Tom Csatari’s Uncivilized Make Controlled Chaos Out of Chico Hamilton’s Outside-the-Box Tunes

Today marks five years to the date that guitarist Tom Csatari’s Uncivilized played a strikingly fresh yet charmingly retro set of Chico Hamilton compositions at the Brooklyn boite where they recorded their now-classic Twin Peaks covers album. The show was fresh in the sense that Uncivilized always seemed thisclose to completely going off the rails, and this was no exception. It was retro in that they swung the hell out of the tunes.

Fast forward to 2022, and a stripped-down version of the band have a brand-new short album of some of that material streaming at Bandcamp. It’s what you would expect considering Csatari’s indomitably outside-the-box sensibility.

Hamilton enjoyed a colorful, genre-defying eight-decade career as a drummer, percussionist, arranger and composer, spanning from the swing era, through bebop and the early years of latin jazz, all the way into the early teens. As a musician, he was vital into his nineties. This blog’s owner saw him in concert twice.

Tuba player Ben Stapp slowly works variations on a catchy riff over drummer Rachel Housle’s low-key swing as the bandleader ranges from blue-flame jangle to surreal psychedelia in the album’s opening number, Conquistadores. Maintaining the slinky jam atmosphere of the original, multi-reedman Kevin Sun and Nick Jozwiak – playing cello instead of his usual bass – slowly disappear into the ether.

The group reinvent El Moors as quasi-Egyptian reggae – or a sprawling, quasi-reggae Egyptian jazz jam, maybe, with an acerbically swirling cello solo and hypnotic Atrocity Exhibition drums. Helena gets reinvented here as a ramshackle bossa tune, Sun’s dancing flute contrasting with Jozwiak’s astringent cello. The band take that dichotomy higher in their bracingly drony remake of El Chico, which Csatari describes as “Hendrix-meets-Twin Peaks”

The final cut is Marcheta, a proto southwestern gothic theme by Victor Schertzinger where the group veer between determinedly shuffling good cheer and more shadowy ambience.

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One of Brooklyn’s Best Jazz Acts Returns to Playing Live with a Vengeance

One of the first bands at the very front of the pack getting busy on the live circuit again is fronted by the guy who might be the best guitarist in Brooklyn. From the mid to late teens, Tom Csatari’s Uncivilized played a careening, highly improvisational but also wickedly tuneful blend of pastoral jazz and psychedelia, with frequent detours into the noir. Their distinctively drifting live album of Twin Peaks themes is an obscure treasure from the peak era of the Barbes scene. The group survived their bandleader’s brush with death (this was long before any so-called pandemic) and have emerged seemingly more energized than ever. Csatari didn’t let all the downtime during the past fifteen months’ lockdown go to waste: he wrote three albums worth of songs. He calls it the Placebo Trilogy, and it’s streaming at Bandcamp.

Their next show is June 26 at 8 PM at the new San Pedro Inn, 320 Van Brunt St. (corner of Pioneer) in Red Hook. You could take the B61 bus but if you’re up for getting some exercise, take the F to Carroll, get off at the front of the Brooklyn-bound train and walk it. Nobody at this blog has been to the venue yet but it gets high marks from those who have.

All three records are Csatari solo acoustic, often played through a tremolo effect. The first one, Placedo-Niche has a couple of numbers with a distantly Elliott Smith-tinged, hazily bucolic feel, the first steadier, the second more spare and starry. Csatari packs more jaunty flash and enigmatic strum into D’art in less than a minute thirty than most artists can in twice as much time: one suspects that this miniature, like everything else here, was conceived as a stepping-off point for soloing.

Morton Swing is an increasingly modernized take on a charmingly oldtimey melody. And Extra could be a great lost Grateful Dead theme – who cares if this singalong doesn’t have lyrics.

The second record, Placebo-ish begins with Fresh Scrabble, Csatari’s gritty, nebulous chords around a long, catchy, descending blues riff. As it unwinds, he mingles the same kind of finger-crunching chords into a southern soul-tinged pattern, explores a moody Synchronicity-era Police-style anthem, then sends a similarly brooding variation through a funhouse mirror. The most John Fahey-influenced number here is titled Sad-Joy, both emotions on the muted side.

The last album is Placebo-Transcendence. The gentle, summery ambience of the opening track, Valentino, suddenly grows frenetic. Sugar Baby vamps along, warm and hypnotic. The wryly titled Civilized is…well…exactly that: it sounds like Wilco. The funniest song title (Csatari is full of them) is Silicone Transcendence (Tryin’ to Transcend), the closest thing to Twin Peaks here.

There isn’t a jazz guitarist alive who gets as much mileage out of a chord-based approach than Csatari, and there aren’t many people writing tunes as hummable as these in any style of music. Yet they tease the ears at the same time. If you want to learn how to write using implied melody, there isn’t a better place to start than these records.

Tom Csatari’s Uncivilized Make a Long-Awaited Comeback in Red Hook This Thursday

Of all the great bands who’ve had monthly residencies at Barbes over the years, one of the most consistently entertaining and even paradigm-shifting ones was by Tom Csatari’s Uncivilized. Throughout 2016 and into the fall of last year, the guitarist and his nine-piece group careened through a more-or-less monthly series of shows there. Crowds were good, and word was out about Csatari’s enigmatically orchestrated, scruffy, individualistic mashup of jangly Americana and improvisational jazz.

Then disaster struck.

Long story short: Csatari survived a brush with death, and has reconvened the band for a show this Thurs, Aug 23, starting at around 6:30 PM at Pioneer Works. The band’s Barbes gigs were always on the epic side, so if you can’t make it to Red Hook by the time the doors open, don’t stress. The show is free; you probably can just walk in although the venue wants you to rsvp. It’s the big comeback jazz show of 2018, and this blog will be in the house.

Throughout the residency, Csatari and the crew played mostly originals, although they did a surprisingly tight and trad Chico Hamilton night and explored other composers as well. The best of the cover nights, by a country mile, was Twin Peaks night in October of last year. It earned a mention as one of the year’s best concerts here, and serendipitously, the entire show was recorded and is streaming at Csatari’s music page.

For that show, Csatari had his tremolo on, but not with as wide an angle as on Angelo Badalamenti’s iconic soundtrack. The group began by skirting the Twin Peaks title theme, hitting on the offbeat instead of nailing it right from the start and ending up with as much if not more suspense as the original as the high reeds – flutist Tristan Cooley and alto saxophonist Levon Henry – misted and veered in and out of focus. Without flinching, they gracefully fluttered through the end, as closely as a nine-piece jazz ensemble can approximate a four-piece rock band. Without a hint as to what they’d play next, they vamped slowly and built to a mighty crescendo fueled by a couple of emphatic Csatari clangs, then the instruments fell away….into a haphazard jam on one of the more unctuous Christmas carols out there. Jethro Tull once used it as comic “relief,” if that means anything to you. Csatari reprised Badalamenti’s haunting, minimialist riffs at the end with a spare, lingering presence.

Listening back to this show a year later is a trip, to say the least. Rashomon memories fall away, while the more indelible ones spring back to life. Drummer Rachel Housle’s stunning dynamics, from hushed, Lynchian suspense to a four-on-the-floor rock swing are a big part of the picture – although happily the mic was positioned so the drums don’t drown anybody out. Likewise, bassist Nick Jozwiak’s slinky pulse and occasional thunderous chord are toward the back in the mix.

The band also played a lot of originals that night, many of the intros slowly coalescing only to slowly unwind later. Rowlings, with its nebulous, Frisellian intro and tempo changes; the haphazardly twisted little waltz Yellow Rose; Just Friends, a starrily brooding duet between Csatari and fellow six-stringer Julian Cubilllos; and the hypnotic Lullaby Stomp (hardly a stomp, actually) are early highlights.

With torchy, soul-infused grit, singer Ivy Meissner leads the band through a couple of her songs, Races Are Run and Shelby as well as the Julee Cruise valium-noir hits Questions in a World of Blue and The Nightingale. Organist Dominic Mekky is most present in the best of the originals, the catchy, nebulously pulsing Pale Rider.

The rest of the Twin Peaks material is also choice. The group reinvent the stalking Pink Room theme as a sway, and then practically a soul strut. Laura Palmer’s theme is all the more menacing for its sparseness, mostly just Csatari and Cubillos the first time around. And bass clarinetist Casey Berman adds welcome gravitas to the sardonic Audrey Horne stripper theme.

Csatari can be hilarious when he wants, with a cynicism that’s pure punk rock. Voices diverge and fall off the page. The momentary detours into into punk, new wave and free squall can be priceless. But he can also be as unselfconsciously dark as you would expect from a guy who would take the trouble to come up with his own Twin Peaks charts. The band should be especially psyched to tackle whatever he throws at them in Red Hook.

Epic Lynchian Jazz at Barbes Last Night

Covering music as iconic as the Twin Peaks soundtrack is playing with fire. Last night at Barbes, it was as if guitarist Tom Csatari said, “Fire walk with me!” and his nine-piece band Uncivilized could’t wait to follow him into the flames. It was less an inferno than the slowly gathering menace of a prairie burn – Angelo Badalementi’s David Lynch film scores are all about suspense and distant dread. And it was an awful lot of fun to find out just where this unpredictable crew would take those themes.

They opened with the Twin Peaks title theme. From the first few lingering notes of Csatari’s guitar, it was obvious that they weren’t going to play it completely straight-up, considering that he was already staking out territory around the famous, ominous, two-note opening riff. The genius of Badalaenti’s score is that he uses very simple ideas for his variations for all the femme fatales, wolves in sheeps’ clothing and resolute boy scout detectives. If only for a second, any of them could be pure evil. In that sense, the music perfectly matches Lynch’s esthetic.

Yet as much further out as Csatari and the band took this material, they also stuck pretty closely to the melody and the changes. This was hardly generic postbop jazz with halfhearted alllusions to the tunes and solos around the horn.

And Uncivilized are the least generic jazz group in New York. One of Csatari’s favorite devices is to swing and sway his way up to a big crescendo where the four-horn frontline can shiver and flurry, more or less – sometimes a lot less – in unison. They did that here a lot, as well as messing up the rhythm a little with a couple of what sounded like momentary free interludes over drummer Rachel Housle’s floating swing.

There are some great players in this band, but she was the biggest hit with the crowd, as dynamic as she was subtle – and she’s very subtle. Starting out with a suspenseful, muted thud with her mallets, she muted her snare with a scarf, went to sticks and then brushes, using the trebliest parts of the kit for rat-a-tat riffs and hits in all the least expected places. Can anybody say “DownBeat Critics’ Poll Rising Star, 2017?”

Bassist Nick Jozwiak bobbed and bounced like a human slinky behind his upright, playing terse, rubbery rock riffs bolstered by the occasional looming chord. Guitarist Julian Cubillos shadowed Csatari with a subtlety to rival Housle, particularly when the bandleader was playing with a slide for a hint of extra deep-woods menace. Keyboardist Dominic Mekky sent starry electric piano wafting through the mist in lieu of Badalamenti’s big-sky string synth orchestration, while the horns – flutist Tristan Cooley, alto saxophonist Levon Henry, tenor saxophonist Kyle Wilson and bass clarinetist Casey Berman – built a fluttery, gauzy sheen.

They reached toward the macabre stripper tune inside The Bookhouse Boys, played a tantalizing, single haphazardly uneasy verse of Laura  Palmer’s theme and then found unexpected grit – and a Pink Panther – in Audrey Horne’s theme.

Singer Ivy Meissner joined the band to deliver Julee Cruise’s Nightingale as well as Questions in a World of Blue, opting for soul-infused plaintiveness rather than trying to be the girl at the very bottom of the well. Meissner also sang Shelby, a noir-tinged soul ballad from her excellent debut album from last year. In between, she suddenly disappeared: it turned out that she’d taken a seat on the floor amidst the band.

Additionally, Csatari led the group through a handful of his own enigmatically careening pastoral jazz numbers, including a couple of somewhat restrained “stomps.” Most of what this band plays sounds as if it’s completely improvised, but it’s likely that most of it is actually composed, testament to how fresh Csatari’s charts are. No voicing is ever in constant, traditional harmony with the rest of the group, which enhances the suspense as much as it it opens up the floor for more interesting conversations than most bands dream of starting.

Csatari’s next gig is with Meissner on Nov 13 at 7 PM at Footlight Bar in Ridgewood. And fans of Twin Peaks and deep noir should also check out Big Lazy, who play their monthly Friday night show at Barbes on Nov 3 at 10 PM.