artfully morphed to 7/4 and then the jousting began. Sharma’s second solo improvisation was more deliberate and cut to the chase more quickly, Hussain wasting no time trading licks, shadowing and weaving in between Sharma’s increasingly agitated cadenzas and downward progressions. Their gallop to the finish was a rich reminder that music, in the right hands, doesn’t have to be dark to be deep. Sharma will no doubt be back in town at some point in the not-too-distant future – keep an eye on the World Music Institute calendar.

And it was interesting to see who came out for this one: a young, hungry, scruffy, mostly Indian posse, with the usual scattering of old hippies. Just as American millennials have gone back in droves to oldtime country and blues, the new generation of Indians are embracing their own roots music. Computerized beats may be everywhere, but nobody’s listening.