Live Log 2024: Intimacies And Invocations
Recent shows ranging from delicate folk to big band free jazz reaffirm the glories of live music
Life has been moving at an overstuffed clip recently, so I have a backlog of live shows to discuss. I am rectifying that here and now with brief snapshots of what I saw and heard in the last few weeks.
May 10: Gunk Is All Right
I’ve probably gone on enough about Gunk’s wonderful zine and their Gunkyard newsletter, which delivers beautiful essays on music and being along with a raft of show listings. Long story short, I’m a fan. So when they announced a happy hour at Baby’s All Right I was right there. We caught a drink with Gunk co-founder (and creator of the beautiful No Glory) H. Pruz, Florist drummer Felix Walworth, and a couple of their friends, including a member of My Wonderful Boyfriend, who have some nice songs out. It was a good hang!
Eventually, it was time for some live music so we headed into the performance space and were greeted by the diaphanous folk of Skullcrusher, who we had last seen opening for Florist in 2023. Performing with a violinist (and Florist’s Jonnie Baker on keyboards for one song), she sounded even more assured than before and her fingerpicking was so mesmerizing I almost thought she had six fingers.
After Skullcrusher's beautiful set, we saw Camp Saint Helene, who were celebrating the release of their second album, Of Earth And Its Timely Delights. I had already listened to the record and was quite impressed with their blend of ancient folk and crunchy psych, all lavished by the airy and mysterious soprano of Elizabeth Ibarra. They pulled it off live, too, even though Ibarra later revealed she had laryngitis and could barely talk! She was a very compelling performer with a theatrical approach that was well-crafted but not overdone in its witchy ways.
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Chalk up another great night at Baby’s All Right. Keep an eye out for more Gunk happy hours - I know I am!
May 21: Tak Goes Electric
In March, I reported on Tak Ensemble’s extraordinary season-opening concert, and on May 21st, I made it out to Roulette for the season finale, which was equally spectacular. On the bill was the world premiere of an evening-length work by Weston Olencki called When the Great Fires Were Lit on the Other Side of the Ocean. Olencki’s name should be familiar to readers of AnEarful as their deliciously dense Old Time Music made it onto my Top 25 for 2022.
Olencki is nothing if not a protean figure, however, and this complexly sourced and constructed piece required an academic lecture to kick things off. Delivered by Dr. A. Gilbert Williamson, who turned out to be Olencki himself, and complete with projected illustrations for his points, the 35-minute “fictional musicological presentation” referred to the piece in the past tense, as though we’d already heard it, and blended a mix of historical and alternative facts to prepare us for what was to come. There was a lot of talk about hums produced by electricity and their frequencies. It was absorbing and quietly gonzo - and certainly had me relaxed and ready for anything before the music began.
You can watch and listen to the whole thing here, perhaps guided by my notes, which follow.
Part 1: Silver Chain Recitations, is based on 60hz hum and opens with a plethora of shimmering overtones
A melodic hum, whisperings of static, a mallet on metal, a bass drum…the animal call of the contrabass clarinet and flute. A droning Appalachian violin and Charlotte Mundy’s crystal voice singing in Gaelic. A series of woozy drones and sparking vibraphone tones surround her like starlight.
It strikes me as an invocation, a call to the ghosts of electricity Dylan sang about in Visions Of Johanna.
Mundy ends a phrase as if it’s the last thing that will ever be sung. Marina Kifferstein plucks a skeletal pizzicato on her violin as Laura Cocks (flutes) and Madison Greenstone (clarinets) drone on.
The intensity builds and Mundy finds her voice again, underpinned by the buzz of a deliberately missed connection, sending out soaring lines in an effort to overpower the hum.
The violin comes back, sounding like a squeaky windmill in a lazy breeze before a storm, and a somehow plush buzz from an amp lead us to mystery, Mindy’s vocal line serene amid the static, paced by Ellery Trafford’s bass drum as harmonics swirl around her.
As the vocal line trawls a lower register, the mystery (where does it come from?) only seems to grow, with competing trickles of static, a high drone from Kifferstein, Trafford’s bowed vibraphone…the movement ends. [Not sure which movement this was!]
Mundy triggers an electric device, leading to a shift in the lighting and an explosion of recorded birdsong. She leaves the stage and pays out two lengths of electrical cable across the floor in front of the stage. Trafford makes a rattling sound with glass on glass while Cocks plays a tentative flute melody above Greenstone’s burbling.
Mundy returns, having surrounded the audience with the cable. She sings what sounds like an Irish hymn [Was this part III: “An Crithir”?] over a loud electrical hum. It’s among the most gorgeous singing I’ve ever heard from anyone anywhere. She pauses. Gathers herself and, as she comes out big, the others explode around her. [This remarkable sequence starts around 1:05:00…nearly made me weep to hear it again]
There a violence to the electricity now; Kifferstein sawing frantically, Cocks swaying, Greenstone stolid, blowing hard on their clarinet. The volume increasing the lights rise to a clinical level…
No more notes. The piece ended and it was magnificent. Absorbing, epic, and completely original. There will be a studio recording eventually, but you’ll need to create lighting to enact the ritual completely.
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June 13: Central Park Mixtape
Free concerts are part of the lifeblood of a New York summer, with the heavy hitters being City Parks SummerStage and BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn. Even if we only get to one or two shows, they’re always memorable and this one was no different. It was a bill of three artists that seemed to have little in common beyond their iconoclastic natures - which was fine with me as I thrive on variety.
First up was Slauson Malone 1, now codified as the duo of Jasper Marsalis (vocals, guitar, keyboards, programming) and Nicholas Wetherell (cello). The set had a similar dynamic ebb and flow as the last time I saw them, although there were fewer musicians on stage this time. There was also no acoustic guitar playing, which I missed, but Marsalis’s ability to go from a croon to a shriek is still a wonder to behold. Even though the audience was far too talkative for my taste, he and Wetherell stuck to their guns and delivered a fascinating set. Wetherell is a fantastic player, able to generate arcs of distortion from his instrument as easily as flowing lines, and an equal partner. This video gives an idea of the unpredictable and very compelling experience Marsalis and Wetherell generate. Make sure to catch up with 2023’s Excelsior, too.
Next up was the Sun Ra Arkestra, the long-running outer-space big band started by the late, great Herman Blount back in the 1950s. While I can’t consider myself a deep fan, I’ve always enjoyed making the occasional visit to Saturn on one of their many, many albums. I likely passed up several opportunities to see the man himself lead the band in concert, but with Sun Ra’s successor, Marshall Allen recently becoming a centenarian, that was not a mistake I was going to make again. Allen is one of the wonders of the world, generating fiercely tangled lines from his tenor sax at the drop of an ankh, not to mention singing on a couple of songs and moving to the groove.
But there is no “I” in big band and the rest of his 21-member cohort were all excellent musicians, blowing solos with character, structure, and wit. While they often generated free jazz explosions, the video presents most of a rhumba-like song that emphasized their rhythmic acuity along with some of the individual star power.
Closing the show was Kim Gordon, who’s gotten a lot of acclaim for her recent album, The Collective, and its blend of noise, trap beats, and social commentary. I must confess, that as excited as I was by the idea of a rock band peeling off from Glenn Branca’s guitar orchestra, I never fell for Sonic Youth. Even their Kurt Cobain-endorsed rise to college rock dominance wasn’t enough to sway me. But Gordon has always seemed authentically cool so I was eager to hear what she delivered live, especially since the album is very much a studio construction created in collaboration with avant-pop-hip-hop producer Justin Raisen.
It turned out to be pretty darn impressive, more than partly thanks to her killer band. Camilla Charlesworth on bass was especially impressive, with a sound that reverberated seismically through the park (and likely beyond!), but Sarah Register expertly brought the noise on guitar and synth, and drummer Madi Vogt navigated the space in and around the electronic beats with conviction. Oddly enough, Gordon only played guitar on two or three songs, which may have been due to technical issues, with her tech taking the instrument offstage in between songs. But she had no problem owning the stage as a vocalist, her deadpan style a nice contrast to the fiery blasts going on around her. I will say that the songs as songs don’t entirely hold up for me and the more explicit the lyrics get (“I’m a man!”) the less interesting they are. Most satisfying for me were the abstract segments, with collaged layers of noise jutting up against each other tectonically, driven forward by pulsating rhythms.
But the performance was rapturously received by the tightly packed crowd. Check out this sample from the show and decide for yourself.
As we walked out through the lush, night-kissed greenery of Central Park, we sang a silent song of praise to the City Parks Foundation, which made this powerfully expressive night possible. We hope to get back there on July 24th for Arooj Aftab’s performance. Got any plans?
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From the archives:
Live Log 2024: Tak Ensemble’s Collective/Protest
Live Log 2023: Summer Catchup Part 2
Live Log 2023: Tak Ensemble Take Over
Hot Live Summer