String Jazz Magic at This Year’s Art in Gardens Series

This year’s free outdoor summer concert series are pretty much over at this point, but there’s another going on in three Lower East Side community gardens through the first weekend of October. The organizers call it Art in Gardens. What’s most exciting is that it’s dedicated to jazz improvisation: right now, it’s the only series of its kind anywhere in town. As you’ll see from the schedule, the lineup is a mix of veterans – some of them admittedly on the self-indulgent/Vision Fest side – but there’s plenty of new blood, and new reasons to chill with neighborhood greenery.

The centerpiece of Sunday’s lineup in the garden on 6th Street between Avenues A and B was Sarah Bernstein‘s mesmerizing Veer Quartet with violinist Sana Nagano, violist Leonor Falcón and cellist Nick Jozwiak. While Bernstein never allows herself to be fenced in by the western scale, it seemed that about eighty percent of her compositions on this particular bill were in those familiar tones.

The music was so fresh that it seemed largely improvised, although the group were all reading from scores. The first number featured a series of exchanges of short, punchy, leaping phrases between individual voices. As the show went on, there was considerable contrast between restless, slowly shifting sustained notes and what has become Bernstein’s signature catchy, rhythmic riffage. As evening drew closer, the tonalties drifted further outside: the most recognizable microtonal piece also managed to have the catchiest twelve-tone phrases bouncing around over achingly tense, often rapturously suspenseful washes of harmony.

There wasn’t much soloing until Jozwiak cut loose with a sizzling downward cadenza and then a fleeting rise afterward, an unexpected jolt of very high voltage. Toward the end of the set, there was finally a furious thicket of bowing and a slowly ascending firestorm in its wake. Otherwise, elegance and sheer tunefulness were the order of the day. There were many moments where only one or two individual instruments were playing, and when the whole group were engaged, Jozwiak would often be plucking out a bassline while one or more of the violins offered keening, sepulchral harmonics far overhead.

Pretty much everything seemed through-composed: verses and choruses didn’t come around a second time, except in later numbers: much of the material would have made sense as a suite. Bernstein’s next gig with this crew is Sept 15 at 7 PM at Spectrum; cover is $15. The next Art in Gardens show features poetry and dance in addition to music: the lineup starts at 1:30 this Saturday afternoon, Sept 14 with Rob Brown on alto sax and Juan Pablo Carletti on drums. At 3:30 Val Jeanty plays percussion, backing dancer Patricia Nicholson and at 4:30 drummer Michael Wimberly teams up with trumpeter Waldron Ricks and bassist Larry Roland at the Children’s Magical Garden, 129 Stanton St, just east of Essex. Can’t vouch for the insect factor at this spot, but on an overcast day the bugs were out in full effect on 6th St.; you might want to slather on some Deep Woods Off or the equivalent.

Kiko Villamizar Puts on a Furious, Funny, Politically Woke Dance Party at Lincoln Center

Lincoln Center’s Viviana Benitez introduced firebrand singer Kiko Villamizar as an artist dedicated to the cause of keeping families together. Although his eclectic, psychedelic tropical dance music addresses other pressing issues, he didn’t waste any time confirming that particular one. The burly, bushy-bearded Colombian-American singer and his slinky five-piece band opened their debut show here this past evening with wih Hasta Que Se Fue, its rumbling chalupa beat underpinning an allusivey harrowing lyric about immigrant families being ripped apart in US concentration camps.

Villamizar blends ancient Afro-Colombian coastal gaita flute music with undulating chicha guitar music along with other styles he grew up with after his family moved from Florida to Colombia. “You don’t have to more your hands like “We Are the World,” but c’mon up here!” he told the crowd, who had been pretty sleepy on this rainy night so far. And suddenly everybody was up on their feet for as the guitarist played echoey, ominous spaghetti western licks over an irresistible cumbia groove. But this was a party for the right to fight: Villamizar’s big anthem addressed the lethal consequences of oil pipelines, which lave contaminated large parts of the world south of the equator.

Villmamizar is also an impresario: he books the annual Wepa cumbia festival in Austin, his home base these days. But it isn’t limited to cumbia, as he reminded with the scampering, skanking El Arbolito, a tribute both to his roots and our endangered forests, a long gaita solo floaitng over the rumbing beat from the bass, drums and traditional tambor alegre.

He dedicated the souful, trickily rhythmic minor-key ballad after that to “the most important person in the universe: her name is Natalie – where are you?” he wanted to know, then imperceptibly shifted the beat into cumbia and then reggae. Villamizar’s sardonic sense of humor is relentless: he explained that an as-yet-unreleased, punchy, syncopated cumbia addressing the South American refugee crisis and the xenophobic Trump response was about “family values.”

From there the band hit a punchy, swinging quasi-ska beat it was like witnesing Peruvian chicha legends Juaneco y Su Combo, but with an otherworldly, swirly edge fueled by the gaita. Villamizar returned  to catchy cautionary tales with Aguas Frias, a swaying eco-disaster parable, then blended Santana-esque psychedelic with hard funk.

After blending what sounded like a traditional call-and-response cumbia with a classic 70s American disco shuffle and a spacerock guitar solo, Villaizar got the crowd singing along with a couple of centuries-old Colombian  trance-dance chants. By now, everybody except the old people and bloggers were up their feet.

“The word ‘ceremony’ doesn’t exist in most of those languages down there, it’s just the way you’re supposed to live your life,” Villamizar explained, then invited up members of the NYC Gaita Club to validate that with another ecstatic processional tune. His Austin buddy Victor Cruz joined them for a thunderous invocation of the spirits and then a communal circle dance by Colombian bullerengue legend Emilsen Pacheco .

The next free show at the atrium space at Lincoln Center on Broadway just north of 62nd St. is on Sept 19 at 7:30 PM with Korean janggu drummer Kim So Ra and her thunderous percussion troupe. Get there early if you want a seat.

A Vivid, Imaginative Live Album and a Jazz Gallery Show From Trumpeter Samantha Boshnack

Said it once, time to say it again: more artists should make live albums. Trumpeter Samantha Boshnack‘s richly melodic, cinematic latest release Live in Santa Monica, with her Seismic Ensemble – streaming at Bandcamp – is lush and sweeping but also bristles with the kind of energy that’s easy to capture onstage but so often gets lost in the rush to wrap up a studio session. Its loosely thematic thread relates to seismic tension in the Pacific Rim, stretching all the way from north Asia to the US Pacific coast. Boshnack is one of the great tunesmiths in jazz and has a thing for unorthodox instrumentation. She likes big, inventive arrangements that still leave plenty of room for individual contributions. She’s leading the group this Sept 9, with sets at at 7:30 PM and 9:30 PM at the Jazz Gallery, as part of this year’s Festival of New Trumpet Music. Fellow trumpeter John Raymond‘s Quartet follows on the bill; cover is $20.

Boshnack and crew open their album with a couple of long, very different, vampy numbers. The first, The Subduction Zone is an uneasily punchy, swaying tune with a catchy trumpet hook at the center, a lustrous, distantly plaintive solo from Boshnack and more of the same from the violinists – Lauren Elizabeth Baba and violinist Paris Hurley – along with some wryly vaudevillian Dan Schnelle drum breaks.

The second, Kamchatka, has terse, bitingly resonant chromatic harmonies – that’s Boshnack, the strings and tenor sax player Ryan Parrish – over an elegantly muted, rat-a-tat Balkan groove, much in the same vein as Ben Holmes’ most recent work. Bassist Nashir Janmohamed takes a purposeful, daincing solo, capped off by a flourish from pianist Paul Cornish. It’s gorgeous, and it’s the best track on the album.

Parrish switches to baritone on Tectonic Plates, following the bandleader’s clear, soaring solo with gritty contrasts over staggered, quasi West African syncopation and jaunty pizzicato from the strings. Cornish’s puckish stairstepping after that completely flips the script as the band blusters and tumbles behind him.

Summer That Never Came opens with a similar smoky/airy dynamic between baritone and strings, then the band rises to a harried canaval-esque intensity before decaying to a wounded, resonant Boshnack solo as the rhythm drops out and then returns, halfspeed.

Convection Current has lush tropical allusions, a buoyant Parrish alto solo, a tightly winding piano solo and lusciously jagged violin over a staggered clave. In the next track, Choro, Schnelle brings back the Balkan flair with his rimshots and tunbles as the bandleader bobs and weaves over the strings’ acidity and smoke from the baritone.

The album’s most epic number, Fuji rises over an allusive Asian theme to towering heights, decays to a spacious and then frenetic piano solo, and finally wistfully incisive solo bass. The stomp afterward has the kind of deviously noisy humor that Boshnack made a name for herself with her B’Shnorkestra large ensemble. The group wind up the album with Submarine Volcano, its series of round-robin conversations, triumphant trumpet and sax. There’s an awful lot going on here, and the fun is contagious.

Cousin From Another Planet Bring a Whole Funky Universe to Lincoln Center

The undulating performance by multi-keyboardist Aaron Whitby’s Cousin From Another Planet project at Lincoln Center this past evening attested to the psychedelic power of good funk music. It’s rare that an audience comes to listen to funk; then again, this was an unusually textured sonic confection.

Whitby brought an allstar cast of New York soul, funk and jazz veterans: Charlie Burnham on electric violin, Keith Loftis on tenor sax, Fred Cash on bass, David Phelps on guitar and Gintas Janusonis on drums. They opened with Escape Route, a  twinkling Hollywood hills psychedelic bourdoir soul tune from the new Cousin From Another Planet record. Burnham’s wafting wah-wah riffs contrasted with Loftis’spare, incisive lines over Whitby’s echoey Fender Rhodes cascades.

Whitby’s wife Martha Redbone and actor Rome Neal joined the group for Sleeping Giant, a mighty, populist psych-funk anthem. “Wake up from this endless bigotry,” Redbone encouraged, then capped off a big, booming crescendo with a searing wordless vocal. Whitby’s chucka-chucka clavinova solo and Burham’s rapidfire lines wound up the song optimistically.

Walking with Z was a picturesque musical account of what it’s like tryng to get a hyperkinetic gradeschooler to his destination on an early morning in downtown Brooklyn. This time it was Whitby who had the wah going on, Loftis blending determination and wry wariness: somebody keep that kid out of traffic!

Eye of the Hurricane was New Orfleans through the prism of classic P-Funk: bracing violin/sax harmonies over a fat, distantly second line-tinged low end. Whitby is a funny guy: he explained that a new number, The Inverse of Nothing, was inspired by mishearing “the universe of nothing” on a youtube physics podcast. He kicked it off gracefully with gorgeous, Mad Men-era solo piano, then the band swung their way into saturnine midtempo funk with some oscillating Bernie Worrell keys from the bandleader.

Redbone returned to the stage for a vigorous, solo-centric detour into the classic 70s playbook: Whitby immersed himself in the stuff under the guidance of longtime P-Funk musical director Junie Morrison, so he knows where all the pieces go. For awhile, he blended with Phelps’ devious, tongue-in-cheek lines, then opted to just let the six-stringer shred.

The band went back to starry, nocturnal mode for a number where Whitby credited Redbone for having saved it from sad ballad territory. She did a good job: it wasnt’ sad at alll, with a series of playful echo effects filtering among the various voices. It was no surprise that Whitby would offer grateful payback with Mrs. Quadrillion, a snappy, no-nonsense strut.

Afer a lively detour into bubbly, classic 70s style clave disco, they closed with Make Somebody Happy, shifting subtly from a boombastic, Clintonesque groove to a spiky, West African-tinged melody fueled by Phelps’ bright, jangly lines., This wasn’t P-Funk, but in their own surreal, imaginative way, Whitby’s irrepressible crew of improvisers turned out to be just as full of surprises.

The next free show at the Lincoln Center atrium space on Broadway just north of 62nd St. is next Thursday, Sept 12 at 7:30 PM with Texas-Colombian bandleader Kiko Villamizar playing oldschool 60s Colombian cumbia plus more psychedelic, electric sounds. People will be there to dance; get there early if you’re going.

Blissing Out With Fabian Almazan at the Jazz Standard

This past evening at the Jazz Standard, pianist Fabian Almazan and his trio played a lustrous, glimmering set of nocturnes with the same epic gravitas as his larger-ensemble work. It was a show to get lost in.

Almazan’s lefthand attack can have every bit as much intricacy and nimble glisten as his whirlwind righthand, but the material in this set – comprising much of his latest, lavishly gorgeous, ecologically-themed album The World Abounds with Life – was typically anchored by sometimes fiery, sometimes broodingly resonant pools of chords or hypnotically circling, trickily percussive lefthand riffs.

More often than not, bassist Linda May Han Oh – Almazan’s significant other – would double those riffs, or at least the rhythm, although she took one of the night’s most unselfconsciously plaintive solos, bowing up to an angst-fueled peak in what could have been the show’s most emblenatic number, Drummer Henry Cole opened that one solo with a steady, elegantly tumbling stroll, finally hinting at a famously canine Led Zep groove. Were the band going to go there? As it turns out, no, Almazan following what would become a familiar pattern, circling staccato phrases lightly enhanced by an echo effect, bookending expansive, lush cascades and long, neoromantic chordal brescendos over a shapeshifting beat.

They opened the night with Benjamin – named after the cynical donkey in George Orwell’s Animal Farm – following a similar pattern. The fluttery electronics, which Almazan would typically set a quarter note behind the beat, added textures that during the sparest passages were surreal, and when the notes flying from Almazan’s fingers grew torrential, created a parallel storm. Sometimes this echoed Ikue Mori’s live sampling with artists like Satoko Fujii. The challenge to the rhythm section to stay undistracted must have been considerable but Oh and Cole didn’t waver.

The highlight of the night was The Everglades, an epic salute to Almazan’s refuge as an angst-ridden Cuban immigrant growing up in Florida. Building an increasingly stormy upward drive out of the murk, then going fullscale orchestral with the electronics, Almazan finally brought it down to a long, hushed, tender calm, a moody salute to an imperiled old haunt. The rest of the set was more kinetic, but the rapturous effect lingered: after awhile, it seemed like one long symphony, warmly enveloping passages alternating with frenetically circling interludes.

Almazan’s going to be on the road, in both the US and Europe, for awhile; his next gig is with trumpeter Terence Blanchard’s Art Blakey project at the Detroit Jazz Festival on Sept 1.

A Wild, Ferociously Lyrical Take on the History of Jazz Uptown

The Manhattan debut of the multimedia spectacle The Spirit of Harlem at Harlem School of the Arts this past evening was everything the final night of the Charlie Parker Festival wasn’t: cutting-edge, fearlessly political and often very funny. And trumpeter Dominick Farinacci’s lavish ensemble didn’t even venture beyond the classics, tunewise. On one hand, songs like Strange Fruit are eternal for a reason. On the other, it’s seldom that a band is able to reinvent them in a way that does justice either to the spirit or the quality of the original.

After Farinacci introduced that haunting number solo, setting a mood more pitchblende than indigo, Shenel Johns sang Abel Meeropol’s chronicle of a lynching with a Nina Simone-like steeliness, in a stark duet with bassist Jonathan Michel. Dapperly dressed rapper Orlando Watson – whose slashing metaphors and intricate flow unearthed innumerable connections between the history of jazz, the New Jim Crow, Black Lives Matter and other historical moments – would reference that song later on, a hybrid kind of fruit still hanging from the poplar trees.

The Spirit of Harlem, which Farinacci put together at the annual upstate Catskill Jazz Factory festival, debuted in Italy just last week, The symphonic part of the evening – with tight, inspired student ensemble the Urban Playground Chamber Orchestra – turned out to be a world premiere, the entire cast pulling it together in rehearsal about three hours before showtime.

The show’s premise is to bring jazz history out of world of pedants and snobs, with unexpected new interpretations and a focus on legendary Harlem jazz shrines. Tapdancer Michela Marino Lerman dueled it out with pianist Mathias Picard, through an increasingly complicated series of stride tunes that ended with a feral take of Tiger Rag. She clearly won the early part of this cutting contest, but Picard really gave her a run for the money with a diabolically fast coda that would have made Art Tatum proud.

Not everything was a total reinvention, but even the more standard interpretations were a lot of fun. The group – which also included vibraphonist Christian Tamburr, tenor saxophonist Patrick Bartley Jr., and drummer Kyle Poole – romped through a phantasmagorical version of Minnie the Moocher that left no doubt what Minnie was smoking. Likewise, Bartley’s eerie duotones and Middle Eastern-tinged wails in tandem with Poole’s shamanistic attack in A Night in Tunisia – which then segued into Dizzy Atmosphere – conjured up the spirit of the early bebop sessions several blocks to the south at Minton’s.

Bartley and Picard got bittersweet and lyrical with a Monk medley beginning with a fleeting excerpt from Pannonica followed by a somewhat furtive take of Round Midnight. After a lavishly orchestrated, rather sentimental new salute to impresario Norman Granz, the entire cast made a quick coda out of Sing Sing Sing. If jazz is your thing, even if you find this material moldy and figgy, Watson’s lyrical firepower and the irrepressible fun of the rest of the show will win you over.

Epic Bustle and Thump and Entertainment From the Uncategorizably Fun NYChillharmonic at Joe’s Pub

Was it worth leaving this year’s Charlie Parker Festival early to catch the NYChillharmonic last night at Joe’s Pub? Absolutely. Who knows, maybe someday singer/keyboardist Sara McDonald’s lavish eighteen-piece big band will play the festival – although the lineup that day will have to be a lot more forward-looking than it was yesterday evening.

McDonald’s music is easy to trace back to the wildly syncopated early 70s art-rock of bands like Genesis, although her compositions also draw on classical music, big band jazz, Radiohead and lately, classic soul music and even disco. Huddled together on the cabaret-sized stage, the mighty group were tight as a drum throughout a pummeling, nonstop performance heavy on the beat.

The staggered, staccato pulse of the opening number set the tone and was the most evocative of 70s psychedelia. Like the rest of the songs on the bill, it was pretty much through-composed, reaching a white-knuckle intensity with a series of rhythmic shrieks toward the end. McDonald typically finds more surprising places to take an audience – and her bandmates – than simply coming back to land on a verse or a chorus. Often but not always, the band would bring starkly moody intros full circle to close a tune, whether voice and keys, voice and guitar, or even voice and tuba.

With a vocal delivery that came across as more chirpy and biting than it’s been in recent months, McDonald sang resonantly while spiraling through tightly wound arpeggios on a mini-synth. Then she’d spin and conduct the ensemble, then return to the mic and keys, and made it look easy.

She explained that she’d written the night’s second number, Living Room, after quitting her shitty dayjob. Maybe some organization like Chamber Music America can step in and help her stay away from shitty dayjobs so she can concentrate on what she does best.

That particular number began as a restlessly propulsive soul anthem bulked up to orchestral proportions, with unexpectedly hushed, halfspeed interludes and a similarly sepulcutral outro, flitting out on the wings of the group’s string section. With the next tune, Ambedo, the band mashed up classic 70s disco and 50s Mingus urban noir bustle, punctuated by a series of almost vexing interruptions and a wry, woozy, Bernie Worrell-style bass synth solo.

The night’s darkest and most bracing song, Wicker – which McDonald dedicated to “Ugly patio furniture everywhere” – had looming, ominous chromatics and 21st century Balkan jazz allusions, along with a deliciously jagged guitar solo and more P-Funk keyboard buffoonery. Zephyr has been considerably beefed up since the last time the group played the piece here, its chattering, uneasy intro more of a contrast with its relentlessly syncopated upward drive. It was the closest thing to orchestral Radiohead on the bill.

Easy Comes the Ghost began with circus-rock piano phantasmagoria, shifting through a polyrhythmic maze to a determined disco strut that ended sudden and cold. The group closed the show with another mashup of Radiohead, dancefloor thud and Darcy James Argue-style big band minimalism. Like Missy Mazzoli, McDonald manages to write torrential melodies without cluttering them.

Time was short, so there were no band intros. It would have been fun to have been able to stick around for brass quartet the Westerlies with crooner Theo Bleckmann, but sometimes life takes you elsewhere…humming riffs from this shapeshifting crew which this time included Alden Helmuth on alto sax, Jasper Dutz and Jared Yee on tenor, Drew Vanderwinckel on baritone, Ben Seacrist and Michael Sarian on trumpets, Nick Grinder and Nathan Wood on trombones, Jennifer Wharton on tuba, Kiho Yutaka and Dorothy Kim on violin, Will Marshall on viola, Sasha Ono on cello, Eitan Kenner on electric piano, Steven Rogers on guitar, Adam Neely on bass and Dani Danor on drums.

A Curmudgeonly View of This Year’s Charlie Parker Festival

Why did the final day of this year’s Charlie Parker Festival at Tompkins Square Park feel so tired? For one, because the order of bands was ass-backwards. Alto saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin, who opened, should have headlined: she and her quartet built an energy that, for many reasons, none of the other acts matched.

The relatively small size of the crowd was also a factor. Sure, there were a lot of people gathered down front, but there was never a problem finding space on the lawn, and the perimeter was deserted. To the west, a homeless guy with wireless speakers was blasting the Carpenters. To the east, a strolling brass band had conveniently picked the afternoon of the festival to compete with Benjamin’s all-Coltrane set during the quietest moments. If Kenny G had been onstage, that interference would have been welcome. But he wasn’t. How classless and uncool!

And as a rock musician would say, other than pianist Fred Hersch, everybody else was playing covers.

Drummer Carl Allen can bring the highest echelon talent wherever he wants, considering the size of his address book.. But the potential fireworks between trumpeter Jeremy Pelt and tenor saxophonist JD Allen never materialized, each reading charts throughout a wide-ranging set of material associated with Art Blakey. Allen was more chill behind the kit than Blakey ever was, and the horns (and spring-loaded bassist Peter Washington, and pianist Eric Reed) went for cruise-control rather than friendly sparring – or otherwise. It was lovely – and it sounded as old as it was.

Ageless tenor saxophonist George Coleman thrilled the crowd with a viscerally breathtaking display of circular breathing throughout one persistently uneasy modal interlude, leading an organ jazz quartet. In another moment, he and his alto player conjured up the aching microtonal acidity of Turkish zurlas. Organist Brian Charette was having a great time bubbling and cascading while the bandleader’s son shuffled and swung and shimmered on his cymbals. But as much veteran talent was on display here, it was mostly Charlie Parker covers.

Benjamin has a bright, brassy, Jackie McLean-esque tone on her horn and a killer band. Pianist Sharp Radway is both sharp and way rad: with his crushing low-register chords, endlessly vortical pools of sound and modal mastery, he was the highlight of the festival. Bassist Lonnie Plaxico walked briskly and pedaled and eventually went to the deepest part of the pocket and stayed there while drummer Darrell Green played much more chill than Elvin Jones ever did with Trane’s band. Benjamin’s decision to work her way up from brooding chromatics and modes all the way to a hypnotically swaying A Love Supreme – with guest vocalist Jazzmeia Horn – was also smart programming. Spiraling and bobbing and weaving, her homage to every saxophonist’s big influence (and sometimes bête noire) was heartfelt and affecting. It also would have been fun to have heard some of her own material: she’s a very eclectic writer and a good singer too.

Maybe the sound guy expected Hersch to savage the keys like Radway did, but he didn’t, and for that reason a lot of his signature subtlety got lost in the mix. Bassist John Hebert’s mutedly terse pulse was often considerably higher, and drummer Eric McPherson – one of the great kings of subtlety – was sometimes almost inaudible. Attack aside, Hersch’s signature mix of neoromantic glimmer, wry humor and gravitas is actually a lot closer to Radway’s style than might seem apparent. Hersch deserved more attention, so that we could have given it back to him more than it seems we did.

The Ghost Funk Orchestra Materialize at Bryant Park

The Ghost Funk Orchestra was originally a one-man band studio project. Then word started getting out about how incredibly fun – and psychedelically creepy – Seth Applebaum’s oldschool soul instrumentals were. All of a sudden there was a band, and then songs with vocals, and now there’s an album, A Song for Paul, featuring the whole crew. This past evening they played the album release show to a huge crowd spread across the lawn at Bryant Park.

Applebaum turns out to be a beast of a lead guitarist, switching from evilly feathery tremolo-picking, to enigmatically sunbaked, scorchingly resonant lines, incisive funk and even some icily revertoned, surf-tinged riffs. The horn section – Rich Siebert on trumpet, James Kelly on trombone and Stephen Chen baritone sax, the latter being the most prominent in the mix – were as tight as the harmonies of the three women fronting the band with an unselfconscious, down-to-earth passion and intenstiy. Lo Gwynn, Romi Hanoch and Megan Mancini twirled and kept the groove going on tambourine as they sang, while second guitarist Josh Park played purposeful chords and oldschool soul licks on his Gibson SG, often trading off or intertwining with the bandleader and his Strat. Bassist Julian Applebaum and drummer Kyle Beach handled the tricky rhythmic shifts seamlessly.

The best of the songs was the darkest one, possibly titled Evil Mind. There were a handful with a galloping Afrobeat rhythm, another with a qawalli-inflected, circling pace and plenty with a swinging straight-up psychedelic funk groove. With all the textures simmering onstage, they didn’t need a keyboardist. Not much chatter with the crowd, no band intros – for all we know, the lineup could still be in flux – just one hypnotic, undulating, sometimes cinematically shifting tune after another. Their next gig is this Halloween at 9 PM at Rough Trade; cover is $12.

 

Cedric Burnside Plays His Individualistic Take on a Classic Mississippi Blues Style at Lincoln Center

Early during his show at Lincoln Center last night, guitarist Cedric Burnside related a story he’d originally heard from his grandfather, iconic hill country bluesman RL Burnside. See, there was this guy who was twenty-two years, still living with his folks. His parents strongly suggest that it’s time for him to find a wife and move out. So he meets a girl and brings her home. Dad takes one look at her and says, “You can’t marry that girl. She’s your sister. But don’t tell your mama, she doesn’t know.”

So the guy goes out and brings another girl home: same deal. At the end of the week, the guy’s mother starts giving him a hard time about not finding a girl and moving out. At this point, the guy spills the beans and tells her what his dad said. His mom’s response is “You can marry either one of those girls if you want, because he ain’t your daddy.”

Much as the younger Burnside draws on a hundred years of revelry and rustic party music, he has his own distinctive sound. Where his “big daddy,” as he called him, played with a careening sway and built a wall of sound with his guitar, this Burnside has a much funkier, incisive, rhythmic attack and a no-nonsense, direct vocal style. And he also plays acoustic, opening the show solo, utilizing an open tuning for a number that was like the source code to early 70s boogie rock, his vocals doubling the catchy bassline at the turnaround.

He followed with a spare, percussive take of RL Burnside’s snide dismissal of a backstabber, Just Like a Woman. He built the next tune by getting the guitar humming with slow hypnotic hammer-on riff, then he’d hit a driving downward progression. He put on his slide for Feel Like Going Home, a more driving, passionate update on the Muddy Waters acoustic version.

Burnside went back to hard-hitting, spare mode for Life Can Be So Easy and its chorus of “Summertime is hard, it’s hard to stay cool,” something Mississippians know a little bit about. Then he brought drummer Brett Benton up and switched to a Les Paul copy for We Made It, sticking with his usual percussive attack, bassline alternating with spare chords: where this guy comes from, this stuff is dance music.

Beyond the open tunings and hypnotic vamping, hill country blues has its own rhythms: bouncier than your typical shuffle but not quite straight-up funk either, and his next couple of numbers worked that hard-swinging style. In the ba-bump tune after that, he revealed that he doesn’t take every gig he’s offered. Going back to the RL Burnside catalog, he did Going Down South with a lot more punch and incisive riffage than the original.

After a thumping warning to “keep your hands off that girl, she don’t belong to you,” he switched to Strat for a number that on the surface was about not missing out – there was another level there, too, the kind of things you might do on a Holly Springs front porch. Meanwhile, it was strange that nobody was up dancing like crowds usually do here. Where were the kids?

The next show at the atrium space at Lincoln Center on Broadway just north of 62nd St. is next Thursday, August 22 at 7:30 PM with whirlwind tropical accordion star El Rey Vallenato Beto Jamaica and his band. Get there early if you’re going because he’s a force of nature and this show will sell out fast – and it’s free!