Brilliant, Distinctively Dark Discoveries and a Stravinsky Favorite with the MSM Symphony Orchestra

Last night at Manhattan School of Music, guest conductor Leonard Slatkin returned to lead the MSM Symphony Orchestra through a program with pervasive if sometimes allusively dark and phantasmagorical overtones: without a doubt, music that resounds in the here and now.

They opened with Cindy McTee‘s Timepiece for Percussion, and String Orchestra. The orchestra quickly danced their way into its proto-Bernard Herrmann motives, alternately playful and menacing, interspersed with moments of sleekness. Quickly, the orchestra rose toward a furtive rhythm, to a tensely pulsing clave with portenous answers between inquiring brass and cynical strings, and flourishes that echoed the evening’s centerpiece, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. It was a delightfully cinematic, apt curtain-raiser.

Frank Martin’s Concerto for 7 Wind Instruments, Timpani, Percussion, and String Orchestra made a good segue. Similarly, Slatkin led the orchestra briskly into a balletesque, allusively chromatic swing with a vivid, broodingly inquiring Nicholas Fitch bassoon solo at the center of the allegro opening movement. From there, Hajin Kil’s searching oboe led them down from a moment of suspicious pageantry to more austere territory.

The second movement began as somber ballet, eerie close harmonies in a balletesque tiptoeing rhythm before the brass kicked in, cynically. Strings and brass developed a quasi-flamenco-tinged forward drive, down to a suspensefully tiptoeing Scheherzada lull punctuated by an even more wary Cameron Pollard horn solo.

The third movement gave way to insistent, tense riffing around the central flamenco theme, the horns answering from around the hall with an equal tension. Timpanist Zachary Masri’s coolly striding solo launched a steady, ineluctably marching crescendo spiced with high woodwind flourishes, toward a coda that offered an unexpected triumph. Kudos to the MSM faculty for resurrecting this.

Their take on Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring turned out to be more of a controlled demolition than feral folk explosion after a long Russian winter. The initial calls were muted and enigmatic within an ambience that was absolutely pillowy. Likewise, Slatkin kept the orchestra on a tight leash, with meticulously puffing accents in contrast to spritely wind cadenzas. Was he setting the bar on the quiet side for the sake of enhancing future pyrotechnics? Uh, maybe.

The group took an unexpectedly dusty and then light-fingered, swinging rise to a cyclotron swirl, with more blue-flame simmer than fullscale conflagration on all sides. A teasing lull with precisely choreographed flutes drew a heavy duty truck crush from the percusssion and low brass. Yet the call-and-response after that gave way to a strikingly smooth swing – making the gnashing monsterwalk and danse macabre afterward all the more effective for its relative calm.

Slatkin led with a woundedly plush pulse from there to a mere whisper before the spirits began flitting up into the picture on the wings of the flutes again. The iconic unleashed-maidens theme seemed more stage-managed, less pagan than other orchestras have played it in the last few years, maybe due to the demands of training. Or maybe Slatkin had something new to tell us about this piece, from the misterioso slink on the way through a stabbing, stiletto coda.

There are plenty of upcoming public performances at Manhattan School of Music this month. One intriguing program features their choral ensemble singing works by women composers including Meredith Monk, Melissa Dunphy, Ysaÿe Barnwell, and Tammy Huynh on April 19 at 8 PM at the Ades Performance Space at 130 Claremont Ave. The concert is free; take the 1 to 125th St. and walk back uphill.

The Penniless Loafers Take Centerstage on a Killer Ska Triplebill at Otto’s Tonight

We are overdue for another ska revival. And it looks like it’s happening.

By the time the fast one-drop got popular in the US, it was already retro. And then it got corporatized, and watered down. And as the years went by and the diehards who played the oldschool stuff got old, the crowds that used to pack the Tribeca-era Knitting Factory trickled down into little bars like Don Pedro’s and Spike Hill and then finally Otto’s. If you’re a diehard who might be interested in seeing the glorious past and promising future of slinky formerly Jamaican sounds in New York, that’s where you can find a triplebill tonight, April 14 which has both.

At 8 PM there’s Barbicide, a more punk-oriented spinoff of 90s legends Mephiskapheles. The 9 PM act is the Penniless Loafers, who are what No Doubt would have been if they’d been good. Third-wave ska trombone legend Buford O’Sullivan, who has played with everybody starting with the Skatalites, headlines with his band the Roosters. A show this good ten years ago would have set you back at least twenty bucks. Tonight, it’s a pass-the-hat situation. Make of that what you will.

The Penniless Loafers represent the future on this bill. They have horns, and keys, but as much of a classic powerpop influence as oldschool ska and punk. In a style almost completely dominated by dudes, their all-female frontline sets them apart. Their latest album Living the Plan B – streaming at Bandcamp – came out while this city was still under Cuomo’s nightmare lockdown and deserves to be better known.

The opening track, Milo, is probably the only ska song ever written about a cat: it’s got jangly guitars, and sleek roller-rink organ, and brass, and an unexpected, irresistible halfspeed reggae breakdown. It says a lot about the band’s sense of humor.

Track two, New Face is a rocksteady song, like a beefier version of the Big Takeover. The band’s frontline – Veronica Gonzalez, Lynsey Vanderberg and Casey Walker – join soul-infused harmonies in Moving Along, a catchy reggae-janglerock mashup with icy chorus-box guitar, bright horns and bandleader Tim Firth’s layers of organ.

The horns take centerstage in Sneaky Little Thoughts, a more brooding reggae tune, the band picking it up suddenly with a sizzling Noah Axelrod guitar solo. Hearts of Pyrite, a shimmery, upbeat but bittersweet tune with gospel-tinged call-and-response vocals, is one of the album’s strongest cuts.

They switch to a blazing mashup of dark fuzztone surf rock over a 60s go-go beat in M.I.A. and then go back to rocksteady with I Spy (a cynical original, not the Pulp anthem).

The band really take the songs to the next level as the album winds up. Day and Night is a smolderingly successful detour into towering, angst-fueled vintage noir soul territory. The band return to moody reggae in One for the Stars and then range from delicate Lynchian pop to a venomous kiss-off anthem in This is Getting Heavy. There’s also a gorgeous bonus track, Lost Love where they slowly make their way up from a wounded noir nocturne to rocksteady.

Turfseer’s Majestically Tuneful Protest Song Playlist Reaches Epic Proportions

Turfseer is arguably the world’s most prolific protest songwriter. Queens-based, theatrical art-rock tunesmith Lewis Papier, who records under that name with a rotating cast of characters, began offering sonic solace and validation for the noncompliant starting in the late spring of 2020. He hasn’t stopped since.

The first time this blog visited his Scamdemic Collection at Soundcloud, there were 33 songs on it. The playlist has since grown to 47. That’s impressive by any standard, let alone during a time when musicians were officially locked out of studio space (and some were too fearful to go inside until NPR assured them it was ok). Considering the consistent quality, relentlessly cynical humor and boundless stylistic breadth of Turfseer’s output, that’s an Elvis Costello/David Bowie-class achievement.

The review here from February 2022 called Turfseer “the missing link between Jeff Lynne and Jello Biafra,” and referenced both the Alan Parsons Project and the New Pornographers. What else is new here, or that hasn’t been covered before?

A lot of his songs turn plandemic “guidelines” inside out, and The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street, a distantly 50s-tinged ballad is typical. “We trust our experts all the way, no time to question, we must obey.” The fleeting soul guitar-and-organ break toward the end is tantalizingly delicious.

The Beatlesque piano ballad The Scam takes the mass psychosis a step further:

Keep your six feet distance to the inch/Isolate, no contact, it’s a cinch!
Everything must go without a hitch, as long as you are certified a snitch

Turfseer has a vaudevillian side, and that’s front and center in Fact Checker, a vindictive mashup of Brecht/Weill dark cabaret and 70s Supertramp. My Mystery Cult is a very subtle orchestrated pop broadside that connects the dots between plandemic compliance and climate change hysteria. Just for the record, New York Music Daily was once in the global warming cult and wishes to apologize for spreading that unscientific bullshit in past years.

The women in the band also sing All the King’s Horses – a brooding art-rock original, not the Erica Smith classic – offering rapt homage to a “Dr. Doom” who keeps falling apart and somehow his cult members keep putting him back together again.

Masters of Fear is one of Turfseer’s most successful keyboard-fueled mashups of late 70s ELO, Carl Newman powerpop and noir cabaret. It’s all about “winning the war without firing a single shot.”

Over a dynamically shifting chamber pop backdrop, Turfseer takes a witheringly sarcastic look back to the Thanksgiving 2020 fad du jour in The Testing Trap. The best jokes in The Great Reset are not lyrical but musical – the bombast is irresistibly spot-on.

In addition to ornate 70s rock, he has a thing for country, and Just Too Good to Be True is a prime example, an understatedly harrowing look at the psychology of denial. For all the orchestration and flashy flourishes in the rest of these songs, this is one of the best of the bunch.

There’s a return to glittery, emphatic neoromantic piano in The Back of the Bus, a coldly scathing analysis of the newest Jim Crow. Cardboard Cutouts in the Stands, a swaying C&W tune, looks back to the aborted 2020 baseball season, a chilling reminder of how quickly the national pastime was transformed into fear porn.

Lush orchestration and melancholy, insistent piano pervade Perchance to Dream, a guy/girl duet about a girl in a coma. The rape metaphors in are just as offhandedly chilling in You Didn’t Recognize Me, a lavish psych-pop song that could be Amy Rigby.

Turfseer found a dramatic, forceful frontguy to go over the top in front of nimbly scrambling piano and electric keys in Expert Opinion. More recent songs have tackled issues beyond the plandemic, notably Walking in the Woke Man’s Shoes, a brisk, ridiculously funny Kelley Swindall-style country tune sung from the point of view of a poor girl whose guy suddenly decided he wasn’t one after all.

The Dish is arguably Turfseer’s most macabre song, a musical counterpart to painter Sasha Latypova‘s research into lethal batch-by-batch variations in the covid shots. Where Have You Gone Tiffany Dover?, a goofy ragtime tune, addresses a question which has become clearer now that mockingbird media are airing actresses pretending to be the country nurse whose late 2020 death on live tv made her the poster child for the Pfizer shot.

The final track on the Soundcloud page – as of today, anyway – is My Polyanna Summer, a snide warning to keep our eye on the ball whenever restrictions are relaxed. To keep up with Turfseer: you might want to bookmark his Substack, where his latest releases usually appear first.

A Sweet Debut Album and a Williamsburg Gig From New York’s Best New Middle Eastern Band

It took three years, but we’re seeing new bands spring up around town and one of the most auspicious is Baklava Express, whose new album Dávka is streaming at Bandcamp. On one hand, they’re a throwback to the golden age of 50s Middle Eastern music, but they differentiate themselves with both their original instrumentals and the presence of an acoustic guitar for extra spiky textures. They’re ambitious and have a lot of nerve: you would never know that they’re a bunch of Americans They even have a signature song, included here on the record. They’re playing on April 19 at 9 PM at Radegast Hall, where the imported beers and brats are expensive (and huge), but the show is free.

They open the record sacrilegiously with Kosher Bacon. This is some sad forbidden food! Bassist James Robbins bows out a growly drone, violinist Daisy Castro carrying the rainy-day, midrangey waltz tune over the plucky interweave of oudist Josh Kaye and guitarist Max O’Rourke as percussionist Jeremy Smith builds an increasingly boomy beat with his goblet drum.

The album’s slinky, celebratory, chromatically delicious title track is a close approximation of a famous Egyptian bellydance theme, Castro and Kaye syncing up for the lead line, with a tantalizingly brief break for oud and hand drum. Then they go back to moody waltz territory for I’ll Figure It Out, which could just as easily be a starkly catchy Neapolitan lament.

The band work an anthemic, bouncy Gipsy Kings-style descending progression in Reunion, Castro multitracking herself into a bracing one-woman string section, Kaye adding edgy, spiraling leads. Up to Us has trickier syncopation and a biting Turkish flavor, with a spare, sinewy, subtly flamenco-tinged guitar solo.

Castro and Kaye take over a broodingly incisive melody line in a third waltz, The Same River Twice, O’Rourke weaving spiky multitracks with his National steel guitar. In an age of censorship and surveillance, it takes mega guts to release a song titled Turtles All the Way Down (a reference to the iconic, pseudonymous book debunking the myths behind vaccine “science”). This one’s as defiant and lush as you would want from a mashup of a classic levantine anthem and more Andalucian sounds.

Waltz for Omer is a similarly brisk, beefy Spanish Romany-flavored number. They close with their signature tune, which turns out to be part whimsical and part whiplash, with the album’s most adrenalizing oud and violin solos. This is easily one of the best two or three albums released this year so far.

Smart, Catchy, Provocative Freedom Anthems From Alicen Grey a.k.a. When Humans Had Wings

Alicen Grey is an intuitive. She works at what some might call the intersection of energetic healing, spirituality and the paranormal. She’s down-to-earth, and entertaining, and also one of the growing legions of freedom fighters who have emerged since the 2020 global coup. She shares her insights into the ongoing Great Awakening – including a wild experience with mysterious, symbolic wreckage in the Arizona desert – via her Substack and youtube channel.

And she’s a musician as well, recording catchy keyboard-based songs under the name When Humans Had Wings. She released her most recent album Run Rabbit Run – streaming at Bandcamp – in 2022. After a provocative bit of an intro, she launches into I’d Rather Be High, a swaying, hypnotic trip-hop anthem: “I dare you to seek until you find the power that sleeps in your spine,” she challenges. The instrumentation is simple, just Grey’s echoey, layered keys plus occasional guitar and drums from Sean Seybold.

Track three, Ears to Hear is a resolute protest anthem:

They got you wearing a mask
Got you wanting the past
Got you nervous to ask any questions
Got you looking at me
Like I’m your enemy
Got you turning your words to weapons

The synths get more fuzzy and the lyrics get more cynical in the album’s title track: “I wonder what you wanted to show me back when I gave a fuck,” she tells her antagonist. The fifth cut, a pulsing escape anthem, is titled Pray, Animal: it’s an intriguing mashup of vintage krautrock and Bjork with hints of psychedelic late Beatles.

The most minimalist anthem here is The Madness of the Saints, Grey shifting between suspenseful electric piano, rapturous pipe organ and rainy-day piano textures over Seybold’s tumbling drums. The final cut is Alternate Universe, a big, delicious kiss-off to a narcissist bandmate.

Grey has a couple of singles up at Bandcamp as well. Earthquake, featuring Dosyble Sane, is super catchy, goes back a couple years and also deals with treachery. And Smoke and Mirrors, from 2022, is her most mysterious, cinematic track so far.

And if you’re interested in how she defines evil – and how to get it out of your life – check out her appearance earlier this week on Mickey Z’s Post-Woke podcast.

Cellist Amanda Gookin Plays a Harrowing but Guardedly Triumphant Solo Show at Roulette

Survivors of child abuse are like the unjabbed. They walk among you, unnoticed, steeled in what Catherine Austin Fitts calls the “refiners fire,” but scarred for life. At her solo show this past evening at Roulette, cellist Amanda Gookin channeled equal parts resilience and numbed horror as a child abuse survivor herself.

She asserted that she had few childhood memories, and from those she shared with a near sold-out audience, it’s easy to understand why. The daughter of a troubled woman who could sing Brahms beautifully but was crippled by what appears to have been serious borderline personality disorder, Gookin began the show seated on the stairs to the stage. With a steady calm, she read a revealing letter to an unnamed sister, mentioning their shared depressive tendencies. She would reprise that letter at the end of the concert: its authorship came as no surprise.

From that introduction, she picked up an amplified frame drum with ball bearings inside and took a slow stroll through the audience to the soundboard and back, as hypnotic waves washed over the crowd. Perhaps this attested to the push and pull of abusive relationships from a child’s point of view.

On one hand, Gookin’s parents had the means to send her away to Bible camp in Texas during the summer. But then her mother found her Jesus diary, discovered her daughter’s entreaties for parental healing, and that was the end of that. As Gookin told it, Wilton, Connecticut in the early 90s was a tough place to be a kid from the one home on the block where the ambulance or police cruiser would be a regular presence. The moment where she recounted a friend’s mother trying to get her to open up about her feelings, late one evening on a quiet staircase, was unaffectedly shattering.

And yet, years later, when her mother died of cancer, Gookin was overwhelmed with grief, and was quick to acknowledge how codependency is a double-edged sword. It was rewarding to hear how she was finally able to move on emotionally.

From the music, Gookin clearly conquered those demons, even as they sometimes wafted to the surface, in a tightly wound, rather minimalist electroacoustic performance. With her own spoken-word between-song segues, it wasn’t always clear where one composition ended and another began. The first piece, by Pamela Z, was a blend of spoken word chopped and cuisinarted through a mixer while Gookin layered shivering, muted harmonics and subtle ambient textures.

Often Gookin would begin a piece or an interlude with the hum of singing bowls, or the creepy, music box-like timbres from a set of wind chimes. Gentle rainshower sonics dripped behind her spare, midrange cello washes as she spoke of a “body submerged in the cloud,” rising to a frenetic, chopping peak.

On a Jessie Montgomery composition, she slammed out a steady, hypnotic series of chords before veering into hazy harmonics and then an aching, microtonal cadenza where she finally veered off into a crazed cello-metal coda.

Throughout the rest of the night, stark octaves, fleeting harmonic accents, the occasional anxious wail and a crescendo into a fragmented evocation of madness figured in turn throughout works by Sarah Hennies, Camilia Agosto and Seong Ae Kim. A concluding piece by Inti Figgis-Vizueta included a paraphrase of I’m in the Mood for Love, simple chords and a spare, elegaic, spacious melody that grew more anthemic with glissandos, eerie trills and raga-like riffage.

The next concert at Roulette is quite similar if perhaps not as personally devastating. On April 12 at 8 PM, singer and sound artist Muyassar Kurdi leads an improvisational electroacoustic trio tracing the lineage of the Arab diaspora. You can get in for $25 in advance.

Victor Muhlberg’s Catchy, Slashingly Vivid Plandemic Musical Theatre Piece Edges Closer to Completion

Last year, Mark Crispin Miller – who is not only one of this era’s most important public intellectuals, but also a talented songwriter – shared a defiant, poignant youtube playlist, Twelve Days of Song, put up by South African songwriter Victor Muhlberg. It took some sleuthing to track him down: the story of how he rescued his late father Johannes Muhlberg’s musical theatre project from obscurity and repurposed it as a plandemic narrative is recounted here.

Good news on the production front: Muhlberg continues to expand the project and has recorded several new songs.

The first is The Fog on the Mire, recalling spring 2020 hell with “The frenzy, the scare, the fear in the air” in a cynical, noir-tinged, Brecht-Weill style cabaret ballad with Godfrey Johnson intoning about the “alchemist’s brew” filtering up through the “cracks in the old empire.”

Bev Scott Brown sings The Ghost of Lonely Pain, a poignant, expressive account of a woman injured in the Covid shot trials and then abandoned after she was crippled.

Johnson and Regina Malan share the mic in Let’s Cheer, a gleefully vaudevillian, dixieland-tinged portrait of big pharma collusion with “fawning politicians and public health authorities,” as Muhlberg puts it.

He and the cast have a finale now: We Say Goodbye, an understated, gently swinging, guardedly optimistic cautionary tale featuring vocals by Scott-Brown, Johnson, Malan, Penny Radsma, Selim Kagee, Roger Maitland and Elaine Ridgway. As with the rest of the show, guitarist Clive Ridgway and pianist Tony Drake expertly negotiate styles from early jazz to 1930s theatre music to stately chamber pop.

Add this to your collection of some of the best protest songs written in the past three years. Here’s hoping that lucky Cape Town residents get to experience the whole production sooner than later.

Colorful, Relentlessly Entertaining, Linguistically-Inspired New Compositions by Eric Nathan

One of the most deviously entertaining recent projects in new classical music is Eric Nathan‘s epic double album Missing Words, streaming at New Focus Recordings. The composer takes inspiration for this colorful collection of vignettes and longer pieces from Ben Schott‘s Schottenfreude, a philosophical satire of the German propensity for interminable compound nouns. In turn, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, American Brass Quintet, cellist Parry Karp and pianist Christopher Karp, the International Contemporary Ensemble, the Neave Trio and finally, Hub New Music have as much fun playing this stuff as the composer obviously did writing it.

It’s a series of tableaux and character studies which range from the vividly cinematic to occasionally cartoonish. Sirens are a recurrent trope, as are pregnant pauses and trick endings. Some of the more otherworldly harmonies look back to Messiaen; the more circular passages echo Philip Glass. The series of miniatures at the end are more acerbic and somewhat less comedic – other than the obvious but irresistibly mangled Beethoven quotes.

The opening number, Eisenbahnscheinbewegung (Railway-Illusion-Motion) makes colorful use of dopplers and train-whistle sonics. Herbstlaubtrittvergnügen (Autumn-Foliage-Strike-Fun) has jaunty trombone flourishes echoed by violins. There’s balletesque bustle and a surprise ending in Fingerspitzentanz (Fingertips-Dance) and mini-fanfares grounded by diesel-engine low brass in Missing Words – what’s missing is the operative question.

Nathan spaciously and rather cautiously approaches the strangely intimate acrylic smell of a new car interior, i.e. Kraftfahrzeugsinnenausstattungsneugeruchsgenuss. Rollschleppe (Escalator-Schlep) is as persistently troubled as you would expect from a portrait of somebody who can’t take the stairs – and yet, the piece has a persistent determination. Life in the slow lane really is where all the action is!

Mundphantom (Mouth-Phantom) is a Scooby Doo conversation. Speaking of ghosts, the Straußmanöver (Ostrich-Maneuver) is performed by a seriously phantasmic bird. Schubladenbrief ((Desk-Drawer-Letter) seems to depict a letter stubbornly resisting an opener, but when the envelope finally get slit, its contents suggest its sender is recounting a wild ride.

Dreiecksumgleichung (Triangle-Reorganization) is built around a flashy violin solo and concludes with a lively flute-driven jig. By contrast, the wry, bracing dawn interlude Tageslichtspielschock (Daylight-Show-Shock) will resonate with any musician dreading a gig at an early hour.

Arguably the funniest piece here, Ludwigssyndrom (Ludwig’s-Syndrome) is a tongue-in-cheek, brief piano concerto with rapidfire, ostentatious cascades and a ridiculously good riff joke that’s too good to give away. The steady upward stride of the piano in Watzmannwahn (Watzmann-Delusion) is also pretty priceless.

The only one of the ensembles on the record who have a New York concert coming up are the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, who are Stern Auditorium at Carnegie Hall on April 15 at 8 PM, playing works by Andrew Norman, Lei Lang and Lisa Bielawa, the latter with the composer on vocals. The venue says you can get in for $21.

Ageless Jazz Vocal Icon Sheila Jordan Makes an Auspicious, Intimate Brooklyn Appearance

That singer Sheila Jordan is still active, and undiminished at 93 years old, is impressive enough. That she has the guts to release a live album is even more so. And she doesn’t restrict herself to Manhattan gigs. She’s playing the album release show for her new one Live at Mezzrow – streaming at Bandcamp – at Bar Bayeux in Crown Heights on April 12, with sets at 8 and 9:30 PM. Not only is she fronting a first- class, similarly lyrical band – Jacob Sacks on piano, David Ambrosio on bass and Vinnie Sperrazza on drums – but this is also a chance for you to see a legend for the price of, say, ten bucks in the tip bucket. Get there early if you’re going.

Jordan’s supporting cast on the live album is also simpatico: Alan Broadbent, with his signature low-key High Romantic style, proves to be an ideal choice of pianist, while her longtime collaborator, bassist Harvie S takes charge of the swing. And Jordan’s banter with the crowd and her bandmates is priceless. They open with a wintry take of Bird Alone: Jordan’s interpretation of the line about “flying over troubled ground” has depth beyond words. Just listen for enlightenment.

She has expert fun with her steady horn voicings as she scats her way through a couple of verses of The Touch of Your Lips Broadbent goes walking through the stygian lows to hold down the fort during a mutedly dancing bass solo.

The two instrumentalists scamper through a precise take of What Is This Thing Called Love until the bass takes the song unexpectedly into the shadows. Jordan then returns to stage for The Bird and Confirmation. The bass-and-vocal duet midway through the Charlie Parker tune, and the way the bandleader holds fast, just a hair behind the beat, gives new meaning to the world “timeless.”

She slows down with Look For the Silver Lining, working a vibrato wide enough to drive a truck through – and those overtones when she goes up the scale will give you chills. There’s another bass-and-vocal duet to open Falling in Love With Love, along with some classic Jordan messing with the beat and a spiraling, lyrical Broadbent solo.

The trio give Baltimore Oriole a shadowy Brecht/Weill swing, then hit a slinky bossa groove for I Concentrate on You: Jordan can still stretch out those melismas like few others. Then the band take Blue and Green by themselves, from a languid, summery atmosphere to an unexpectedly Twin Peaks crescendo to set up Autumn in New York. Which is the high point of the show, Jordan’s shivery, bittersweet delivery and Broadbent’s occasional noir bolero accent giving way to a genuine hope-against-hope and an ending that’s the most unexpected moment of many.

They close the show with an understatedly triumphant take of Lucky to Be Me – the moment where Jordan calls out the guy who’s on his phone is worth the price of the whole record. And if you want to watch the show, there’s a video of the whole thing up at youtube.

Another Clever, Psychedelic, Ridiculously Amusing New Album From the Versatile Curtis Hasselbring

For all his noir overtones, trombonist Curtis Hasselbring is a funny guy. He’s played spy jazz and seriously straight-up jazz, but he’s also a distinctive guitarist and multi-instrumentalist with purist taste in early 80s new wave and no wave rock. In keeping with his cinematic style, he’s most recently been working his Curha project, which these days has become a one-man band outlet for his most satirical, cartoonishly psychedelic side. He’s bringing those songs to the small room at the Rockwood on April 12 at 8 PM.

Just the titles of the tunes on his latest Curha 3 album – streaming at Bandcamp – are a dead giveaway. The opening track is Seeing-Eye God, a carnival-of-souls organ theme built around a prowling boogie-woogie piano loop. On one hand, it’s unusually dark, compared to the stuff on the other two Curha records. On the other, it may be have real-world relevance, considering how the surveillance-industrial complex went warp speed in the months after March, 2020.

Hasselbring keeps the organ, adds an enigmatic guitar lead and what sounds like pizzicato violin over the vaudevillian drum machine loops in the second track, The Gravity Games, a wryly anthemic new wave chorus popping in and out unexpectedly.

Bee Alley is a Residents-style exercise in variations on a goofy bass-synth loop with an unexpectd, um, Americana-ish detour that’s too good to give away (hint: lusitanos). Boulevard of the Avatars is even funnier, a crazed but very carefully orchestrated mashup of blippy motorik sounds, an adventure theme and trippy Tom Tom Club minimalism with just a hint of genuine menace. Hasselbring also distinguishes himself here on baritone sax!

The funeral parlor Casio makes a brief return in Badly Supervised Seance. Rode on an Airplane Last Night – now THAT’S a even scarier, huh? – has Hassselbring doing a brassy big-band intro and outro around a goofy, dubby, strutting theme, a rare moment where his trombone takes centerstage.

He assembles a surreallistically textured trip-hop layer cake with A People Mover, then builds a marionettish promenade out of tinkly music-box timbres in Library of Infinite Calamity.

Then he breaks out his guitar again for Three Weird Sunsets, the missing link between George Clinton and 80s oddballs Renaldo and the Loaf. He closes the record with Everyone You Know, which could be the theme to a Martian sitcom about Jamaican Rastas in the 70s. Dare you to make it all the way through this album without smiling.