Pianist Alfredo Rodriguez Brings His Glistening, Fearlessly Relevant Cuban Jazz Uptown

Cuban pianist Alfredo Rodriguez’s recordings run hot and cold. He can take your breath away with his towering majesty; other times, he overreaches. When he’s at the top of his game, he’s a great tunesmith. His latest album The Little Dream – streaming at Spotify – was conceived in opposition to the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant bigotry, in particular the clampdown on DACA and the deportation of children and families. The result is a characteristic mix of material that draws equally on classical, latin and more recent postbop jazz. Rodriguez and his trio, bassist Munir Hossn and drummer Michael Olivera are playing the Miller Theatre this Saturday night, March 3 at 8 PM; you can get in for as low as $20.

Throughout the album, Rodriguez’s playing is remarkably spare and focused: this is his most minimalist work to date. It opens somewhat jarringly with Dawn, a haphazard juxtaposition of Rodriguez’s signature neoromantic glimmer and gravitas, postbop scramble and what could be soukous, Hossn scurrying way up high as Olivera flurries frenetically.

The title cut has an insistently verdant, Pat Metheny-ish PBS title theme feel: Hossn channels Jerry Garcia, way up the fretboard, then Rodriguez hits a terse stride interlude. It’s a celebration of the “dreamer” kids’ resilience rather than a commentary on their precarious status in the United States.

The whole band gets into picturesque, pointillistic mode for Silver Rain. Likewise, Rodriguez works variations on a shiny, glistening bucolic theme in Bloom while Olivera circles hypnotically with his brushes, and Hossn bends and perambulates with his treble turned all the way up.

Unlike what its title might have you thinking, Dance Like a Child has a terse, darkly bluesy focus, Rodriguez shifting through increasingly enigmatic, animated cascades to lingering, looping phrases. He artfully spaces his colorful riffs in Vamos Todos a Cantar, Hossn adding yet more spiky upper-register work, this time with son jarocho tinges.

Interestingly,  Besame Mucho – ostensibly the most recorded song in history – is where Rodriguez really distinguishes himself, with his tersely balletesque pulse, austere lyricism and soul-infused Fender Rhodes voicings as the rhythm section shuffles mutedly. A lot of artists never get to this song’s haunting, wounded inner core, but Rodriguez does, all the way through to an ending so simple it’s crushing.

Hossn’s muted plinks evoke a kora as the glimmering Tree of Stars comes together, up to a triumphantly precise, spiraling coda. The spare but insistent song without words World of Colors is almost stunningly translucent yet just as bittersweet.

True to its title, Alegria leaps and pounces with a joyous Spanish Caribbean folk feel hitched to sparkling Metheny drama, although the light electronic touches don’t add anything. A Rodriguez album wouldn’t be complete without a moody nocturne, so Moonbeam fits the bill, but with more slink and space than usual: it’s the strongest track. The final cut is a fusiony mess and should have been left on the cutting room floor. Another thing this album could stand to lose is the echoey, wordless vocals, which aren’t anywhere near boisterous enough to evoke flamenco, and often drift perilously close to new age music. Rodriguez’s concise, vivid tunes stand on their own just fine without them.

A Lavish, Twisted, Trippy Album by One-Man Band D. Treut

One of the most strangely beguiling albums of recent months is multi-instrumentalist D.Treut’s solo release, some of which has made it to Bandcamp. Dave Treut is best known as a drummer with a long association with Brandon Seabrook, one of the jazz world’s most distinctive, assaultive guitarists and banjo players. But Treut – whose solo project is pronounced like the lead poisoning capital of the world – is also a talented multi-instrumentalist and singer. He’s just back from midwest tour, leading his group at around 10 on March 1 at C’Mon Everybody. Adventurous guitarist Xander Naylor plays at 9; cover is $12.

Treut plays all the instruments on his lavish nineteen-track collection: drums, bass, keys, guitar and sax. Stylistically, it’s all over the place, with classic soul, jazz, psychedelic rock and unhinged experimentation, often all in the same song. It gets weirder as it goes along. The first track, A Dream Is a Wish, is a haphazardly orchestrated epic with a long, woozy portamento keyboard solo at the center. It manages to stagger as much as it swings: imagine Tom Csatari’s Uncivilized big band on really good acid.

The second track, Absolution – Saints & Demons is a long psychedelic soul ballad with chugging organ and a neat little alto sax break: when Treut’s voice finally goes way up the scale, he takes you completely by surprise. Whirlwind Woman  – (Sarah’s Song) is a careening, slowly disassembling mashup of glamrock, soul and a little Hendrix. If Oneida weren’t so pretentious, they might sound something like this.

Treut stays in vintage soul mode for The Way the Cookie Krumbels – (Chloe’s Song), with Let It Be piano in tandem with stomping kickdrum and misty cymbals. Grammy Tappy is a funny, noodly guitar instrumental – truth in advertising. Treut follows that with Everything I Did I Did For Love, an even goofier EDM spoof.

Churchy organ comes to the forefront over the stomp in A Gift; then Treut takes a detour into wooly post-Velvets rock with Full Moon Insomnia. He strips the instrumentation down to loopy, swaying drums and bass for Where Others Have Gone, then balances sax squeal with bass growl in 78 Miles, the first crazed jazz track here.

Likewise, a staggered organ loop anchors somewhat calmer sax in Skip 5, catchy riffs percolating to the surface and then sinking back into the morass. Uptown Downtown is gritty no wave disco, while Times a River comes across as Public Image Ltd. covering Lady Madonna, maybe.

Joe’s Bounce is a misnomer: it’s more of a loopy Terry Riley-style theme, with a drum track that artfully blends shamble and precision. Circle could be described as sliced-and-diced Afrobeat at halfspeed; the Seabrook inflluence comes across most vividly in the simmering, keening, blippy Skip Funk 5.

There are hints of both distant, fragmented menace and new wave amidst call-and-response vocals in Dreamed a Wish On. She’Wanna’Doo is the catchiest and poppiest track here; the album winds up with a little over a minute worth of Body & Soul, just disembodied sax and vocals.

As with a lot of good psychedelia, the obvious question is whether or not you have to be high to appreciate this. Let’s say that couldn’t hurt. And for anybody who remembers late 90s/early zeros Lower East Side kitchen-sink legends Douce Gimlet, this is a real treat.

And it was also a treat to catch Treut turning in a standout performance with the Icebergs at Pete’s Candy Store this past evening. Hitting offbeats on the bells of his cymbals and making those off-kilter accents sound perfectly natural, he stepped into the big shoes left behind when David Rogers-Berry left the band and filled them. Drums are typically more of a big deal in a trio. That Treut held his own alongside Tom Abbs – one of the great cello rockers, who plucks out basslines and chords on his axe like he’s playing a guitar – and charismatic frontwoman Jane LeCroy, was an awful lot of fun to watch.

Majestic, Cinematic Sweep and a Midtown Album Release Show From Bassist Mark Wade

Mark Wade’s bass steps with an almost cruel, emphatic pulse beneath Tim Harrison’s stubborn piano loop as the title track of Wade’s new album Moving Day – streaming at Bandcamp – gets underway.  Is this “Here we go again, pushed even further to the most remote fringes of this city by the real estate bubble, drug money laundering and the never-ending blitzkrieg of gentrification?”

Maybe.

As the song builds over drummer Scott Neumann’s increasingly bustling yet subtle implied-triplet groove, it takes on a cinematic sweep not unlike Amina Figarova’s musical travelogues. The bandleader’s growling, tireless propulsion eventually hits a dancing pulse as Harrison lightens and loosens: maybe this is turning out to be more escape than exile. You can decide for yourself when the trio play the album release show on March 3 at 8 PM at Club Bonafide; cover is $15.

The bass on this album is especially well recorded, considering that Wade typically plays with a sinewy, almost gravelly tone that’s well-suited to his restlessly shapeshifting compositions. The second track is Wide Open. With its hard-charging drive fueled by Harrison’s left hand, often in tandem with the bass, it wouldn’t be out of place on a recent Orrin Evans album.

The Bells opens as a somberly majestic waltz ringing with uneasy modal lines and Debussy-esqe close harmonies, drawing its inspiration from Wade hearing churchbells in the south of France, out of tune and sync with each other. Like the album’s opening track, it brightens considerably, punctuated by Wade’s minimalist solo.

Another Night in Tunisia is the familiar favorite chugging along over a series of rhythmic shifts: having just heard Dave Douglas completely radicalize the song, it’s impressive to hear how well this holds it own alongside it. The album’s other cover, Autumn Leaves, benefits from a terse bass solo and some deliciously enigmatic reharmonizing that Harrison lets linger as his lefthand jabs, hard: he’s a voice we ought to hear more of.

His stately chords open Something of a Romance with plenty of gravitas, followed by a mighty buildup of a wave from the rhythm section, some jauntily chugging wee-hour swing, a spacious, cantabile solo from Wade and then a return to rising tides. The similarly crescendoing, picturesque Midnight in the Cathedral imagines the crowds and music there from over the centuries: swelling multitudes and maybe a wedding as Neumann shuffles on the cymbals and Wade leaps and bounds around an old Gregorian chant theme that Rachmaninoff used more than once.

The New Orleans shout-out The Quarter offers irrepressibly cheery, catchy contrast. The album winds up with In the Fading Rays of Sunlight, a portrait of a particularly glorious end to the day that follows a clever series of glistening downward trajectories. Needless to say, compositions and a band this good would resonate with the crowds at Smalls and Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Adam Nussbaum Reinvents Leadbelly Classics with Taste and Good Cheer

On one hand, it’s always fun to play the blues – especially if you’re out of material and the crowd of drunks is still screaming for more. On the other, is your version of Got My Mojo Working going to be better than Muddy Waters? Obviously not. Beyond impressing the bartenders with your work ethic, hopefully assuring a return engagement, will anybody remember you played that song? Probably not. That’s a question that drummer Adam Nussbaum’s Leadbelly Project raises.

The premise of the record – streaming at Sunnyside Records  – is to reinvent Leadbelly songs as instrumentals. Beyond the obvious, does the group – which also includes tenor saxophonist Ohad Talmor, with guitarists Steve Cardenas and Nate Radley’s two axes standing in for Mr. Ledbetter’s twelve-string – actually add anything to the Leadbelly canon? Happily, yes. You can see for yourself when they play the Jazz Standard on Feb 27, with sets at 7:30 and 9:30 PM; cover is $25.

The album is smartly sequenced, like a live set. Playing with brushes, Nussbaum subtly varies a jaunty, New Orleans-tinged shuffle beat, Cardenas supplying burning, syncopated rhythm, Radley’s terse washes and incisions functioning as leads while Talmor’s sax dances in between the raindrops or provides lively, upbeat atmosphere.

A handful of these numbers are essentially one-chord jams; most of them are relatively brief, around the three-minute mark or even shorter. The first two, Old Riley and Green Grass, set the tone and establish the roles that the guitarists will shift back and forth from as the album goes on. Black Girl (Where Did You Sleep Last Night) sure outdoes that infamous grunge version – it’s sort of a Quincy Jones soundtrack piece, a roadhouse at still-sleepy opening time.

Bottle Up and Go is a lot more lighthearted, Nussbaum swinging on the rims before it picks up steam. each guitarist adding what in country music would be called a “strum solo,” staying pretty close to the ground.

It’s Talmor’s turn to get terse and bluesy in Black Betty, over Nussbaum’s second line groove – finally, the two guitars pair off for a a southern-fried jam. They follow that with the brief Grey Goose, built around a series of echo effects, then Bring Me a Little Water Sylvie, where the band finally diverge before slowly coalescing out of individual rhythms. Radley distinguishes himself with some unexpectedly rustic C&W licks.

You Can’t Lose Me Cholly gets recast as a joyous mashup of jump blues and calypso.  Nussbaum’s lone original here, Insight, Enlight gives the band a chance to revisit the dynamics of the first couple of tunes, rubato. They make straight-up swing – with a little choogle – out of Sure Would Baby and close with a warmly waltzing, aptly starry Goodnight Irene.

So is this rock? Well, it rocks – a lot, in places. Is this jazz? Sort of. Is it blues? More or less. Whatever you want to cal lit, it’s like nothing else out there. In less competent hands this project could have turned into a trainwreck; Nussbaum and the rest of the band really distinguish themselves with their collective imagination here.

Dave Douglas Radically Reinvents Dizzy Gillespie at Jazz at Lincoln Center

On one hand, there were probably a thousand groups around the world who were doing what what trumpeter Dave Douglas and his sextet did this past evening at Jazz at Lincoln Center  But those bands’ improvisations on Dizzy Gillespie themes were probably limited to solos around the horn. What Douglas did was simple on the surface – distilling riffs and phrases into their simplest, catchiest essence, often to the point of unrecognizability, and then jamming them out. But it was far more sophisticated than that.

The result was essentially two practically hourlong suites, packed with pairings, echoing, catch-and-follow and sometimes some pretty wild, untethered collective improvisation, drummer Joey Baron signaling the changes with gusty  abandon. The rest of Douglas’ band – second trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, guitarist Bill Frisell, pianist Gerald Clayton and Linda May Han Oh – turned in the kind of transcendence and joyous interplay you would expect from some of the world’s foremost improvisers.

Looking behind him down on the streetlights’ reflections on rain-soaked Broadway, Douglas went for appropriately distant, forlorn solo ambience to open the night’s second show. Oh bowed sepulchral high harmonics, Baron icing the windows, then the rest of the group joined, pensive and sparingly.

For the rest of the set, Douglas was Douglas; choosing his spots, always finding the mot juste. Space is a big part of his game: it seemed even more so this evening, whether punctuating the themes with sudden cloudbursts, wafting minor blues, snazzy sixteenth-note volleys or achingly melismatic lines that seemed microtonal – which probably weren’t, but Douglas can fake you out like that. For somebody who plays as many notes as he does, it’s amazing that he doesn’t waste any. Akinmusire basically played the role of flugelhornist: lots of long, methodically crescendoing legato solos, hovering around the midrange for the most part, occasionally in close formation with the bandleader.

Watching Frisell as a sideman was a trip. Only Baron was more exuberant. Yet Frisell also seemed to be the captain of the gravitas team, which also comprised Oh and Clayton. The pianist had been playing eerie, Satie-esque close harmonies for much of the set; it wasn’t long before Frisell decided to slam-dunk a couple. Otherwise, his shimmering, icily reverbtoned washes contrasted with judicious blues, shards of jangle and clang and an unexpectedly lighthearted detour into quasi-funk that Baron couldn’t resist spicing with polyrhythms.

Likewise, the drummer traded rims and hardware with Oh’s sotto-voce swings and vaults from the highest branches, finally getting a long solo in an epic Night in Tunisia and taking it from Buddy Rich to Wipeout and back. Oh and Clayton would throw a hot potato back and forth when least expected, notwithstanding how much murk and mystery they were building. When A Night in Tunisia finally coalesced, ironically it was Clayton who pulled away the latin noir he’d been shadowing all night,in to some jubilant tumbles. Meanwhile, Oh walked the changes  – but in Arabic hijaz mode, and expanded from there. Straight-up swing has seldom been so dark or interesting. The group finally closed with a verse of somebody else’s well-known tune: it wouldn’t have meant a thing if they hadn’t swung it as they had all night.

Douglas’ next stop on the never-ending tour is a duo show with similarly lyrical, individualistic pianist Uri Caine on Feb 27 at 7:30 PM at Filharmonie Brno in Brno, Czech Republic.

A Rare Treat from the Harlem Quartet at Lincoln Center

Ironically, the Harlem Quartet haven’t played New York much lately. That’s because they have a ongoing London residency when they’re not on international tour. Last night at Lincoln Center, the ensemble – violinists Ilmar Gavilan and Melissa White, violist Jaime Amador and cellist Felix Umansky – reaffirmed how much Manhattan’s loss is the rest of the world’s gain.

“I don’t want you to run away!” Gavilan grinned. He was referring to Walter Piston’s String Quartet No, 3, which as he explained has “A bit of a mathematical approach.” Much as the piece is a study in the counterpoint the composer was famous for, the quartet found a surprising amount of lyricism lurking within, particularly throughout the “grey and rainy” second movement, as Gavilan put it.

Soul battled with math through a Russian-tinged chase scene, austerely acidic washes grounded by viola and cello and a lively steady/dancing dichotomy to close: twelve-tone harmonies, lively classical gestures.

That the Debussy string quartet wasn’t the highlight of the concert attests to the strength of the rest of the program. This was a robust version, awash in wistful French proto-ragtime allusions: another great New York quartet, Brooklyn Rider, recorded a very similar take a few years back. Umansky reminded the crowd how much Debussy wanted to break free of the heavy German influence in the repertoire, so there was a sense of triumph – if often a bittersweet one – throughout the spirited flutters of the opening movement, the spiky pizzicato of the second and then finally a foreshadowed Twin Peaks theme at the end.

Gavilan’s dad, Guido Lopez Gavilan, was represented on the bill by his Quarteto en Guaguanco, which came across like Piazzolla with especially clever, shifting contrapuntal voicings. The group dug in hard, Umansky plucking out nimble basslines up to an interlude where everybody tapped out an altered salsa beat on their instruments.

The best number of the night was the encore, Take the A Train. Hearing a great string section play the blues is always a treat, this one elevated to even greater heights on the wings of the group’s dramatic flourishes and sparkles as they swung it – and maybe even improvised a little – Umansky again playing the role of bassist.

Much as the programming at Lincoln Center’s atrium space has a global scope, there’s an ongoing series of string quartet shows reflecting the organization’s original agenda. And all of these shows are free! The next one is with the brilliant Heath Quartet – whose latest album is an epic recording of the Bartok cycle – on March 22 at 7:30 PM, playing works by Haydn and Tschaikovsky. Get there early if you want a seat.

Amy Rigby Can Write Anything – Even Psychedelic Rock

On one hand, Amy Rigby might be the last person you’d expect to make a psychedelic rock record. On the other, she’s been fluent in an amazing number of styles – honkytonk, classic Brill Building pop, countrypolitan and garage rock, among others – for so long that her new album The Old Guys shouldn’t come as any surprise. While the presence of her husband Wreckless Eric – a guy who knows a thing or two about psychedelia – probably makes a difference, Rigby doesn’t need outside help. She’s playing the album release show, kicking off her latest American tour at El Cortez, 17 Ingraham St in Bushwick this Saturday night, Feb 24 at around 8. Patti Smith lead guitarist Lenny Kaye opens the night with a relatively rare set of his own acerbic powerpop. Cover is $15; take the L to Morgan Ave.

As the title implies, the album – streaming at Bandcamp – weighs a lot of heavy questions, including but not limited to aging, death and the viability of being what’s charitably known as a “legacy act” out on the road. The opening cut is From philiproth@gmail to rzimmerman@aol.com. It’s Rigby at her slashingly surreal best, a stomping, clanging backbeat anthem and a sardonic look at the ups and downs (some might say the curse) of celebrity.

She keeps the hypnotic ambience going with the more subdued, nostalgic Are We Still There Yet. The title references one of her cult classics, specifically a hellish family drive scenario. Musically, the gently swaying opening chords look back to her ever-more-relevant Summer of My Wasted Youth, a bittersweet snapshot of early 80s pre-gentrification New York. This one has a lush, spacerock feel not unlike the Church at their dreamiest.

“I’ve been running out of time to do the little things I want, too much shit to get through,” she muses in Back From Amarillo over a gentle late 60s Jimmy Webb-style country shuffle backdrop. Somberly and soberly, she contemplates the grim realities facing veteran songwriters: “I hope it’s ok that I still drink.”

Playing Pittsburgh, a shout-out to Rigby’s adolescent stomping ground, has a slinky Chicano Batman psych-soul groove and some wry, satirical tropes pilfered from six decades worth of psychedelic rock. She follows that with Leslie, an echoey, drifty salute to an indomitable scenester with “fringe in your eyes to hide the lines.”

“Had my eyes on the prize when it was time to revise,” Rigby laments in the title cut, sort of a mashup of Cheap Trick and Brian Jonestown Massacre. “Bars are all closed ‘cause nobody goes…I raise a glass to the old guys, had a blast did the old guys.” Who’s playing that deliciously sinewy bass solo?

On the Barricade is classic Merseybeat gone psychedelic, an allusively pissed-off protest anthem that’s over too soon. “I’ve been known to turn the other cheek, but that was in a different place, a simpler time,” Rigby rails in New Sheriff, over a savage, noisy Ticket to Ride swing – it’s a coming-of-age song for any embattled liberal who’s been pushed over the edge.

“Built a city of sandcastles in the time it takes to swim from Malibu,” Rigby intones in Robert Altman, raising a glass through the mist to the late, great American film auteur. Slow Burner, the album’s most enigmatic number, has a starry, hypnotic jangle. Its most elegaic is Bob, a catchy, wistful recollection of the guy who taught her about Lou Reed – in the key of E. The final cut is One Off, an early Who-style stomp and the album’s most directly philosophical track. Nice to see someone with such a formidable back catalog still at the top of her game. If you want to learn how to write a song, this is as a good a place to start as any.

A Fearless, Passionate, Revelatory Solo Performance by Pianist Remi Geniet

Playing earlier today at the Morgan Library, pianist Remi Geniet found striking common ground in a Bach chaconne, a Beethoven sonata and a twisted trio of pieces from Stravinsky’s Petrouchka. But Geniet’s agenda, on a program staged by Young Concert Artists, seemed to be a lot more ambitious than merely assembling context to highlight how amazingly modern Bach’s harmonies could be. This show was all about contrasts… and conversations. Not simply one hand answering the other, but an intimately intense study in how composers alternate voices and develop dialogues – or, in the case of Prokofiev, eventually let a series of distinct and downright strange personalities into the picture.

Geniet brought all that into in hi-res focus: it was like getting a close-up of Beethoven’s eyes. Or Bach’s, or Ferrucio Busoni’s, which were responsible for the 1893 Bach transcription that Geniet played first. Dynamic shifts from a careful stroll to several crescendos of tumbling cascades, where the pianist threw caution to the wind and turned the afterburners on, were razor-sharp. The effect was the same with the conspiratorial whispers that led up to the stampede at the very end. Other pianists have probably played cleaner versions of this arrangement, but it’s hard to imagine one with more color and passion than this one.

The melodic development and tangents of Beethoven’s Sonata No. 31 in A Flat Major, Op. 110 are more expansive, but Geniet’s approach was the same. The energetic twinkle that the composer works up in the first movement turned out to be more meteor shower than starry night. Likewise, the sense of loss and abandonment in Geniet’s austere, muted phrasing as the second movement slowly built steam was absolutely harrowing. And the sense of questioning in the gritty waltz after was no less uncompromising. The pianist’s relentless lefthand drive made a welcome change from the innumerable safe, cookie-cutter performances of this piece.

Closing with the Russian Dance and scenes from both Petrouchka’s cell and the shrovetide fair – a solo piano arrangement so difficult that the composer himself couldn’t play it – was the icing on this Halloween cake. As he did with the two previous pieces, Geniet didn’t settle for the kind of icepick staccato that would have enabled a smoother ride through this gleefully macabre ballet: he savaged the chromatics, and eerie close harmonies to let them resonate, even if that translated only in split seconds. In the same vein, that long vamp in Petrouchka’s cell, with spectres flickering and flitting overhead, became all the more menacingly hypnotic.

Stravinsky has great fun playing ever-increasingly sadistic puppeteer with these themes, and Geniet reveled in yanking an ever-increasing cast of personalities up, and down, and sideways, mercilessly. After all the dichotomies of the rest of the program – caution versus passion, despondency versus guarded hope – it was a chance to completely go for broke. The audience gave him a series of standing ovations for it.

Geniet’s next performance is on March 2 at 8 PM at Powell Hall in St. Louis with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, playing Tschaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 on a bill also including works by Schumann and Semetana; tix are selling out and it doesn’t look like anything more affordable than $33 seats are still left. And Young Concert Artists’ popular series of performances by a global cast of up-and-coming talent continues this Feb 28 at 8 PM at Merkin Concert Hall with bassist Xavier Foley playing solo works by Bach, Sperger and Franck plus his own compositions; you can get in for as little as $10.

Tasty Psychedelic Tropicalia and a Union Pool Album Release Show by Renata Zeiguer

Renata Zeiguer sings in a balmy, dreamy high soprano and writes tropical psychedelic rock songs that often slink their way toward the noir edges of soul music. Yet as Lynchian as the guitar textures can be, her music isn’t gloomy – if there’s such a thing as happy noir, it’s her sound. And her new album, Old Ghost – streaming at Bandcamp – sounds like she had a great time making it. She’s playing the release show this Feb 23 at 11 PM at Union Pool; cover is $12.

“You’ve got a grip on salvation, a heavenly whip, I know,” Zeiguer intones cajolingly in the album’s opening cut, Wayside, which rises from a simple, catchy bossa-tinged vamp to a catchy, anthemic backbeat sway. Once you get past the jarring out-of-tune guitars and lo-fi synth on the intro to Bug, it morphs into a starry, ELO-ish romp with a gritty undercurrent. That uneasy catchiness pervades Below, from its Ellingtonian intro, to its lemon-ice chorus-box guitar riffs and gently pulsing samba rhythm.

After All comes across as a noisier take on Abby Travis-style orchestral noir – or 90s cult favorites Echobelly at their noisiest and dirtiest. Zeiguer’s coy melismas over the altered retro 60s noir soul backdrop of Dreambone evoke Nicole Atkins at her most darkly surreal – Zeiguer’s fellow Brooklynite Ivy Meissner also comes to mind.

The swaying Follow Me Down, awash in uneasily starry reverb guitars, depicts a lizard “Steadily slithering, steadily, patiently swallowing me whole.” The song’s mix of guitar textures – burning and distorted, keening, and lushly tremoloing – is absolutely luscious.

Neck of the Moon contrasts insistent syncopation and offhandedly noisy, flaring guitar work with Zeiguer’s signature starlit sonics. The dichotomy is similar in They Are Growing, pulsar guitar twinkles and pulses lingering over a brisk new wave shuffle beat. The album winds up with its title track, Gravity (Old Ghost), a steady, bittersweet lament about something that’s “only dissipating over time,” set to a catchy, Motown-inflected groove.

This is a great playlist for hanging out with friends on a smoky evening, adrift in the bubbling, percolating textures of the guitars and keys, Zeiguer’s comfortingly calm yet irrepressibly soaring vocals percolating through the haze. It would make a good soundtrack to that Netflix show about the weed delivery guy – now what’s that called?

Prolific Britrock Polymath Edward Rogers’ Latest Album Is His Best Ever

In 1976, the face of the next decade, if not the decades after was profoundly altered by the UK punk rock explosion. But does anybody remember what the bestselling UK album of 1976 was? It sure wasn’t by the Sex Pistols. And it wasn’t by David Bowie, or Pink Floyd, or Led Zeppelin either. It was a compilation by Americana hack Slim Whitman sold exclusively via tv infomercial. That paradox capsulizes the thought-provoking, sweepingly elegaic esthetic of Edward Rogers’ latest album TV Generation, streaming at Soundcloud. The epic fourteen-track collection chronicles the grim decline of a society that ignored digital intrusions on their privacy and their freedom until it was too late.  He’s playing the Cutting Room on Feb 22 at 7:30 M, opening for the world’s foremost twelve-string guitarist, Marty Willson-Piper, a similarly brilliant, acerbic songwriter and former member of Australian psychedelic legends the Church. Cover is $20.

Originally a drummer, Rogers narrowly escaped a grisly death in a New York City subway calamity that cost him the use of two of his limbs. But he persevered, reinvented himself as a crooner and songwriter and nearly twenty years down the line,  has built a formidable body of work that draws on classic glam, art-rock and psychedelic styles from the 60s and 70s. This latest album is his tour de force: in context, it’s his Scary Monsters, his Message From the Country, his London Calling, simply one of the best and most relevant albums released this decade.

“Are you wake it awake yet…let’s move along! Turn ont the tv!” Rogers hollers as the album’s tumbling, hypnotic, Beatlesque opening track,gets underway:

So many stories
Too many black holes
Keep you hypnotized
As they take their toll

With James Mastro’s simmering Mick Ronson-esque guitar paired against terse sax, 20th Century Heroes could be the great lost Diamond Dogs track, an enigmatic chronicle of corporate media archetypes whose fifteen minutes expired a long time ago falling one by one as the years catch up with them. Rogers follows that with No Words, a Bowie elegy set to a lush, elegantly fluttering  contrapuntal string arrangement.

The savage kiss-off anthem Gossips, Truth and Lies chimes along on a gorgeous twelve-string guitar arrangement capped off by a tantalizingly brief solo. By contrast, it’s easy to imagine ELO’s Jeff Lynne singing Wounded Conversations, a sunny, jazz-tinged 70s Stylistics-style soul-jazz ballad grounded by fluid, resonant organ.

The album’s centerpiece – and one of the most haunting songs released in the last year – is Listen to Me. Over a brooding wash of mellotron and moody acoustic twelve-string guitar, Rogers offers a challenge to the distracted millions to escape the surveillance-state lockdown:

Voices we hear all around us
Are out to control
Don’t wait for a postmortem
No one wants to know about
Isn’t too long til lost promises
Is this what you want for your future
More lies than we can count
…written by me through your own peephole

Rogers goes back to rip-roaring Stonesy early 70s Bowie for Sturdy Man’s Shout. On This Wednesday in June begins spare and reflective and then explodes, recalling the 1989 Montreal Ecole Polytechnique mass shooting – how sad that this song would be so relevant at this moment in history.

The austere baroque-tinged Terry’s World sends a shout-out to one of Manhattan’s last newsstand owners – an endangered job, “a life denied.” Rogers follows that with The Player, a sardonic, Kinks-style ba-bump portrait of an old codger who can’t take his eyes off the girls he probably wouldn’t have kept his hands off a half-century ago.

The Kinks in baroque-psych mode also inform Alfred Bell, a brisk stroll through a burnt-out schoolteacher’s drab day. The question is, should we be feeling sorry for this poor sap, or the kids who get stuck in his class?

With its gloriously acidic lead guitar, the album’s catchiest and hardest-rocking number is She’s the One, a portrait of a girl who gets what she deserves since she nothing’s ever good enough for her. The album closes with the wryly titled TV Remixxx, a goofy psychedelic mashup of themes from the title track. If you wish that Bowie was still alive and making great records, get this one.