Mary Halvorson Releases Her First Acoustic Album on Bleecker Street with Amazing Duo Sets Monday Night

The guitar summit of the year is this Monday night, Sept 17 at 8 at the Poisson Rouge, where Mary Halvorson is playing two duo sets, one with fellow six-string mastermind Bill Frisell and the other with multi-reedman Robbie Lee. Her set with the former promises to be as good as, say, B.B. King dueling with David Gilmour. This bill isn’t just two of this era’s greatest guitarists sharing the stage: it’s two of the greatest guitarists ever. The set with Lee is also auspicious since the two have a brand new album, Seed Triangular, streaming at New Amsterdam Records. $20 adv tix are still available as of today.

Halvorson has done plenty of strangely entrancing work over the years, but this is her weirdest album, not only because it’s her first acoustic record. Here she plays a late 19th century 18-string Knutsen harp guitar, a1930 Gibson L-2 model and a 1888 SS Stewart 6-string banjo. Lee, whose background spans from indie classical to chaotic free improvisation, plays antique flutes plus chalumeau (a medieval clarinet), soprillo saxophone, melodica and bells. Many of the album tracks are miniatures, carefully edited from a one-day, completely improvised studio session earlier this year. Some of it sounds like John Fahey on acid; other moments bring to mind the quasi-baroque minimalism of frequent Lee collaborator and lutenist Jozef van Wissem.

The duo open with an alternately precise and fluttery little intro, then make their way carefully but emphatically through Seven of Strong, Halvorson’s enigmatic strums shadowed by Lee’s wandering microtones. Like a Ripple Made By the Wind builds a memorably desolate minimalism. Then, in A Forest Viol, Lee runs his melodica through a weird distortion patch while Halvorson picks elegantly.

After the uneasy strum-and-flutter of Potamogeton, the two make their way through Fireproof-Brick Dust (Halvorson is unsurpassed at song titles) with a squirrelly, loopy, distantly flamenco-tinged elan. The Stuttering Note of Probably turns out to be an obstinate little mini-tone-poem for harp guitar, while Pondeteria contrasts Lee’s quavers with Halvorson’s tuneful steadfastness.

The album’s funniest cut is Rock Flowers, Lee’s over-the-top microtonal sax drama against Halvorson’s tongue-in-cheek banjo. She hints at a handful of pretty folk themes but never quite makes it out of the mist in Spring Up Here. Lee makes short work of his solo bubbles in Sing O-Gurgle-ee This Evening, the album’s shortest number.

The album’s best track is Shoots Have Shot, veering between stately quasi-Andalucian riffs, off-the-rails wreckage and wryly spacious minimalism. The Tawny Orange is similarly spare and allusive, while Early Willows edges toward wistful pastoral jazz. The album closes with the rather epic title track, which could be Gabor Szabo taking a stab at the neo-baroque. Much as this release doesn’t deliver the raw thrills of Halvorson’s electric work, there’s plenty of her signature humor here – and you have to give her credit for having the nerve to record on those tinny old acoustic axes.

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Blackberry Smoke Kick Out the Jams on Their Latest Epic Tour

The high point of Blackberry Smoke’s Manhattan show this past evening happened about midway through, a twisted, surreal kaleidoscope of sunbaked Georgia clay refracted upward into grim, grey Pink Floyd atmospherics, anchored by drummer Brit Turner’s steady sway. As frontman/guitarist Charlie Starr pulled away from the center with a sudden, Gilmouresque howl, Paul Jackson stayed steady, plucking icy chordlets from his hollow-body Gretsch to light up the somber mist. Keyboardist Brandon Still, who up to this point had switched effortlessly from funky, echoey Fender Rhodes to some spot-on honkytonk piano, built a black swirl of organ beneath the ominous skies above.

By the time the jam was over, Starr had referenced Hendrix, the Grateful Dead (several times) and maybe Neil Young before leading the band into a dirtbag verse or two of the Beatles’ Come Together. Bassist Richard Turner’s graceful, boomy McCartney licks were almost comical, in contrast with the grimy detour the band had suddenly taken. Maybe it wasn’t as cartoonishly funny as the Aerosmith cover, but it worked as comic relief. And it was one of umpteen moments during the show reaffirming the eternal popularity of jambands – and why Blackberry Smoke are one of the best in the business.

Obviously, most jambands don’t have the songs, or the snide lyrical impact that Blackberry Smoke’s most recent material has. They had the crowd singing along practically from the first chorus of Fire in the Hole, the outlaw redneck rock anthem they used to open the show. Just like the last time these guys passed through town, the audience was fistpumping and raising devil’s horns to Waiting for the Thunder, Starr’s ripsnorting, fryolator-guitar fueled diatribe about the divergence between the rich and the underclasses. The song is a lot more vivid than that statement – and it was awfully validating to see a bunch of out-of-towners getting down with a protest anthem. Even if Lynyrd Skynyrd could have written a song like this one, they never would have gotten away with it.

Whether Blackberry Smoke are doing that, or twangy party anthems – and there were plenty of those in the mix – they haven’t lost touch with their populist roots. Case in point: Best Seat in the House, from the band’s latest full-length album, Find a Light, a cynical, backbeat-driven anthem told from the defiant point of view of a working class kid whose ambition doesn’t go much further than that.

Likewise, the funniest point of the evening was when Starr introduced Run Away From It All, a muted, brooding would-be escapee’s tale to open a brief more-or-less acoustic segment. “We haven’t had much luck with radio,” he admitted. “Then I looked around the house and couldn’t remember if I owned a radio.” Over a long enough timeline, all technologies’ survival rates drop to zero.

In contrast with that stark cynicism, the band ran through plenty of sidewinding stomps, a simmering peach pie of southern twang and Stonesy snarl. And then they’d suddenly get serious with a gloomy, toweringly lingering, cinematic mini-epic like the death-obsessed Running Through Time.

The seemingly endless Blackberry Smoke tour continues; the next stop with anything approaching affordable tickets is at Sept 13 at 7:30 PM at the Capitol Center for the Arts, 44 S Main St. in Concord, New Hampshire where it will cost Granite Staters $35 to get in.

Transcendence and Joy with Souren Baronian’s Taksim at Barbes

Every year here, sometime in December, there’s a list of the best New York concerts from over the past twelve months. Obviously, it’s not definitive – nobody has the time, and no organization has the manpower to send somebody to every single worthwhile concert in this city and then sort them all out at the end of the year.

But it’s an awful lot of fun to put together. Legendary Armenian jazz multi-reedman Souren Baronian has a way of showing up on that list just about every year, and he’ll be on the best shows of 2018 page here, too. This past evening at Barbes, he and his Taksim ensemble – Adam Good on oud, son Lee Baronian on percussion, Mal Stein on drums and Sprocket Royer on bass, tucked way back in the far corner – channeled every emotion a band could possibly express in a tantalizing fifty minutes or so onstage. Surprise was a big one. There were lots of laughs, in fact probably more than at any other of Baronian’s shows here over the past few years. There was also longing, and mourning, and suspense, and majesty and joy.

Baronian came out of Spanish Harlem in the late 40s, a contemporary of Charlie Parker. Considered one of the original pillars of Near Eastern jazz, as he calls it, Baronian immersed himself in both bebop and what was then a thriving Manhattan Armenian music demimonde. In the years since, he literally hasn’t lost a step. Much as he can still fly up and down the valves, and played vigorously on both soprano sax and clarinet, his performances are more about soul than speed and this was typical. Some of his rapidfire rivulets recalled Coltrane, or Bird, but in those artists’ most introspective and purposeful moments. And neither dove headfirst into the chromatics to the extent that Baronian does.

He opened with a long, incisively chromatic riff that was as catchy as it was serpentine – a typical Baronian trait. Good doubled the melody while Royer played terse low harmonies against it, the percussion section supplying a solid slink. Baronian’s command of Middle Eastern microtones is still both as subtle and bracing as it ever was as he ornamented the tunes with shivery unease as well as devious wit.

Throughout the show, he’d often play both soprano and clarinet in the same tune, then put down his horn and play riq – the rattling Middle Eastern tambourine – while other band members soloed. The night’s two funniest moments were where he led them on boisterous, vaudevillian percussion interludes with as many cartoonish “gotcha” moments as there was polyrhythmic virtuosity.

Where Baronian made it look easy, Good really dug in and turned a performance that, even for a guy who’s probably one of the top half-dozen oudists in New York, was spectacular. Brooding, ominously quiet phrasing quickly gave way to spiky, sizzling tremolo-picking, pointillistic volleys of sixteenth notes and a precise articulation that defied logic, considering how many notes he was playing. Getting the oud sufficiently up in the PA system helped immeasurably – oud dudes, take a look at this guy’s pedalboard, for the sake of clarity and a whole lot more.

The night’s best number also happened to be the quietest and possibly the most epic – considering how many segues there were, it sometimes became hard to tell where one tune ended and the other began. Baronian played this one on clarinet, looming in from the foghorn bottom of the instrument’s register and then rising with a misty, mournful majesty. As the song went on, it took on less of an elegaic quality and became more of a mystery score. Royer’s spare, resonant groove, Stein’s elegant rimshots, the younger Baronian’s otherworldly, muted boom and Good’s shadowy spirals completed this midnight blue nocturne.

They picked up the pace at the end of the show, taking it out with a triumphant flourish. On one hand, that Baronian chooses Barbes to play his infrequent New York gigs (he’s very popular in Europe) is a treat for the cognoscenti, especially considering how intimate Brooklyn’s best music venue is. But if there’s anybody who deserves a week at the Vanguard or Jazz at Lincoln Center, it’s this guy.

Watch this space for upcoming Baronian Barbes gigs. In the meantime, Good is playing one of his other many axes, guitar, with slashing, careening heavy psychedelic band Greek Judas  – who electrify old hash-smuggling anthems from the 30s and 40s – tomorrow night, Sept 8 at Rubulad. It’s a lo-fi loft space situation with a Burning Man vibe – fire twirlers, space cake and absinthe could be in the picture. Cover is $10 if you show up before 9; email for the Bushwick address/info.

A Wild Night With Dobranotch to Kick Off This Year’s New York Gypsy Festival

Dobranotch means “good night” in Russian. It’s a very understated way of describing the crazy, exhilarating dance party they put on this past evening at Drom to open this year’s New York Gypsy Festival. The Russian klezmer band romped and blasted through a fiery set of originals and radical reinventions of more traditional material, showing off their virtuoso chops as well as an irrepressibly boisterous sense of humor.

Klezmer dance music is fun by definition, but these guys are beyond the pale. There was a point about midway through their set where their their guest dancer, Lea Elisha, went twirling across the floor in front of the stage, her mane of curly hair flying, an unstoppable human gyroscope. Meanwhile, frontman/violinist Mitya Khramtsov played behind his back, Hendrix style.

OK, that’s common enough. Next, he played with his bow behind his back and his violin tucked under his arm.

Then he stuck his bow down his pants and fiddled the violin on the bow – without missing a catchy minor-key riff. After bowing with his mouth, then sticking the bow in the dancer’s mouth and fiddling it, he finally handed the bow to a surprised audience member and had him do it.

Ilya Gindin, the band’s not-so-secret weapon, started the show on alto sax, then switched to oboe, firing off lickety-split spirals and slashing chromatic trills. Then he switched to clarinet. Slowly and methodically, he disassembled the instrument between verses, moving further and further up the scale until there was nothing left to play but the mouthpiece and then the reed. By then, it was all he could do to slowly bend a note up to where it was supposed to be, but nobody wanted the joke to stop.

Beyond the theatrics, this is an incredibly tight party band. More often than not, Khramtsov and the horn section would lock in on their harmonies while Gindin did his thing. Roman Shinder fired off fast flurries of banjo chords as Evgeny Lizin thumped out the groove on a big tapan bass drum and accordionist Ilya Shneyveys fleshed out the sound with rich washes of chords and elegant filigrees.

Khramtsov took a couple of stark, strikingly rustic departures into otherworldly weaves of microtones, veering away from the center before leaping back into the traditional western scale. The best original of the night was an epic, darkly Bessarabian-flavored anthem written by trombonist Grigory Spiridonov, who puffed out staccato basslines when he wasn’t harmonizing with tenor saxophonist Max Karpychev and the rest of the group.

They reinvented the iconic Algerian protest anthem Ya Rayyeh as a gruff but similarly sardonic Russian brass tune. Likewise, they turned a shapeshifting Macedonian bagpipe dance into what Khramtsov termed a “gypsy rhumba,” although it sounded more like a Turkish tango. They finally wound up the night with a third encore, gathered on the floor in front of the audience. An unexpectedly slow, lushly benedictory, moody concluding anthem with edgy solos all around couldn’t douse the crowd’s energy.

The New York Gypsy Festival continues at Drom on Sept 14 at  9:30 PM with the eclectic Underground Horns celebrating ten years of mashing up Balkan, New Orleans and latin brass sounds. You can get in for ten bucks in advance.

Mesmerizing Accordion Sounds Serenade Bryant Park, Again

As all of us in New York have been painfully reminded over the last few days, summer is far from over. But there’s a silver lining: the summer outdoor concerts aren’t over yet, either. One of the year’s best series so far – no surprise – has been the Bryant Park accordion festival. Considering how widely that little box has infiltrated cultures around the world, it’s also hardly a surprise that this may be New York’s most multicultural annual festival.

This past evening’s installment was characteristically sublime and eclectic. Laura Vilche is one of relatively few women whose axe is the even smaller bandoneon so widely used in tango music. She played very kinetically, rhythmically and also remarkably sparsely, underscoring the sheer catchiness of her sometimes slinky, sometimes brooding mix of Argentine and Paraguayan themes. Her dynamically shifting take of the Carlos Gardel classic La Comparsita was the biggest hit with the crowd gathered on the folding chairs and blankets provided for concertgoers. Then she packed up her gear and moved to another of the park’s five quasi-stages to serenade another group; many followed.

Where Vilche was spare and almost otherworldly direct, Latvian-born accordionist Ilya Shneyveys played lavishly and even epically throughout a set of original and often relatively obscure klezmer songs from across the Jewish diaspora. He opened his set by explaining that he was going much further afield, beyond horas and Hava Nagila, and he wasn’t kidding. With long, lingering, suspenseful intros building to waterfalling and then absolutely torrential volleys of notes, he used every second of the allotted time to air out every bracing chromatic and adrenalizing minor key in a series of dances and more subdued material. The highlight was a slowly crescendoing, rather mysterious diptych typically played as an introductory theme for wedding guests. “Cocktail music,” he smirked. He’s playing tomorrow night, Sept 6 at 9 PM at Drom with pyrotechnic Russian klezmer band Dobranotch to open this year’s New York Gypsy Festival; cover is $15 if you get tix before midnight.

As much fun as it was to watch those two musicians, the stars of this installment of the accordion festival were Eva Salina and Peter Stan. In two separate sets, they played a lot of the same material, completely differently the second time around. The mesmerizing Balkan singer and her longtime accordionist collaborator aren’t just frontwoman and accompanist: each is as integral to the music as the other. Toying with rhythm and taking their time making up intros, outros and meticulously thought-out solos, they brought a jazz sophistication to a blend of Romanian and Serbian tunes from across the Romany diaspora.

Their first take of a catchy dance number, imploring Romany husbands to come home to their wives and kids from faraway jobs, was very straightforward. The second was slower and much more plaintive. Jaunty dance rhymes contrasted with haunting ballads of loss and longing. Both musicians’ fearsome technique was in full effect, whether Stan’s supersonic volleys of chromatics and grace notes, or Salina’s minute, microtonal melismas and ornamentation.

Next week’s first episode of the festival is on Weds Sept 12, starting at 5:30 PM with a phenomenally good lineup including but not limited to Ismail Butera playing Middle Eastern and Mediterranean music, Will Holshouser’s Indian-influenced accordion jazz, Shoko Nagai’s mix of klezmer and Japanese folk, and Sadys Rodrigo Espitia’s oldschool Colombian cumbia and vallenato. The festival’s grand finale is two days later, on Sept 14, and starts a half hour earlier.

A Gusty, Gutsy Return by Brooklyn’s Most Individualistic Guitarist and His Band in Red Hook

An enigmatic mist of sound rose from the inner courtyard at Pioneer Works to the top of a makeshift tower with a spiral staircase scarier than any Hitchcock movie set a couple of weekends ago. As Uncivilized bandleader/guitarist Tom Csatari finally edged his way through the clouds of horns, and keys, and drummer Rachel Housle’s deftly muted polyrhythms, into the iconic two-note phrase that opens Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks theme, the subtext screamed. Distant menace seldom hits so close to home.

Csatari and his more-or-less-nine-piece band were really on a roll until the midde of last year, when it suddenly looked like they might be finished. But Csatari dodged a bullet, survived a brain tumor operation and has reemerged with both his chops and his band intact. In an era when New York jazz musicians under forty who can afford to play live regularly are as rare as rent-regulated apartments, that’s a big news.

Csatari’s music sways and careens a little when the whole unit is going full tilt. The game plan seems to be that everybody has license to stray a little but not too far. The result is lot of tense, unresolved close harmonies, making a deliciously uneasy contrast with all the catchy riffs that permeate the mix. Few of those melodies ever return once they’re gone. Csatari can sound like Kenny Burrell or Wes Montgomery if he wants, but he hardly ever does – Americana of all kinds is more his reference point. You could call him a scruffier Bill Frisell if you wanted. 

There were more than a few moments throughout this characteristically epic show where the group brought to mind the Grateful Dead – but with two Bob Weirs and no Jerry Garcia. Csatari’s fellow guitarist Julian Cubillos is typically a noisier foil than he was this time out, the two shadowing each other with terse, even flitting riffs from 60s soul, or 70s country, or older blues. Meanwhile, the horn section bubbled and scooched to both sides, usually pretty seamlessly. There wasn’t a lot of soloing. Saxophonist Levon Henry got a bright, cheery one early on, then a trumpeter whose sweet old canine friend had gone onstage and wandered amid the band earlier, joined the melee and contributed a similarly boisterous one of her own.

The whole band weren’t all constantly playing at the same time, either: there were brief, suspenseful moments for keys and rhythm section, and for the two guitars. References to the Dead at their most qawwali-influenced, the Modern Jazz Quartet and the AACM – especially in the most orchestral moments – shifted with remarkable grace for a unit who never appear to be all in the same place at the same time. Yet Csatari always anchored the wafting ambience and frequent gusts with his nonchalantly incisive, tersely resonant flickers of melody.

Csatari’s webpage doesn’t show any upcoming gigs; watch this space. And the free semimonthly outdoor shows out back of Pioneer Works continue this Sunday, Sept 9 at 7:30 PM with an even more careening group, Haitian tropicalia punk band Ram. You’re supposed to rsvp, but last month this blog’s owner and girlfriend both just walked in without any hassle. Even the security guy out front was chill. Go figure. 

A Stormy, Epically Relevant Jazz Standard Show by Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society

In their late set last night at the Jazz Standard, Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society threw caution to the wind with a stormy, careeningly dynamic career retrospective of sorts. Which isn’t what you might expect from the conductor’s intricate, tightly clustering compositions. But this era’s most thrilling, relevant large jazz ensemble’s approach perfectly fit his material’s relentless angst, white-knuckle suspense and cynically cinematic, Shostakovian portraiture.

Argue’s albums are meticulously orchestrated and produced – which is not to imply that they suffer from the digital sterility of so many big band albums these days. Even so, this show was especially fresh and full of surprises. The group opened somewhat counterintuitively with an older tune, Flux in a Box – Argue explained that he took the title of the subtly polyrhythmic, Jim McNeely-like number, with its cell-like mini-spirals and bursts, from a vast, sarcastic fictitious filmography in a David Foster Wallace novel. Alto saxophonist Alexa Tarentino chose her moments carefully for variations on staggered, fragmented phrases, pianist Adam Birnbaum offering comfortably lyrical contrast.

Then they immediately launched into the ferocious, fearlessly political material Argue has made a name for himself with in recent years. First was a series of tunes from his withering critique of gentrification, Brooklyn Babylon, kicking off with Matt Clohesy’s mighty bass chords, Sebastian Noelle’s resonant guitar astringencies, a vividly nightmarish portrait of grand construction schemes run horribly amok. Seemingly hell-bent on getting to the end, they leapt through tense pairings of instruments among the band’s eighteen members to a harried take of Coney Island, which was strangely more enigmatic here than the album’s horror-stricken, plaintive coda.

Three pieces from the group’s latest conspiracy and conspiracy theory-themed album, Real Enemies were next on the bill. Amped up to a level remarkable at this sonically pristine spot, The Enemy Within came across as a mashup of the Theme from Shaft and the Taxi Driver theme as done by an epic version of John Zorn’s Spy Vs. Spy, maybe. Dark Alliance had wry woozy P-Funk textures grounded by relentless Bernard Herrman-esque glimmer and ghostly flickers, alto saxophonist Dave Pietro resisting any possible urge to find any kind of resolution in his exquisitely troubled, modal solo. A duel with trombonist Ryan Keberle followed – not waterboarder and waterboardee, but allusively so.

The last of the triptych was the mighty, swaying Trust No One, Carl Maraghi’s serpentine baritone sax solo giving way to a sudden dip to creepy knock-knock riffs, deep-space pointillisms from Birnbaum and Noelle jumpstarting a flitting poltergeist choir from the saxes. They closed with Transit and its fiery, cloudbursting drama. Argue explained that he’d written it on a Fung Wah bus enroute from Boston to Chinatown – no wonder it’s so scary! In that context, the constant dodges between phrases rushing by, not to mention the irresistibly fun trick ending, made perfect sense. Trumpeter Jason Palmer’s solo turned out to be more of an expert series of Route 495 twists and turns than the launching pad for pyrotechnics that it usually is in concert. The takeaway: a frequently riveting performance by a crew also including but not limited to multi-reedman Sam Sadigursky, trumpeters Seneca Black and Nadje Noordhuis; trombonists Jacob Garchik, Mike Fahie and Jennifer Wharton and drummer Jon Wikan.

A Mesmerizing Start to the Final Installment of This Year’s Charlie Parker Festival

The final night of this year’s Charlie Parker Festival this past weekend was front-loaded. Young lions and then a veteran lioness set the bar impossibly high for whatever followed. By five in the evening, the usual wall-to-wall mob that has come out for the festival’s original flagship space, Tompkins Square Park, hadn’t materialized. Maybe it was the stormclouds overhead. Maybe, more ominously, the shrinking turnout reflects how many of the longtime East Village residents who supported this festival year after year have been driven out by gentrifiers. As we all know, gentrifiers have no interest in the arts: there’s infinitely more perceived immortality in taking a selfie in front of a hundred dollar brunch spread than while watching some guy blowing weird notes on a horn at a show which costs nothing to attend.

So an aging bunch of East Village holdovers (that’s what they call us), kids and tourists got to revel quietly in the trio of trumpeter Adam O’Farrill, tenor saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins and vibraphonist Joel Ross team up with drummer Craig Weinrib, conguero Roman Diaz and a slinky bassist throughout a set that shifted artfully from rapturous, misty atmospherics, to tantalizingly allusive Afro-Cuban grooves punctuated by darkly masterful solos. O’Farrill set the tone, leading a hazy, distantly disconcerted tone poem to open the show, then finally brought it back at the end of their roughly 45 minutes onstage. In between, they reinvented hauntingly elegaic Coltrane as AACM cloudscape, spiced with wickedly incisive Arabic-tinged modal horn work, Then they took a jaunting, biting clave theme and made a lattice of disorienting polyrhythms out of it. The bassist managed to hold the center, pedaling his riffs while Weinrib and Diaz made their meticulous rhythmic negotiation look effortless. This really is the future of jazz, and it’s in good hands with these relatively young, restlessly hungry cats.

Which is not to say that ageless septuagenarian Amina Claudine Myers isn’t still pushing the envelope. What a trip it was to watch open her se by swinging her way through gutbucket Jimmy Smith B3 organ grease, leading a trio with Jerome Harris on guitar and Reggie Nicholson on drums. Then she took the party into the tectonically shifting ambience she’s best known for, building a storm on the horizon with peaks in between for stark, magisterial 19th century gospel and practically the complete Chopin C Minor Prelude. Rather than twisting the harmonies to suit the rest of the material, she played it exactly as written, letting its anguished series of chords linger. “Have mercy,” she sang over and over again throughout the set’s last number, as much a command as an entreaty.

There were a couple of other acts on the bill afterward, but pianist Orrin Evans’ originals are a thousand times more interesting than the material he was scheduled to run through as a replacement at this money gig. O’Farrill is at the Jazz Gallery on Sept 29 at 7 PM on day two of Futurefest there, dueling it out with guitarist Gabe Schnider, followed by obscure Japanese jazz unit Secret Mall and then at 10 by vibraphonist Sasha Berliner leading a quartet. Cover is $25.

An Incendiary Concert at a Legendary Studio Immortalized on the BC 35 Album

Martin Bisi is a legend of the New York underground  – and he’s hardly a stranger in many other worlds as well. As a young engineer in 1983, he vaulted to prominence by winning a Grammy for his work on Herbie Hancock’s hit Rockit, which would go on to be sampled by thousands of hip-hop acts over the decades. The vast list of acts Bisi has worked with at his legendary Gowanus digs BC Studios runs from Sonic Youth  to John Zorn to the Dresden Dolls. 

His new album BC 35 – streaming at Bandcamp – was recorded in front of a live audience there over the course of a marathon weekend in January of 2016, a historic event very enthusiastically reviewed here. True to form, Bisi also recorded it and played with many of the groups on the bill, in celebration of the studio’s 35th anniversary. Much as he’s as distinctive and darkly erudite a guitarist as he is a producer, he’s somewhere in the mix here on three tracks: characteristically, he isn’t being ostentatious. His latest gig is at El Cortez on Sept 1 at around 8 on a killer triplebill, in between the perennially sick, twisted noiserock of the Sediment Club and the headliners, no wave sax legends James Chance & the Contortions. Cover is $20.

The order of the tracks leaps back and forth between the Saturday and Sunday sessions. The album’s most notable cut is Details of the Madness, the first recording and live performance by 80s noiserock legends Live Skull (who call themselves New Old Skull here) since 1998. guitarist Mark C, bassist Marnie Greenholz Jaffe and drummer Rich Hutchins pick up like they never left off, enigmatically catchy, icy guitar multitracks over a relentless fuzztone swing that slows with an ominous nod to Joy Division.

Some of these tracks are improvisations, including the album’s opening number, Nowhere Near the Rainbow. Original Sonic Youth drummer Bob Bert gives Parlor Walls guitarist Alyse Lamb, Skeleton Boy from Woman and Lubricated Goat’s Stu Spasm a slinky pulse for sputters and squall punctuated by the occasional anthemic goth riff. SYNESTHESIA!  – an Alice Donut reunion, more or less – is similar but much dirtier. Denton’s Dive – with Hutchins, Skeleton Boy, Dave W, Phil Puleo and Ivan Up – is practically ten minutes of sludgecore, dissociative reverbtoned noise and swaying atrocity exhibition atmosphere.

Here’s how this blog described the Sunday session jam What a Jerk: “Algis Kisys of Swans jousted with ex-Cop Shoot Cop bassist Jack Natz and drummer Jim Coleman for a ferocious blast through a hornet’s nest of needle-pinning fuzztones and booming low-register chords.” What’s here is a judicious edit – if noiserock jams can be judiciously edited, Bisi’s definitely the man for the job. After that, Tidal Channel’s no wave synth-and-spoken-word piece Humash Wealth Management, Inc. keeps the assault going full force.

JG Thirlwell’s characteristically creepy, southwestern gothic overture Downhill features Insect Ark’s Dana Schechter on bass and violinist Laura Ortman leading a full string section. It is probably less memorable for being this blog’s owner’s most recent appearance on album, as part of the impromptu “BC Radiophonic Choir.”

The lineup on The Animals Speak Truth includes Barbez’s Dan Kaufman on guitar, Botanica’s Paul Wallfisch on organ and keys and the Dresden Dolls’ Brian Viglione on drums, maintaining the lingering lysergic menace in a vamping instrumental that picks up to a grimly tumbling, clustering pace.

Looking back to the weekend reportage again: “Susu guitarist Andrea Havis and drummer Oliver Rivera Drew (who made a tight rhythm section with baritone guitarist Diego Ferri, both of whom play in Bisi’s European touring band) backed Arrow’s soaring frontwoman Jeannie Fry through a swirl of post-MBV maelstrom sonics and wary, moodily crescendoing postpunk jangle.“ That’s His Word Against Mine, by JADO.

White Hills’ echoey End of the Line offers contrast as well as the weekend’s lone reference point to Brian Eno, BC Studios’ co-founder. Bolstered by Wallfisch and Viglione, noir singer/guitarist Ajda the Turkish Queen’s toweringly gorgeous, Lynchian waltz Take This Ride is the strongest track here. The album concludes with a noisy, hypnotically pulsing jam by Cinema Cinema plus David Lackner and Mikel Dos Santos, and more Tidal Channel assault. Warts and all, you’ll see this on the best albums of 2018 page at the end of the year, a magical piece of history. What a treat it was to be witness to most of it.

A Mighty, Moody Album and a Lincoln Center Gig by the Scott Reeves Jazz Orchestra

The rain-slicked streetcorner tableau on the album cover of the Scott Reeves Jazz Orchestra’s latest release Without a Trace – streaming at Bandcamp – Is truth in advertising. In recent years the group have taken a turn into moody, brassy latin-inspired sounds, something they excel at. They’re at Dizzy’s Club on Sept 3, with sets at 7:30 and 9:30. Cover is steep – $35 – but like most A-list large jazz ensembles not named the Maria Schneider Orchestra, you don’t get many chances to see them. This time out the lineup includes singer Carolyn Leonhart; alto saxophonists Jon Gordon and Jay Brandford; tenor saxophonists Rob Middleton and Tim Armacost; baritone saxophonist Terry Goss; trumpeters Nathan Eklund, Dave Smith, Chris Rogers, and Andy Gravish; trombonists Matt McDonald, Jason Jackson and Matt Haviland; bass trombonist Max Seigel; pianist Roberta Piket; bassist Todd Coolman and drummer Andy Watson.

They open the album with a an expansively layered, brassy cha-cha arrangement of Kurt Well’s Speak Low, a feature for Steve Wilson’s allusive, melismatic alto sax, echoed by trumpeter Chris Rogers. Watson’s stampeding drums kick off a tasty series of chromatic riffs from the brass to wind it up.

With a stunningly misty wistfulness, Leonhart gives voice to the longing and angst in Reeves’ moodily latin-inspired title track, Jim Ridl’s tightly clustering piano ceding to Armacost’s more optimistic tenor solo. Likewise, they turn toward Vegas noir in Reeves’ broodingly bouncy reinvention of All or Nothing At All, following the bandleader’s bluesy, bubbling solo up to a haggard, white-knuckle-intense crescendo.

Incandescence could be a Gil Evans tune, maintaining a grim intensity throughout Reeves’ distantly Ravel-esque portrait of starlight over the French countryside. Vibraphonist Dave Ellson moves carefully, Ridl more menacingly, Wilson’s soprano sax peeking and glissandoing with a relentless unease.

Reeves based his own vampy arrangement of Wayne Shorter’s Juju on the composer’s most recent chart for the song and beefed it up with bright banks of brass. Tenor saxophonist Rob Middleton’s solo draws closely on Shorter’s own modally-charged work on the original.

Reeves then looks to Alberto Ginastera’s Piano Sonata No. 1 for the central hook for the album’s most epic track, Shape Shifter, with gritty close harmonies, Ridl’s Arabic-tinged piano and Reeves’ alto flugelhorn solo vividly bringing to mind the most cinematic side of early 60s Gil Evans – although a relatively free interlude with Ridl leading the randomness is a detour the song really doesn’t need. The brightly gusty closing cut, Something for Thad is a Thad Jones shout-out. Many flavors and lots to savor here.