Two New York Chicks Play the Year’s Best Twinbill, Then Go Their Separate Ways

The best doublebill of the year so far was back on the 14th of the month at Joe’s Pub, when Rachelle Garniez and Carol Lipnik gave the crowd a lot to laugh about and plenty to get completely lost in. The distinctively “New York chicks,” as Garniez put it, each played a duo set, Garniez with bassist Tim Luntzel and Lipnik with pianist Matt Kanelos, but neither were the least bit low-key. Garniez grew up on the Upper West Side when it was much more of a Wild Wild West neighborhood – and that wasn’t so long ago. Lipnik’s childhood Coney Island is a rare New York hood to revert to that direction. Garniez rode waves of poignancy and irresisistibly sardonic humor; Lipnik set a mood of mysterious, otherworldly, luminous beauty early on and maintained that all the way through, save for a creepily hilarious goth-pop cover of The Twist, with a nod to Klaus Nomi. Both artists have shows coming up that no doubt will be just as good, Garniez at Barbes at 8 on June 4 and Lipnik at Pangea on Second Ave. between 11th and 12th Sts. at 7:30 on June 14 and continuing Sundays throughout the month.

Garniez opened the show: when she wasn’t segueing from one number to another, she eased her way in, improvising an intro, teasing the audience with a stream-of-consciousness rap that got the crowd howling even as she snuck in snide references to everything that plagues the East Village these days, from global warming to gentrification to antidepressants. For that matter, she could have been referencing just about anywhere. Her first number was Kid in the Candy Store, a coyly bluesy cabaret tune that she reinvented this time out as Marc Ribot-esque acoustic guitar skronk. Who knew?

She switched to accordion, strutting through the sultry Medicine Man and waltzing her way through the even more defiant, metaphorically bristling individualist anthem Tourmaline. Her new material worked on as many levels as you would expect from what has become, over the years, a deep and iconic repertoire. A skeletal, bluesy guitar number went in a more Waits direction, a defiant bon vivant’s look forward to her own fun funeral. The best song of the night was another new one, an understatedly chilling, apocalyptic Britfolk-tinged waltz that wouldn’t have been out of place in the Richard Thompson songbook. Then she went to the piano for some East Village gospel, then God’s Little Acre, a vicious slap upside the head of any would-be stalker trolling Facebook for a girl he had the hots for in a past century. She drew the most laughs of the night with her closing number, an appreciative faux-operatic faux-homage to opioids and Jean-Claude Van Damme.

Lipnik and Kanelos opened with a rippling, neo-baroque song about the oyster and the sand, as she told the crowd. With an awe-inspiring four-octave range that was as strong in the ominous lows as it was in the stratospheric, bone-chilling, sometimes playfully ticklish highs, she kept the crowd hushed except for a few comedic moments. Lipnik’s back catalog is actually a lot more diverse than this show let on – she’s an avatar of Coney Island phantasmagoria and circus rock. But this was the album release show for her new one, Almost Back to Normal, a metaphorically searing, lushly atmospheric art-rock cd that looks back to similar albums by Nico and Laura Nyro.

Kanelos kept the pedal down for a rippling resonance, his steady chords hitting on the beat as Lipnik mined the songs’ ominous subtext for all it was worth. Water imagery was everywhere.  Lipnik worked every corner of her magical voice, in command but not overstating it: vibrato, echo effects, droll operatics and skin-peeling swoops to places in the sky where there’s probably no air. She voiced her attempt to sonically translate a William Blake illuminated manuscript as creepy, incisive art-rock, then built to the album’s title track with a titanic, white-knuckle intensity as she reached for the rafters and held on for dear life.

An “anthem for crows” offered a resolute Occupy movement mantra for anyone who wanted to seize it.  Beyond that LMAO version of The Twist, there was also a Mexican/Weimar cabaret mashup, an echoey, angst-laden version of Harry Nilsson’s alienation anthem Lifeline, a galloping, rather macabre setting of a poem by dark 70s cult favorite and Allen Ginsberg pal Helen Adam and a showstopping, haunting apocalyptic anthem by Kanelos to close the night. Representing for the hometown team, Garniez and Lipnik didn’t throw their hats in the ring and offer a deathmatch challenge to any of the new arrivals from Malibu and Bloomfield Hills and Fort Worth, but the subtext and the final score was clear: New York 2, Suburbia 0.

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The Maria Schneider Orchestra Bring a Luminous, Relevant New Album to a Stand at Birdland

To pigeonhole the Maria Schneider Orchestra‘s latest magnum opus, The Thompson Fields. as pastoral jazz downplays its genuinely extraordinary beauty and epic sweep. But a musicologist would probably consider how much the vast expanses of the Minnesota prairie where Schneider grew up have influenced her writing. To call Schneider this era’s paradigmatic big band jazz composer would also be just part of a larger picture: among this era’s composers in any style of music, only Kayhan Kalhor and Darcy James Argue reach such ambitious and transcendent peaks. She’s bringing her Orchestra to a stand at Birdland this week, June 2 through 6 with sets at 8:30 and 11 PM.

As is her custom, Schneider’s compositions go far, far beyond mere vehicles for extended solos, although the solos here are exquisite and serve as the high points they ought to be. Scott Robinson’s alto clarinet dipping between heartfelt lows and airily triumphant swells on the opening number, a newly reorchestrated take of the early-morning nocturne Walking by Flashlight – from Schneider’s previous album Winter Morning Walks – sets the stage.

That number is the shortest one here: the rest of the album builds an expansive, dynamically rich Midwestern panorama. All of Schneider’s familiar tropes are in top form: her use of every inch of the sonic spectrum in the spirit of her mentor Gil Evans; endless twists and turns that give way to long, lushly enveloping, slow upward climbs; and her signature, translucent, neoromantically-influenced tunesmithing. Marshall Gilkes’ looming trombone and Greg Gisbert’s achingly vivid flugelhorn illuminate The Monarch and the Milkweed, a pensively summery meditation on the beauty of symmetry and nature. Robinson’s baritone and Donny McCaslin’s tenor sax take to the sky in Arbiters of Evolution, a labyrinthine, pulsing, slowly unwinding portrait of birds in flight (perhaps for their lives – as in much of Schneider’s work, there’s a wary environmentalist point of view in full effect here).

Frank Kimbrough’s piano and Lage Lund’s guitar carry the title track from its gentle, plainspoken intro through an unexpectedly icy interlude to gracefully dancing motives over lush waves of brass. The most pastoral of all the cuts here is Home, graced by Rich Perry’s calm, warmly meditatitve tenor sax. Then the orchestra picks up with a literally breathtaking pulse, inducing g-forces as Nimbus reaches its stormy heights, Steve Wilson’s alto sax swirling as the cinematics unfold. As a portrait of awe-inspiring Midwestern storm power, it’s pretty much unrivalled.

Gary Versace’s plaintive accordion takes centerstage amidst a rich, ominously brooding brass chart in the intense, elegaic A Potter’s Song, dedicated to the late, great trumpeter and longtime Schneider associate Laurie Frink. The album winds up on a joyously Brazilian-flavored note with Lembranca, inspired by a pivotal moment in Schneider’s life, spellbound by a carnival drum orchestra, Ryan Keberle’s trombone and Jay Anderson’s bass adding color and bouncy energy.

The album, a crowdfunded endeavor comprising newly commissioned works, comes in a gorgeously illustrated full-color digipak with extensive and articulate liner notes from the composer. Like a couple other pantheonic artists, Richard Thompson and Olivier Messiaen, Schneider is also a birder, and her commentary on current environmental crises affecting the avian world and her beloved prairie home turf are spot-on. Where does this fall in the Schneider catalog? It’s hard to say: there’s the ambition and scope of, say, Concert in the Garden, but also the saturnine majesty of Winter Morning Walks. It’s a new direction for her, no surprise considering how often she’s reinvented herself. And while it doesn’t seem to be up at the usual spots, i.e. Spotify and such, you can get completely lost in the radio feature at Schneider’s webpage. It’s the best possible advertising this album, and her work as a whole, could possibly have.

Erica Smith Is Back with a Vengeance

Erica Smith is one of the most diverse and most shatteringly evocative singers in New York. She got her start in oldtime folk music – we’re talking eighteenth century, sea chanteys and such – then went deep into Americana, then played everything from janglerock to psychedelia to torchy jazz with her backup band the 99 Cent Dreams. Most recently, she’s been enlisted to sing the Linda Thompson role in the Shootout Band, the downtown NYC supergroup who specialize in Richard and Linda Thompson songs. Smith is also one-third of the amazing all-female gospel frontline of Lizzie & the Sinners. But she hasn’t lost a step writing and performing her own plaintive, pensive, sometimes exhilarating originals. She’s doing a relatively rare (at least, these days) solo gig on May 31 at 9 PM upstairs at 2A on an excellent bill with fellow Americana guitarist/singer Monica Passin, a.k.a. L’il Mo, with wryly edgy, politically-fueled American Ambulance frontman Pete Cenedella headlining at around 11.

Smith’s most recent solo show was on a similarly kick-ass quadruplebill at the Jalopy back in February with Passin, the witty, historically-inspired, lyrically brilliant Robin Aigner and then the coyly whimsical, multistylistic violin-accordion duo the Wisterians. Smith opened with one of her most picturesque, intense numbers, River King, a waterside tableau that puts a terse update on classic Fairport Convention. Her new material was also strong: a bittersweet, fingerpicked oldtimey Piedmont-style blues; an even more bittersweet, summery waltz set in Corlear’s Hook Park on the Lower East Side; and an angst-driven narrative written on the eve of a Colorado blizzzard, with flight cancelllations and their immense implications. And she treated the Americana purists in the crowd to a downright haunting, brooding take of Wayfaring Stranger and a low-key, simmering version of the old folk standard Pretty Saro, from her cult favorite album Friend or Foe.

The rest of that night could easily have been anticlimactic but it wasn’t. Passin pulled off the rare feat of playing lots of guitar solos, solo acoustic, and managed to make them work without sounding skeletal and ungrounded. Aigner cut loose with that richly ambered, jazzily nuanced voice of hers, singing sly hokum blues, metaphorically-loaded Depression-era historical narratives and allusively snarling ballads. And the Wisterians – violinist Karl Meyer and accordionist Brooke Watkins – matched Aigner one-liner for one-liner with a clever, sometimes vaudevillian set that spanned from oldtime Americana, to Belgian barroom dance music, to edgy, chromatically-fueled Balkan folk.

Jon DeRosa Brings His Haunting, Lynchian Chamber Pop Back to New York

It’s amazing how Jon DeRosa can croon with such nuance and skill considering that he’s lost most of the hearing in his right ear. Another sad reminder of the brain drain that continues to plague New York, the noir chamber pop singer decamped for Los Angeles last year, but has a haunting new album, Black Halo  to show for it. He’s bringing those ghostly songs back to town for an album release show at around 10 at St. Vitus in Greenpoint on June 3; cover is $10.

“The initial inspiration was this intense feeling of isolation and disconnection growing in me while still in New York,” DeRosa explains, “And kind of retreating into this inner world, this spirit world, really. After living there for so many years, I literally felt like a ghost drifting through the crowds, invisible, and with no real connection to anyone or anything.”

Who in New York, who’s been here since the zeros or even earlier, hasn’t felt that way? We’re excluded from the political process that’s turning even the grungiest working-class neighborhoods into ghost towns of future crackhouses, built not as actual homes but as lifesize gamepieces for robber barons hell-bent on cashing in on the real estate bubble before it explodes. And the privileged white suburbanites displacing the artistic class here have no interest in what makes a city a city. The arts don’t exist in their social media-based meta-world. They barely even watch movies. They’re all starring in their own little status-grubbing dramas which they think are comedies but are really horror videos. And they all think they’re Spielberg, but they’re not even Ed Wood. What’s just as disturbing is that some of us have found ourselves dragged into that too, by demands of the dayjob or just trying to stay in touch with the rest of the world.

That was what DeRosa escaped; from the album, he seems to have regained his footing in a shadowy place between the living and the dead. Much as there’s an elegaic strain that runs throughout the songs, there’s hope as well. DeRosa plays guitars, with Charles Newman on keys, Matt Basile on bass, Tom Curiano on drums and Carina Round on vocals. Claudia Chopek’s one-woman string section and Brad Gordon’s one-man wind ensemble join forces to create a lush miniature orchestra on several of the tracks.

The album’s opening, Lynchian, 60s noir pop ballad, Fool’s Razor establishes an atmosphere of anomie and defeat despite its towering, angst-fueled sweep. DeRosa’s chiming twelve-string guitar mingles with glockenspiel and piano on The Sun Is Crying, a sad waltz with a late 60s Laurel Canyon psych-pop vibe and a shout-out to Leonard Cohen. Then DeRosa and Round reach for unexpectedly blithe, surrealistic, mariachi-tinged Vegas pop with When Daddy Took the Treehouse Down.

Coyotes veers from southwestern gothic to mid-80s Cure jangle: “Fear is a thief in disguise, cuts out your heart and flees with its prize,” DeRosa broods in his resonant baritone, then follows with a wryly familiar Edith Piaf riff. Give Me One More Reason is the album’s most psychedelic track, a bartender cynically watching the night’s last patrons, who “don’t know how it feels to end the night standing upright,” waiting til after the doors are locked to pour a few glasses for the ghosts of the whores who still call the dive their home.

The bolero-rock number Lonely Sleep works an elegant, understated angst:

You say that there’s a river, but I see no way across
And you say the mind’s the builder, but my mind has long been lost

DeRosa and Round duet on the ghostly lullaby Dancing in a Dream, a more organic take on Julee Cruise Twin Peaks atmospherics. The piano-driven dirge Blood Moon brings to mind the Ocean Blue as well as DeRosa’s more ambient work with Aarktika. Likewise, Knock Once has 80s values: brisk new wave bassline, hypnotically loopy goth guitar. Then DeRosa brings a lingering, astigmatic 80s ambience to Orbisonian pop with You’re Still Haunting Me – which, when you think about it, pretty much defines what Lynchian music is all about, right?

The album’s most epic number is High and Lonely, a spare, hypnotically apocalyptic anthem: “I want none of your fleeting wealth, I want none of your earthly fortune,” is DeRosa’s mantra. The album winds up with the title track, a Spectoresqe instrumental waltz. DeRosa has a strong and occasionally shattering back catalog, notably his 2012 release A Wolf in Preacher’s Clothes, but this is his strongest, most consistent release. It’s not officially out yet, therefore no streaming link, although a couple of tracks are up at Motherwest Studios’ soundcloud page. Fans of the creme de la creme of dark rock: Nick Cave, Mark Sinnis and the rest will love this. It’s good to see someone we pretty much took for granted here in New York able to keep the torch burning thousands of miles away.

A Fantastic Honkytonk and Twang Triplebill at the Jalopy on the 31st

Country singer Katie Brennan has an interesting backstory. She’s also a virtuoso concert harpist with a classical background. She got her start in New York leading a nebulously funky indie rock band, the Holy Bones, before going deeply into Americana with her vastly underrated 2008 countrypolitan album Slowly. Then she went back to her native Washington State for a spell. But now she’s back, leading a first-class honkytonk band, the Bourbon Express. They’re playing the album release show for their deliciously oldschool new album, One Big Losin’ Streak – streaming online – on a killer triplebill on May 31 at around 9 PM at the Jalopy. As a bonus, brilliantly guitar-fueled, period-perfect 1964-style twang and surf instrumentalists the Bakersfield Breakers open the night at 7 followed by the Country Provisions Band at 8. Cover is $10.

The new album is the best thing Brennan’s ever done. In keeping with the mid-60s vibe, the songs are short, typically around the three minute mark or less with brief, incisive solos by guitarist Brendan Curley – who also doubles on mandolin – and steel guitarist Jonny Lam. Bassist Andrew Dykeman and drummer Andrew Hodgkins keep things tight. Vocally, Brennan’s pulled back a little on the wide-angle vibrato that’s been one of her signature traits and soars to some pretty spectacular high notes, bolstered by Sarah Kinsey’s harmonies.
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The album’s opening track, Don’t Turn Me Down has a touch of western swing, spiky lead guitar paired off against lingering steel. Upward Track opens with a classic mid-60s C&W riff straight out of the Don Gibson playbook, Brennan’s cheery, chirpy delivery bringing to mind vintage Dolly Parton. Last Dance features a tasty handoff from mandolin to steel midway through.

Party Girl, which is more or less the album’s title track, will hit the spot for anybody whose work week feels like one long losing streak. Which Wine Goes with My Heartache follows a droll, Amy Allison-style storyline: Brennan might not be the most likely person to answer that question, considering that she’s a whiskey drinker.

The Texas shuffle I’m Not Ready is a period-perfect 60 Tammy Wynette bad girl honkytonk number. Let’s Say ‘I Do,’ told from the point of view of a girl who likes “Roping old cowboys in smoky old bars, turning their pickups into getaway cars,” has a trick ending: like the music, Brennan’s lyrics look back to an earlier era when Nashville songwriting was full of all kinds of puns and one-liners. But the funniest song here is Your Love Is Better Than Nothing: the joke is a musical one tha goes back and forth, and is awfully tricky to play, and too good to spoil here. Slippin’ Around brings back the western swing sophistication; the album winds up with Those Days Are Gone, a gorgeously bittersweet love song that turns out to have a happy ending.

The Bakersfield Breakers have an amazing debut album of their own streaming at Bandcamp. If memory serves right, their most recent show around these parts was upstairs at 2A back in March, where guitarist Keith Yaun put on a clinic in just about every instrumental country and rock style from the 50s and 60s, with a harder-rocking and more surf-oriented edge than you’d guess after hearing the album. Some pretty volcanic Dick Dale and Ventures covers were part of that, but the best song of the night was a sad, wistful original that wouldn’t have been out of place in the Duane Eddy playbook.

Tongues in Trees Wrap Up Their Lush, Enveloping Sonic Cocoon at Barbes This Week

Hypnotic, thoughtfully adventurous trio Tongues in Trees wind up their May residency at Barbes with a show tomorrow night, May 27 at around 8 PM. It can be pretty comical to see how bands tag themselves, but this crew found a bunch that fit: “experimental art rock folktronica indian classical New York.” But one they didn’t pick – psychedelia – probably describes them best. On their debut ep – streaming at Bandcamp – singer Samita Sinha, guitarist Grey McMurray and drummer Sunny Jain take dreamy pastoral soundscapes, many of them colored with the precise modulations and ecstatic peaks of Indian carnatic nusic, and set them to trancey rhythms orchestrated with richly multilayered guitar textures.

The album’s first track, Howl Like (Running Brooks) opens with resonant, lingering guitar and Jain’s wind-chime cymbals, Sinha choosing her spots as the washes and gently jangling guitar loops rise and fall, the drums finally picking up with a mighty majesty. It’s the closest thing here to what the band sounds like live.

The second cut, Love Letter is a gently swaying lullaby – Sinha uses a gauzy filter on her tenderly keening vocalsa, way up toward the top of her her stratospheric range, as she often does onstage as the song builds to another soaring crescendo before fading down gracefully. Parallel sets Sinha’s nuanced, microtonal carnatic vocals and McMurray’s subtly polyrhythmic jangle and swoosh over a hypnotic, persistent motorik groove. The last track is Meri Bhavana, taking the gentle/rippling dichotomy of the second song up a notch.

At the first night of their residency earlier this month, it was especially cool to see Jain behind a full kit – rather than the big, boomy dhol bass drum he pummels in bhangra brass band Red Baraat – utilizng everything from the rims to the hardware with jazz precision and wit. Sinha alternated between mics and effects, a pillowy, springlike tone and full-gale intensity. McMurray, for a guy who plays very economically, really gives himself a workout onstage, always in search of the perfect timbre and the perfect spot for a note or a phase, many of which he spun through a loop pedal. Pouncing from one stompbox to another, he was like a stepdancer or a marine on an obstacle course, managing to knock over just a single drink in the process. A special guest added some looming trombone lines and also a dub edge to the several of the songs via a mixing board.

A Dynamic New Album and a Bushwick Show from Cellist/Singer Patricia Santos

Patricia Santos calls herself a “vocellist.” As you would expect from a distinctive, terse cello player and strong, eclectic singer, she has her fingers in several projects. Most notably, she’s half of the cello-vocal duo the Whiskey Girls and a member of brilliant noir art-rock/circus-rock/latin band Kotorino as well. Santos also has an intriguingly intimate, tunefully diverse new album, Never Like You Think, streaming at Bandcamp and an album release show coming up at 9 PM on May 27 at Max Cellar (downstairs from Amancay’s Diner), 2 Knickerbocker Ave. at Johnson Ave.in Bushwick. It’s close to the Morgan Ave. stop on the L.

The albun’s first track is The One I Should Love, a starkly swaying minor-key blues with just vocals and two instruments, sawing cello contrasting with Andrew Swift’s bitingly resonant guitar. Then the two instruments essentially switch roles. In Your Arms sets Santos’ wryly sultry vocals against a strutting tune that builds to a subtly crescendoing waltz, winding out with a long, hypnotically vamping, pitchblende outro. For You is even more spare, Santos’ warm, balmy vocals paired against a minimalist four-note riff that throws off shards of overtones, especially when she hits a passionate chorus.

Santos keeps the stark ambience going through a raptly dynamic, then unexpectedly explosive take of the classic Mexican folk song La Llorona. Old Hill, another waltz, has a wistful front-porch folk feel grounded by the celllo’s ambered tones. The album winds up with an absolutely knockout, creepy, noisy cover of Kotorono’s Little Boat. The original has a deadpan ominousness: here, Santos teams with Kotorino bandleader/guitarist Jeff Morris, building to a skronk-infested, murderous peak. It’s a cool blend of grit, elegance and raw intensity that aptly capsulizes a captivatingly individualistic debut release.

NYC Classical Sensation the Queensboro Symphony Orchestra Pitches In for Nepal

What do you do when you’ve suddenly created the fastest-growing classical music scene in New York? You stage a benefit concert for Nepalese earthquake relief. All proceeds from the exciting new Queensboro Symphony Orchestra’s May 31, 7 PM NY Concert for Nepal will go to Catholic Relief Services and Korea Times-led projects to aid the survivors. Maestro Dong-hyun Kim will lead the orchestra in performances of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5, Mozart’s Horn Concerto No. 3 (featuring Peter DelGrosso) and the Nepali national anthem arranged by Paul Joseph.

When five hundred people turn out on a gloomy, overcast work night in the middle of nowhere in Queens (an exaggeration – the venue is a brief, barely ten minute walk from the Flushing stop at the end of the 7 line), you know something’s up. The buzz at the reception after the orchestra’s richly dynamic, wildly applauded concert last month was that the word is out: musicians really like playing for Kim. A thoughtful, insightful individual with an unassuming gravitas but also an infectious, dry wit, he led the orchestra with meticulous attention to both detail and emotion.

This ensemble is on the young side and doesn’t have a lot of “name” players, at least in the US, but is stocked with talent. Trumpeter Chulho Kim drew more than one spontaneous ovation from the crowd with his seemingly effortless, liquid command of the long solo and several other passages in Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto. The orchestra’s brass section shone brightly throughout a surprisingly nuanced if aptly festive take of Handel’s Royal Fireworks Music. And the conductor made a steady, Teutonic celebration out of Beethoven’s Egmont Overture, employing a familiar trope, setting the floor very low so as to max out the headroom on a long upward climb.

But the piece de resistance was the world premiere of Kathryn’s Mirror by Paul Joseph. The colorful impresario – who is also the orchestra’s composer-in-residence, more or less – admitted to the crowd beforehand that he’d been given a mere three weeks to orchestrate the suite, but pulled it off with aplomb. It turned out to be a sweeping neoromantic theme and variations that would make a dynamite film score for a bittersweetly suspenseful World War II-era drama. Watch it on youtube and see for yourself: there’s cinematic John Williams angst and grandeur but also neatly intricate Carl Nielsen-style orchestration and a pensively lush central theme that Antonin Dvorak could easily have written. And the ensemble took care to emphasize the emotional tug-of-war as its aching introductory waltz shifted shape. Soloists were strong: a looming horn figure early on, poignant strings as the first part hit a crescendo, growing in colorful swirls as the mood lifted a bit. A recurrent and brilliantly crystalline clarinet theme, tense dips and epic swells propelled the concluding segments. It predicts good things for this ambitious composer and an ensemble that’s growing by leaps and bounds. The May 31 concert is at 7 PM at Mary’s Nativity Church, 46-02 Parsons Blvd. at Holly Ave. in Flushing. If you felt like it, you could take a bus from Main Street (the bus stops right outside the church), but it’s probably faster and easier just to walk from the train.

Noa Fort Brings Her Darkly Expansive, Eclectic Songs to the West Village

Pianist/singer Noa Fort– younger sister to respected jazz pianist Anat Fort – is one of New York’s more interesting and original artists. She bridges the gap between art-rock, chamber pop, classical and jazz, singing in both English and Hebrew, reflecting her Israeli-American background. Her moodily modulated alto vocals mirror the diversity of styles in her playing: she can channel torchy cabaret, creepy circus rock or work the corners of a song with a jazz and blues sophistication. She’s playing Caffe Vivaldi on May 26 at 9 PM.

She likes minor keys, slow tempos and takes her time: the videos on her music page often go on for six or seven minutes at a clip. The first tracks are solo or duo performances. There’s Winter Requiem, a slow, brooding art-rock anthem. The second number works around a menacingly carnivalesque stairstepping piano theme. No World Between Us – a duet with sparse, Lynchian washes of guitar from Amir Weiss – has an icy gothic rock feel, but with a loose rhythm that owes more to jazz. Fort goes deeper and even more darkly into that idiom with All By Yourself, a trio with her sister plus bass clarinetist Nitai Levi, before the instruments go off on a a jaunty improvisational tangent. And Now Is the Time – also with Anat on piano – looks back to Nina Simone for inspiration.

Fort’s originals leading a quintet are straight-up jazz, lively and rhythmic, with a similarly moody edge that brings to mind the work of another Israeli artist, Avishai Cohen. And her choice of Wild As the Wind is particularly apt, a richly dynamic take that starts absolutely ghostly and then picks up with a bittersweet edge: And just when you think you have her pegged as an enigmatic jazz/classical type, you discover at the bottom of the page that she likes ska-punk. Go figure. It’s more likely that she’ll air out her more introspective stuff at the show next week…but wouldn’t it be cool if she threw a Hub City Stompers song into the mix to shake up the room…

Guitarist Aram Bajakian and Singer Julia Ulehla Play Riveting Balkan Psychedelia at the Stone

Guitarist Aram Bajakian is in the midst of a weeklong stand at the Stone, with a revolving door of downtown jazz and rock talent. His late set last night was a rare performance with his wife, singer Julia Ulehla, playng what could be characterized as Balkan psychedelia from their magical Dalava album from late last year. Although both artists are respected in their individual fields – Bajakian was Lou Reed’s lead guitarist, did a turn in Diana Krall’s band and is one of John Zorn’s first-call guys, and Ulehla is in demand as a classical and indie classical singer – they haven’t worked together a lot, at least in public. And they should – this set was transcendent. They’re doing it again tonight, May 23 at 8 with a full band; at 10, Bajakian leads a “punk Armenian folk” group playing songs off his fantastic 2011 Kef album.

Bajakian wryly explained to the crowd that they shouldn’t expect note-for-note versions of the songs on the album, considering that the Stone is a place for improvisation, and that the two were dead set on playing without a net. They opened on a feral note, establishing a recurrent dynamic, Bajakian’s savage tunefulness counterbalanced by Ulehla’s precisely modulated, alternately wailing and misterioso delivery. All the material save for one song, if memory serves right, was taken from the Dalava album, based on a collection of folk songs passed down from Ulehla’s Moravian great-grandfather. Ulehla sang in perfectly unaccented Czech, providing English translations before pretty much every number.

And these songs are crazy, and fun, and had a sardonic humor worthy of the best American C&W. In more than one instance, Ulehla voiced both the clueless guy and the unattainable girl who puts him down. Together they played everything you could possibly want: fire-and-brimstone Slavic gospel; an airily skeletal horizontal mood piece; and a clanging, roaring, angst-fueled, Lynchian post-Velvets guitar number to open the show, Ulehla matching her husband for breathtaking intensity, if a little more low-key. Bajakian alternated between Telecaster and a hollowbody model that he played with a muted attack, but with the reverb turned up all the way to max out the ghostly factor.

Ulehla’s great-grandfather Vladimir believed that songs were like living beings (ask any musician – they are!) and that they could be reanimated at any future date, with whatever new life musicians could breathe into them. Bajakian turned an early number into a careening blues, and later shifted with deadpan aplomb between searing, cliffhanger noiserock and a tiptoeing waltz, drawing plenty of chuckles from the crowd. Meanwhile, Ulehla held her plaintive ground, whether with a soul-infused grit, an enigmatic resonance or operatic flair.

There’s an aasumption – grounded in decades of pretty irrefutable evidence – that people who play edgy music tend to be difficult and troubled. You certainly don’t expect them to be warm. But that’s how Bajakian and Ulehla came across, exchanging glances, as if to say to each other, “Isn’t this cool? I know you give everybody else goosebumps, but tonight the two of us can double that and then some!” Believe it or not, last night’s show wasn’t sold out. Tonight’s your chance to catch magic in a bottle.