Surreal, Occasionally Assaultive Epics and a Bushwick Brewery Gig from Bassist James Ilgenfritz
You’re going to want to turn down the volume on your device for the first track on bassist James Ilgenfritz‘s wildly uncategorizable new album You Scream a Rapid Language – streaming at Bandcamp – especially if you’re wearing earbuds. Some of this is assaultive, abrasive music, but it can be a treat for people who gravitate toward those kinds of sounds. The bassist’s next gig is a two-night stand with multimedia artist and playwright Sarah Krasnow at Honey’s, a mead brewery at 93 Scott Ave. in Bushwick on Jan 4 and 5 at 8 PM. Cover is $10; since this is happening over another L-pocalypse weekend, if you’re not in the neighborhood, it’s going to be a bitch to get to. The closest train that’s running is the M to Myrtle Ave; you could take your chances with the bus after.
Muted, pummeling beats anchor violinist Pauline Kim Harris’ sharp, shrieking, slashing upper-register riffage in the album’s first track, Terminal Affirmative. As usual, Ilgenfritz writes for every fraction of the available sonics, from nails-down-the-blackboard upper-register harmonics, to cello-like low-midrange washes, to pings and thuds from Alex Cohen’s double bass drum. .And just when you think this might be all shards and fragments, it turns into a witchy tarantella.
The second number, Apophenia III: The Index is a twistedly disjointed electroacoustic epic with lots of sardonic wah-wah, a talkbox, creepy, minimalist piano from Kathleen Supove, sepulchral wisps from James Moore’s guitar and Jennifer Choi’s violin, and a bit of a strolling stalker theme. How to Talk to Your Children About Not Looking at the Eclipse, a chattering solo tableau for Margaret Lancaster’s solo flute, is as ridiculously picturesque as the title suggests.
Freaky faux-operatic spoken word, fragmentary Joseph Kubera piano, flickering bass and lingering vibes from William Winant blend uneasily, sometimes edging toward horror, in Apophenia IV: A Bell in Every Finger. It could be a performance art parody, or maybe everybody just got really stoned before improvising it. Either way, it runs out of gas short of the twelve-minute mark. The album winds up with the five-part suite Fanfares For Modest Accomplishments, played by violin duo String Noise and spanning from chirpy, minimalistic acerbity, to wry conversationality, playfully adrenalizing rollercoaster interludes and a coy false ending.
Escaping the Nazis with a Quartet for the End of Time
Olivier Messiaen premiered his Quartet for the End of Time in a Nazi prison camp. There’s no way of knowing exactly what he was thinking at the time, but it’s probably safe to say that he considered that maybe this could have been his last concert, and the last piece of music he’d ever write. And while much of it is macabre, there’s a transgresssive subtext: we’re going to make a break for it and get the hell out of here, Messiaen seems to be saying. And he got away with it, right under the Nazis’ noses!
As it turned out, Messiaen didn’t have to go through with an escape plan, and there were no reprisals. Either the Nazis didn’t get it, or they didn’t take him seriously. He would eventually be liberated in 1941 and go on to write lots of other somewhat less creepy music. The new recording of the Quartet for the End of Time by clarinetist Raphael Severe with the Trio Messiaen – streaming at Spotify – is worth owning just for the liner notes. Long story short: new scholarship reveals that the composer didn’t write all of it in the Nazi camp. Like so many other European artists, he’d volunteered to fight the Nazis, but this harrowing suite underscores how much he hated wartime conditions.
There are parts of the new album that sound fast, and others that sound slow, although that perception uptimately proves false. It’s probably due to how intensely Severe and the group – pianist Théo Fouchenneret, cellist Volodia van Keulen and violinist David Petrlik– tackle the piece. The many passages that evoke the songs of the birds that Messiaen loved so much are muted and distant, a taunt to a prisoner who can only hear them. The aching, acidically immersive, apocalyptic rapture of the final movement drags on and on – exactly as the composer persuaded his bandmates to play it the first time around. But the frantic, stormy moments before then are just short of grand guignol. Messiaen, a devout Catholic, left no doubt how sincere his liturgical themes of struggle and salvation were, but here the real-life horror narrative is inescapably, barely concealed amidst the shrieks, sprints and sudden swells.
There aren’t many other pieces of music for such a strange lineup as piano, violin, clarinet and cello, but the group found one: Thomas Ades‘ Studies from his opera The Tempest. These short character sketches – Messiaen-inspired instrumental arrangements of operatic themes – run the gamut from calm pensiveness to brooding melancholy.
It’s Been a Typically Eclectic Year at Upper Manhattan’s Home for Adventurous New Classical Sounds
If new classical music is your thing, don’t let any possible twee, gentrifier associations scare you away from the Miller Theatre‘s series of so-called “pop-up” concerts. For almost a decade now, Columbia’s comfortable auditorium at the top of the stairs at the 116th St. stop on the 1 train has been home to an often spectacularly good series of free, early evening performances of 21st century works along with the occasional blast from the past. The name actually reflects how impromptu these shows were during the series’ first year, and while the schedule now extends several months ahead, new events still do pop up unexpectedly. Sometimes there’s free beer and wine, sometimes not, but that’s not the main attraction, testament to how consistently solid the programming here has become.
This past fall’s first concert was a revelatory world premiere of John Zorn’s new JMW Turner-inspired suite for solo piano, played with virtuosic verve by Steven Gosling; that one got a rave review here. The October episode, with indie classical chamber ensemble Counterinduction playing an acerbic, kinetic series of works by their charismatic violist Jessica Meyer, was also fantastic. Various permutations of the quintet, Meyer joined by violinist Miranda Cuckson, cellist Caleb van der Swaagh, clarinetist and bass clarinetist Benjamin Fingland and pianist Ning Yu began with the dappled shades of I Only Speak of the Sun, then brought to life the composer’s many colorful perspectives on Guadi’s Sagrada Familia cathedral in a dynamic, high-voltage partita. The most bracing number of the evening, Meyer explained, drew on a David Foster Wallace quote regarding how “ the truth will set you free, but not until it lets you go,”
There were many other memorable moments here throughout the past year. In February, Third Sound played an assured but deliciously restless take of Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No. 1 along with a mixed bag of material from south of the border. A month later, pianist Marilyn Nonken parsed uneasily lingering works by Messiaen and Tristan Murail.
Then in April, Rebecca Fischer delivered a fascinating program of solo violin pieces along with some new solo arrangements. The highlight was a solo reinvention of Missy Mazzoli‘s incisively circling Death Valley Junction. Fischer also ran through an increasingly thorny, captivating Paola Prestini piece, along with brief, often striking works by Lisa Bielawa, Gabriela Lena Frank and Suzanne Farrin.
Last month, Tak Ensemble tackled elegantly minimalist chamber material by Tyshawn Sorey and Taylor Brook. And December’s concert featured firebrand harpist Bridget Kibbey, who played the Bach Toccata in D faster than any organist possibly could, then slowed down for simmering, relatively short pieces by Albeniz and Dvorak among others.
The next Miller Theatre “pop-up” concert on the calendar is next January 21 at 6 PM with violinist Lauren Cauley.
A Fearlessly Funny, Politically-Inspired Trip From Trumpeter Jaimie Branch
Trumpeter Jaimie Branch‘s latest album Fly or Die II: Bird Dogs of Paradise – streaming at Bandcamp – is her most surreal, amusing yet also ferociously relevant album yet. The centerpiece is the fiery diptych Prayer for Amerikkka, opening with Lester St. Louis’ gingerly incisive cello riffs. Branch’s trumpet defiantly shouts above a gloomy, swaying, starkly gospel-tinged sway from bassist Jason Ajemian and drummer Chad Taylor. “We got a bunch of wide-eyed racists, coming for you as they dig in your paychecks – they think they run this shit,” Branch snarls as the guys in the band do a surreal call-and-response behind her. The strings flutter ominously, then shift to a brisk, increasingly lush pulse. “What is love when it’s all just memory, in solitude – this is a warning, honey, they’re coming for you!” Branch follows with a scream, then twelve-string guitarist Matt Schneider fuels a flamenco-tinged stampede out.
Branch opens the album with Birds of Paradise, a hypnotic, balafon-like loop and seagull-scape. After her mighty two-part broadside, an increasingly agitated string interlude leads into Twenty Three n Me: Jupiter Redux, its catchy, brightly loopy theme sailing over a steady clave and background squall, peaking with an explosively echoey vortex.
Jungly samples and a spare, echoing bass/cello duet introduce Simple Silver Surfer, a ridiculously surreal, spikily vamping faux-surf tune that Branch finally pushes toward New Orleans. Slow tectonic shifts permeate the album’s title track, then Taylor’s playfully tumbling drums take over and segue into the jubilant Nuevo Roquero Estereo, reprising the album’s loopy opening theme with spare, terse trumpet riffage and dubwise electronics.
Branch winds up the record with an irresistibly hilarious, catchy oldschool soul groove titled Love Song, dedicated to “all those assholes and all those clowns out there, you know who you are.” Her talking trumpet will have you rolling on the floor: it’s the best straight-up dis recorded this year. What an unselfconsciously, ridiculously fun album.
An Epic Collection of Shattering, Haunting Tracks by Noir Icons Ran Blake and Jeanne Lee Rescued from Obscurity
Ran Blake and Jeanne Lee’s 1961 debut The Newest Sound Around is arguably one of the ten best albums ever made. Looking back, it’s astonishing to see that straight out of college, both artists had already largely concretized their individual sounds: Lee, with her airy yet shatteringly direct, intimate vocals, Blake the piano polymath who could be icier than Messiaen, more macabre than Bernard Herrmann, as folksy yet sophisticated as Charles Ives or, for that matter, John Fahey. There’s telepathy in the duo’s performances, all the more unlikely considering how frequently each could leave the page, disrupt the rhythm or shift the mood. It’s rare that two artists this fearlessly adventurous would find each other and work together so effortlessly. Lee sadly left us back in 2000, but Blake, now past eighty, remains as vital or even more so as an icon of all things noir.
And they have a new album out: The Newest Sound You Never Heard, a lavish double-disc compilation of live and studio recordings from Belgian radio from 1966 and 1967. It’s profoundly dark, deep stuff, a gold mine of wicked reinventions of jazz standards, a handful of originals and even a couple of rock tunes. The 1966 session opens with a devilishly determined, icy-hot contrapuntal reimaging of Thelonious Monk’s Misterioso, Lee enigmatically intoning a Gertrude Stein poem: sometimes a rose is a lot more than a rose!
Blake teases the listener as he eases into Honeysuckle Rose with a down-home warmth, then turns into the shadow stepson of Eubie Blake with his offhandedly menacing stride work: no one alive uses passing tones to create disquiet more memorably than Blake does. Lee returns, with generous reverb on her wondrous, resonant vocals, as Blake shifts from boogie to brooding belltones in their take of Green Dolphin Street
Lee’s sultry alto against Blake’s stygian rumble and icepick incisions turn A Hard Day’s Night into a blue-neon southern noir ballad. The two dance their way uneasily through a brief version of I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, then romp darkly through Hallelujah, I Love Him So: it brings to mind Rachelle Garniez at her most enigmatic.
Who knew how vast the desolation, yet also the hope, could be in Night and Day? Lee’s coyly misterioso interpretation of Something’s Coming gets a spare, grimly determined response from Blake. “Please don’t tease me,” Lee sings, cool and collected – and of course, Blake does exactly that, in a marionetttish Just Squeeze Me.
Blake’s solo take on God’s Image is as fearsome as anything Messiaen ever tried to evoke…yet also infinitely playful. Lee’s tough sophisticate takes centerstage over Blake’s mutedly fanged lefthand in Retribution. The first of his originals, Smoke After Smoke is one of his mini-movies: a saloon, a peek around the corner, then the scheme unfolds in a split second.
The two build wee-hours Manhattan streetcorner ambience, then shift to Montmartre after dark in Parker’s Mood. Likewise, Blake deftly shifts the beat to turn Caravan from a Middle Eastern anthem to starry Mitteleuropean restlessness (a second take from a year later is brisk, intense and 180 degrees from that). Conversely, the two’s distant rapture brings out new reverence in the spiritual Beautiful City,
Blake’s alternately frantic and stunned horror make the brief Birmingham USA one of the album’s most hauntingly evocative numbers. By contrast, the pair have ridiculous fun holding the doors until Ellington’s A train conductor is ready to scream for them to get onboard. There are also a couple of takes of Ja-Da here, the first lively and full of unexpected syncopation, the second, more spaciously dadaesque – it’s funny how much Lee prefigures future Jamaican dancehall toaster Yellowman here!
The 1967 disc begins with Out of This World, Lee conjuring a protagonist who really sounds like she was high while reading a fairy tale, Blake anchoring it with a grim boogie. They raise the surrealism of Mr. Tambourine Man to new levels, Blake moving from deep-space drift to terse blues. Blake’s phantasmagoria in Round About is unsurpassed on this album; then Lee shifts abruptly to a soberly hushed a-cappella performance of He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.
Moonlight in Vermont, in this duo’s hands, is definitely a winter song. The second Blake original, The Frog, the Fountain and Aunt Jane is a wryly evocative solo piano miniature. Lee follows it, solo, with a meticulous, line-by-by line, cinematic interpretation of Billie’s Blues. Reconvening for A Night in Tunisia, they switch out the North African milieu for a Broadway funhouse mirror.
Blake can’t resist going for full-on chromatic stalker menace in My Favorite Things, Lee coyly updating the lyric for jazz relevance. Her resolute blues pairs off against Blake’s deadpan humor in Blue Monk; then with characteristic counterintuitivity, their take of Ornette Coleman’s Lonely Woman is arguably the most monochromatic, steady number here.
The album closes with a trio of ballads. The longing in Lee’s voice in The Man I Love is visceral over Blake’s Mompou-esque belltones. They work that dynamic even more eerily with Something to Live For and close with an expansive Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most, Lee hovering just above Blake’s quiet devastation.
To compare albums recorded this year to this one isn’t really fair: there’ll never be another singer like Jeanne Lee. She’s the smartest girl in the class, singing to you alone, daring you to feel as alive and think as far ahead as she does. These days, the tireless Blake continues to make records and perform. The album hasn’t hit the usual online spots yet – peruse the song titles above for what little streaming music there is for this one at present.
Feral Tunefulness From Cellist Tomeka Reid and Her Quartet
The Tomeka Reid Quartet’s new album Old New – streaming at Cuneiform Records – is the rare jazz album you can play for people who hate jazz, and they’ll end up transfixed. It’s also the rare studio recording that burns, and seethes, and threatens to go off the rails just like a live show. It’s catchy, and ferocious, and bursting with tunes. What an amazing time it seems this band had making it.
In this era where jazz artists leap from one project to the next with barely enough time for it to coalesce, there’s a rare chemistry here, reflecting the group’s longtime associations. Drummer Tomas Fujiwara and guitarist Mary Halvorson play together in Halvorson’s Code Girl band,, while cellist Reid and bassist Jason Roebke share early roots in the Chicago scene.
The band scamper and swing hard over Roebke’s chugging bass on the increasingly jagged, noisy title track, Halvorson and Reid trading scrapes, wry trainwhistle lines, eerie jangle and stark, emphatic riffage. Reid says it’s a hymn at the core, but it also seems to draw on early 80s proto-hip-hop like Midnight Starr. Gotta love that Fujiwara rumble on the way out!
Wabash Blues is a Romany swing tune with Reid’s careening cello in the Stephane Grappelli role, at least until it switches to 12/8 time for a bracing, acidic verse, an allusively grim Halvorson pitch-pedal solo and some adenalizing tumbles from Fujiwara.
Niki’s Bop is a shuffling shout-out to Reid mentor Nicole Mitchell, with echoes of both New Orleans and Stevie Wonder, cello and guitar pogoing joyously in their respective channels until Halvorson goes off in a trail of whippit bubbles. Reid and Roebke bubble around a joyously circling Afrobeat riff as Aug 6 gets underway, Halvorson kicking sharp-fanged chords until the group take it out together as a catchy anthem.
The simply titled Ballad is the group’s White Rabbit, a relentlessly uneasy shuffle, Reid’s ominous low-register flutters and shards contrasting with Halvorson’s steady incisions over an increasingly agitated, murky groove. Sadie, a swing tune dedicated to Reid’s grandmother, is the most trad number here, Reid alternating between a second bassline and wryly muted horn voicings, with an unexpectedly hypnotic bounce out.
The album’s most epic and adrenalizing track is Edelin, opening as a misterioso tone poem with flickers and washes from the strings and suspenseful cymbals, eventually coming together as a twisted road theme to rival anything Big Lazy ever put out, all the strings taking turns fanning the flames as the pyre explodes into a conflagration. Peripatetic makes a good segue, a series of increasingly savage climbs that eventually go completely haywire: Halvorson brings in a little funk, but this beast can’t be controlled. The album winds up with RN, which is Reid’s Watching the Detectives, a steadily swaying, broodingly plucked modal theme and variations that unexectedly drift toward sunnier, more psychedelic terrain. It’s one of the best albums of the year in any style of music.
Fun fact: according to the record’s press release, Reid was voted “Violinist/Violist/Cellist of the Year for the second consecutive time by the Jazz Journalists Association.” Does this mean we can vote for JD Allen as trumpeter/clarinetist/saxophonist of the year? Maybe Brian Charette can be pianist/harpsichordist/organist of the year too! Googling for jazz harpsichordists doesn’t get you much, but Brian would no doubt be amped to contend for the award. Or maybe the JJA is just trying to save paper…or precious hard disc space on that old Commodore from the 80s.
Jason Yeager Reinvents Pan-American Classics as Protest Jazz on His Searingly Relevant New Album
Pianist Jason Yeager couldn’t have timed the release of his latest album New Songs of Resistance – streaming at Bandcamp – any better. With Bolivian President Evo Morales driven from office by a right-wing coup and Nicaragua’s Sandinistas under increasing fire from corporate-aligned fascists, Yeager’s mix of original protest jazz and classic nuevas canciones from 1970s Latin America are more relevant than ever. He’s playing the album release show on Dec 19 at 8:30 PM at the Cell Theatre; cover is $15.
The album’s most stunning track is Yeager’s grimly modal, savagely kinetic setting of Somos Cinco Mil, the final poem written by iconic songwriter Victor Jara in the Santiago stadium in the hours before he and thousands of other members of the Chilean intelligentsia were murdered by Augusto Pinochet’s death squad following the 1973 CIA-sponsored coup. Vocalist Erini sings this defiant but eerily prophetic anthem with a plaintive calm against cellist Naseem Alatrash’s slashing, Egyptian-tinged accents and the bandleader’s crushing chords.
The group open the album with an elegantly pulsing take of Violeta Parra’s Gracias a la Vida, Erini’s expressive delivery over Matthew Stubbs’ clarinet and bass clarinet, Cosimo Boni’s trumpet, Milena Casado’s flugelhorn, Yeager’s spare piano and the understated rhythm section of bassist Fernando Huergo and drummer Mark Walker.
Farayi Malek delivers Yeager’s cynical broadside The Facts over a sardonically ominous pseudo-march – a frequent and potently effective trope here – bringing to mind the fiery intensity of Todd Marcus‘ similarly political work, especially when the bass clarinet kicks in. Yeager introduces another Jara song, Aqui Me Quedo with a pensively unsettled solo intro, Erini’s vocals rising defiantly over sweeping orchestration.
Mother Earth, a Yeager original, has strong Monk echoes along with more suspiciously straightforward strutting and,a long, insistent trumpet crescendo. Singer Farayu Malek’s matter-of-fact recitation of Yeager’s scathing, spot-on lyrics to In Search of Truth addresses a host of problems – eco-apocalypse, the corporate-driven race toward slavery and dehumanization – over an increasingly agitated backdrop. Then Yeager opens Leon Geico’s Cinco Siglos Igual with a brooding, Rachmaninovian noir interlude, Erini’s expressive, ripely wounded vocals bringing to mind Camila Meza, Casado picking up the pace against the band’s lustre.
The rest of the record includes three originals and a Brazilian song. Protest, a menacing, stabbing little march, leads into the album’s creepiest, most carnivalesque number, Reckoning: with a tune and a Malek vocal this coldly dismissive, who says revenge songs need lyrics? Yeager’s final instrumental interlude follows, macabre and suspenseful. The album ends on an upbeat note with a loose-limbed take of Brazilian songwriter Chico Buarque’s Apesar de Voce, sung with dusky resolve by Mirella Costa. Yeager’s relentless, usually understated intensity, starkly evocative compositions and imaginative reworking of a smartly assembled mix of classic songs make this one of the best albums of 2019 in any style of music.
An Embarrassment of Riches from Kenny Barron on Record and at the Vanguard This Month
Tis the season when venues show their true colors – or try to, anyway. There’s the Lower East Side shed that’s fallen on hard times and has been booked by that odious corporate empire for the past year, trying to relive some former glories with an overpriced residency by a legendary, noisy 90s band. Then there’s that West Village flagship of a global chain of jazz joints, who’ve brought in the trumpeter king of elevator jazz. There are going to even more Jersey license plates than usual this month in the vicinity of West Third Street.
On a more optimistic note, the Village Vanguard has booked timelessly mighty piano sage Kenny Barron for a long stand beginning this Dec 17, where he’s playing at 8:30 and around 11 through the 22nd with a quintet featuring the perennially adrenalizing Johnathan Blake on drums. Then Barron’s going to strip it down to a trio with bassist Buster Wiliams and drummer Tain Watts for the rest of the dates, which run through the 29th.
Barron’s latest record is The Art of the Piano Duo (streaming at Spotify), a lavish archival triple live album recorded with the late, greatly missed Mulgrew Miller on three dates spread over about a ten-year span. This isn’t piano four hands: it’s two of the great purists of the past several decades, locked in on separate pianos that often sound like one. Trying to figure out who’s who can be next to impossible until you determine who’s in which channel (it differs from record to record). In deference to his fleet-fingered friend, Barron’s legendary lefthand usually seems a little lighter than usual. Eventually, Miller’s fondness for gospel reveals itself, along with Barron’s occasional detour toward tropical sounds: in general, he’s the more adventurous one here. The first album dates from 2005, in Marciac, France; the second and third are Swiss shows, from Zurich on May 12, 2001 and Geneva just over a decade later, respectively.
The material is pretty much all midtempo ballads, plus an unexpectedly careening Yardbird Suite and a triumphantly saloonish Blue Monk. The first side opens with Stars Fell on Alabama, where the two pianists’ phrasing is sometimes so swingingly synced that it’s surreal; other times, there’s a little shadowing going on, the echo creating a quasi Fender Rhodes effect. Throughout their collaboration, the two trade expansive solos, each comping chords and/or walking the bass for the other as the tradition calls for it. Nobody’s in a hurry: they can stick with a tune for fifteen minutes or more. This isn’t a record for people with short attention spans.
Each artist also contributes solo pieces. Miller’s take of I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good, from the Zurich date, turns out to be a stately ballad with a little playful leapfrogging. Barron’s solo version of Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most, from the Geneva set, contrasts saturnine, vampy lustre with jaunty ornamentation: it’s anything but sad. Likewise, his Song for Abdullah- a Abdullah Ibrahim shout-out – balances a precise, scampering approach with steady gravitas. The two close the final disc with a colorfully clustering version of Joy Spring, aptly capsulzing how everybody seemed to be feeling on that May night early in a decade that’s about to close. And none too soon: looks like we’ll have an impeachment to celebrate as the Twenties come roaring in.
Haunting Gravitas and Playful Beats with the Karuna Trio at Lincoln Center
This past evening at Lincoln Center, the Karuna Trio shifted between nocturnes and space jams. The nocturnes were intense and brooding, sometimes bordering on the macabre; the space jams ranged from starry effervescence to deep-nebula murk. Considering how many Euro-tourists pass through Jazz at Lincoln Center on any given night, free jazz like this would go over well at a space that so rarely programs it.
But it was great to see the trio of percussionist Adam Rudolph, drummer Hamid Drake and pianist Alexis Marcelo spinning all those sounds out of thin air, a couple of blocks to the north. Creative music tends to be all or nothing: when it’s good, there’s really nothing better. But free jazz also attracts some of the most annoyingly self-indulgent, pretentious players around. You know the type: they only play free jazz because if, perish the thought, they might actually have to say something meaningful, or acknowlege, let alone converse with their bandmates, that might limit their precious self-expression. So watching these three pros teaming up to build a majestic series of waves, and then ride them, was redemptive to say the least. Not to mention a lot of fun.
This was a leisurely, thoughtful performance, the three players leaving plenty of space for each other to think out where they’d go next, or respond to an idea that someone had thrown into the mix, and that empowered the audience just as much. Which made sense, considering Drake’s opening remarks that the spectators are just as integral to a concert as the musicians.
Marcelo played both the role of anchor and outlier. Opening with flickering, light-dappled phrases, then shifting to ominously resonant, vampy chromatic themes often enhanced by or echoing from a synthesizer perched above the keys, he was the dark knight of this soul. Other times, it was clear that the two drummer buds were going to lock in on a long series of subtly interwoven polyrhythms, with Marcelo adding color and texture, and after knocking at the door with one long hammering phrase, finally pulled the two percussionists back out of the sun and into the shadows.
There was also a playful, salsa-tinged interlude initiated by Marcelo; rippling echoes of Satie and the neoromantics; a pause for trinket noisemakers, an unselfconsciously funny one for singing bowls; hints of birdsong and deep-forest wildlife; and a final gnawa-influenced interlude with Rudolph on sintir and Drake on daf frame drum that was beside the point. Anyone in the house who was at this same space a couple of years ago to witness some of Morocco’s great maalems of gnawa music would have recognized that for the ersatz groove that it was. But the depth, and rapture, and generous interplay of the first four-fifths of the show lingered after the trio had left the stage.
Rudolph and his Go Organic Orchestra team up with the Brooklyn Raga Massive to create a monstrous, improvisational forty-person raga orchestra tomorrow night, Dec 13 at 7 PM at CUNY’s Elebash Hall at 365 5th Ave. just north of 34th St.; cover is $25. This year’s final free concert at Lincoln Center’s atrium space on Broadway just north of 62nd St. is on Dec 19 at 7:30 PM with Los Rumberos del Callejón bringing their oldschool salsa dura sound out of the alley. The salsa dance concerts here are insanely popular; showing up a half hour early wouldn’t be a bad idea
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