The Live Chronicles Continue

Here’s a look back at a couple of Sundays ago, which happened to be a tremendous day for live music in New York: yeah, it’s a while ago, but good music is timeless. This was on a Sunday, no less. Goes to show that even gentrification can’t kill good music in this city: unexpected places yield unexpected rewards.

The day began with the New York Scandia Brass Quintet – comprising part of the brass section of the brilliant and underappreciated New York Scandia Symphony Orchestra – playing in Fort Tryon Park way up in Washington Heights. The tourists all went in the direction of the Cloisters; the neighborhood people went down the hill to hear the music. It might seem like an insult to describe a brass quintet as sleepy, but that vibe perfectly captured the feel of the afternoon, and as the show went on, the musicians picked up the pace. The Scandia’s raison d’etre is to spread the word about Scandinavian composers who deserve to be better known here than they are: the early part of this concert felt like it could have been staged in Copenhagen, or Oslo sometime in the summer of 1876, to pull a year out of the air. There were a couple of national anthems, a couple of arrangements of folk tunes, a secondary national anthem that’s sort of the This Land Is Your Land of Norway, and finally a bracingly modernist composition by Anders Koppel, a sixties rocker who found his calling as an avant-garde composer. Meanwhile, the quintet and their conductor took pains to introduce the compositions, engage the kids in the crowd and hold a raffle for the benefit of those lucky enough to be on the lawn when the music started: a pair of lucky couples walked away with some unexpected goodies.

If that was any indication, the concert picked up the pace from there – the orchestra has played a series of June concerts here for the last few years – but it was time to get on the train, and with some Sunday luck get to LIC Bar in Long Island City to watch Wallace on Fire prowl and sway their way through a casually intense set of Americana-flavored rock outside at the bar’s friendly patio space. An outside observer would never have guessed that this was the equivalent of a pickup band, frontman/guitarist J Wallace leading a four-piece group with a keyboardist and drummer who’d rehearsed together maybe once before, along with eclectic bassist Joe Wallace (who’d dropped his pants onstage during his show the previous night at Webster Hall, playing with glamrock party monsters Haley Bowery and the Manimals). Together they evoked Steve Wynn, Neil Young and maybe Son Volt. J Wallace’s laid-back drawl and unselfconsciously biting guitar set the tone, matched by his keyboardist’s soulful wail and Joe Wallace’s incisive, melodic basslines. Uneasily swaying anthems and a couple of laid-back backbeat-driven country numbers were a big hit with the impressively large crowd who’d gathered in the bar’s backyard patio space to hear the music despite some soccer game that had drawn all the neighborhood Europeans into the front room with the tv.

After that, the day wasn’t over yet. Indonesia’s massive, brightly costumed, roughly 40-person Manado State University Choir brought a stunning virtuosity and also a personal warmth to St. Paul’s Chapel downtown. The young singers – some of whom seemed to be younger than university age – greeted audience members personally, shyly but vigorously: choirmaster Andre de Quadros covers all the bases in their lessons in public performance. African-American spirituals are hugely popular with choirs and their audiences in the Indonesian archipelago, and they sang a handful with the same meticulousness they gave to a couple of Mendelssohn works. It didn’t have the improvisational ecstasy of American choirs; by the same token, it was good to see those haunting old songs treated with the same dignity and respect as Mendelssohn, which they deserve. But it was the traditional works that the crowd – a mix of expats, tourists and fans of esoterica – had come to see. The men assailed the first one with a percussive fury as the women’s voices swirled in a counterpoint rich in microtones, then brought it down with a guttural suspense to end it: there’s a lot of cross-pollination between India and Indonesia, and this piece reflected it. A second one took on an even greater majesty as the tightly choreographed singers shifted places almost as much as they shifted notes with a similar intricacy; the enveloping crescendo reached its peak with a third work, the womens’ lushly interwoven high tonalities mingling to the point where it was impossible to keep track of who was singing what. The group closed with a fascinatingly interpolated mashup of an ancient Andalusian Muslim hymn and an English one: “This was from the days when it was normal to be Arab, Muslim and European,” de Quadros remarked dryly, and his words took on a particular poignancy in a neighborhood that’s seen extremists protesting against a tiny second-floor storefront mosque a few blocks to the north. Susie Ibarra’s Electric Kulintang was next on the bill, but the interior of the landmark old church had risen to boiling point, and since her ensemble is New York-based and plays the occasional concert at the Stone, there didn’t seem to be any harm in leaving. Besides, it would soon be time to get to the Rockwood to see Vagabond Swing.

Doing Shots with Haley and Hannah

Saturday night at Webster Hall, singer Haley Bowery waited about half an hour into her show before she reached behind the sound monitor and pulled out the gun. Before the song started, she’d lured several people in the crowd to the edge of the stage with the promise of whiskey. She pumped the rifle, then held it steady in her right hand, taking aim at a guy in the front row. As his jaw dropped, she fired at him.

If he’d been as steady on his feet as her aim was – Keith Richards’ right hand has nothing on Haley Bowery’s – he would have gotten a generous mouthful of hooch. It wasn’t bottom shelf, either: whatever she’d filled that big black heavy-duty squirt gun with, it was decent whiskey. As the band stomped behind her, she moved on to the next person, and then the next. A couple of them came back for seconds and she took her time with them: at least a couple of people left the show with a free buzz. But that’s not the only reason why it’s impossible not to like Haley Bowery.

Her songs imagine a CBGB of the mind, but not from the punk rock era. Instead, her glam-infused four-on-the-floor rock has a little bit of Bowie, the Dolls, maybe T-Rex but through the prism of cynical 80s New York powerpop, with all the accoutrements: the leather boots, the torn fishnets, the booze, the defiant pose and maybe other stuff. It’s a lifestyle, and she seems hell-bent on putting across the fact that she’s living it – and maybe building a tribe of fellow troublemakers who also consider themselves born strange (which is the title of the album whose release she was celebrating). Her band the Manimals is tight and unexpectedly diverse: solid Attis Jerrell Clopton on drums, surprisingly eclectic Patrick Deeney on guitar and Joseph Wallace (who also plays in the excellent Wallace on Fire) on bass, with Matthew Pop guesting on keys on a couple of numbers. She didn’t waste time getting to the point: “Fuck the rest of ‘em, let’s paaaarty,” she ordered the crowd the end of Halloween, a lurching anthem that with a little youtubing could be the theme for next year’s freshman class and many afterward. Some of her songs turned out to be unexpectedly bittersweet, like 29, a wistful ballad pondering  how to stay young when you’re staring down the wrong side of 30. A little later she turned to the bitterness and anger of Blitzed, a kiss-off song whose protagonist “Tried to find my bliss, and I got blitzed”- and then “If you need me, boy that ship has sailed.” And Undertow (the backdrop for the booze and the squirt gun) implored everyone to “Drink your whiskey up for the people who never thought you’d be more than a zero.” Revenge is sweet.

Opening act Hannah vs. the Many took that theme further. With a ferocious, spun-steel wail, charismatic frontwoman/guitarist Hannah Fairchild poured out torrents of double entendres and embittered imagery over catchy melodies that ranged from roaring punk-pop to hauntingly ornate, slower, artsier ballads. Her four-piece band didn’t have a bass player this time out, but that didn’t phase them, lead guitarist Josh Fox raising the songs’ searing ambience with long, echoing, slowly twisting sustained notes drenched in cold reverb. Fairchild projects a warmth and nonchalance in contrast with her songs’ raging angst: she reflected on how nice she felt the audience was, but then she related how when she’d just arrived here from her native Minnesota, people had said the same thing about her. “So I called up my girl friend and told her that, and she just laughed. I’m Minnesota mean!”

But her songs aren’t so mean as they’re just plain anguished: they’re anthems for a new generation of smart, alienated kids. The best one of the entire night, and the quietest one, was Jordan Baker, a torchy, sadly bouncing chamber-pop song that Jarvis Cocker would be proud to have written, and it was there that the audience split up: the front row bobbing their heads in unison, completely lost in Fairchild’s tale of infatuation despite knowing better, while the crowd in back noisily readied themselves for the whiskey. The rest of the show was a lot louder: over scorching punk-noir and stagy, gypsy-tinged dark cabaret, Fairchild savaged poseurs, backstabbers and the slow death of hope in a city full of promises that end up dashed in the crush simply to survive as rents rise and imagination is drowned out in the roar of conspicuous consumption and a cultivated shallowness. “How long before the suburbs come to claim us?” she pondered toward the end of Fox’s Wedding, as the song built from almost a whisper to a wail. A lot of the songs were new, and considerably louder than the haunting, often piano-based tracks on her absolutely brilliant new album All Our Heroes Drank Here: whether she follows that or remains sort of a New York teens counterpart to Pulp, she’s someone to keep an eye on. In a way, Haley Bowery was the perfect segue: there wasn’t any way anybody was going to top Fairchild as far as intensity was concerned, so, fuck the rest of ‘em, it was time to party. Hannah vs. the Many are at Spike Hill on July 7 at 11; Haley Bowery’s next gig is a private show (well, sort of – her site lists it as July 17 at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, presumably indoors).

Wallace on Fire at LIC Bar

Last night Wallace on Fire played LIC Bar. Any musician whose peers rave about him - or who’s ambitious enough to seek out Lorraine Leckie as a collaborator – is always worth discovering. This particular version of the band was just frontman J Wallace on guitar and vocals and Joe Wallace (no relation) on bass. Even stripped down to just the basics, they were definitely worth the trip to Queens. J Wallace plays his acoustic through a Fender tube amp, often running through a distortion pedal for just enough grit to add an extra level of menace. The bar’s booker described their music as country blues, which is a starting point – J Wallace’s songs take the style to new places. He gets a lot of props for his vocals – and he’s an excellent singer, no question, as strong when he goes up the scale as when he hangs around the low notes – but he’s also a strong guitarist. Rather than getting involved in extended solos, he works in thoughtful riffs from across the acoustic blues spectrum (and one from Jimi Hendrix), and he’s just as solid with country and folk styles.

Some of the slower songs went into straight-up rock: a couple with echoes of heavy southern rock like Black Oak Arkansas, another that staked out territory in an artsy, post-grunge vein much like Fen or bands of that ilk. And then they segued straight out of that one into The Rain, a catchy, pensively swaying Leckie tune with a dark Patti Smith vibe. The set’s opening tune built around a menacing Steve Wynn-style hammer-on riff; a bit later, they covered Neil Young – another obvious but not overwhelming influence – and then went from bouncy folk-pop, to a carefree, whistling country song and then back to the pensively burning bluesy stuff.

Joe Wallace is an excellent bassist, propelling the songs with a smart, in-the-pocket style while managing to slide all over the place, using all kinds of imaginative voicings along with the occasional booming chord: watching him play was inspiring. LIC Bar seems to be a home base for Wallace on Fire: watch this space for upcoming shows.