Rock n Roll Suicides of 2018, Live

The Man in the Long Black Coat is lost.

He’s never been on this Crown Heights block before. Then again, before the days of the Long Black Coat, there was no reason for anyone who didn’t live or work, or have friends or family on this block, to be here.

The address he’s looking for seems to be in an unmarked former commercial storefront on an otherwise mostly residential brownstone street. He moseys a couple of doors down to a gentrifier bar and peers in: no sign of anything out of the ordinary. Turning back, he spots a couple making their way into a darkened doorway. The Man in the Long Black Coat follows them: he’s psyched. He likes mysteries.

Another mystery immediately presents itsef when the friendly girl at the door greets him. See, if you’ve been following this oft-interrupted story here, you’ll remember that the Man in the Long Black Coat is having a problem with invisibility. People have been bumping into him, and he’s had several near-misses with Ubers blasting through intersections. It’s not that the Ubers are even running the light like they always do: it’s that they clearly don’t see him.

And it’s not that being invisible, for sometimes hours at a time, doesn’t have its benefits. The man has discovered that he can walk into any gentrifier boite in town, check out the band and not have to worry about dropping a double sawbuck on a glass of fancy beer or a tiny, garlic-deprived crostini. He just needs to stay out of the way of the kids staggering around the joint.

Unfortunately, invisibility isn’t something that the man can switch on or off. The bank, the jewelry store, the lumber yard, the supermarket: it never occurs at any of those places. He’s tried all of them, only to be disappointed every time.

But here, it’s a welcome change to be at least marginally perceptible. Because of who he is, the Man in the Long Black Coat’s favorite holiday is Halloween: invisible or not, this is the one time of the year that’s really his.

The long, rectangular groundfloor space is obviously somebody’s home – with a big stage in the back. The hosts are throwing a Halloween kegger, and there are bands. The crowd is demographically diverse, a few in costume but mostly not. Nobody’s taking selfies, and people are talking directly to one another rather than texting. The man is reminded of downtown Manhattan theatre crowds in the days before the Long Black Coat. These people are sharp, and energetic: they all look like they’d love a turn onstage.

As it turns out, many of them end up doing exactly that. One of the drummers opens the night with a few stagy Rocky Horror-style bits. Is one of those ghoul-camp numbers actually from the Rocky Horror soundtrack? It’s been so long since the Man in the Long Black Coat heard the album that he can’t remember. Being ensconsed behind a couch, close to the keg, doesn’t help the memory factor.

Toot Sweet are the first band onstage. Accordionist Mary Spencer Knapp, rocking a leopard-print bodysuit, wields her axe like a guitar. Her vocals are fierce, intense, sometimes channeling righteous rage, like a young Rachelle Garniez. The songs mash up noir cabaret and Brecht/Weill, punk and new wave, with a distant latin influence. The new wave aspect is heightened by the  second keyboard, a synthesizer, taking the occasional keening solo over a nimble rhythm section. The crowd sings along: they want more than they get.

Dressed as a superhero, Haley Bowery – leader of the Manimals – makes her way through the crowd, handing out jello shots. The Man in the Long Black Coat takes one. It’s a scary toothpaste blue, but it tastes fruity and it has a kick. The man doesn’t need it. A welcome if unexpected shift into invisible mode just a couple of hours earlier gave him a chance to crash a shi-shi Alphabet City party and pound one glass of bourbon after another like a college kid. He’s never been able to drink himself visible – usually it seems to work the other way – but the way things are going here, he reasons that this might be the night.

The Manimals take the stage: Bowery on the mic, guitarists Michael Jayne and Chris Norwood trading licks on their flashy Les Pauls, melodic bassist Jack Breslin pushing the songs alongside drummer Matt O’Koren. The Man in the Long Black Coat thinks to himself that this is what it must have been like to see Bowie around the time of the Aladdin Sane album – but with a woman out front. Back when the band were known as Haley Bowery and the Manimals, they had a bit of a glam thing going, but they sound a lot more British and a whole lot more eclectic now. Verses don’t necessarily resolve into choruses and vice versa, and there’s a lot more angst – and depth – to the songs.

And just like Bowie, there’s an alienatedly reassuring ‘you’re not alone” theme to several of the songs. So this is where all the Rock n Roll Suicides of 2018 have gone, The Man in the Long Black Coat muses. Haley was a decent singer back in 2012 – when he saw her at Webster Hall on a twinbill with the amazingly lyrical noir cabaret-punk band Hannah vs. the Many – but she is fantastic now, with a highwire wail that she cuts loose when she really wants to drive a chorus through the roof.

With her piercing blue eyes, boxcutter cheekbones and lithe stage presence, she also looks a lot bigger onstage than she really is. One superhero outfit eventually falls to the side for another superhero look, a unitard this time. Hannah Fairchild from Hannah vs. the Many takes a cameo on harmony vocals and adds her own rocket-fuel wail to the mix. At the end of the show, Haley pulls out an old song, Halloween. “Fuck the rest of them, let’s paaaarty,” is the chorus. The crowd seem to know all the words. The Man in the Long Black Coat gives the band a devils-horns salute: maybe someday we won’t need to shlep all the way to Crown Heights to see a show like this.

Happy Halloween, everybody.

The Manimals play Hank’s on Nov 9 at around 9. Hannah vs. the Many are at the Way Station on Nov 10 at 10.

Organist Gail Archer Reinvents a Horror Movie Classic and Unearths Rare Russian Gems

What’s more Halloweenish in 2018 than Russia? Not to invalidate anyone’s suffering, but compared to what Russians have had to deal with under Putin, this country’s had it relatively easy lately. And Russia doesn’t have this November 6 to look forward to.

Musically speaking, what could be more appropriate for this Wednesday’s holiday than a Russian organ music record? It doesn’t hurt that it’s played by one of this era’s most adventurous interpreters of the classical organ repertoire, Gail Archer. Her latest album A Russian Journey is streaming at Spotify.

While there isn’t as vast a tradition of music for the organ in Russia as there is further west, there was a boomlet of composers writing for the instrument beginning in the late 1800s. That’s the formative period Archer starts with, unearthing some majestically tuneful, frequently mysterious material that too seldom gets programmed beyond its home turf.

She gives Cesar Cui’s hypnotic, Asian-tinged Prelude in G Minor a relentless, artfully crescendoing interpretation. His Prelude in A Flat Major comes as a shocking contrast, a starry, steady, mysteriously rising piece with a sobering balance between lows and exuberantly voiced highs, maxing out the organ’s high reed stops. It’s a roller rink at Dr. Zhivago’s grave.

Likewise, Sergei Ljapunow’s enigmatically neoromantic Prelude Pastoral has both steadfastness and swirl, through shadowy counterpoint between the pedals and midrange, bittersweet glitter, and confidently calm exchanges of catchy, allusively carnivalesque riffage between registers. Clearly, this is Baba Yaga country he’s exploring here. Glazunov’s Prelude and Fugue in D Minor is steady, stately and somber, Archer maxing out the silken sheen of the upper registers again as she builds intensity through the hypnotic waltz of the fugue.

Contemporary composer Sergej Slominski’s Toccata has a brightly celebratory French flavor: the work of Eugene Gigout comes to mind. Archer strolls enigmatically through the opening bars of Alexander Schawersaschwili’s Prelude and Fugue, a dynamic piece with acidic sheets of sound, calmly marionettish phrasing and cinematically climbing variations, She winds up the album with a vigorous, epic, yet often remarkably subtle take of Zsigmond Szathmary’s organ arrangement of Moussorgsky’s classic Night on Bald Mountain, which in terms of sheer mystery outdoes most of the orchestral versions used in horror films for the better part of a century.  Rabid members of the organ music underground won’t be the only people who will relish making some new discoveries here.

Celebrating Cole Porter and Philanthropy at Lincoln Center

“Do you know Bob Steel?” the friendly Arkansas orange magnate asked his tablemate – a Red Sox fan celebrating his team’s fourth World Championship in fifteen years a bit early – at this year’s Lincoln Center fall gala last week. Just to be clear, this fan was not ex-Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has also never tried to hide his fondness for the Boston team, and was also present.

“Not personally,” the considerably younger Sox fan replied.

“He’s a good guy,” the Arkansan confided, almost conspiratorially. He’d been at UNC while Steel was at Duke; his friendship with the longtime Lincoln Center benefactor has remained strong since. This particular evening was Steel’s “turn in the barrel,” as he’d sardonically told host Patricia E. Harris in the weeks beforehand.

Fundraising consultant Amy Schiller, who was also at the celebration, empathized. For anyone who’s ever been feted at one of these events, it really is a turn in the barrel, she reminded. It’s less a barrel going over Niagara Falls than the kind in a .357: it feels like you’re hurled out into midair at the speed of sound.

Offstage, Steel and his vivacious wife are exactly as humble and unassuming as Harris described them, a quintessential culturally engaged cosmopolitan New York couple with whom you might have shared a “wow, that was something” moment after, say, a performance by the Philharmonic. The fundamental difference is that they may have essentially underwritten that moment of reflection and transcendence. 

They have three daughters. Pianist/singer Jon Batiste dedicated what may have been the highlight of the musical portion of the night, a glistening, rainswept, New Orleans-tinged wee-hours take of Cole Porter’s In the Still of the Night to them: “In the steel of the night,” he quipped.

As the lavish swells of the orchestra rose and fell from the lowlit stage, a full house were treated to a full hour of Cole Porter classics. In her slinky lace dress and heels, singer Kate Davis left no doubt as to what Love For Sale was about, her aching melismas giving the protagonist a poignancy to match the Billie Holiday version. The edgiest moment of the night was pianist Aaron Diehl’s simmering, shapeshifting interpretation of Too Darn Hot. The most kinetic points were located at the heel and toe of tapdancer Jared Grimes‘ shoes; he kicked up a storm to rival any sit-down percussionist.

Other than echoing John D. Rockefeller’s insistence that this continent’s flagship cultural institution should be a place for everyone, Steel didn’t say much. In this particular moment, that sort of quiet advocacy for one of New York’s treasures spoke a thousand times louder than any self-aggrandizing tweet ever could.

Batiste is at the Jazz Gallery on Dec 18, with sets at 7:30 and 9:30 PM; cover is $20. Diehl is at NJPAC in Newark on Nov 29-Dec 2 at various times with the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, playing Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue; $20 seats are available.

Two Sides of One of This Era’s Great Trumpeters

Today’s Halloween episode here does not concern a macabre record or a dire political prediction. It’s a plug for a delightful annual Brooklyn Halloween tradition: the block party on Waverly Avenue between Willoughby and DeKalb in Ft. Greene, packed with kids on a mission to fill up their candy bags, adults trudging after them, Pam Fleming’s Dead Zombie Band serenading everybody. For the last four years, the trumpeter and her slinky, cinematic group have played the party, starting at around 6 PM and ending at around 9. Sometimes they do two sets, sometimes three. You never know what you’re  going to get. It’s Halloween, after all. Take the G to Clinton-Washington, it’s running all night this Wednesday.

Although the Dead Zombie Band’s album is a great soundtrack for this blog’s favorite holiday, Fleming has finally released her long, long-awaited new album, Buds, with another project, Fearless Dreamer, their first since 2004. It’s one of the catchiest jazz albums of the year, and streaming at youtube. The opening cut, I’ve Had Enough, sets the stage, a smoky, torchy, absolutely gorgeous, augustly bluesy 6/8 minor-key ballad. The bandleader plays a terse solo as Jim West’s organ swirls behind her, drummer Todd Isler and bassist Leo Traversa supplying a no-nonsense, surprisingly hard-hitting groove. Tenor saxophonist Allen Won’s cries and bends add vivid, pissed-off intensity: this may have political subtext.

The album’s title track is a jubilantly syncopated, Beatlesque anthem, West switching to piano, Peter Calo’s guitar adding spiky textures. A bubbly bass intro kicks off Power Spot, a bright theme that subtly veers through a triplet rhythm toward Ethiopia: Fleming and Won contribute balmy solos over some neat, dub-tinged counterpoint.

Taken Away is one of those great, somber themes that Fleming writes so well, disembodied spirits from Won’s soprano sax flitting and sailing while Fleming builds a clenched-teeth, elegaic crescendo over a sparely intertwining backdrop. Coolman Funk is a similarly expert detour into roots reggae. Blues-infused and incisive over a vintage Marleyesque bassline, Fleming draws on her several years as one of the three women in Burning Spear’s Burning Brass.

4:20 AM is a time and place many of us would remember if we could: what the hell, one more hit before passing out, right? But the title of that song here turns out to reflect more of a general, moody wee-hours tableau than anything aromatic and green, shifting through altered reggae toward swing contentment.

Isler’s subtle, martially-tinged clave propels the group through Shades, a brooding but kinetic latin groove as catchy as any track here. Calo’s gritty guitar and Fleming’s mighty horn chart burn through the big soul epic Mama Don’t Leave Us Now. The album’s final cut is Keep It Movin’, a strutting, bursting funk tune that’s a dead ringer for classic Earth Wind & Fire. Beyond her work with Jah Spear and with high-voltage New Orleans/soca/blues jamband Hazmat Modine, this is arguably the best thing Fleming’s ever released: look for it on the best jazz albums of 2018 page here at the end of the year.

A Few Detours and a New Sound From a Legendary, Haunting Vocal Ensemble

After the fall of the Iron Curtain, neoliberals made their way into Bulgaria and convinced the new government to put the nation’s most popular export out of business. The renowned choral ensemble who were first known as the Bulgairian National Women’s Choir, then became a global sensation as Le Mystere Des Voix Bulgares, and are now known in the English-speaking world as the Mystery of the Bulgarian Voices, were stripped of their government funding. Without that, these extraordinary, legendarily otherworldly singers were forced to take dayjobs. It’s hard to think of a more apt example of how drastically neoliberal tax policies can slash the very fabric of a nation at the seams.

Happily, the group have kept going over the years. Their latest release,  BooCheeMish – their first in two decades – is streaming at Bandcamp. It’s a new direction for them. While the group have recorded with rock artists – Kate Bush, most famously – there’s more rock on this release than ever before. Lisa Gerrard of Dead Can Dance contributes her voice to four of the tracks.

With the first number, Mome Malenko, the group set the stage with their characteristically eerie close harmonies, shivery melismas and modal, microtonal lines. This song has more of an Arabic chromaticism; the balance of hushed lows against the keening highs of the women’s voices is especially rapturous.

The second track, Pora Sotunea has rock keys, bass and a tabla rhythm bolstering an Andalucian-tinged tune. Rano Ranila, with its pulsing bursts of counterpoint, is the rhythmically trickiest trip-hop tune ever recorded. By contrast, Mani Yanni has a sepulchral vastness and broodingly melismatic Asian spike fiddle.

Much as the many percussion elements in Yove don’t get in the way, it would be even more impressive to hear just the women’s voices leaping and trilling, keeping perfect time throughout this polyrhythmic dance. Sluntse has more of that stark fiddle along with precise, jazz-tinged, acoustic guitar: beyond a brief intro, it’s an instrumental.

Unison is a return to distantly Indian-tinged trip-hop, with a vocal solo from who. The majestic, solowly unfolding call-and-response of Zabekaya Agne have more traditionally uneasy shifts between major and minor modes, along with a rather imploring vocal solo and ney flute over a boomy Middle Eastern dirge beat. It’s the album’s most successfully eclectic stylistic mashup.

But Tropanitsa, an attempt to Bulgarianize (Mysterize?) a blithe tropical tune, is a mess. Happily, the ensemble return to enigmatic massed splendor in Ganka, then dance their way elegantly through the catchy Shandal Ya. The album’s final track is Stanka, moody strings replicating vocal harmonies beneath their soloist’s impassioned lead melody.

For continuity’s sake, let’s count this as today’s installment for Halloween month. These magical voices persist in evoking a strange, antique spirit world, notwithstanding the many additional touches which some listeners may find superfluous.

Father John Misty’s First Live Album Is As Bleakly Funny As You Could Want

Said it before, time to say it again: more artists should make live albums. Studio, schmudio! If you’re Father John Misty, all you need is a mic, a guitar and a DI straight into the board. Rip the file to a thumb drive: instant album! Cost? Nothing. His vocals, guitar, uneasy tunes, gallows humor and withering cynicism are in first-class shape on his new album Live at Third Man Records, which strangely hasn’t hit Spotify yet, although it is available on vinyl. It’s today’s Halloween month installment

The first track is an aching take of I Love You Honeybear:

…on the Rorschach sheets where we make love…
You’re the one i want to go down with…
Unless we’re getting high on a mattress while the global market crashes

Meanwhile, the “misanthropes next door” are terrified that their neighbors are about to sire a Damien.

The surreal early Dylan influence – on the music and the lyrics, fortuituously, but not the vocals – really comes out in the solo acoustic take of I’m Writing a Novel. In the good Father’s alternate universe, Sartre and Heidegger join him in his trailer to share a pot of opium tea.

Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings is pretty much what any decent tunesmith might write after “Retracing the expanse of your American back with Adderall and weed in my veins,” as he relates to the nameless girl.

Chateau Lobby 4 (In C for 2 Virgins) is even more twistedly funny, newlyweds in a wee hours scenario: “So bourgeoisie to keep waiting, date for 21 years seems pretty civilian,” the guy tells his bride who “left early to go cheat your way through film school.”

This take of So I’m Growing Old on Magic Mountain is could be the great lost mid-70s co-write between Leonard Cohen and Neil Young. Everybody stays silent til the end through the endless deadpan litany of evils in Holy Shit:

Age-old gender roles
The golden era of tv
Eunuch sluts
Consumer slaves
A rose by another other name…

This intimate set closes with a concise version of Everyman Needs a Companion: Father John’s riffing on a bromance between Jesus and John the Baptist is pretty classic. The next Father John Misty show is in the UK at Portsmouth Guildhall in Portsmouth on Oct 28 at around 7:30 PM; cover is £29.25.

Dark Beasts Play a Mystery Show in Fort Greene

“We are the daughters of the witches that you’re burning,” Dark Beasts bassist Lillian Schrag intoned, knowing and sinister, over the jagged jangle of guitarist Trixie Madell and the airy lines of violinist Violet Paris-Hillmer on the chrorus of Witch Hunt, the high point of their their impromptu, quasi-secret show in Fort Greene this past July. There is no other young Brooklyn group who can touch them, in terms of imagination, songwriting or social relevance.

Some bands grow up in public, usually with embarrassing results. Dark Beasts, as you might expect from the band name, have grown up playing secret shows – or at least semi-secret ones. They began as a trio, about three years ago, playing ominously amorphous no wave. Over that time, they’ve solidified their sound centered around Schrag’s brilliantly surreal lyricism.

The July show was arguably their best ever. They tend to have new material for every set. This one was characteristically brief, just four songs. They opened with Killers Raining Down on Me, a a creepy waltz interpolating a familiar Byrds folk-rock theme, Paris-Hillmer playing piano and doubling Madell’s lines behind Schrag’s somber vocals.

Mythical Creatures Are Not Far Away – with guest vocals by Chris Nelson of Escape by Ostrich – chronicled the adventures of a drunk unicorn in an ATM and then afterward. “You might just end up dead in a most peculiar way,” Schrag intoned gleefully at the end. The last song of the night was Lobster Quadrille, a Lewis Carroll text set to the tune of 99 Bottles of Beer, more or less.

The band are currently on hiatus as their members are all back in school (Paris-Hillmer and Madell in Brooklyn, Schrag in Missouri); watch this space for possible future shows during school vacations or next summer.

Kombilesa Mi Bring Their Populist Afro-Colombian Dance Party to Lincoln Center

This past evening a sold-out crowd packed the dancefloor at Lincoln Center to see Kombilesa Mi play a defiant, catchy set of live hip-hop with organic beats – and lyrics in both Spanish and Palenquero, a rapidly disappearing coastal Colombian patois. That there would be as many kids in this city getting down to this music and singing along – in both languages – as there were tonight speaks to what the real New York is: young, immigrant, Spanish-fluent and socially aware.

Everybody in the nine-piece group has an individual look: Busta Rhymes-ish dude with lights in his dreads, flashy guy in a silver jacket with multicolor stars emblazoned into his buzzcut, and in the back the most modestly attired member, dreads pulled back into a tight ponytail and rocking a leopard bodysuit. She hammered on a mighty standup kit with three big bass drums. Two of them looked like big oil drums; the other was a slightly smaller double-headed llamador. The rest of the four-piece live percussion backline included tambora and tambor alegre – the smaller, more rapidfire instruments common to bullerengue, another coastal Colombian sound – and the magical marímbula, which looks like a cross between a Jamaican rhythm box and a big cajon. Lincoln Center’s Viviana Benitez, who programmed this show, described it with a wistful sigh: “It sounds like a big drop of water.” At other times, it could be a big, low-register tabla. Just the beats alone would have been enough for this concert, and this crowd.

But this group is all about the message. Solidarity, resistance, struggle and preservation of ancient Afro-Colombian traditions were persistent, insistent themes throughout the night – with some party rap included. Hailing from San Basilio de Palenque, one of the first free black towns in the Americas, they’re one of very few hip-hop acts anywhere in the world to rap in Palenquero, a mashup of Spanish with African Bantu, Portuguese, French and even a little English. In other words, pretty much everything you would have heard in a portside town south of the equator, two hundred years ago. As with innumerable other indigenous traditions, the conquistadors and their descendants did everything they could to obliterate it: even native speakers take care not to lapse into it in the big city since it’s considered lower-class.

Kombilesa Mi (Palenquero for “my friends”) say the hell with that. They have as many different kinds of flow as any rap group could have: fast-paced party rap, machinegunning verses and singalong choruses with big shouts back and forth between group members and the crowd, and singalongs that draw as much on Mayan as African influences. The beats ranged from a jump rhythm that got the crowd going early on, to a cumbia beat that went over just as well. In over an hour onstage, this crew spoke truth to power, celebrating blackness, local autonomy, community and their own individual identity. Toward the end of the set, they took a handful of slinky detours into bullerengue, with its endless volleys of call-and-response. The result was like New York group Bulla En El Barrio, with an even more thundering drum section and that marímbula, with its irresistible, subterranean “plunk.’ 

Along with Terraza 7 in Queens, the atrium space at Lincoln Center is one of the very few places in town – and the only Manhattan venue – that regularly has Afro-Colombian music. There are sounds here that represent many other diverse New York communities as well, and the more-or-less-weekly shows at the space on Broadway just north of 62nd St. are free. The next one is Nov 3 at 11 in the morning, a bill designed for families with preschoolers which features violinist Elena Moon Park leading a band playing children’s songs in Korean, Japanese, Mandarin, Tibetan, Taiwanese, Spanish, and also English. If you’re up that early, you ought to get the fam to the space early too since these programs tend to sell out fast.

Another Deliciously Catchy, Jangly Album From the Warlocks

What would Halloween month here be without the Warlocks? The well-loved psychedelic rockers’ latest album Songs from the Pale Eclipse is streaming at Bandcamp. It might be the most consistently tuneful record of 2018. Just about shadowy, jangly retro ultraviolet-rock band from the Mystic Braves to the Allah-Lahs to the Growlers owes a debt to these guys: they resurrected that acid-washed 60s sound first.

The album’s opening track, Only You, contrasts vast, echoey 80s goth chorus-box guitar on the verse with a gritty, distorted chorus: imagine the Chameleons UK if they actually could write a tune. Lonesome Bulldog is a lusciously jangly psych-folk anthem, frontman Bobby Hecksher’s hushed vocals channeling desolation and despair until guitarist John Christian Rees kicks in with some toxic distortion as the song winds out.

Easy to Forget has the same kind of moody, catchy, jangly newschool Laurel Canyon psych-folk four-chord vibe, Hecksher’s voice rising unexpectdly toward fullscale angst: it could be the great lost track from the Church’s Seance album.

“You make my hands clammy with tears,” Hecksher complains in Dance Alone, shifting back and forth between a wah-wah Beatles verse and stately chorus awash in watery guitar multitracks. All the guitars – Hecksher, Rees and Earl V. Miller – get into the picture as this mini-epic winds up.

You might expect a track titled We Took All the Acid to be a surreal Revolution 9 trip-scape, but this one turns out to be a dreampop number, like early Lush with a guy out front. The band go back a couple of decades for the tightly propulsive, catchy, Love Is a Disease, driven by Christopher DiPino’s bass and Jason Anchondo’s drums. Then they fast-forward back to the 80s for the slow, undulating Drinking Song, another elegantly ornate Church Seance soundalike.

Special Today is especially moody for a love song. I Warned You has reverbtoned blues harp filtering through the vampy jangle and clang. The album’s final cut is The Arp Made Me Cry – that distinctive, slightly warpy, sharp-toned synth from the 70s must have really made a mark on Hecksher, at least enough to come up with this swirly ballad. You’ll see this on the best albums of 2018 page at the end of the year.

A Dynamic, Relevant Grand Finale to This Year’s Momenta Festival

Over the past four years, the Momenta Festival has become one of New York’s most exciting annual events. Each member of the irrepressibly daring Momenta Quartet takes his or her turn programming a night. The festival usually ends on violinist Emilie-Anne Gendron’s birthday. This year’s grand finale, Friday night at the Tenri Institute, happened to be cellist Michael Haas’ birthday: he and the group celebrated by going starkly deep into a program centered around Bartok’s harrowing String Quartet No. 4.

. As he explained succinctly before the show, it’s a piece he’d been scheming to play ever since joining the ensemble five years ago.  As was the case last year, admission was free, and there was high-grade craft beer afterward, also courtesy of the hosts. What more could a concertgoer possibly want?

They opened with Eric Nathan’s diptych Four to One, from 2011. Interestingly, this was the only contemporary work on the bill. It set it the bar almost impossibly high for the rest of the evening, notwithstanding the iconic Bartok quartet immediately afterward. Right off the bat, it became a harried, relentless, microtonal rollercoaster ride, the group holding fast to the counterpoint amidst the storm. Violist Stephanie Griffin’s plaintive assertions were particularly striking, as was Gendron’s turn in the rather cruel spotlight over a menacing wash in the second part. Haas’ cello was also stark yet prominent: it’s not hard to see why he’d want to program this. It reminded a lot of Michael Hersch’s recent, troubling microtonal work.

The performance of the Bartok turned out to be one of the very best of many witnessed by this blog or its owner over the past couple of decades. The persistent sense of doom the quartet parsed with razorwire intensity had particular resonance in this post-2016 election era. Menacingly emphatic gestures leapt from the dark interweave of the first movement, danger drawing ever closer. The circle dance in the second was just as macabre, especially with the exchanges of voices between instruments. Haas’ plaintive cavatina, echoed incisively by violinist Alex Shiozaki, brought the longing and if-only atmosphere of the third to a peak: it was impossible not to think of Shostakovich being influenced by this when writing his String Quartet No. 7. Both the savagery and after-the-battle emotional depletion of the final movement were just as indelible a reminder of the perilous consequences of fascism. The more things change…

Augmented by the Argus Quartet – violinists Jason Issokson and Clara Kim, cellist Joann Whang and guest violist Rose Hashimoto – the Momentas wound up the program with a triumphantly anthemic take of Enescu’s Octet for Strings in C Major. The young composer wrote it at nineteen in a rather successful attempt to outdo Mendelssohn at teenage octetry. The main theme has a suspenseful Andalucian feel, which grew to echo the Ravel bolero in places: together, the group reveled in the dramatic foreshadowing, even if it grew facile in places. A more mature composer might have written it half as long, but even so, when the synopsis of the final movement finally circled back, there was no denying how much of a party this merry band had brought.

The Momenta Quartet are currently on tour: their next gig is tomorrow night, Oct 24 at 7:30 PM playing works by Agustin Fernandez, Roberto Sierra, Eric Nathan, and Philip Glass at Santa Teresa Church in Cochabamba, Bolivia. The Argus Quartet’s next New York show is on Nov 13 at 7:30 PM at Weill Hall at Carnegie Hall, playing an excellent, diverse program including Janacek’s String Quartet No. 2, “Intimate Letters,” along with works by Haydn, Ted Hearne, Juri Seo and Christopher Theofanidis. Cover is $25/$15 stud.