Concert Review: Paul Wallfisch, Julia Kent and Carol Lipnik at the Delancey, NYC 10/12/09

Monday night was typical Small Beast – gauche as it may seem to review the same event week after week, the simple fact is that this is the best regular rock night in New York. Maybe the world. And it’s free. As usual (last week was an exception), Botanica frontman Paul Wallfisch opened the night solo on piano. He’s the kind of player who is frequently at his best as a response to some kind of adversity, in other words, when he has something to transcend. Last night, by contrast, he was clearly in a good mood, a welcome opportunity for the crowd of cognoscenti to hear some of his warmer, slightly more carefree, gospel-flavored material: the title track to Botanica’s forthcoming album; the hypnotic Beauty Is; a version of the Paul Bowles lyric Etiquette, which he’d set to an aptly pensive tune; a noir cabaret number by Baby Dee; a typically jaunty version of Leonard Cohen’s I’m Your Man and an absolutely psychedelic Ray Davies cover on which he was joined by the evening’s next act, cellist Julia Kent.

Yet another reason why Small Beast is so cool is how effortlessly it’s balanced in terms of gender: women have been the stars lately and this evening continued that trend. Kent – who did time in Rasputina and has an exhaustive symphony orchestra and chamber music background – is a first-class composer in her own right, playing a hypnotic set of expansive originals. Typically, she’d pluck out a playful bassline and then loop it, adding layer after layer of frequently haunting ambience over it much as the Quavers do live. To do this is far more complicated than it seems – your timing has to be spot-on, and Kent’s was. The effect was riveting and frequently cinematic. Moving from trippy, echoey and atmospheric to stark and haunting, she evoked composers as diverse as Jenny Scheinman and Shostakovich. The best piece of the night grew strikingly darker as its second movement kicked in; her final number layered squalling insistence over swaying, casually pretty arpeggios.

Then Carol Lipnik and her longtime cohort, pianist Dred Scott – whose Tuesday midnight shows at Rockwood Music Hall have become the stuff of legend – took the stage and took the volume up a notch. With her spectacular four-octave range, Lipnik barely requires amplification, and this time out she’d brought along a reverb pedal that she used to give her big crescendos even more firepower. As expected, the audience was rapt. Scott didn’t waste a note as he moved from the noir swing of The Last Dance, through the macabre tango pulse of When I Was a Mermaid, the playfully minimalist psychedelicism of You’re My Firefly and the hauntingly plainspoken sympathy-for-the-freak narrative Two-Headed Cow. Lipnik moved and swayed effortlessly from a wail to a devious smirk to what sounded like a wildly phasing human theremin. As one knowledgeable member of the crowd was quick to discern, wherever Lipnik was, she was invariably in the moment. Lipnik’s collaborations with Scott and also with John Kelly are ongoing – watch this space for updates. It would have been fun to stick around and see what the next act, violinist Rebecca Cherry and her nine-piece band had up their collective sleeves, but the F train was about to turn into a pumpkin and that’s no way to get home.