Lucid Culture

His best, angriest, most lyrically rich and stylistically diverse studio album in ages, in fact since Industry, his 1997 collaboration with bassist Danny Thompson. Some of you may wonder why we’re reviewing someone so well-known here, and there’s a reason: he’s actually not that well known. He hasn’t had a label deal in years. He does, however have a rabid cult following, some of who go on the road with him like the Grateful Dead. Those fans insist that Thompson is both the best rock guitarist AND the best rock songwriter ever. They might be right.

He was already a dazzling player at 19 when he joined legendary psychedelic/Britfolk rockers Fairport Convention in the late 60s. He left that band a few years later and then put out several critically acclaimed semi-acoustic albums with his wife Linda Thompson. That collaboration culminated with their legendary 1982 record Shoot Out the Lights, a brutal blow-by-blow chronicle of the dissolution of their marriage that ends with what would become his signature song, The Wall of Death. It’s safe to say that it’s one of the greatest albums ever made. Since then, he’s released innumerable solo albums, both live and studio recordings, and virtually all of them are terrific. This ranks with the best of them.

The album’s centerpiece is a towering, seven-minute epic about violence. Its setting is Ireland, but its cast of dubious characters and their inevitable charge towards tragedy could could just as easily be in Iraq. Toward the end, we get a typically febrile Stratocaster solo from Thompson. He generally plays with a round, open tone without any distortion or effects, similar to Robert Cray. Here, he fires away a fusillade and then the instruments fall away one by one, with an understated, somber grace that perfectly matches the lyrics. Thompson is a master of matching melody to words, and this is a prime example.

There’s also a fiery anti-Iraq war number called Dad’s Gonna Kill Me, told from the point of view of a British soldier with his patrol, “sitting targets in the Wild West Show.” Dad is someone in command: he’s never named. It’s a tense, terrified, loping minor-key number that builds to an eerie, pointillistic guitar solo.

A lot of this album is electrified English jigs and reels, spiced with ominous chromatics from Thompson: he loves those Middle Eastern tonalities. The sarcastic Mr. Stupid is directed at a greedy ex (ex-wife Linda, perhaps?) living off his royalties and tour earnings: “Clear the streets and book your seats, Mr. Stupid’s back in town.” She may despise him, but he’s quick to remind her that he’s still the one who writes the checks. The theme recurs in the album’s concluding number, Sunset Song, Thompson railing about being “up there on the cross where some say I belong.” He hasn’t been this angry at anyone – other than the Bush regime – in a long time.

 Otherwise, there’s the excellent, sarcastic, defiantly fast I’ll Never Give It Up; Bad Monkey, another broadside aimed at an ex; Francesca, a rueful minor-key lament set to a surprisingly effective reggae beat, and the scorching, anti-Tony Blair song Sneaky Boy. And six other good ones, beautifully arranged with antique instrumentation: strings, krummhorn, mandolin, even uillean pipes on the tail end of the aptly metaphorical Too Late to Come Fishing. If you’re in the Thompson cult, you undoubtedly have this by now along with everything else; if he’s new to you, this is a fine way to become acquainted with a criminally underrated, astonishingly powerful rocker.

The expat Australian keyboardist/singer’s imagination knows no bounds. Tonight she ran amok, trampling every convention, leaving no good idea unexplored. She’s a shapeshifter: the first album she recorded was orchestrated rock, the second a richly layered pop record, and her latest, Edible Restaurant blends art-rock and ragtime (see our reviews page). Tonight saw her doing completely rearranged versions of some of her pop gems, including Martin’s Big Night Out (“They danced to this in Australia,” she told the audience encouragingly, but the impressively good Monday night crowd was rapt and stayed put), and Everyone Wants to Adore You. Radiant in a shimmery blue dress, she mined the depths of her Nord Electro keyboard for some of her favorite, 70s-inflected settings: echoey Fender Rhodes, Arp synthesizer with a watery flange effect, and the classic, slightly trebly Yamaha electric piano tone that seemingly every band from Supertramp to the Boomtown Rats were using late in the decade. She’s a fine player, but what really comes across live is the strength of her writing and how counterintuitive it is: just when you think she’s going to settle into a standard verse/chorus/verse progression, she goes off on some wild tangent that sounds like something from early, Peter Gabriel-era Genesis, or Shostakovich, or some bizarre English dancehall song from the 1920s.

Her backing band, including Beaver Bausch on drums, Hazmat Modine guitar sharpshooter Michael Gomez and the reliably high-energy J. Walter Hawkes alternating between muted trombone and ukelele, stayed with her and held up their end. Gomez is a fiery, bluesy cat: after he took a particularly evil, tersely minor-key solo toward the end of Veselka, Gertler’s tribute to the East Village kasha-and-pierogies institution, she followed his lead, closing the song with an ostentatiously eerie, monster-movie run down the scale into a cold, echoey pool of noise. They also played a new one about the komodo dragon in a zoo who recently experienced spontaneous oogenesis (or immaculate conception, if you prefer), as well as a slightly abbreviated take of the new album’s bustling title track, and the strangely captivating If Bob Was God, which does double duty as Dylan tribute and sultry tale of longing and determination to bring it to a crescendo, if you follow my drift.  They closed with a deadpan, oompah version of the AC/DC karaoke standard It’s a Long Way to the Top If You Wanna Rock N Roll – deadpan until Hawkes took a long, completely silly, completely over the top heavy metal ukelele solo. By the time he finally got to the top of his tiny little fretboard, everybody in the house, the band included, couldn’t stop chuckling. All in all, this was pretty typical of what you can expect from a bandleader – and band - with a boundless sense of fun. What a great night!

This wasn’t technically a reunion of the original members of this obscure but brilliant late 80s/early 90s Los Angeles indie/new wave group: only frontman Dan Sallitt and lead guitarist Larry Jacobson were present. Yet the Zombies played Brooklyn recently, with just Colin Bluntstone and Rod Argent from the original lineup onstage. If that’s the standard, then this show ought to qualify.

Blow This Nightclub had the misfortune to come out right around the time the major labels stopped signing quality acts. Otherwise you would know them well. They aren’t quite as obscure as you might think. This show came together on the spur of the moment: since Jacobson was going to swing through town, Sallitt pulled together a pickup band consisting of the Sloe Guns’ Bill Gerstel on drums, Dann Baker (from Love Camp 7 and Erica Smith’s band) on bass and former Sinclair frontwoman Donna Upton on backing vocals. They played this show after just two rehearsals yet ended up sounding as good if not better than the original band. Sallitt’s soul-inflected tenor sounded particularly strong, ably abetted by Upton’s powerful pipes. Gerstel gave the songs some swing, and Baker proved he’s the best bass player in Erica Smith’s group. While Sallitt occasionally plays an acoustic show or two, Jacobson hadn’t played some of these songs in ten years, yet as he said after the show, they were still in his fingers. In almost exactly a half-hour’s time, the band ran through some of their best material and a surprise cover.

Fueled by Sallitt’s clever, cynical lyricism, Marriage for Beginners was one of the show’s high points, as was the gorgeously crescendoing When Amy Says, with Sallitt’s and Upton’s harmonies on the chorus. The best song of the night was the caustic, brutally dismissive Love Camp Summer, a withering portrait of a bunch of trust fund kids vacationing in Mexico: “You’re having too much fun/You’ll be happy when it’s done.” They closed the set with the bouncy, tongue-in-cheek Fran Goes to School, a Dann Baker song seemingly about a shut-in who finally manages to get out of the house. The small but riveted audience screamed for an encore, and the band finally obliged with a spirited, impressively tight version of Neil Young’s Ohio, a song that everyone in the band had undoubtedly played before, but had never thought of rehearsing as a unit.

Which goes to show what can happen when you take some of the best players in town and put them together on a stage. This one will sadly be demolished at some indeterminate date in the near future, when New Jersey developer Bruce “Ratso” Ratner finally gets the go-ahead to tear down the building. Since Freddy’s is in the “footprint” for the Atlantic Yards  luxury housing/basketball arena complex, its days are numbered. Tonight’s show, more than just a great moment in obscure rock history, is yet another reminder of what New York stands to lose from the explosion of luxury housing. For not only are all those cheaply prefabricated, plastic-and-sheetrock Legoland highrises displacing music venues, they’re displacing the people who play there. And raising rents to the point where musicians and other artists can’t afford to live here anymore. Cities have always served as a cauldron for great artistic alchemy, and we’re witnessing their extinction on a scale greater than any other time in history. If Ratner and his cronies get their way, what was once arguably this nation’s greatest musical metropolis will become a vapid highrise suburb devoid of anything edgier than American Idol. New York is already in the midst of an artistic brain drain, and it will only get worse. Ask yourself, when’s the last time you discovered a good New York band (or artist, or filmmaker, etc.) under thirty years old? This city was once a magnet for great talent, but now nobody can afford to come here. In the absence of some cataclysmic event (or voter initiative) that puts an end to the luxury housing boom, what’s left of a vast and fertile scene won’t last much longer. Get out to Freddy’s – or Lakeside or Magnetic Field or wherever else something good is still happening – while you can.

Relax. There aren’t going to be any dirty bombs going off. It’s all a conspiracy theory.

In order to build a bomb with sufficient nuclear material to do real harm, you need to get your hands on the stuff. Sure, there’s plenty of it around, particularly in the former Soviet Union. There’s just one complication: it’s radioactive. Nuclear waste any more potent than, say, what the dentist gets rid of from his or her x-ray machine, is so lethal that unprotected exposure will kill you in a matter of hours. So if you’re planning on becoming the nuclear Osama Bin Laden, you better come equipped, with garments and gear and a high-tech facility that will cost you millions if not billions. Where you’re going to get all that stuff without tipping off the authorities is a mystery you’ll have to solve first.

Or, let’s say you’re in a hurry to get your 72 virgins and you can’t wait for the protective gear to come through. In that case, you’re going to need a new fanatic for every four hours that the stuff is in your hands. And unless you’re getting your hands on a domestic supply – fat chance of that, unless you’re buying from the same people who brought us 9/11 – you’ll have to come up with a team of suicide drivers, suicide pilots, a fleet of trucks and at least a couple of planes to get you across whatever ocean is in your way since everybody on the first plane is going to be dead about, say, halfway across the Atlantic.

The likelihood of any organization, even the CIA or Halliburton being able to pull this off? Figure it out. To say that the odds are against it is the understatement of the year.

 And even if somebody decided to steal your neighborhood dentist’s x-ray waste box and blow it up somewhere, that stuff is so low-level that even if you were downwind of the bomb, you wouldn’t be in any more danger than you would be from drinking New Jersey water. The dirty bomb is a hoax, an urban myth, a conspiracy theory. It’s just another Bush regime fearmongering tactic designed to encourage you to give your Constitutional rights away in the name of security and bring us one step closer to a 1984-style police state. Don’t buy it.  

Tonight was full of surprises. The sky was a late-period Turner painting, wave after wave of thunderclouds galloping in from the ocean, rolling out toward central Brooklyn. Of course, we’d brought a picnic. The park was crawling with cops. Mathematically speaking, there had to be at least a small handful who hadn’t yet met their monthly quota of “quality of life” arrests, i.e. people pissing in the bushes, shagging in the grass or, perish the thought, drinking in public. These quotas officially don’t exist and are probably illegal, but as any New York cop will tell you, you’ll never get promoted unless you write the kind of tickets the top brass wants. Rudy Mussolini may be off running for President, but his stench remains. Yet nobody showed any interest in the suspicious little plastic cups into which we poured the beaujolais we’d brought in an equally suspicious clear plastic container. Maybe they weren’t paying any attention because they, too had come for the music. Maybe some of them actually were B-52’s fans. Not implausible.

Just like it would have been if this was 1979 and it was the band’s first tour, this was a gathering of the most unlikely people, like the off-duty firefighter in front of us hollering for the band to play Planet Claire. It definitely wasn’t the usual crowd that comes out to shows here: by the looks of it, the overwhelmingly white, local blue-collar contingent had been scared off by the impending monsoon. This time, the lawn was packed with kids who had come from all over New York to see “the world’s #1 party band.” It definitely wasn’t a nostalgia trip: they’d come expecting a good time, and maybe even because in a weird way, the B-52’s are actually kind of important. The band would probably laugh at that, but it’s true.

Considering that the nucleus of the group has basically been playing the same songs over and over and over again for practically thirty years, it’s hard to believe that they can inject any enthusiasm into their set. Yet somehow they do.  In the decades since their first album, Cindy Wilson, believe it or not, has become a hell of a singer. Kate Pierson has not. Fred Schneider is still a one-trick pony, and Keith Strickland has switched from drums to guitar. The other musicians are competent, if they don’t seem to be in on the joke that the original B-52’s still seem to find at least mildly entertaining after all these years. They ran through all the hits: Private Idaho, Strobe Light, Give Me Back My Man, Roam, and Love Shack (reinvented as funk, a genre this band should avoid at any cost). They also did three new numbers, a couple of garage songs and something of a midtempo ballad sung by Pierson. The new material is pretty generic: the silly spontaneity of their first couple of albums is completely absent. Played through concert-quality amps and bolstered by a bass player with studio chops, the old songs sound oddly focused but not rote: Schneider still barks and preens like in the old days, the womens’ vocals are still flat and ultimately, the music’s blatantly derivative but inimitably dadaesque sense of fun prevails. Say what you want about how original this band was (they weren’t), what good musicians they were (they weren’t) or what they had to say (not much), but they’re definitely in the Secret Rock N Roll Hall of Fame. A lot of the second-generation 60s garage-meets-new-wave songs they played tonight have become standards. Who ever would have thought in 1978 that almost thirty years later, Joe Strummer would be dead, but the B-52’s would still be together and playing stadiums.

On the minus side, the B-52’s brought camp to the masses. Not such a good thing, considering that the affectations of camp, along with the sarcasm that’s commonly mistaken for irony, have become the defining characteristics of the trendoid esthetic. But that crowd wasn’t here tonight, obviously: this band is all about fun, and they don’t have that in Williamsburg.

The firefighter in front of us roared and leaped with delight when they launched into the bassline from the Peter Gunn Theme, Pierson sang along with the synthesizer and Schneider began to intone, “She came from Planet Claire.” They saved Rock Lobster for last and did it note for note with the record. Nobody went “down, down, down” and did the crabwalk, but that was to be expected, as the first few raindrops were just starting to hit.

The show had started inexplicably early, causing a large portion of the crowd to show up halfway through the band’s set, or even later. Perhaps the promoters wanted them to get the show in before the rains came, figuring that nobody would bother to stick around for the other scheduled act, Patty Smyth and Scandal. If that was their hunch, they were right.

From there, we went to Banjo Jim’s, which has become an after-concert ritual lately. The former 9C is a nice, cozy place, a generally reliable reminder of what the East Village used to be. It wasn’t tonight. A balding, fortyish folksinger was playing loud acoustic guitar, badly, and going on and on about how we should just turn everything over to the Dalai Lama and everything will be ok. And what a sensitive guy he is and how he can’t wait to get back to California. I say, get this guy a ticket on the first plane out. I think his name was Ellie Elliott – can’t remember, considering how hard I was trying to tune him out. One of my accomplices spent most of her time outside the bar smoking, waiting for him to finish up and leave. And when she wasn’t outside, she was wishing she was. Banjo Jim’s, please do us all a favor and don’t bring this loser back, whatever his name was. 

“This is the power of reggae music,” announced lead singer Keith Porter. What he meant wasn’t clear. Maybe it was that the troupe of restless daycamp kids who had taken over the middle of the park were behaving themselves surprisingly well, or that the sprinkling of West Indian toddlers with their grandmothers remained practically silent for the duration of the concert. Maybe that was the power of reggae music. Or the power of residual THC in Jamaican breast milk. Ital is vital, yeah mon.

It’s easy to make jokes about reggae. Too easy, for that matter. Even if the Itals’ keyboardist was using a small handful of tinny settings straight from the synthesizer factory floor, circa 1983, or that whenever Porter addressed the audience, he couldn’t maintain a train of thought for more than about half a sentence, it was impossible not to sway and bounce to this band. Their day in the Jamaican sun came and went a long time ago – it was 1986, said Porter, that their hit Rasta Philosophy was nominated for a Grammy (it didn’t win). “Before there was BET, or MTV,” Porter emphasized, and he was right in a sense. The corporate entertainment-industrial complex hadn’t completely penetrated Jamaica at that point, just at the time the rapidfire deliveries of dancehall were pushing conscious roots reggae acts - the Itals among them - into the background. But they were enjoying considerably popularity on the college circuit here, one of the practically innumerable bunch of good Jamaican vocal trios with roots in the 60s, and lucky enough to find an audience among young people here when the youth of Jamaica were more interested in pursuing their own homegrown version of gangsta rap.

Typically an opening act for more famous reggae artists, with the demise or disappearance of most of their contemporaries the Itals seem to have finally hit center stage. They played as if they’d come to claim their territory, mixing major and minor keys effortlessly. The rhythm section was skintight throughout their long, practically two-hour set; their guitarist took only one solo, but it was a good one, flashing some flamenco chops as opposed to the metal that all too frequently rears its drooling head from time to time in what’s left of roots reggae. Porter’s cajoling tenor can be a dead ringer for legendary loverman Gregory Isaacs, and his two harmony singers (notably a young woman named Kayla) nailed everything, pitch-perfect, all the way through. This is hard music to sing: you can’t just hang out all verse long and then come in on the chorus.

They bookended a bunch of romantic songs – including a nice new one called Mind Over Matter - with more conscious material including Rastafari Chariot from their 1981 debut album Brutal Out Deh, widely considered to be their high point. Midway through the show, a middleaged man walked up to Porter and asked him sing his first hit, the 1967 Westmorelites tune Hitey Titey, and he obliged with a few bars while the drummer tried to play along. But it was clear the band didn’t know the song.  The afternoon’s silliest moment  (there are invariably plenty of these at a reggae show) saw the band seguing into a Tony Orlando and Dawn song from 1975 for a few bars. In front of the stage, a small, stout, elderly woman in a Bahamas t-shirt, swaying and waving a Jamaican flag kept giving the flag to Porter, who kept trading it off with her throughout the show. She was finally rewarded for her enthusiasm with a free cd. Beaming, she led another fan over to the roped-off area behind the stage, where they were sternly sent away by one of the roadies. The massive that turned out in full force for Burning Spear’s show here a few years ago was conspicuously absent, and the mostly West Indian, blue-collar Brooklyn Heights lunch-hour crowd seemed pretty sleepy. Which shouldn’t come as any surprise, considering the previous day’s subway flood and tornado hell. This was the last of the summer’s weekly Thursday noontime shows here that the Brooklyn Academy of Music puts together, a thoroughly irie way to play hooky from work and enjoy the unseasonably cool breezes beneath the trees. Jah give to I and I a respite!

As reported in today’s NY Times:

“According to the National Weather Service, a tornado touched down in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn just after 6:30 a.m. and traveled northeast, damaging homes and tearing the roof off a Nissan car dealership before dissipating.

The tornado forced the evacuation of 20 buildings, leaving 32 families without shelter, the city buildings department said. Another 50 buildings experienced some damage.

On 58th Street in Sunset Park, Lanie Mastellone watched her ceilings collapse one by one. ‘Then when I opened the door to get out of the actual apartment,’ she said, ‘that’s when I realized I had no roof.’

Jeffrey M. Warner, a meteorologist at University, said that the tornado was the first one to hit Brooklyn since at least 1950, when modern record-keeping began. It was the first tornado to hit New York City since 2003, when a weak tornado touched down in Staten Island, and only the sixth tornado recorded in the city since 1950, Mr. Warner said.”

 I missed the Shaolin tornado but ever since I saw that waterspout over the Hudson in 2002, I knew it only had to be a matter of time.

 Manhattan, next? Hollywood must be waiting with bated breath.

What’s the opposite of a towering inferno? A towering…waterspout?

 Maybe OJ can revisit his old role and finally get the exoneration, the “rehabilitation,” the requisite Oprah appearance and book deal with whoever’s taken over from Judith Regan…

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Early evening Thurs Aug 9 hip-hop throat singer Akim Funk Buddha plays Lincoln Ctr Plaza, outdoors, 6 PM  with other like minded people. He’s a trip: saw him play with Rachelle Garniez and her band once and he came close to stealing the show, not an easy thing to do.

Starting Thurs Aug 9, 8 PM the Metropolitan Playhouse presents Alphabet City IV, portraits of real-life Lower East Side old-school trailblazer types: three actors each do a 20-minute monologue based on these people’s actual lives. Not a tribute but more of an theatrical oral history project. Could be riveting, if done well: Evelyn Milan of the The Lower East Side Harm Reduction Center, Mary Lee Kortes, leader of Mary Lee’s Corvette and chinchilla raiser Blake all get their 20 minutes onstage. The stories from the LESHRC alone could be hilarious (or really sad); Kortes, one of the originators of East Village chic, reputedly has supplied her character’s wardrobe, and one can only wonder how the chinchilla guy manages to evade the cops.  Address: 220 East Fourth Street, box office 212 995 8410, call for info (their website doesn’t specify ticket prices). Other dates: Saturday, August 11 at 2, Wednesday, August 15 at 8, Saturday, August 17 also at 8.

Later Thurs Aug 9 , 9:15-ish the B-52’s play Asser Levy Park at Coney Island, F to W 8th is the closest stop or take any train to Stillwell and walk in the opposite direction of the baseball stadium. None of the original musicians are left, although Fred Schneider and the girls are apparently still with them. It’s still a party: who would have thought in 1979 that almost thirty years later, Joe Strummer would be dead and these guys would be playing stadiums? For 80s fetishists, Patty Smyth & Scandal, best known NOT for their ode to masturbation I Touch Myself (that was the Divinyls - thanks Paula!) but for their schlockfest hit The Warrior open the show around 8:30.

Fri Aug 10, noon, virtuoso blues guitarist Jeremiah Lockwood plays with a band of some sort in the park on Liberty between Church/Bwy, downtown, doing his oldtimey stuff: this sometime Steve Ulrich sparring partner is definitely worth checking out.

Later Fri Aug 10, Kartik Seshadri, acclaimed disciple of Ravi Shankar plays sitar with tabla player Abhijit Banerjeeat outdoors at Lincoln Ctr, South Plaza, 6 PM

Also Fri Aug 10 Carolyn AlRoy plays her birthday show upstairs at the Living Room, 9 PM. Early arrival suggested, the place will be packed: it’s a small room. Tersely literate songwriter, beautiful voice evocative of a young Marianne Faithfull, sometimes very funny: Amy Rigby fans should check her out. Matt Keating has been playing lead guitar for her lately which is an added treat.

Also Fri Aug 10 groove trio El Jezel play Fontana’s, 9 PM. Guy/girl vox, strange and eerie guitar/keys, slinky rhythm section, something of a Cure/Portishead vibe: gripping and good.

Sat Aug 11 starting at noon it’s the Shaolin Bluegrass festival, 441 Clark Ave., Richmond Town on the Island (Staten), free. Performances by: Dan Paisley and Southern Grass, Jesse McReynolds and the Virginia Boys, Ronnie Reno & the Reno Tradition, Straight Drive. The best of the bunch is Straight Drive, the opener, fronted by the amazing Jen Larson. Who would have thought that an architecture historian from Boxford, Massachusetts would have the most scary-beautiful, high lonesome Applachian voice on the planet. She’s a force of nature. Directions from the Staten Island ferry: take the S74 bus from the terminal to Richmond Road and St. Patrick’s Place, allow yourself plenty of travel time since it’s the weekend.

Also Sat Aug 11 keyboard/vocoder groovemeisters play Chin Chin play Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, free, time TBA at the intersection of Broadway and Vernon Boulevard, N train to Broadway. The drummer also plays for Rev. Vince Anderson, which is quite an endorsement; they also liberally borrow horn players from Antibalas, another endorsement.

Also Sat Aug 11 buzzsaw power pop trio True Love with special guest Tammy Faye Starlite on lead vocals play Who’s Next at Joe’s Pub, 9:30 PM. This sedate venue and its patrons won’t know what hit ‘em: the frontwoman is something beyond hilarious, and the band is up to the task. This will be a lot of fun if you can afford it.

Sun Aug 12 Ted Leo Pharmacists play McCarren Pool in Williamsburg, I’m guessing 6:30ish. He does the early Joe Jackson thing, all trebly, distorted guitar and fast tempos, writes good political lyrics and unfortunately completely loses sight of melody for what seems hours on end. But it’s free and it’s completely pre-9/11 mellow, you just walk right in and nobody bothers you.

Also Sun Aug 12 the Red Hook Ramblers with Hazmat Modine guitar weapon Michael Gomez play Banjo Jim’s, two sets, 9 til late raising an old-timey ruckus.

Also Sun Aug 12 there’s a quasi Blow This Nightclub reunion at Freddy’s in Brooklyn, 9 PM It’s guitarists Larry Jacobson and Dan Sallitt along with sub bassist Dann Baker from Erica Smith’s band. BTN was a great, wickedly lyrical late 80s/early 90s LA new wave band, don’t miss this if you’re into brilliant obscurities.

Mon Aug 13 Greta Gertler & the Extroverts with the spectacular J Walter Hawkes on trombone play the Mercury, 8 PM. This brilliant, witty, Australian expat art-rock keyboardist has gone in a more oldtimey direction later, with richly rewarding results: check our reviews page (click to your right, then go back a few pages) for a look at her brilliant new one Edible Restaurant.

Later Sat Aug 13 Rev. Vince Anderson and his band the Love Choir play Black Betty as they do every Monday, two sets starting at 10:30 PM. Last week’s show was as fun and musically spectacular as always: George Rush is back on bass and reliable as ever, the Rev. gets thinner and thinner (ladies, he’s single) and faster and faster on the 88s.

Tues Aug 14, MC Shan plays Queensbridge Park, 7 PM, 21st St. and the East River in Queens. He earned a place in the hip-hop history books by writing The Bridge Is Over, battling with KRS-One. Watch your back if you choose to go – undercover agents provocateurs will no doubt be trying to stir up trouble with the local kids from the projects.

Fri Aug 17 art-rock cellist/multi-instrumentalist Serena Jost plays a full band show at Barbes, 8 PM. Sort of the female Jeff Lynne, updated for the zeros: classical chops, gorgeously catchy melodies and a good sense of humor.

Later Fri Aug 17 Ninth House frontman Mark Sinnis plays Banjo Jim’s, midnight. Recent shows have seen this Nashville gothic guy playing with excellent guitarist the Anti-Dave from Vulgaras and the brilliant, eerie Suzanne Mitchell on violin.

Sat Aug 18 at Damrosch Park out behind Lincoln Center starting at 7, it’s rockabilly night, an unusually mixed bill, a lot of people playing with each other tonight:

Rev. Gary Davis disciple Larry Johnson; awful 60s survivor Roy Head; “Rock and Roll Tornado” and rockabilly legend Dale Hawkins; rockabilly semi-legend Charlie Gracie, baritone 50s rockabilly crooner Sleepy LaBeef and the Dixie Hummingbirds.

Later Sat Aug 18 Electric Engine – indie rock masters of the crescendoing chorus – open for the attractively thoughtful Hula at Luna, 10 PM.

Mon Aug 20 what’s left of 70s soul/funk legends the Spinners (the frontguy died back in the 80s) open for Philly soul brothers the O’Jays at Wingate Field, 7:30 PM

Winthrop Street and Kingston Avenue in Bed-Stuy, free. The headliners are supposedly pretty much the same as they were in the 70s. C’mon, tell me you don’t want to jump on the Love Train. Directions: 2  train to Winthrop Street, walk 2 blocks east or by bus: B12 on Clarkson Avenue to New York Avenue, walk north; B44 on Nostrand Avenue and New York Avenues to Winthrop Street, walk east.

A triumph of persistence and spirit. At 87, the legendary jazz pianist is still vital, still evolving. Maybe he’s been pushing the envelope for so long that now it’s pulling him. If Telarc had decided to record this evening’s show, they could have called it Brubeck Plays Blues and Ballads. That this band could turn a pretty standard night of blues and ballads into something as special as they made it says something about the quality of musicians onstage. Brubeck didn’t try any fast righthand runs, not that the device was ever his thing. His approach has always been chordal, his innovations rhythmic, and tonight both were front and center and brilliant. One of Brubeck’s great achievements has been to bring classical and modern classical melodies into jazz, and it was evident that this is still one of his fascinations.  

They opened a little shaky with one of the tracks from his forthcoming album Indian Summer, Brubeck joking with the audience about how they were going to be playing it at Newport next week and had to get to know it. But the show came together quickly after that. The best song of the night (Brubeck is a songwriter in the best sense of the word) was a surprisingly saturnine, austere autumn reflection that began with two insistent, pianissimo chords, while the audience was still applauding the previous number. They built quietly and deliberately to the point where bassist Michael Moore took an appropriately haunting, cello-like bowed solo.

The rest of the evening saw sax player Bobby Militello playing leads over Brubeck’s wittily magisterial, minutely intricate chord work, cleverly embellished by drummer Randy Jones’ tasteful cymbal splashes and rimshots. Moore showed a fondness for sliding up to notes for an effect like a trumpet player playing with a mute, or a guitar played through a wah pedal, even while running quickly up the scale, and this was quite gripping. They recast When the Saints Go Marching In in a minor key; the blues numbers had swing and bounce, both Brubeck and Militello taking a few playful bars against the beat when the mood struck them.

The night’s only Kenny G moment came when they tried to make something of Somewhere Over the Rainbow and as much as Brubeck tried to work his way around the melody, the rest of the band following suit, they still ended up somewhere under it. Jazzing up Broadway tunes has long been a way of life for a lot of players, but - Coltrane’s version of My Favorite Things aside – it’s an easy way to end up in quicksand.

At the end of the show, Brubeck admitted almost sheepishly that they hadn’t done much in the way of the odd time signatures that have been his stock in trade for sixty-odd years, so they did one in ten that segued into Take Five, which quickly turned into a very long drum solo. It took a long time to get going, but Jones eventually built it to a hypnotic, tribal war dance, then walked away from it, then came back and finally took it to the head, if only for a few seconds. Brubeck joined the crowd in appreciative, awestruck bliss. He’s a vastly underrated figure, a force of nature, and what a pleasant surprise to be able to see him at a universally affordable price on a shockingly gorgeous night in midtown Manhattan.

 And what a pleasant surprise to see how the annual August Lincoln Center Out of Doors series (of which this concert was a part) has picked up the slack where the Central Park Summerstage series fell off the radar. It looks as if some old hippies have taken over the booking here, and are doing a tremendous job: the emphasis is still on world music and Americana, they still have their annual rockabilly and gospel nights, but the quality of performers this year is exceptional. Watch our weekly NYC music calendar for this month’s many highlights.

I should have had that 40-ounce. But no, I was trying to be good, not spend half the evening pregaming and I paid for it. I even got kicked out of the park where I’d been hanging out, by a sleepy-looking West Indian security guard who looked irked that he’d been roused from his nap to chase me away (which probably explains why he was locking the gates five hours after what he said was closing time). If I’d had that 40, it would have been my good-luck charm and the guy would stayed sound asleep. And I would have had more fun at the show.

Thee Minks are the kind of band that you see and you say, mmm-hmmm, good. If you’ve had a few drinks, YOU FUCKING LOVE THEM. Hope Diamond, their guitarist, turns her amp up so loud she doesn’t even use a pick. All she has to do is brush the strings of her Gibson SG to get the most evil, distorted, overtone-laden tone I’ve heard this year. Liz Lixx, the bass player, is still pretty primitive, but she has good ideas and you know that if she sticks with it she’ll be fine. And she has a cool bass, a beautiful black-and-white Gretsch Les Paul copy. The drummer, who goes by the name of the Playthang, is excellent, and the band rewarded him by giving him an amusing vocal cameo toward the end of the show.

The Philadelphia band’s best songs came toward the end of the set. They’d started out pretty much by-the-book garage/punk, nothing you haven’t heard before if that’s your music, if the 13th Floor Elevators, MC5, Kinks, Lyres or Mooney Suzuki are your thing. Their website says they bear some resemblance to Radio Birdman, but I didn’t hear that at all. About halfway through the set things suddenly got a lot more interesting: more melodies, unexpected chord changes and a lot more imaginative stuff coming out of the bass. The songs’ subject matter seems to be limited to drinking and sex – or both – but at least they’re about something, which is more than you can say about 99.999% of the Sonic Youth ripoffs out there. And there’s absolutely nothing trendy, pretentious or affected about this band. They just want to kick. Your. Ass. And then they do it. This was a good party. Damn, should have had that 40.

Their last numbers included a punked-out cover of Loaded by Judas Priest (it seems that they actually like the song, instead of making fun of it: whatever the case, their version kicks the shit out of the original). And they did a song about their drummer where he got to sing about what kind of crazy animal he is. “I’ll eat your fucking children,” he hollered, before a series of false endings that wound up with him flailing around Spinal Tap style. The crowd loved it. Not that there was much of a crowd: they were an out-of-town band, after all, and since the audience that actually comes out for real rock music in New York continues to be priced out of town, that wasn’t unexpected.

For anybody who misses the Continental, this place is LOUD: I’m usually one of those front-row people but I ended up back by the door where the volume was still earsplitting. But the mix was excellent: no surprise, since Zach from Ninth House was doing sound.