A Relatively Rare Appearance by the Darkly Exhilarating Scott Reeves Jazz Orchestra

Big band jazz composers may be the most pure artists in all of music. These people do what they do strictly out of love. When you’re done paying the band – if in fact there IS anything to pay the band  with- there is absolutely no money in writing original big band jazz. Even the universally respected Maria Schneider survives on Chamber Music America grants. So it would be a little misleading to say that the last time this blog caught a show by the Scott Reeves Jazz Orchestra, it was in late summer 2014 at a now-defunct Park Slope coffee emporium/wifi hotspot. The mighty ensemble might have played a couple of gigs since then. But what a fantastic show this one turned out to be! Considering how much of an individualist the bandleader is – his axe is the alto flugelhorn, sort of a higher-pitched valve trombone – it was no surprise to hear how distinctive his music for large ensemble is, a stormy, brassy blend of old and new, with a nod to the great Miles Davis/Gil Evans records of the late 50s and early 60s. He’s pulling the group together for a 4:30 PM gig on July 10 at Smalls; cover is $20 and includes a drink.

That Brooklyn show – at the old Tea Lounge, which for quite awhile was booked by a similarly estimable big band composer, JC Sanford – opened with deliciously bustling noir 50s crime jazz riffage and quickly hit a latin-infused swing fueled by an indomitable baritone sax solo, the brass punching in like a heavyweight with his nemesis on the ropes. A steady, apprehensively fiery trumpet solo handed off to sparsely dancing bass and eerily modal piano until the band rose again. It was like being at a Gil Evans show half a century ago, albeit surrounded by North Slope kids absorbed in their laptops and tablets.

Reeves kept the latin flavor going through the vampy second number, a brassy blaze finally interrupted by a wryly garrulous bari sax break, the composer taking a judiciously enigmatic, uneasily bubbling solo as the rhythm section crashed and burned. Catchy call-and-response between high reeds and brass dominated the trickily syncopated number after that, lit up by a tantalizingly moody alto sax solo.

A brooding midtempo clave number was next, Reeves soloing resolutely and steadily as the rest of the brass shivered, up to a neat if similarly uneasy round-robin brass chart, The band sank their collective teeth into a blustery early space-age Ellingtonian shuffle after that, And the trumpet solo on the eerily triplet-infused number that followed, wow. If memory serves right, the band also made their way through an Ellington tune late in the set (when you’re multitasking and letting your recorder do the heavy lifting, details like this grow exponentially elusive over time).

Oh yeah – one more thing – Reeves loves false endings as much as he loves noir latin grooves. There’s nothing more fun than getting the crowd to believe that every single one of the eighteen or so people onstage is finished, when in fact they’re not. At this late date, it’s impossible to remember who was in the band – Sanford might have been on trombone, maybe Ben Kono – a fortuitously ubiquitous presence in big band circles in this city these days – on alto sax, possibly Carl Maraghi on bari sax and Nadje Noordhuis on trumpet, among the group assembled back behind the couches along the space’s northern wall. What’s coolest about the Smalls gig is that whoever’s on piano gets to play the house upright rather than the electric piano the band was forced to make do with in Park Slope.

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Svetlana and the Delancey Five Salute Ella and Satchmo and Put Their Own Sophisticated Stamp on Classic Swing

It figures that drummer Rob Garcia would grab the opportunity to kick off Svetlana & the Delancey Five‘s show at Lucille’s Friday night with a counterintuitive series of offbeats into a hi-de-ho intro, Mike Sailors’ spiraling trumpet solo rising to carnivalesque heights and foreshadowing a darkly lustrous, unselfconsciously erudite show. Why has swing jazz become so enormously popular again? Sure, you can dance to it, and many couples – as well as an exuberant, octogenarian tapdancer – were cutting a rug at this show. But swing is also escapist, and frontwoman Svetlana Shmulyian makes no secret that this is her her vehicle for finding solace and transcendence, and that everybody is welcome to get onboard. But what differentiates this band from the hundreds of others working territory that’s often been done to death over the years is that this group isn’t just a vehicle for vocals. In over four years together, this semi-revolving cast has built a cohesiveness, a camaraderie and a distinctively sophisticated sound largely unrivalled in their thriving demimonde.

For example, Blue Skies is a swing staple, but Shmulyian didn’t sing it as straight-up exuberance – and essentially warned the crowd that she wasn’t going to. And then made good on that, with an uncluttered, balmy optimism grounded in the sense that there definitely had been a storm before the calm. The rest of the program was thematic, a characteristically ambitious celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the mid-50s Louis Armstrong/Ella Fitzgerald collaborations. A potential minefield, but Shmulyian and special guest trombonist/singer Wycliffe Gordon rose to that challenge, indomitably and with a deeply bluesy edge echoed throughout the band.

Pianist Ben Paterson spiced his purist riffs with the occasional gracefully adrenalizing neoromantic cascade, while Garcia delivered grooves that roamed far south of the border, as well as from Buddy Rich splash, to a more chill, vintage Harlem pulse. And his arrangement of the Beatles’ Because brought out every bit of angst in Paul McCartney’s moody ballad, reinvented as a darkly bristling tango. Bassist Scott Ritchie kept his changes purposeful and low-key, and was having more fun than simply walking the changes. Saxophonist Michael Hashin alternated between sailing soprano and dynamic yet terse leaps and bounds on tenor.

But it was the chemistry between Shmulyian and Gordon that hit the highest points of the night, whether his masterful and deceptively subtle plunger work, or his droll, tongue-in-cheek vocals and effortless shifts into falsetto, or the night’s most hilarious moment, at the end of a solo toward the end of the show. As obvious and vaudevillian as that was, Gordon waited patiently to make that moment as ridiculously amusing as it was. And the reliably dynamic, eclectic Shmulyian was pretty much jumping out of her shoes from the git-go, rising to the very top of her register, vibrato going full blast. Yet it was a simmering take of the midtempo ballad Under a Blanket of Blue that arguably carried the most impact.

Likewise, the best song of the night might well have been a brand-new Shmulyian original, a bittersweetly swaying, guardedly optimistic New York-centric ballad allowing for a flicker of hope in the face of omnipresent bad news. Although she also grinningly acknowledged the results of the Brexit referendum, drawing some pretty wild applause from throughout the club. Grounded in the here and now, Shmulyian and her band played a show to get lost in: not bad for somebody who grew up in Moscow spinning Ella Fitzgerald vinyl on her family’s turntable and arrived in New York without knowing a soul here. The band’s next New York gig is a free show on July 23 at 8 PM at the auditorium at Kingsborough Community College, 2001 Oriental Blvd. in Manhattan Beach; the closest train is the Q to Brighton Beach.

Eden Lane Bring Their Misty, Haunting, Lynchian Jazz Songs Back to the West Village

Stephanie Layton stood tall and resolute, a tinge of mist in her voice, in front of her jazz combo Eden Lane at Caffe Vivaldi late last month. “If it was up to me, I’d only sing sad songs,” she told the crowd, concise and to the point – and half of them roared their approval. If there ever was a market for depressed music, New York in 2016 is it.

“But that wouldn’t be well-rounded,” she explained gently. As you would expect from a vocalist who’s in demand as much as she is, Layton is actually very well-rounded. And one suspects that her similarly well-rounded bandmates in the Tickled Pinks – arguably New York’s most irrepressibly fun swing harmony trio, who will be on West Coast tour this August – share her preference for dark material. Karla Moheno leads one of this city’s most mysteriously cinematic, haunting bands, Karla Rose & the Thorns, while Kate Sland sings and plays bass in uneasily swirling rock group Merit Badge. Layton’s other gig is playing piano alongside her singer sister Susanne in honkytonk power trio Dylan Charles & the Layton Sisters. And in a stroke of serendipity, Layton is bringing Eden Lane back to Caffe Vivaldi on July 29 at 9:30 PM.

Last time out at that venue, Layton was in her element. In her auburn bangs, retro red-framed glasses, black top and smart vintage print skirt, she had the David Lynch ingenue persona down cold, a perfect match for her blue velvet vocals. Her purist, inspired backing unit also included Charles on guitar along with bassist Larry Cook, tenor saxophonist Janelle Reichman and pianist.Yan Falmagne. They slowly made their way into My Baby Just Cares For Me, Layton giving it an understated nuance with a nod back to Nina Simone, Reichman’s sax matching Layton’s understatedly pillowy delivery. Then she completely flipped the script with the first of two state-specific songs, a coyly shuffling, wordy rarity from the Blossom Dearie catalog,  Rhode Island Is Famous for You, Charles plinking wryly through a verse when Layton threw one his way.

Then she went back to disarmingly direct, bittersweet mode for Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe, less Peggy Lee ballad than angst-ridden wish song lowlit by wee-hours piano underneath Reichman’s long, moodily spiraling solo. Layton duetted with Charles on a briskly swinging, almost defiantly contented take of Mississippi Mud, then went back to geographical jazz with a rare Erik Frandsen tune, the vividly affecting Unique New York. Eight million hearts just can’t be wrong, and she gave voice to every one, hoping they won’t lose their apartments to speculators looking to make a quick flip before the market crashes.

The band kept the wistful, grey-sky mood going, with a knowingly wounded, mentholated tropical tinge, Falmagne leaping in to keep the volume up when Charles added an aptly stark solo. Layton’s resigned interpretation of Rodgers and Hart’s Little Girl Blue was just plain shattering: her “Just sit here and count your fingers,” was enough to get tears from a stone. Likewise, their bittersweetly swaying take of When Sunny Gets Blue echoed the classic Jeanne Lee version, emotionally if not rhythmically. From there they picked up the pace, bouncing their way through No Soap, No Hope on the wings of Reichman’s rapidfire riffage.

Layton matched an anxious, brittle vibrato to her opaquely enveloping low register in an enigmatic take of When the Sun Comes Out, Charles’ rain-off-the-roof solo capping it off. Julie London’s Nice Girls Don’t Stay for Breakfast was next, keeping the heartbroken mood front and center over Falmagne’s judicious phrasing. They closed with a tongue-in-cheek, hungover Sunday pancake afternoon version of Give Me the Simple Life. Some laughs, plenty of goosebumps and enough empathy to pull just about anybody out of the abyss. Dare you to go to Caffe Vivaldi on the 29th and find out for yourself.

Hot Jazz on a Hot Summer’s Day

The party at Saturday’s slate of hot jazz bands at Central Park Summerstage was out back, on the lawn behind the arena. The picknickers and snuggling couples who’d made that spot their destination were on to something. There are no sightlines back there, unless you sit on somebody’s shoulders, maybe, but the grass has grown in since the hurricane, making a comfortable return to a time that for awhile seemed gone for good.

Inside, a mostly white, monied, youngish crowd slowly grew, milling around aimlessly, lethargic as the sun beat down oppressively on the astroturf. The bleachers to the left and right were packed, especially in the shade of the trees. The tented spaces directly behind the sound booth – which these days is situated at the back of a wide, fenced-off path to the stage – are paid seats reserved for ticketholders who fork over thousands of dollars to sit there, according to one of the many, many ushers working the show. But those seats remained empty for the duration of a concert that went on for over four hours. Then again, hedge funders are not known for their fondness for dancing, or their taste in music, or for any kind of fun in general. What would have been fun would have been to organize a posse to occupy those seats since all that space was going to waste. Needless to say, plenty of people would have jumped at a chance to do that in, say, 1988, when the arena was funded by taxpayer money rather than hedge funders trying to dodge the IRS. Then again, that was also before antidepressants and post-9/11 security paranoia.

On one hand, this concert was a bunch of familiar faces playing familiar material. Then again, that’s a spoiled New Yorker’s view. Many of the creme de la creme of the New York oldtimey swing jazz scene made their way up to the bandstand as the sun made its way slowly across the sky. Trumpter Bria Skonberg served as emcee for the New York Hot Jazz All-Stars, an aptly named pickup band featuring – in no particular order – Anat Cohen on clarinet, Wycliffe Gordon (who’d just played a raptly fun set with Svetlana and the Delancey Five the previous night) on trombone and vocals, Jerron “Blnd Boy” Paxton on banjo, Dalton Ridenhour on piano, Vince Giordano on bass, vocals and bass sax and Joe Saylor on drums. With dixieland flair and expertly bluesy chops, they made their way through a New Orleans-heavy set, Gordon channeling Louis Jordan with similar erudite, unselfconscious verve.

Hot Sardines frontwoman Elizabeth Bougerol, decked out in a dazzling orange pantssuit, sang the most apt song of the afternoon. The wistfully swinging title track to the band’s new album French Fries and Champagne may speak to those on a beer budget with a taste for bubbly, but it’s as much of a guardedly hopeful anthem for those who’ve weathered the past several years’ blitzkrieg of gentrification. Bougerol didn’t mention the UK’s secession from the European Union – Svetlana did that the previous night, with relish – but that’s the first domino. The real estate bubble can’t last much longer. Meanwhile, the band – musical director Evan Palazzo on piano, Jason Prover on trombone, Mike Sailor on trumpet, plus sax, rhythm section and a full string quartet – partied like it was 1929. Bougerol toyed with the beat in a brassy, sometimes languid, sometimes come-hither mezzo-soprano, through a set composed mostly of original, period-perfect continental 1930s style swing numbers. The best of the standards was Bougerol’s insightful bilingual rendition of an old chestnut, titled Comes Love in English, but whose French chorus translates loosely as “Love Is Fucked Up.” They also took a rather farfetched stab at horn-driven countrypolitan along with a misguided remake of a wretched 1980s cheeseball pop hit. Then again, that song was huge in France, and that’s where Bougerol hails from.

Butler, Bernstein & the Hot 9 headlined. By then, the turf had really soaked up the heat and was throwing it back up, and the band onstage reflected that. This is basically trumpeter Steven Bernstein’s return to his roots playing the lively New Orleans-centric swing and pre-swing repertoire he cut his teeth on in Berkeley and then New York before making his own indelible mark as an avatar of noir, and film music, and Jewish jazz. So it was no surprise to hear him leap and snort and fire off one explosive burst after another as pianist Henry Butler boogied and rumbled and barrelhoused, guitarist Matt Munisteri jangling and clanging through every hip voicing in the book as the horns and strings wove an endlessly joyous lattice of southern-fried revelry. Inside, the crowd’s energy level had picked up to the point where it was hard to find a space out of the sun that wasn’t forbidden. Out back on the lawn, there was plenty of space, and relaxation, a good place for starting over when the time comes. And it will. Bring it on.

Irresistible, Cleverly Sardonic Fun with Uri Caine and the Lutoslawski Quartet

If you missed pianist Uri Caine with the Lutoslawski Quartet at National Sawdust last night, you missed a really fun show. Caine is one of the great wits in music, a category-defying player equally adept at jazz, classical and klezmer. He’d been commissioned by the organizers of the Jazztopad Festival to collaborate with the enterprising Polish string quartet, and the results were obviously contagious. In between numbers, cellist Maciej Miodawski couldn’t resist breaking into a smile, and while his bandmates – violinists Marcin Marcowic and Bartocz Woroch, and violist Artur Rozmyslowicz – were more stoic, there was no mistaking the cameraderie between the five players onstage. An album of their work over the past year together, both in Poland and the US, is due out soon.

The performance was about album-length, half a dozen pieces in total clocking in at around the fifty minute mark. Caine nimbly negotiated long, rapidfire cascades and arpeggiated flurries, interspersed with seemingly haphazard leaps and bounds that sounded like improvisation even though they were obviously not: this group keeps it fresh. Meanwhile, the quartet alternated between gracefully paced circular motives, steady pizzicato and shiftting sheets of atmospherics.

And Caine’s signature sense of humor was ubiquitous: in the wry round-robin of pizzicato that concluded one number, a similarly droll series of glissandos later on, and in the surrealistic juxtaposition of gleaming, Schubertian neoromanticism and increasingly errant variations that were sort of a more elegant take on what Spike Jones might have done with the theme. Caine led the group into the most trad piece of the night, lowlit with his barrelhouse lefthand and gospel allusions, to close the show  The crowd roared for an encore; they didn’t get one .

What was a little surprising was the choice of venue. National Sawdust has world-class sonics and is a perennially enjoyable place to take in a show. On the other hand, the expat Polish community a little to the north and west in Greenpoint is fiercely supportive of their indigenous sounds. A guy as far out as Tomasz Stanko can sell out any one of the wedding halls there. Considering the size of the Polish contingent that made it to this one, the crowd would have tripled in size closer to Greenpoint Avenue.

Anbessa Orchestra Plays a Killer Barbes Show, Then Heads to Red Hook

One of the most exciting concerts of this summer promises to be the twinbill on July 1 at Pioneer Works at 159 Pioneer St. in Red Hook, where sizzling Israeli-American Ethiopiques groove band Anbessa Orchestra opens for popular Ethiopian jazz bandleader/keyboardist Hailu Mergia. Realistically, there probably aren’t a lot of people outside of Red Hook who are going to go to this, but if you are in Red Hook, get your ass over to the venue and pick up an advance ticket for $20 and save yourself five bucks off the door charge. The show is advertised as beginning at 8, although things usually start on the later side here. The easiest way to get to the venue from downtown Brooklyn is to catch the B61 bus, which runs down Court St. and then takes a right on Atlantic, past Sahadi’s, and will drop you off about a block and a half from the venue.

Anbessa Orchestra played an amazing show at Barbes the Saturday night over Memorial Day weekend. They hit hard right from the start, shifting rhythms artfully from slinky to funkier as guitarist Nadav Peled fired off intricate Malian desert rock hammer-on riffs, the alto saxophonist picking things up with a bluesy, exuberant solo as the band cantered behind him. They hit a punchy, staccato minor-key Ethio-funk groove after that, Peled distinguishing himself as he would do all night, finding interesting places to go on the fretboard throughout what was basically a one-chord jam as the dancers on the floor twirled and bounced.

Fueled by Eden Bareket’s smoky baritone sax, the next number built quickly out of an ominous intro to a brisk, camelwalking triplet rhythm, balmy alto sax overhead. Considering that the blues is African and Ethiopian music is the world’s oldest, it’s no surprise to hear so much blues in this band’s music. What’s most refreshing, and ultimately makes them as catchy as they are, is that they keep things terse and purposeful and don’t overplay. The horns are tight and so is the rhythm section, and when somebody tales off on a solo, they make it count, whether Bareket’s offhandedly wild postbop spirals on this particular number, or the bubbling organ against the ominously looming horns on the similarly funky but considerably more otherworldly tune after that. A biting, puristically bluesy Wayne Tucker trumpet solo and Peled’s clanking, clenched-teeth guitar each built to an explosive peak as the music rose and fell.

The highest point of the night was when Tucker went blasting and trilling to an instant crescendo as the even mightier anthem afterward swelled and then grew quieter, Peled’s deep-desert riffage bobbing and weaving under a tightly syncopated minor-key horn chart, drummer Eran Fink and bassist Tamir Shmerling nimbly negotiating its tricky rhythm, seemingly shifting in and out of focus. Peled took it down to a quiet, darkly majestic solo interlude before the organ and rhythm section pulled it back up into the stormclouds. Then the band completely flipped the script with an easygoing, catchy, major-key, vintage Jamaican-style rocksteady tune. And that was just the first set. These are just some of the flavors they’re likely to bring to Red Hook on the first of next month.

 

Leila Adu Brings Her Darkly Surreal Psychedelic Soul to Williamsburg

Leila Adu sings a singular blend of psychedelic soul and art-rock, with frequent and often disquieting detours into the avant garde. Her music has echoes of Kate Bush, and Amy X Neuburg, and maybe Amanda Palmer, and also draws on Adu’s Ghanian/New Zealander heritage. Her lyrics have a bitingly aphoristic, stream-of-consciousness quality in the same vein as Jane LeCroy. The singer has a brand-new ep, Love Cells – streaming at Bandcamp – and an album release show coming up on June 29 at 7 PM at National Sawdust.  She shares the bill with electronic salad-spinners O Paradiso and the sometimes sepulchrally minimalist, sometimes nebulously intense Nico Turner. Cover is $15.

The ep’s opening, title track is a trip-hop slow-jam number that wouldn’t be out of place in the catalog of another, more famous singer with the same last name. “Find your passion ’cause the world ain’t gonna save you,” she suggests. What’s refreshing about it is that the requisite ka-chunk beat is organic rather than synthetic. Track two, Surrogate Suspect is a surreallistically altered take on a creepy circus rock waltz: “There’s lots of marauding idiots out there, look a gift horse in the mouth,” Adu asserts. For what it’s worth, it may be the only song released this year to mention eating pork pies.

Adu wastes no time shifting to horror movie cadences in Satellite Head, an angst-fueled, richly lyrical escape anthem:

Got no money for a taxi and I don’t have a car
But I’m alive
You put a full stop on my life
I used to run at night, now there is no…
I get up a six, travel a twelve-hour day
But I’m around
I’m forgetting your name, but I’m alive
It’s an adult’s game, it’s not all right
I pray that I don’t crystallize

Adu follows that with Je T’Aime, a solo vocal miniature with jaunty, jazzy, multitracked harmonies.

Horror in Black and White takes a sharp turn back to scampering, phantasmagorical menace, a caustic look at racial tension. Adu brings the album full circle, back to loopy trip-hop with The City and the Voodoo Lady and its woozy 90s acid jazz vibe. The album’s persistent unease takes a step back here, at least temporarily, Adu’s ambitious lyrics grounded by her uncluttered, precise, direct vocals. This is one of the most intriguing and individualistic short albums to come over the transom in recent months.

Vox Urbana at Barbes: One of NYC’s Best Shows of the Year

Saturday night at Barbes, Tucson psychedelic cumbia band Vox Urbana played one of the most deliriously fun shows anywhere in New York this year. They sound like Chicha Libre with horns – yeah, that good.

They opened with a slinky, eerily vampy number, the musical equivalent of a red-on-black Sequeiros tableau. The tremoloing funeral parlor organ in tandem with frontman Kiki Castellanos’ watery, vintage chorus-box guitar gave the music both a menace and a retro allure with tight, bright brass overhead. The number after that sounded like a Burning Spear reggae hit from the 70s reinvented as cumbia, morphing cleverly and almost imperceptibly into a bouncy tropical rock groove. Then they went back to a swaying, hip-tugging slink with an enigmatically anthemic number that hit a big peak as the organ grew smokier while the horns traded riffs with Castellanos, the dancers gathered at the front of the room taking his advice to get down and have some fun.

By now the place was packed, and it was hot: “It’s like Tucson up here!” Castellanos said drily. The band responded with another number that paired purposeful, punchy horns against a lurid, organ-fueled backdrop. Considering how psychedelic the band’s music is, it’s amazing how tight they are: throughout the show, solos were short and concise, and the band kept the unstoppable sway going throughout a big percussion break – Saul Perez on congas and Casey Hadland on drums – into the next tune. Their Spanish lyrics turned out to be much the same, entreating the dancers to do their thing, encouraging global unity and late in the set, sending a shout-out to a popular Tucson community activist. The organist switched to accordion for that one.

The night’s best number was an instrumental that mingled hi-de-ho blues and dark dub reggae into a cumbia….or it might have been a minor-key party anthem a little later on, where Castellanos shifted through his pedalboard and switched out the ice for various degrees of heat, finally taking it out with a wild volley of tremolo-picking. Then the band moved toward ska and then back to the tropical rock – and then an eerily bouncing, modal Ethiopian tune!.

And for what it’s worth, this group draws a really goodlooking crowd. As sadly as this neighborhood has been whitewashed over the years, it was encouraging to see pretty much every New York demographic dancing and reveling in the fact that this is still a multicultural city.

Hard-Hitting, Edgy, Tuneful Postrock Band Sunwatchers Opens for Smog’s Bill Callahan in South Williamsburg

Sunwatchers play hard-charging, psychedelic postrock instrumentals with Middle Eastern, Balkan and occasional African touches. Their sound blends the searing guitar and electric phin of Jim McHugh with Jeff Tobias’ atmospheric, resonant alto sax over the driving rhythm section of bassist Peter Kerlin and drummer Jason Robira. They’ve got a new, self-titled full-length album (sort of streaming online if you connect the dots – follow the individual links below) out from Thee Oh Sees’ John Dwyer’s Castle Face label, and they’re opening a kind of weird twinbill at Baby’s All Right starting the night of June 26, which happens to be sold out. As of today the two following shows, at 9 PM on the 27th and 28th, with Smog’s Bill Callahan headlining, are not. Cover is $25. On one hand, as loud, and catchy, and adrenalizing as these guys can be, putting Callahan – Mr. Mist – on after them is anticlimactic. On the other hand, it’s good to see a deserving band get to play to a captive audience. ***UPDATE – all three nights are sold out.

The suite – much of which has been released previously on cassette a couple of years ago – opens with Herd of Creeps, a pounding series of variations on a wickedly catchy minor-key hook, sax and guitar blasting together as a toxic swirl builds in the background over a punk stomp. It reminds of the kind of long, ska-flavored jams Tuatara would take back around the turn of the century. They vary it with more complex guitar on the second track, For Sonny (a Rollins dedication? It isn’t as far as out as the jazz sax icon could go with it) and then hit a hardcore drive as the guitar buzzes and oscillates and the sax swirls on track three, White Woman.

Eusubius moves toward the looseness of free jazz, but Robira’s decisive, spacious hits hold it together as the guitar flutters and bursts into flame and the sax does the same, but more warmly and low-key. It’s like an electric wacko jazz take on circular, spiky yet balmy West African kora music. The band goes back to the original theme for the most epic cut, Ape Phases, sort of a cross between the insistent aggression the album opens with, and the more varied second part. They finally hit a peak in a machete-thicket of tremolo-picked guitar and frenetically melismatic sax.

Moroner shifts from a (relatively, for these guys) easygoing, ultraviolet-lit Velvets/Black Angels style jam toward more haphazardly intense territory. Likewise, the final cut, Moonchanges rises out of spiky blues guitar phrasing over atmospherics, to a steady, surprisingly four-on-the-floor drive with amiable sax/guitar interplay.There are some good special guests here – Dave Harrington on guitar and keys, Hubble’s Ben Greenberg on guitar, Cory Bracken on vibraphone, Dave Kadden on keys and Jonah Rapino on fiddle, but it’s not apparent where any of these guys are exactly within the squall. Bite the bullet, go to the Baby’s All Right show and find out for yourself.

Kelley Swindall and David Allan Coe in Midtown: Rising Star and Old Lion of Country and Americana

Last night at B.B. King’s, Kelley Swindall had the daunting task of taming a sold-out crowd of drunken fans of the shit-kickingest country music imaginable. And she had to do it with just her voice, and her guitar, and her personal assets. That by the end of her first number, a talking blues about drug-running, she’d pulled the audience to the edge of the stage and got them whooping along, testifies to how effortlessly she worked these people. Which makes sense when you remember that she cut her teeth with a residency at the old Holiday Lounge, one of New York’s most notorious dive bars.

That she closed her set with a muted, enigmatic version of her ballad You Can Call Me Darlin’ If You Want, inspired by the big hit that headliner David Allan Coe ended up closing his show with, also speaks to Swindall’s stage savvy. She engaged the Deadheads in the audience – several, as it turned out – with her original My Minglewood Blues, which is as vindictive as it is funny. Otherwise, she reasserted herself as an individualistic champion of all things Americana, from blues, to the wildly applauded, grisly Murder Song, to neo-Patsy Cline, Big and Rich-style hick-hop, stark mountain music and regret-drenched Nashville pop. And some urban sounds too, including a vivid, late-night Tom Waits-style Soho blues tableau. Although based in New York, Swindall is best known as an attraction on the national touring circuit. Her next gig in her adopted hometown (she’s Georgia-born and raised)  is July 15 at 10:30 PM at Arlene’s.

Coe is 76 now, and also still knows how to work a crowd, even if he doesn’t have much of a voice left. Most of his set was a medley of hits he’s written for others, all played in the same key, backed by a band who’d come in if they knew the song and lingered in the background awkwardly when they didn’t. He’d saved the best of those numbers, Cocaine Carolina, for Johnny Cash. The worst were a couple of lame hip-hop co-writes with a Michigan corporate pop guy from the zeros. There were plenty of unexpected moments, including the catchy Please Come to Boston, a folk-pop hit appropriated by Kenny Loggins’ label exec brother in order to get a plaque in the Zager and Evans Hall of Fame.

The big audience singalong, at least until the final number, was Take This Job and Shove It (Coe didn’t mention what might be the best recorded version, by the Dead Kennedys). But as far as the funny songs that are his stock in trade were concerned, that was pretty much it, and that’s too bad, because even in his mid-70s, Coe can still be hilarious and this show wasn’t. Including the audience fight that sent Coe’s considerably younger wife/backup singert scrambling back to the dressing room for good, and also might have cut his set short – and resulted in at least one person leaving the club in an ambulance. Redneck music is fun, but they can be something else.