Roots Grown Gnarled and Elegant; Jack Rose, Hideout, Chicago, 09/24/09 and Sarah Borges and the Broken Singles, Fitzgerald’s, Chicago, 09/25/09

Two shows in Chicago that seemed at first glance to be about as far as ou can get on the spectrum that is “roots music”.  Rose has been doing this since his days in the overtone-laden minimal psychedelia of Pelt and his demeanor on stage is of abject seriousness, staring a hole in his acoustic guitar and barely communicating with the audience at all, letting his instrumental music fill the air and get perceived for what it is, removed from his personality.   Borges has three albums out, two on Sugar Hill, and her voice, like a huskier Amy Allison or a twangier Dar Williams, is the show, and she’s bending over backwards – at some points literally – to be ingratiating and charming.

The more you see Jack Rose the more you realize how much he’s evolved over time, what on his first solo album was easy to dismiss as  post-Fahey, longer forms, some beautiful flat-picking, melodies showing off their elasticity by stretching until they almost broke then snapping right back, or like pools of viscous rainwater on a dirty street running together so you can see the rainbow in the whole. 

By the time the first two were collected under Two Originals Of and then the gorgeous Raag Manifestos I started to realize what an original voice you had in Jack, not by eschewing what’s come before but by absorbing it, Lightnin’ Hopkins and Maybelle Carter and Mississippi John Hurt and Peter Walker, and Hawaiian slack key and Indian music and sacred steel and more recently and most intriguingly flamenco runs.  His most recent album and the most recent time I saw him, at Terrastock, has him accompanied by the Black Twig Pickers, a more traditional bluegrass/mountain music duo and again it didn’t click until I spent more time with the record and realized he’s integrating his own harmonic language without compromising it into this fabric. 

But the show at the Hideout found him back in solo mode and it was hypnotic and uplifting, hitting everything in his catalog and bringing out the melodies more than I think I’ve ever seen him.  In that little room, everyone fell to silence and each note hung in the air in an almost Morton Feldman waltz.  Decay and generation, birth and age, step one, one-two, one-two-three, heel-toe-turn.  I didn’t even stick around to see the headliners, I wanted those songs to keep ringing in my head a little longer.

Borges the next night followed the stultifying Elvis 56 which featured the fantastic guitar work of Eddie Angel and the drumming of Teen Beat from Los Straitjackets but a English singer who did a spot-on Elvis impression and perfect Elvis dancing and mannerisms and sang a set of things from Elvis’s early career including his covers of R&B like “Money Honey” which weren’t that good in the first place.  Angel’s muscular guitar playing and Smed’s always lithe and sexy drumming tried mightily to elevate this but it couldn’t get over being charmless, feeling like like you walked into a particularly humorless Civil War recreation, give me somebody who shows up as Dr. Who or something.

Sarah Borges and the Broken Singles, included bass player and harmony singer Binky, Robert Larry Delaney on drums, and Lyle Brewer who might be the best lead guitarist I’ve heard for this kind of music since the guitar player in Robbie Fulks’ band, which is high praise by any measure and doubly high when we’re seeing them in Chicago.  They came out and in a ballsy move opened with the first song of theirs I ever heard, “On the Day We Met”, which is still think is probably the best song they’ve ever written and it stood as a call to arms, an ars poetica that set up the fun, free-wheeling tone of their set, “I want my old records back / I’m gonna sell them all for trade / It’ll be less lonely hearts club / And more of the hit parade” and went through an hour and a half of their own fine songs, especially good was the ‘60s pop-Latin by way of Dean Martin and the Shirelles “Me and Your Ghost” (“Since you’ve been away I’ve been livin’ / But you know that livin’ like that’s a shame / Me and your ghost both know / We can’t go on this way”), the ragged stomp of “I’ll Show You How”, the Aerosmith-style blues stop (thanks to Anne for pointing that out) aon the song about a prostitute (can’t find my notes where I wrote down the title and I’m not finding it on either of the records I have) and the soaring ballad “Better at the End of the Day”.

Between the seams of this rock-solid original material they wove in enough covers to show their muscle but did it without making the covers seem like they were showing up their own songs and shining light on their aesthetic that can encompass Smokey Robinson’s “Being With You”,. J. Giles Band’s “Cry One More Time”, Charley Pride’s “Just Between You and Me” and Hank Ballard’s “Open Up Your Back Door” (what turned into a rousing 30 minute encore when a certain member of Elvis 56 had to be hooked off the stage, which again proves how fantastic her band is, when he went into “Treat Her Right” they were right there with him on every digression), and still left me wishing they’d done a couple of other covers they’ve recorded (“It Comes to Me Naturally” and “Stop and Think it Over”).  Much like Jack Rose, they’ve absorbed all of these genres and styles, amoeba-like without changing their shape or their intent. 

Sure there are quibbles, there’s nothing truly new here and the banter went on to the point where it hit a Tammy Wynette-like level of smarm, but those are minor.  If you want a well-played, purely entertaining bar band in the best sense with some fantastic vocals, you can’t do better than this.  See Sarah Borges.

 

Technorati Tags: music,Chicago,Jack Rose,Sarah Borges,The Hideout,Fitzgerald's

Mephistopheles Leaves Through Another Door; “An Apology for the Course and Outcome of Certain Events Delivered by Doctor John Faustus on This, His Final Evening”, Theater Oobleck, 09/26/09

No epigram this time, I think the title of the play took up more than enough space, suffice to say I was in Chicago for a friend’s wedding and looking for some theater.  The Michael Shannon play was tempting, so was the Arthur Conan Doyle thing at Steppenwolf, but the early write-up of this promised just the kind of high=minded literariness and wackiness that I couldn't resist.

We all filed into two long rows of chairs on either side of the basement of the Chopin Theater, one man sitting at a chair on one end and another standing nervously, who then walks to the lounge we filed in from and pulls a heavy door shut so we’re in a dark room lit only by two globe lights and an Exit sign.  And we’re off.

For the next hour, Colm O’Reilly as John Faustus sweats and stammers his way through boastful justification and not-quite-belied regret, through flights of visual fancy, from Sisyphus tracing hash marks on the rock in mud until the mass is mostly the shell of keeping time to a world pouring out of the hump on the devil’s back like a piñata.  

Faustus works to get us on his side, but through it all, you get the impression that what he most wants is to evoke a reaction – something, anything – from Mephistopheles (David Shapiro) who holds all the cards and has nothing to gain or lose by giving in.  Shapiro is riveting in a role with one action and no lines, but it’s O’Reilly who keeps making you laugh (“I return with future beer and potatoes!” “I am a very annoyed person!”) and bringing you to tears with the wasted efforts and barely submerged regrets. 

Mickel Maher’s text is a wonder and by the time Mephistopheles turns off the lights and leaves through the other door you’re completely taken up.  Runs through October 24 at the Chopin Theater in Chicago.  http://theateroobleck.com/plays/an-apology-2009

Technorati Tags: theater,Theater Oobleck,Chicago

Flickering Shapes, Grief, Rage; Luc Tuymans at the Wexner Center

"Knowing I am going away past the sharp edge of the world, she knows we need magic, we need magic stronger than words since just words cannot save us. I follow her to the place where the machines hum and draw blood since we need strong magic, need to rip the skin, let blood, and change the body for life, so it know."


-Daphne Gottlieb, "maps and legends"

When you see Luc Tuymans paintings they come up on you slowly, some vaguely impressionist techniques through a new sensibility, and then you start seeing them together and you get the patterns, the juxtaposition, and it all comes together when you see he was a film maker. He doesn't try to replicate stills, none of the photorealism of Marilyn Minter, he captures the velocity of film - establishing shot, close up, jump cut to the same shot from a slightly different angle, and not in an old-Hollywood way, all handheld Super-8 that blew their entire budget on a crane shot that makes that look even more devastating as in the shot - the painting - of a couple dancing at the Governor's Ball that's almost touching until you get the political implications and behind it the Presidential Seal seen so close it's blurry, looking new, looking freshly used. It's like you found a storyboard with half the shots missing and had to piece the story together from the faded, munged drawings.

World War II and the Holocaust deeply haunt his work, and the current specters of nationalism, jingoism and racism, with at least two paintings of gas chambers, one an interior with the showers as black uneven splotches, like sunspots, and the roof almost translucent, the sky seeping into this empty room The other looks like it could just as easily be a summer camp, as a companion to The Architect, which is a grey painting of Albert Speer having a skiing mishap, taken from home film footage of a vacation he was on, maybe the summation of the whole retrospective. Banal, and interesting just for the way he uses color, and then the audience says, "Oh, that architect. Damn."

Tuymans uses color in a very subdued way, but that doesn't mean he uses less of it. He has an amazing eye for seeing all the colors in a suit coat, or a sky at ease, reds and blues figure prominently in everything and most of the time they don't draw attention to themselves, just shoot their acid into the veins in your eye and sink in so you start seeing them three or four paintings later, unless something is done for sheer effect, like the strawberry blonde hair of the paratroopers that makes more apparent they don't have any faces.

If you're within a hundred miles of Columbus before January 3, go see this. You won't regret it.

Church by Young Jean-Lee, Available Light, Riffe Center; August 20, 2009

"I beg for haven: Prisons, let open you gates-


A refugee from Belief seeks a cell tonight.

Executioners near the woman at the window.


Damn you, Elijah, I'll bless Jezebel tonight.

Lord, cried out the idols, Don't let us be broken;


Only we can convert the infidels tonight.

Has God's vintage loneliness turned to vinegar?


He's poured rust into the Sacred Well tonight."


-Agha Shahid Ali, "Ghazal"

I've always loved old gospel music and Renaissance religious art, but the religious expressions that really move me or raise my hackles are plagued with doubt. Like they're working through something to convince themselves. Current 93, Leonard Cohen, and now Young Jean-Lee's new play, Church. Young Jean-Lee has said she tries to make whatever the last show she'd like to make is. It's like she's writing herself into aesthetic corners and trusting that the truth of her approach and the truth of the performances will carry her out. And Available Light, I believe doing the first performance of this not done by Jean-Lee's own troupe, shows up again as one of the most interesting, provocative theater companies Columbus has or has ever had.

The play is about working through her lack of belief, or lack of concrete belief anyway, and it's structured like a televangelist/mega-church's service I used to grow up listening to because I fell asleep too late with the TV on, with gentle words in soothing cadence that explode into almost baffling anger and then recede but somehow feel like they never lost control, never lost the arc of the message. It opens on a darkened stage with Reverend Jose (Ian Short) saying in an even tone that gets progressively more and more of an edge, as it calls out the audience for grasping for tiny things, and talking about our attempts to quit smoking, quit drinking, quit bad relationships and "that's what you talk about when you're trying to be deep." When the lights come up there's Reverend Kate (Kate Watts, so good in God's Ear as the couple's almost-oblivious daughter) asking the audience questions and turning somewhat ludicrous, mocking "prayer requests" into things that aren't so ludicrous.

And it goes through sermons from Kate, rambling and surreal but periodically stabbing you in the heart, Reverend Eleni (Eleni Papaleonardos), working through her addiction to be loved and exploding in an indictment of those who would use religion for bigotry or exclusion, and Revererend Jose bounces off the good will he's already built up and then comes back out and starts discussing mummies and mummies are real and god and the devil are both mummies until he breaks down. Then there's dancing which is perfect, unforced, but well-choreographed, and sone group harmonies by Reverends Kate, Eleni and Casey (Acacia Duncan), and ultimately a choir comes out and takes the stage.

All of the Jean Lee plays I've seen seem to rotate around what you think, what you feel like you should think, what you say and what you're trying to avoid saying, both publicly and privately. This makes no attempt to hide the surface absurdity of some of these concepts (translated as chicken blood and mummies, using the old Bunuel surrealist technique of horror images to hint at a deeper psychological interest), but it flashes back and forth between these and totally rational words and explanations to create this dichotomy and draw you in. Maybe this is a little slighter than The Shipment or Dragons Flying to Heaven, but it might be more moving than either, at least for me.

Gesture/Action/Gesture/Action – Vandermark 5, Wexner Center for the Arts, 08/06/09

“By one-sidedly emphasizing only one aspect of the new, Brotzmann transforms the music into a kind of still life, reducing it to a style without concomitant creative substance.”
- Amiri Baraka, review of Nipples in Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music

I don’t necessarily agree with the above sentiment but I’ve heard similar things about both the Euro improvisers (Brotzmann, Gustafsson, Bailey, Bennink) and the Chicago crowd exemplified by Fred Vandermark, that what you get is a frozen-moment perspective of the fire music of the ‘60s, unmoored from the gospel and R&B underpinnings that someone like Ayler had so it looks like action painting.  But I stand in front of those Rothkos at MoMA and every time I hold back tears, and Vandermark was my big gateway into free jazz.  Really, my gateway was John Corbett’s Extended Play that came out my freshman year in high school, and it’s an easy step to Ken Vandermark from there.

The first live shot of the juice I love in freer improvised music came from the sets of shows Zach Bodish booked in the much-missed rock club Little Brother’s and it was 2000 when both DKV and Vandermark 5 came to Little Brother’s on separate occasions in one of these series.  The first time I’d seen un-amplified, not even through a PA, music I think, though I’m a little ashamed to admit it took me until I was 20.  And at the time I was just blown away by the interplay.  But slowly I drifted away from Vandermark and when I heard he was coming back to the Wexner Center  almost a decade later, there was no chance I wasn’t going to go but I was a little nervous that I’d be let down.

And I’m happy to say that was completely unfounded.  In the years I haven’t been keeping up, Ken Vandermark’s tone has gotten even more assured and the melodies he’s writing are killer, while the band has gotten even more groove-based.  From the opening “Friction” to the closing “Cadmium Red (For Francis Bacon)” I was enraptured.  I would’ve liked a few more songs that varied from head-solo-solo-bridge-head (or thereabouts) but the tunes where he deviated from that, “Spiel” with its interlocking sections glued together by Fred Longberg-Holm’s distorted cello, or the gorgeous ballad “Early Color” propelled by Dave Rempis’s sax, were astonishing.

Every memory gets me back to the sheer physical force of the rhythms they churned out, Kent Kessler on bass and Fred Longberg-Holm on cello often both playing pizzicato to create one seamless giant rhythm below everything, or both playing arco to give it a chamber music kick and expanse and Tim Daisy’s drums stop the music short in the most interesting ways when they’re not bringing different, almost orchestral colors out to the fore.  I’m glad the Wex is bringing this kind of thing to Columbus, and I intend not to let it be another 9 years before I see the Vandermark 5.

Olafur Eliasson: Take Your Time, MCA, Chicago; Cy Twombly, The Natural World, Art Institute of Chicago

“You see half the moon, its crescent, and one of the planets, maybe Saturn, maybe Jupiter, in the early night sky over Berlin, through the windows of a taxicab, near Potsdamer Platz.

You think: Beauty.

No, this is not beauty, maybe not, maybe, this is the rest of it, maybe not, maybe, the rest of beauty,
maybe not, maybe, what remains of beauty,maybe not, maybe, what is visible, certainly, uncertain.
Your arms would not be able to stretch as far as necessary to form an adequate gesture for beauty
(You know that, don't you?).
So,  beauty remains in the impossibilities of the body.”
--Einsturzende Neubauten, “Beauty”

If beauty doesn’t stop you dead sometimes, catch you breathless and reeling, I’d go have your pulse checked or your head examined.  Or stay away from me.

It had been a little while since something left me totally speechless but still trying, desperately trying to articulate my reaction to it (maybe God’s Ear at Available Light, or the William Forsythe exhibit at the Wex) and like I knew it would, Chicago came through in spades last weekend.  My batteries were in terrible need of a recharge born of whiskey, wine, pizza, some rocking music, and mostly some art.

The Eliasson has been making the rounds from SFMOMA to MoMA but the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago was the first chance I had to actually see it.  And large chunks of what I knew about Eliasson almost made him sound like Christo, whose work I enjoy but don’t really remember.

This exhibit opens with a series of the most intricate spectrum paintings I’ve ever seen, “Your Eye Activity Field”, showing the 300 nanometers of the spectrum the eye can see, and it’s immediately followed by a long hallway lit in monochromatic yellow.  So it’s teasing you, showing all the colors you can see and then bleaching everything into a yellow that’ll drain the aesthetic appeal out of anything and everyone.  By the time you get out of the hallway, you’re so grateful to get your eyes back that you’re overjoyed to find… a wall fan hung from a cable in the middle of a room.

The fan’s swinging is entirely propelled by its blowing and it works as a prank but it also has some beauty to it, some swing.  You move from this to the bones of Eliasson’s work.  Wire models, photographs of nature.  And the photographs are in grids that almost but don’t quite tell a story.  A river runs through a row but it doesn’t quite match up.  A horizon shifts slightly.  All perception.  There’s a moss wall in this same section, growing and alive over the wires.

The light and the nature come up again in the second half of the exhibit, which has mirror tricks and an inverse disco ball (black matte glass facing out and light and mirror within so it projects these astonishing patterns on the floor directly underneath, not flung like coins of light over the room), and a kaleidoscope hallway (positioned as the opposite of the monochromatic hallway)  where you see visions of yourself in other colored mirrors until you stop and look directly at the wall and all you see are other people. 

The two pieces in this that bring everything home are A Room With All Colours and Beauty.  The former, a 360 degree space that travels across the color spectrum either by colors chasing across the wall or all shifting at once, in what Ken Hite dubbed “$12 Ecstasy”, you actually feel your heart rate slow or speed up and your brain chemistry turn over like an engine. when you get close enough it fills your field of vision.  But you need to come to it slowly, standing in the middle and getting the overall rhythm, watching it as a backdrop, then moving in.

And one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen is just called “Beauty”, a dark room with a man-made waterfall running over small jets of air that create sculptural illusions in the water, and two spotlights that make rainbows when the water flows a different way.  You feel the slightly-warm mist and you breathe in the humid air and you can’t see anything but the waterfall and maybe yourself.  I wanted to live in that room for a week or two.

Staggering out of this into the daylight we made our way to the Art Institute of Chicago and the beautiful new Renzo Piano-designed Modern Wing.  Still the first museum I fell in love with, still repays that love in spades. 

This time there’s a new Cy Twombly show and I’ve always respected his work but I’ve never been the biggest fan, this blew me the hell away.   Some blurry photographs and the sculptures and paintings he drew from them, and it’s all nature work, Untitled (paintings and sculpture) is based on a garden with deceptively sloppily blended acrylic, wax crayon, pastels and wadded bits of paper that bring to mind the flowers you made in art class as a child.

But the pieces that really killed me are Gathering of Time and Untitled (Winter Pictures) which are beautiful giant seascapes with this crude dark energy right underneath the surface, and they’re juxtaposed so you can feel the heat and warmth breathing out of the canvases.  So glad I saw this. 

The rest of the trip was great, good friends, good music (Jack Oblivian was one of the best rock shows I saw all year), good food (Enoteca Roma made the best polenta I’ve ever eaten), and good whiskey (I discovered the reasonably priced but amazingly tasty and cinnamony Templeton Rye on this trip), but both those exhibits alone made this work going.  Well, plus seeing a smile on Anne’s face.

All So Much Like Me – Eric Taylor, Red Door Tavern, 07/10/09

“Whether writing is knowing or whether it it singing, the love remains, the joy, the daring, the exaltedness when one approaches, at however far a remove, perfection.  Shake the greatest Art ever, and dross will come out.  But honest effort for its own sake is beauty.  If the writer is talented and lucky enough, then the result may be beautiful too.”
-William T. Vollman, “Writing”

Eric Taylor is the kind of artist who feels like he’s read every book and heard every songwriter worth hearing, and lived everywhere with this amazing storehouse of experiences, all of which he’s remembered perfectly.  And it doesn’t come off showy, he reaches through everything he’s built up and pulls out the perfect image, the decisive moment, le mot juste, and then he makes it rhyme.

Crammed in the back of a Grandview bar chasing red wine with Dewar’s on ice, he spun these monologues, with flexible rhythms and room for improvisation, that were fascinating in their own right, and you hit a point where you, the audience, are sure this doesn’t relate to any song, he’s just going off, but all of a sudden his perfect William Burroughs impression leads into “Whorehouse Mirrors and Pawnshop Knives” which he wrote based on his conversations with Burroughs, the story about a knife-thrower writing hearts on a bag with crayon then throwing knives into them because “He know that me and her.. .well, he knew,” turns into the version of “All So Much Like Me” that’ll make you give up making art forever or go right home and paint another canvas.  “Billy’s got a girl as cold a switchblade / She walks the wires at night / She was born and raised on a Carolina midway / And she likes my songs all right”.  The only time I’ve seen a singer-songwriter get a round of applause for the spoken word section of his set.

You’ll never see a better songwriter who has a more assured grasp on repetition.  His lyrics sound purely conversational, but its deceptive in its seeming simplicity, as in the perfect version of “Prison Movie” he introduced with the story that Johnny Cash told him he really liked it and he made the mistake of asking why.  “It’s got my name in it!”  The song rotates on the axis of memory, dream, and banal existence, and where most songwriters, a lesser talent would certainly place the dream in the chorus, with the lilting music, but Taylor has the chorus reinforce the daily life of the protagonist, “In a line / We all walk in a line”.  And it opens with memory, “You learn how to cry in the cradle / And you learn how to lie in jail” and slowly moves towards dream, where he’s sure he’ll be when he gets out but not sure at all, the dreams are impoverished, weak things, “I’ll steal my Mama’s station wagon / Fill it full of whiskey and gas / Drive on up to Macon / And sit in front of Rachel’s house” and even the delusions of grandeur don’t pay off, “They might write a book about me / I could sign a movie deal / And the lawyers can take all the money / Just as long as Johnny Cash plays me” and then it’s back to “In a line”.

If I see a more moving or enthralling performance this year, it will be a great year.  Which is saying something in a year that’s pretty great already, with Larkin Grimm and Sarah Borges and Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Leonard goddamn Cohen.  Thanks go as always to Chip Kobe and Bob Teague for brining this to town.