Records of the Year, 2011

There are always great records getting made, no matter how bad it gets.   This year I felt a little disconnected, got a little caught up in trend chasing and my motto for 2012 is fuck that noise.  I still found stuff that knocked me sideways and this is only a sampling.

1.  Blueprint, Adventures in Counter Culture – Long Columbus’s best producer, maybe Columbus’s best rapper for the last handful of years, but as big a fan as I am?  This record is a full-on motherfucker, breaking through to new clarity and new truth and leaving the listener exhilarated.  The beats have a new spacious quality, catchy and head-knocking but everything in sharper quality and the little details are more apparent and get stuck in your head – the vocoder and synth bounce of “Automatic”; the kicks and subtle static on “Go Hard or Go Home”; the huge, sparingly doled out snare sound on “My Culture” – everything feels of a piece, as an album, but without sounding samey or monochromatic.  And the words are, of course, top notch, and like the beats, the product of the same mind but still varied in tone from the singing anthem “So Alive” to the wry barfly story I think all my friends can relate to “Keep Bouncing” to the clenched fist ars poetica “Radio-Inactive”.  Lines you can quote and you’ll find something new every listen.

2.  Tune-Yards, Whokill – This might’ve been the first record I wholeheartedly loved this year; a slap across the face, a Graceland for my generation but really synthesizing and really absorbing the African influence instead of just appropriating.  Rickety keyboards, fierce lyrics, fiery drumming and that perfect sandpaper voice going from a scream to almost cabaret-style recitation.  The use of negative space and dynamics is unparalleled this year or most years, quiet and loud both have aggression and sensuality; dance and protest music at the same time, fist pumping choruses that keep the beautiful release but also undercut it.  A record like life, where sex and politics and love and joy are all more complicated then they seem and at first easily digestible slogans twist and obscure and reveal themselves over time.

3.  Raphael Saadiq, Stone Rollin’ –Raphael Saadiq can do almost no wrong in my book.  Where his last record The Way I See It was a fizzy Motown riff with some of the catchiest songs of his career, a record very much about leaving other things out, Stone Rollin’ is closer to his classic solo debut Instant Vintage, a big, sweaty all-encompassing look at the world.  Beatles strings, Chicago soul horns, greasy organ, bass lines from James Jamerson play with bass lines from Steve Swallow, and Saadiq’s own guitar in the manner of Curtis Mayfield or Waylon Jennings are jumbled up in the song and the record.  This a record with songs for every dance step you know and dance steps you need to make up, familiar and warm, with the  nuttiness and complexity of the finest bourbon.

4.  Tyshawn Sorey, Oblique-I – I heard some amazing jazz this year but this one made it impossible to pay attention to anything else the first few times I heard it.  Sorey takes the spare, icy song forms of Koan and puts them in the instrumentation context of more traditional jazz – guitar, alto sax, keys, bass, drums.  The songs recall Bartok as much as Paul Motian, contained and folky enough to think you grasp them but wriggling out from that grasp and never letting you get too comfortable.  Loren Stillman’s alto sax does a lot of melodic work but just as frequently does an amazing job seeming like it’s supporting the real melody in the rhythm section. Todd Neufield, a name new to me, does a perfect job on guitar, alternating between spreading almost indistinguishable grout between organ, sax and bass with Grant Green ice skating lines and Joe Strummer jagged stabs that really let the texture show.  Keys and bass are also more than fine.  But Sorey’s drums, of course, carry the day, he sounds like the best parts of every drummer I’ve ever loved – Max Roach, Andrew Cyrille, Sunny Murray, Elvin Jones, Jeff Watts, Paul Motian – but sounds so distinctive he’s a drummer you can pick out from a mile away in a million contexts.  Never better than doing his own compositions, sometimes using the snare and hi-hat for expected propulsion, sometimes just painting shadows with the snare, sometimes letting the song hang with the kick like a heartbeat, and usually doing at least two of these things at the same time.  Breathtaking.

5.  Black Swans, Don’t Blame the Stars – Every time a new Black Swans record comes out I say it, and I don’t see any signs of stopping: Jerry Decicca is the best songwriter in town and one of the best working today.  I’ve already waxed rhapsodic about Don’t Blame the Stars but to say again, it’s not only as beautiful as all the Black Swans records but it’s a different kind of beautiful.  This is a record more concerned with the outside world and maybe more accessible to people who found the earlier work intimidating or hermetic.  All the playing is amazing, from Noel Sayre’s violin – this is the last record of their he worked on before his tragic early death – through Canaan Faulkner’s bass, Chris Forbes’ guitar, Jon Beard’s keys, Brian Jones’ drumming, all recorded crisply and warmly by Keith Hanlon.  If these songs let you go, you might be dead inside.

6.  Amy Lavere, Stranger Me –Lavere’s always been a good singer and an interesting bass player but for me this is the record where she really came into her own.  From the opening track, “Damn Love Song” with its caveman stomp drums, surging organ and guitar stings this record takes old forms and plays them with a simultaneous knowledge of the history and with such fire and confidence that they sound brand new.  One of the best breakup records I’ve ever heard, hitting all the moods from sexy to angry to wry with lyrics that lift the narrative above the self and give it independent life. Arrangements are just surprising enough without being showy, as on “You Can’t Keep Me” with a great Pat Place post-disco bass line and mariachi trumpets after “I’m not your pet / I’m gonna break the chain you have / Tied around my neck / I’m stomping out here / I hope the dishes rattle down / Off your shelf / And if I see you first / I’ll run like hell.”

7.  Craig Taborn, Avenging Angel –I wrote about this record at some length already.  A shuffling of every great jazz piano solo and a meditation with so much life in it it feels breathless. 

8.  Times New Viking, Dancer Equired – Times New Viking always had hooks, but this warm, clearer record put the lyrics and the melodies a little more easily graspable.  Everyone stepped their game up in a more accessible way, Jared Phillips’ guitar, Adam Elliot’s drums, Beth Murphy’s keys, all contribute equally to infectious riffs and sticky melodies and the singing claims a more central space.  In sanding the fuzz down, instead of the smoothness being uncomplicated, new contours showed up and the swaggering melancholy that was always there was irresistible now.  For what it’s worth, this record also boasted my favorite love song of the year, “Don’t Go to Liverpool.”

9.   Now Ensemble, Awake – My favorite bit of chamber music this year.  The first track, “Change” was one of the most stunning things I heard all year with pulsing, overlapping cells of horns and piano and little guitar stings building a painting in turns, stops and surges and perfectly controlled splatter.  And the rest of the record maybe didn’t better better that but it kept the intensity up for the rest of its length.

10. Jessica Pavone, Army of Strangers – Jessica Pavone comes out just about every year with a record that tops everything she’s done and justifies my fandom, whether it needed justifying in the first place.  This record takes her classical work (as on last year’s lump in the throat Songs of Synastry and Solitude) and her improv work (with Anthony Braxton, Taylor Ho Bynum and others) and puts them in a string-driven rock context that no one’s done this well since the first couple of Dirty Three records.  Moody washes of ink animated Stan Brakhage style, color rupturing darkness and silence splitting sound apart and vice versa. 

11. Hayes Carll, KMAG YOYO (And Other American Stories) – Hayes Carll should be the great hope of mainstream country if the world would pay attention.  A thin voice with a tight-enough band but a textbook example of the sum being greater than the parts.  The record has a few curveballs, what feels like enough weirdness to keep the writer from getting bored or complacent, as in the cut-up morphine dream rockabilly of the title track and the Eddie Cochrane meets Booker T boogie for the new Depression of “Stomp and Holler”.  But where this excels is its takes on traditionalism, the sensitive-but-not-quite-broken Merle Haggard ballad of “Chances Are” and the almost-minimal break up remembered with a smile of “Bye Bye Baby” and the slightly political sex duet with Cary Ann Hearst of “Another Like You.”  He writes melodies you’re sure you’ve heard before and lyrics that sound like the bar conversation you always think you had until the next morning’s phone call to rattle off your indiscretions.

12. Gabriel Kahane, Where Are the Arms – Kahane’s second album of pop songs is an ice sculpture of an exposed nerve.  It takes up the gauntlet thrown down by those beautiful David Garland records and pushes on the rib cage, connecting the inherent minimalism in rock with the pulse of minimalism and wrapping it around heartbreaking songs sung perfectly.

13. Psychedelic Horseshit, Laced – Matt Whitehurts’s Psychedelic Horesehit project is often the best kind of frustrating.  He has a habit of discarding something the second he seems to have it under control, taking that one kernel of truth out of it and putting it in a context where he’s no longer so confident.  So this second proper album was a surprise but not a surprise at all.  Working principally with percussionist Ryan Jewell, this is a record of pop dance motifs including tropicalia and Eurodisco turned inside out and held together by Whitehurst’s guitar under layers of dirty gauze and that sneering, post-Ron House lyrical sensibility.  This record was a breath of fresh air whenever it came on my ipod and I couldn’t help but stop random and let the whole thing play.

14. Anna Calvi, Anna Calvi – This record is a monument to complicated, raw sensuality.  As much about the way breath feels in her (for a lot of definitions of “her”) lungs, inside and out as it is about the on-the-page content.  That said, the content’s pretty damn good too with songs worthy of Roy Orbison or Nick Cave – it wasn’t a surprise when she opened for Grinderman – with minimal percussion and blankets of harmonium, cut through by oil-spill strings and Calvi’s flamenco guitar.  This record has the sexiness of being held in mid-air over curved, sharpened knives.

15. Hunx and his Punx, Too Young to Be in Love – There are few things I like more than girl group music, and no one’s writing better songs in that mold than Hunx. 

16. Baby Dee, Regifted Light – Another great, piano-heavy record from one of the great songwriters of this confused, joyful, fucked-up age.  A few gorgeous instrumentals around Baby Dee’s always heart-wrenching and frequently hilarious songs, particular attention should be paid to the title track “His blessing glistens on my back / And multiplies / As I regift it to your eyes / Its gentleness increases”.

17. Psandwich, Northren Psych –Every few years, Ron House reappears with a new set of songs that put everyone in Columbus on notice.  One of his best bands, and that’s saying something, and they’re firing on all cylinders with Zac Szymusiak’s drums heavy on kick and tom, Bobby Silver’s melodic bass playing and the snaking, searing guitars of Brett Burleson and John Olexovitch building barbed wire sculptures around House’s voice and lyrics. 

18. Harris Eisenstadt, September Songs – Eistenstadt’s compositions just get stronger and his drumming continues to blow me away.  As much as I love his usual sextet, there’s a lushness and immediacy in this trio – with Angelica Sanchez on drums and Ellery Eskelin on tenor – that I can’t get enough of.  Ballads that harken back to the dark-sexy side of ‘60s Blue Note but without ever being a museum piece.

19. Cheater Slicks, Guttural: Live 2010 –It’s a live Cheater Slicks record they thought was good enough to release.  Of course I think anyone reading this needs to buy it.  This band has been on a big resurgence the last few years and this does an amazing job of capturing the volatile, snarling energy of them on a good night in a little bar.

20. Charalambides, Exile –Everything those of us who are fans expect from a Charlambides record but somehow avoiding the trap of being stale or precious.  Christina Carter’s voice still cuts through the guitar landscapes like a knife and oblique narratives float on top of everything, meditative but always unsettling.

21. Follies, Broadway Revival Cast Recording – I’ve been obsessed with Sondheim for as long as I’ve cared about music – the same friend introduced me to Sondheim as, a few years later, introduced me to whiskey; I’m never sure if I should send him a gift every year or punch him – but the original cast recording of Follies always sounded really shoddy, despite the talk (which I believe) being that it was one of the best casts of all time.  So I knew the songs but didn’t know them until this new revival.  The cast is just about perfect – Bernadette Peters sounding incredibly fragile as Sally Durant, Ron Raines as Ben Stone coming apart – and everything is just clear enough.  These are ghosts meant to be seen in close up.

22. Jenny Hval, Viscera –A perfect title for a near-perfect record.  This is an accounting of everything inside and everything that keeps a person moving, without obscuring any of the dripping unevenness. 

23. Matthew Shipp, Art of the Improviser – A perfect summing up of Shipp’s solo piano and working trio, taking on his compositions from many periods of his career and standards and applying a cubist’s logic to get at the real emotional, structural core. 

24. Colin Stetson, New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges – One of the most stunning solo saxophone composed records I’ve ever heard.  Little dashes of electronics and brief guest appearances by Laurie Anderson and Shara Worden help fill out the universe.  Just like the stunning Tara Donovan sculpture in my other best-of list I said used mylar to trap the light it’s sculpting with, these are sculptures of pure breath, exorcism via exhalation.

25. Noveller, Glacial Glow –Sarah Lipstate continues the evolution of the Noveller project getting cleaner and more focused but always keeping up that intensity and that mystery.  As a solo guitar record this is an interesting companion to the Stetson record on the list, how much feeling can you funnel through that intense, meditative stripping-away and how do you make it flower, how do you make it explode into a night sky?

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Shows of the Year, 2011

Great year for live music, with only having to travel for work for a few isolated weeks instead of months at a time I saw 125 shows and honestly very few of them were weak.  But these were the 20 that fought for themselves in my memory, that I wanted all my friends to be there seeing and was glad for whatever friends of mine were there, whether it was 100 or 2.  As with the other posts, everything in in Columbus unless otherwise stated.

1.  Tyondai Braxton and the Wordless Music Orchestra, 03/07/11 (Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center; Manhattan) – The sound of the world cracking open and being born.  Playing a record I’d already been in love with but hearing it in a great-sounding room with all the woodwinds and strings and a four-person vocals/kazoo section was eye opening to say the least.  Colors bleeding into each other and exploding in the back of my head and this raw, perfect joy.  Just joy.

2.  JC Brooks and the Uptown Sound, 12/02/11 (The Basement) – JC Brooks also appeared on my theater list this year but the first time they came to Columbus doing their set – they were the backing band for my top-rated Numero Group show at the Lincoln Theater a few years ago – reaffirmed their status as the best live band working today.  A new lineup with no horns, stripped down and ready for action, with those same great songs that embrace everything from James Brown to the Delfonics to Johnny Thunders to Sonic Youth as dance music.  Even with a sadly small crowd – probably 50 people – Brooks didn’t for one second phone it in, a sweat-drenched, perfectly sung performance that had everyone in the palm of his hand, and the band was right there behind him.  Music like this is what’s keeping soul alive.

3.  Liminanas/Gaz Gaz, 08/19/11 (The Summit) – A band, Liminanas, that comes to the US for the first time (at least for a full tour) and really come out with something to prove.  They and Gaz Gaz teamed up to do both sets as a barbed wire wall of 7-piece sound.  Great, catchy songs sung in a manner just disaffected enough - caring/not caring blurring into one another.  A mix of elements that’s not new – a dash of Velvet Underground pulse instead of beat, ‘60s girl group vocals and drums, Ramones drive, clean and dirty guitars switching prominence between verse and chorus, and a tambourine player who looks like he’s having the time of his life – but all played with such fire and charm that it sounded brand new.  The whiskey was sweeter, the smiles grew bigger and by the time we all stumbled into the night slick with sweat we felt washed clean.

4.  Budos Band, 02/26/11 (Outland on Liberty) – For all my bitching about poor Columbus crowds, once in a while my city really does me proud and this time they did it again with Budos Band.  The last of three shows A. and I made it to that night (and not a stinker in the bunch, I should say, Rodney Crowell acoustic and the Bill Frisell/Greg Leisz tribute to Speedy West and Jimmy Bryant were both top notch also) and it was a scorcher.  Promoting their great third record, III, as the sax player said, “It’s the one on the merch table with the fuckin’ cobra”, bari sax melting over the crowd, trumpet raining knives, bass twitching like a raw nerve and walls of percussion and guitar undulating in time.  These last three shows on the list, I danced more than I did at any other show.

5.  Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society and Dan Zezelj, Brooklyn Babylon,  11/09/11 (Brooklyn Academy of Music; Brooklyn) – I was really torn whether to put this in the “theatre” list or the “shows” list, but as good as Zezelj’s images and animation were – and they were very good – this was all about the music for me.  Everything perfectly balanced, big, brassy, cinematic music that harkened back to classic Basie and Jones/Lewis but also full of modern riffs and touches including electronics and the whole band playing percussion, no boundaries but always within the realm of the narrative, nothing showy.  I was so enraptured I didn’t want this to end; barring a DVD, I’d love a CD of this music.

6.  Robbie Fulks, 05/23/11 (The Hideout; Chicago) – Fulks’ Monday residency at the Hideout is a treat everyone who can get to Chicago should experience as often as possible.  The joy of seeing Fulks as a player and a songwriter not hemmed in by budget or travel or the third booked night in a row where he’s lucky to get gas money has really brought a flowering of the artist he’s always been.  His ad hoc recurring band the night A. and I were in Chicago, The Scavengers, had Robbie Gjersoe on guitar, KC McDonough on bass and organ, and Gerald Dowd on drums and everyone singing.  As purely fun a night of music as I had, full of wacky surprises – bebop and funk instrumentals played as perfectly as anyone right now, covers of Jon Hartford and Bobbie Gentry and Bill Fox, some new Fulks originals that were heartbreaking and wry as always, everything good about the last 40 years of pop music in a tiny room played out of love.

7.  Hell Shovel and Day Creeper, 10/05/11  (Ace of Cups) – Anyone  who’s ever seen one of these lists knows I love Demon’s Claws, but even I was unprepared for Jeff Clarke’s new band.  The Riders of the Purple Sage on mushrooms, Old 97s with a taste for meth instead of whiskey, whatever comparisons you want to make the material and playing is more than strong enough to stand up to it.  Songs that split the difference between Carl Perkins and Johnny Thunders but with a deep Suicide love of drone; my happiest musical surprise all year.

8.  Black Swans, 12/30/11 (house concert) – The Black Swans ending a pretty great year that also had them releasing their best album so far and touring like mad, with the wrap-up at this recorded house concert for an invited crowd.  They rolled through 15 songs including new stuff – that sounded fantastic, particularly “Fickle and Faded” – and most of their records, played with characteristic warmth and practiced telepathy.  Songs of loneliness and love bringing a community together.

9.  Josef Van Wissem with Che Chen and Robbie Lee and Paul Metzger and Mike Shiflet, 06/18/11 (Skylab) – van Wissem’s lute playing’s always extraordinary and this set had him, for lack of a better word, more rock and roll style with a deep Keith Richards rhythm but without ever dumbing down.  The flurries of notes all felt perfectly inevitable, and the backing with Che Chen on tapes, percussion and violin and Robbie Lee on a homemade bass clarinet was a wall of sound that cracked my rib cage and left me trying to explain this to people I knew wouldn’t care and not giving a damn.  Mike Shiflet’s opening set was transcendent and Paul Metzger’s set after them of bowed extra-string banjo (I wrote down 12 but thinking about it, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was 18) was the perfect thing to send us all back into the night.  The kind of thing Skylab does better than anywhere else in town that makes Columbus lucky to have them. 

10.  Puffy Areolas and Unholy 2, 04/02/11 (Cafe Bourbon Street) – For a while, the Puffys have been leading Ohio’s charge of joyful, anarchic, greasy rock.  Damon taking up lead vocals as well as guitar started the concentration and adding Bim Thomas (of legendary Bassholes, Obnox, anything worth playing on fame) turned the flame bright blue.  As strong a sweaty, beer-drenched show as I saw all year, the room all leaning in, huddled close as one and dancing simultaneously – that’s right, we were defying motherfucking physics.  The Unholy 2 set afterward that turned into an improbably rocking all star jam was also damn fine.

11. Signal Ensemble and Third Coast Percussion, 03/13/11 (Le Poisson Rouge; Manhattan) – Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians at LPR played flawlessly, with rhythms that sank all the way into your skin and made the molecules of the room vibrate in countless different directions at once.  The capper on one of the best New York trips I’ve ever had, and after it was over, the four of us took a cab to my favorite bar and toasted the night without words.

12. Orgone, 07/14/11 (Ravari Room) and Gang Gang Dance, 07/12/11 (Double Happiness) – Two shows in the same week that were very different but equally invigorating takes on rhythm.  Gang Gang Dance, in one of my favorite new bars of the year almost uncomfortable packed, which makes that kind of music even better.  The waves of people mean you can’t not dance and the long neon taffy synthesizer lines and percussion like a dozen heartbeats in a sack put everyone over the top.  Orgone, sadly playing to maybe ten people at Ravari Room, where I’ve seen a number of great shows, giving their 100% and swirling their psychedelia through vintage Roy Ayers style smooth funk, occasionally throwing us with a hard break.  Bliss.

13. V-Roys, 12/27/11 (Southgate House; Newport, KY) – The Southgate House was one of my favorite venues in Ohio (yeah, I know it’s Kentucky, but it’s the greater Cincinnati area and it doesn’t occur to me in the same breath as venues in Louisville or wherever) which is closing after the 31st.  This show did justice to every  great memory I had there.  Mic Harrison and Scott Miller’s solo projects are fantastic with great songs but there’s a special magic with those two voices and guitars bouncing off each other, which is in no way meant to slight the swinging, driving, supple rhythm section of Paxton Sellers and Jeff Bills.  Still nailing everything from slowly blooming explosions of heartbreak and rage like Miller’s “Lie I Believe”, “Goodnight Loser” and “Sorry Sue” and grimy, ragged power-pop like Harrison’s “Amy 88”, “Sooner or Later”, and Miller’s “Guess I Know I’m Right.” Sure, maybe this went on a little too long and had too many midtempo songs but when someone hasn’t been around in 12 years and they just came back for a few drinks and some sweet memories before they vanish back into the ether, indulgence isn’t a sin it’s a blessing.

14. Group Doueh, Chicha Libra, and Mucca Pazza, 06/25/11 (Cleveland Museum of Art; Cleveland) – Every museum fundraiser should be this good, in all senses.  Well run, plenty of places to get a drink, lines are managed and the music is perfectly curated, never an afterthought.  Group Doueh’s blistering guitar over synth and gospel vocals in twisting mobius strips took my breath away.  Chicha Libre’s Peruvian pop takes on everything from classic French ballads to the theme from the Simpsons worked just as well in the midwest under a warm, cloudy sky as in a tiny Brooklyn club.  Mucca Pazza worked better in these circumstances than I’d ever seen them.

17. Paradoxical Frog, 11/10/11 (Cornelia Street Cafe; Manhattan) – I saw Tyshawn Sorey twice this year, both in sax/piano/drum contexts;  along with being blown away by his playing even more than usual, Paradoxical Frog stunned me with their compositional rigor and ultimate dedication to sound.  Kris Davis’ piano sounds better every time I see her and she was a massive gravitational force with Ingrid Laubrock’s tenor swooping in and pulling out, weaving through Sorey’s upside down lightning storms.  A band all about tone and feeling but still steering clear of any clichéd way to think about those concepts. 

16.  Bassekou Kouyate and Ngoni Ba, 11/18/11 (Wexner Center for the Arts) – The kind of thing the Wexner does better than anyone in town.  An invigorating  show where the main instrumental voices were ngoni of different sizes (may  be called something different, like the difference between a mandolin and a mandocello) ringing out in different ranges with different resonance, under gorgeous not quite gospel vocals, waves of groove and melody melting in and washing over each other and the audience. 

17. Six Organs of Admittance and Black Swans, o8/08/11 (Skully’s)  – I don’t get a lot of joy out of ragging on promoters or venues but the way this show was handled was a fucking travesty.  An act that hadn’t been here in a while, that had always drawn in the realm of 100 people played to 12 by my count not including the opening band, and I can almost guarantee won’t be here again for a long, long time if ever.  But beyond that ass-chapping lack of promotion, this was a beautiful, meditative thing with Six Organs (in solo acoustic mode like the first time I saw him) soothing silence and reflection in paintings of his own blood on a rainy Tuesday right as some chill was puncturing the end of summer.

18. Guitar Wolf and Cheap Time, Bottom Lounge, 05/19/11 (Chicago) – Chicago might be my favorite place to see a straight up, do shots and bounce into people rock show as well as boasting some of my favorite people to see that kind of show with.  Cheap Time came out and got us all moving with what Ken Hite dubbed “The Pretenders recreated as a Replacements tribute band”, Brit-inflected Pop songs with a rust belt sensibility (and a male vocalist really reviving Hynde’s clipped vocal style and range) played by three people bashing through their instruments at the very edge of their ability like it’s the only thing that matters.  And Guitar Wolf came out and destroyed like always, Ramones songs played twice as fast and three times as hard, with stage presence that harkened back to KISS and the Kinks. 

19. Doveman, Nadia Sirota and Owen Pallett, 03/09/11 (Merkin Hall; Manhattan) – Let’s have some love shown to Judd Greenstein’s work with the Ecstatic Music Festival, I’m bummed I can’t make the 2012 iteration (just can’t pull off a trip up there till April this year) but it’s always packed with stuff that I’m drooling over.  This example from last year was perfect.  It started with Owen Pallett doing a number of songs from his mesmerizing Heartland and reaching back to his earlier work under the name Final Fantasy, really reaching into his lungs and playing with his abilities as a singer, enjoying not having to set up loops, really taking advantage of having the string quartet with him.  Then Nadia Sirota played some gorgeous viola pieces, slowly reassembling the quartet behind her, including a new piece Pallett wrote for her.  And Doveman with his charming banter and intoxicating piano and vocals, backed by everyone who’d been on stage that night playing much of his last record and brand new work with new arrangements.

20. Plastic Crimewave Sound and Psychedelic Horseshit, 01/28/11 (Skylab) – The first time I saw Psychedelic Horseshit’s new material live with Matt Whitehurst and Ryan Jewell building taffy sculptures of JG Ballard cityscapes, layer on layer of synth and guitar and percussion both organic and synthesized.  Then Plastic Crimewave came out and did their patented art-rock, Stooges through Hawkwind through earlier Crimson, with those great songs and guitars turned up just loud enough in that little room to pry your third eye open.

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Art Exhibits of 2011

The second of the posts about stuff that turned me on and left me breathless this year.  Every year I get a little more into visual art, with the ravenous hunger of someone trying to catch up because he wasn’t on it enough in his teens (like music or theater).   I’m still a total dilettante, and these are always through untrained eyes but I’m hoping they get trained a little more every year.  I saw some of the best stuff I’ve ever seen this year, all over.  I felt bad I didn’t make it to any new cities – or back to St. Louis, Pittsburgh, etc – but I saw plenty of stuff that sparked me emotionally or got me writing or even made me want to be a better person.

As with the other three, unless stated otherwise it was seen in Columbus, Ohio.

1.  Glenn Ligon, America (Whitney Museum; NYC) –I remember pretty clearly the first time I saw Ligon’s work (depressingly recently) at the Wexner Center here in Columbus and how stunned I was.  His work still stuns me, both what I’ve seen before and what’s new to me, the potency of the narrative and the politics suffusing the aesthetic but never losing sight of the purely aesthetic pleasures.  No narrative, no history, no theory is left unquestioned in Ligon’s work and the drugs all come to you through needles in your eyes.

2.  Willem de Kooning, de Kooning: A Retrospective (Museum of Modern Art; NYC) – I was already a de Kooning fan but this retrospective was perfect.  This is a textbook case of how to do a blockbuster exhibition that’s earned its bonafides and even has things around some corners for the true fans/geeks to surprise and awe.  For me, this was more about the pastels and sketches and the final room of his late Alzheimer's paintings, all sharper lines and eye-scorching color, but if you didn’t know anything this would show you all you need to know and if you know everything this would be gorging yourself on your favorite chocolates.

3.  Josephine Halvorson, What Looks Back (Sikkema Jenkins & Co. Gallery; NYC) – The most stunning new set of paintings I’ve seen in a long time, the kind of work that makes your hair stand up.  Generally inert objects: a door starting to rot, a set of channel locks, masonry coming apart, in one of the most arresting moments a splayed rib cage, all in uncomfortable/disorienting closeup.  They’re painted very realistically, except for inhuman perspectives, and tiny expressionistic touches – a hole that’s one blob of color – that add to the overall mystique.  The color palette is muted and warm but also a little drab, shutting down the sensual eroticism as it starts to rise up.  Like a Raymond Carver poem or a Gary Braunbeck short story, the straightforwardness belies other metaphors, the whiff of mortality gets overpowering at times, but even things starting to go still hum with life. 

4.  Nathalie Djurberg, Human Behavior (Wexner Center for the Arts) – The blockbuster of the Wexner Center’s spring exhibitions was the very fine Louise Bourgeois/Hans Bellmer exhibit but the Djurberg was what I kept going back to and kept stunning me.  Her videos – with music by Hans Berg – got chuckles for their vintage claymation format, “the darkest Davey and Goliath episode ever” and it uses that childlike sense to drop the hammer.  Sexual abuse, racial violence, the grinding under the wheels of avarice keep pounding at you but there’s such a strong understanding of psychology and the nuance of the medium that it never gets didactic.  The audience is engaged while they’re repulsed.

5.  David Wojnarowicz, Spirituality 1974-1990 (PPOW Gallery, NYC) – On a slightly smaller, more focused scale than the De Kooning, this was a blistering retrospective with a knife in the eye at every corner.  This is a scalpel into the dark, crusted-over cynicism in the heart of belief. Bursting with arresting images – ants climbing over classical art, a crucifix, a gun, a conquistador; the iconic “Silence = Death” with the lips sewn shut; collages with homeless children and headlines and babies and luchadores – that led to the hope inside of all defiance and the defiance inside of all hope.  I walked out of this practically in tears.

6.  Alexis Rockman, A Fable for Tomorrow (Wexner Center for the Arts) – An environmental cri de coeur, full of acrylic paintings of nature gone wrong.  Genetically altered animals ready for slaughter, actual trash between the painting and the surface, but kept from being an airbrushed van or a Heavy Metal cover with the intellectual rigor and deep reality under everything.  There’s a playfulness that underscores the horror and a rigorous classicism in the compositions.  Every time I saw these there was always more to see.

7.  Various Artists, The Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven (Canzani Center at Columbus College of Art and Design) – James Voorhies blew me away with his curation of this group exhibit at the local private art school.  The Love and Rockets-based title was a feint, attaching the show to a more obvious nostalgia and lulling you into false comfort before the more rigorous look at the detritus of post-modernism.  Highlights included: Mark Leckey’s and Alejandro Vidal’s homoerotic, hypnotic videos, Lara Kohl’s stunning ice sculpture of a remembered fairy tale inside an unadorned old freezer, Mary Lum’s photograph and painting hybrids that re-energized things that might go unseen or unnoticed.

8.  Various Artists, Nulla Dies Sine Linea (Instituto Cervantes; Chicago) – A fantastic look at contemporary Spanish drawing.  Breathtaking comic strips, Santiago Talavera’s empty but overstuffed with endorsements golf island.  Sure, with the 23 artists represented there was going to be some chaff but what was good left me chattering like an idiot and there was a massive bounty of riches here.

9.  Frances Stark, My Best Thing (PS1; NYC) – An episodic video of Stark’s online sex chat transcripts “acted” out by what looked like digital Playmobil figures in their underwear with subtitles and read by a text reader.  I didn’t expect much either, but this piece was entrancing.  Suddenly three chapters later I look around and not only am I still there, four people who were in when I came into the gallery are still there too.  A look at what we talk about when we’re trying to get laid and how much deeper that intimacy leads us into everything else we talk about.  This was a perfect refocusing after the interesting-but-flawed September 11 exhibit upstairs and a work that gave me a lot to chew on for the trip back to Manhattan.

10. Mark Grotjahn, Three to Five Faces (Shane Campbell Gallery; Chicago) – Grotjahn’s rhythmic, tribal abstractions, layers of paint like stalagmites forming on cave walls was exactly what I wanted to see on a sunny Chicago afternoon right off the Blue line.  The kind of ego-obliterating, meditative show I love and don’t see that often. 

11. Frank Stella, Irregular Polygons (Toledo Museum of Art; Toledo) – A. was right.  She damn near always is.  The Toledo Museum took my breath away on a weekend visiting the spots where my better half grew up.  And while the main collection was awesome, and the Botero exhibit was a hoot, this reassembling of these Frank Stella canvases blew my hair back and gave me a new appreciation for Stella overall.  Bright colors in shapes that created the impression of three dimensions in a way I’d never seen before. 

12. Richard Serra, Junction/Cycle (Gagosian Gallery; NYC) – A labyrinth of rusting metal almost reddish-brown, twice as tall as any person and curving in and back so the hallways it created suddenly narrowed.  The sculpture puts you back inside your body and suddenly you’re more aware of your own mumbling through the echoes, and every step needs planned out, navigated.  It almost begs to be experienced with a stillness but the closeness compels you to move on.  I had dinner with one of my dearest friends on that trip and this was the one thing we were both tripping over ourselves to tell the other about.

13. Laurel Nakadate, Only the Lonely (PS1; NYC) – This piece threw me for a loop – 365 “snapshots” of the artist crying, in different circumstances, with different backdrops.  It was almost daring the viewer to come up with a story, a unifying narrative for what made her cry every day.  And then the other component consisted of videos where Nakadate got college girls to strip while saying in an even voice, “You’re so beautiful.  You know, you’re the prettiest one.”  Throwing a wrench in assumptions and inherited gender roles even if intellectually you’ve already discarded most of them.  Thought provoking and deeply visceral.

14. Tara Donovan, Drawings (Pins)/Untitled (Mylar) (Pace Gallery; NYC) – These two Tara Donovan pieces spread over two branches of the Pace Gallery made my mouth dry and left me stammering.  Untitled was Mylar folded into overlapping orbs with the folds visible inside like cauliflower turned inside out.  The orbs are asymmetrically lined up so it’s an enormous mass, looking like it’s tumbling over itself or growing like mold, but the way the folds are used – and the combination of skylight and artificial light at Pace – gives the impression that she sculpted with the light, the Mylar’s just there to trap it.  It looked like the birth of the universe.  Drawings was pins of different sizes and angled different stuck in canvas to give the illusion of shading, a slower burn but incredibly complex and incredibly effective, and again, light’s the subject and the medium, metal and canvas are just the conduit for transference.

15.  Uta Barth, untitled (Tanya Bonakdar Gallery; NYC) – Like the Donovan, this was also all about light.  Photos of a shower curtain which were laid out sequentially so the river of light through the center made a horizon.  There’s no attempt to hide the materials or the contrivance, the large format digital photos had some serious artifacting in places and a human hand – the photographer or an assistant – appears in a few pictures, clearly turning the curtain for better effects.  But ultimately, it’s just the drama in light shockingly breaking up our everyday that made my heart sing.

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Theater and Dance of the Year, 2011

This is the first of four blog posts recapping what really turned my crank this year.  Nothing’s comprehensive, obviously everything’s hemmed in by what I managed to see/hear (I got better at cataloging the books I read, but not better enough; hopefully next year will include a fave books and a return of fave movies), which is in turn hemmed in by money/a desire to keep my job, time, and sanity.
My year in theater didn’t have the best batting average – sometimes the radar goes wonky.  So I only have 10 things that came to mind for the best of the year; I might have had some reservations, but if anyone asked me if they should see any of these things, it was an unequivocal yes.  There were a number of things with GREAT, astonishing parts – Laurie Metcalf’s performance and Joe Mantello’s direction in The Other Place; Lily Rabe and Alan Rickman’s work and Sam Gold’s direction in Seminar; the dance sequences to Underworld’s music in Beautiful Burnout; the performances and singing in Falsettos; Acacia Duncan in Hum; big chunks of Thomas Browning’s Burning I’m still processing.  But all of those had some unsatisfying element, usually the material.  These are ten shows (for lack of a better word, I included opera and dance) I can stand behind… you know, if anyone asked.
1.  Satyagraha by Philip Glass and Constance DeJong (Metropolitan Opera, NYC) – The first Glass opera I’d ever seen live though I’d been a fan for a long time, and I was stunned.  An orchestra of organ, woodwinds and strings, no brass or percussion, a small cast, a set of headlines and corrugated metal all added up to one of the most moving things I’ve ever seen on a stage.  Waves of diamond, glittering sound subsuming you and tossing you up, and Richard Croft’s Gandhi was an injection of pure light in his phrasing and singing, a tenor you’re lucky to see once.  I was in tears a few times, and the climax of the second act was an image that I think will always stick with me.
2.  Passing Strange by Stew and Heidi Rodewald (Balliwick, Chicago) – The first midwestern production of Passing Strange worked like a charm, partly thanks to JC Brooks and the Uptown Sound in the place of Stew and his band.  The band was smaller and tighter and Brooks sank his teeth into the material coming up with a different take: angrier, more physically present, that was electrifying.  And the rest of the cast was pitch-perfect, especially Steven Perkins as Youth and LaNisa Renee Frederick as his mother.  As with last year’s Merrily We Roll Along this is the rare revival that made me wish so badly there was a recording (any bootleggers, get at me) and when I listen to my original cast recording these are the faces I see.
3.  Skyscrapers of the Midwest by Matt Slaybaugh, adapted from Joshua Cotter (Available Light) - A meditation on growing up, with its intertwined braids of sex, pain, and death.  The way the town you grow up in can hem you in and suffocate you but always takes you back.  With dinosaurs and robot heroes!  As pure a jolt of fizzy adrenaline, mainlined sugar with just enough sour to keep its edge, as anything I’ve ever seen.  And a great middle finger to anyone who says comic books don’t make good theater.
4.  A Short History of Crying by Sanja Mitrovic (La MaMa ETC, NYC) - Sanja Mitrovic’s one woman show at La Mama (as part of a Croatian theater festival in New York) was the most physical, immediate thing I saw all year.  If she’d grabbed me by the collar and performed the work right into my face it wouldn’t have been more striking.  Different narratives that all illuminate the different reasons for/meanings of crying  through epic political tragedy and folk songs.  The different ways to be broken are dealt out, seemingly at random, until the mosaic she was building all along is clear.  This is hobbled by its last 5 minutes (in this case, celebrity impressions), but everything up to that is so good it can charge that to the game.
5.  L’Effet de Serge by Philip Quesne (Vivarium Studios, Wexner Center for the Arts) – This is exactly the kind of thing that makes the Wexner Center invaluable to Columbus.  A French play that left me walking out the door (and the couple miles home) skating on air.  A gorgeous ars poetica that puts the common every day and simple, childlike play at the very core of art.  Which we should all do well to remember, whatever our individual art is.
6.  The Rehearsal: Playing the Dane adapted from William Shakespeare (Pan Pan, Wexner Center for the Arts) – I wasn’t the biggest fan of Pan Pan’s punk rock Oedipus that came through town a couple of years ago that felt to me like more sizzle than steak, but this made up for that big.  A deconstructed Hamlet with the requisite in-jokes (a great dane that maybe is only there because he’s a great dane, but cute dogs are almost never wrong on stage).  However, the look at different interpretations in the first act turning into a really moving, condensed take on Hamlet and the acid trails of interpretations that could have been in the second was satisfying as a riff on Shakespeare, satisfying as a riff on theatrical history, and satisfying as a piece of theatre in its own right (though I wouldn’t recommend seeing it unless you already know Hamlet a little bit).
7.  Southern Bound Comfort by Gregory Maqoma and Sid Larbi Cherakoui (Wexner Center for the Arts) - One of the best examples I’ve seen of the way dance can subvert and transcend the body even while making the rest of us more aware that we’re living in our own skin.  The noose tree and the noose baby were provocative, powerful images but the way they were arrived at and then worked with was so fresh and the movements so subtle they were even more shocking in the aftermath of the dance.
8.   Just Kids by Sean Lewis (Available Light) - Everything I see Sean Lewis in trumps the last thing which already hit me so hard my teeth rattled.  And this take on his father through different stages of his life is a damn tour de force.  His portrayal of “Rick” is searing but with a deep empathy and massive amounts of charm, and the way tape is incorporated is better than anything this side of Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape.  The writing crackles like everything he does but there’s a much stronger use of space and silence this time, the pauses make everything feel lived in and Matt Slaybaugh’s direction balances that without letting the audience catch our breath.
9.  How to Live Safely in a Science Fiction Universe by Jennifer Fawcett and Matt Slaybaugh, adapted from Charles Yu (Available Light) - Available Light’s second comic book adaptation in a 12 month period (different seasons) and it’s also a home run.  Elena Perantoni-Fehr’s a wonder as always and her work as the computer who is almost as emotionally stunted as the protagonist is funny, flirty, and very moving.  Ian Short’s perfect as the nerd forced into becoming an active participant in his own life, a grippingly physical performance.  Jennifer Fawcett and Matt Slaybaugh’s adaptation is just about flawless, Dave Wallingford’s technical cues went off seamlessly (except when showing the seams made it more immediate).  The work pulls its punches with an easy moral and too much explaining in the last few minutes, but everything up till then is a great Dr. Who episode written by Samuel Beckett.  Your inner child is sadder than you remember.
10. House/Divided by James Gibbs, Moe Angeleos, and Marianne Weems (Builders’ Association, Wexner Center for the Arts) - I already wrote at length about this show, but Builders Association attempt to draw connections between the dustbowl (via Grapes of Wrath) and the digital dust bowl the country’s facing now was mostly a worldbeater.  The contemporary stuff had some flaws in the specifics but the Steinbeck was perfectly realized and the technology was magnificent.  Giant spectacle that was always underpinned by a crushing sadness, the scope only intensified the pain and desperation.  Muddy water takin’ back the land.

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The Monster needs profit, it cannot stay the same size. House/Divided, Wexner Center, 10/08/11

“Those days like one drawn-out song, monotonously
promising.  The quick step, the watchful march march,
All were leading here, to this room, where memory
stifles the present.  And the future, my man, is long
time gone.”
--Amiri Baraka, “Letter to E. Franklin Frazier”

The Builders Association has a long, fruitful relationship with the Wexner Center, and a dedication to making art that’s deeply tied to the moment.  Sometimes that timeliness works beautifully, sometimes the headlines aren’t digested enough into the art – for what it’s worth, I loved Alladeen  and mostly liked Super Vision, and I think I’ve  written here about my disappointment with their most recent work to play Columbus, Continuous City.

It took me a while to write about House/Divided, partly because I don’t blog about work, I don’t intend to blog about work, and I’d need to get HR clearance if I wanted to blog about work.  But I work for a large bank in mortgage servicing.  And I’ve had family members and close friends foreclosed on and/or given loans they didn’t have any chance of paying back in the first place.  So maybe I had an extra layer of personal resonance with the subject matter, but I think I can review this without saying anything about my work instead of theirs.

 House/Divided was developed with the Wexner Center and particularly looking at foreclosures around the Weinland Park neighborhood, just South and East of the OSU Campus.  If people out of town know that neighborhood for anything, it’s where the Short North Posse, familiar to readers of F.E.D.S. magazine or Vickie Stringer books, were based.  That’s also the neighborhood where Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, recently gave a speech at a newly remodeled elementary school.

Three mostly distinct strands are braided in House/Divided – Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, the foreclosure of a specific house in Weinland Park, and the overall state of the financial meltdown (at first symbolized by a handful of cogs in a bundling/mutual fund bullpen and loan originators and then through Alan Greenspan).  Obviously, not all of these strands are equal, and they’re not all quite as well-developed, but the effort’s worth a hell of a lot and when they do work together it’s the most moving thing I’ve seen all year.

Grapes of Wrath is the spine of the piece and it’s handled incredibly well, pared down to the perfect moments to show the characters are distinct people but also as representative of conflicted hope and desperation and what happens when hope rots in your throat.  Also, it’s good that they knew what of Steinbeck’s structure to not use.  They didn’t go through Tom Joad’s killing a man, or that famous speech, which would’ve been incredibly distracting and I had a pang they were going there when they followed it so closely, through Rose of Sharon’s stillbirth.

The set is perfect – a house built in four rotating sections with elements of an actual foreclosed house inside, a bathtub, a wall that’s been stripped (for copper? for wire?), some piles of clothes and rubble, on top and some older furniture on the bottom, and screens that can come down over it for the purpose of video, with a bank of computers over to the side for the contemporary call center/bullpen sections. 

In the Grapes of Wrath section, the video is good, the music is very good, and the use of these very specifically minimalist sets is perfect.  The beginning of the drive, what many of us remember from the book and almost certainly sticks out from the John Ford movie, is handled with the staircase as the car, perfectly simple and understated but still giving the impression of isolated, cramped, people on top of each other for miles.  As well, the moment when Ma Joad tries to haggle with the company store and the representative’s face is projected right above them, bigger than the entire bottom half where the physical action is occurring, and watching his face change as Joad fixes herself in his mind as an individual, watching him soften, is one of the most stunning in the entire piece.

Neither of the modern strands is quite as successful but suggesting the dramaturge/writers with TBA aren’t as strong as Steinbeck seems a little like an unfair comparison to expect.  That said, the big picture stuff is mostly excellent.  The Lehman Brothers “conference call” could’ve been taken from an actual transcript from one of those conference calls – I’ve no way of knowing if it actually was – and the disposition of Alan Greenspan that ends the piece, which I’m pretty sure is taken from transcripts, where, again, you see his face struggling to maintain composure and explain the comforting aspects of ideology even in the face of such an epic repudiation of his own – “I put too much faith in the bank’s interest in self-preservation” is dead on. 

The Weinland Park stuff is okay but feels rushed and more like ciphers than characters.  There’s a sequence where a customer is arguing with a “mortgage assistance” call center worker who is trying to tell him that his mortgage is a pool loan that feels incredibly false and in sharp contrast to the incredible wordless dismantling of the house set occurring concurrently on stage.  That was my complaint with Continuous City, there were no people to grip onto in the spectacle.  There are people here but the modern people aren’t quite thought through enough, it’s closer, but the Steinbeck props it up a lot. 

That said, those are minor gripes compared to the way my chin dropped into my lap at the set changes, the company store scene, the images of everything practically drowning in a stock market crawl during the Lehman Brothers meltdown, and especially those closing moments with Alan Greenspan intercut with sound and video of a flood coming.  It’s a vital, moving piece I encourage anyone reading this to see if it comes to your town.

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I Want it All; Falsettos, Available Light, 09/15/11

After a righteous reading of Annie Baker’s Circle Mirror Transformations, Available Light’s season started in earnest this weekend with Falsettos, the Tony winning 1992 Broadway stitching-together of two earlier Off-Broadway one acts, March of the Falsettos and Falsettoland, with music and lyrics by William Finn and book by James Lapine.

This production will look very familiar to anyone who saw last year’s triumphant take on Merrily We Roll Along including at least five of the six cast members, director John Dranschak, and a similarly minimal evocative set.  But that’s far from a bad thing, all of those elements are a little more at ease in their roles, a little more fine-tuned, a little more layered and mature. 

I had almost no familiarity with this show at all before coming in – I knew of it but I definitely didn’t know it.  It’s a jewel-box, a chamber operetta and each part gets to glimmer darkly. The beautiful part of this is the contrast between the small moments, one voice or two coiling around each other, and those seconds where the whole mosaic reveals itself, the greater patterns that vanish into the ether as soon as they pass.  The structure upends what you think of for musicals, beginning with all voices in concert and slowly unraveling over the course of the act so each act ends with one voice, not a big, dramatic close. 

Falsettos is the story of Marvin, a grim cipher who leaves his wife and child to take up with a man, Whizzer, while still trying to keep everything “normal” in the conception of that he had growing up.  The first act set in 1979 and the second 1981, he seems impacted by the changes underway but not so much concerned until Whizzer gets sick in the second act. 

Scott Johnson as Marvin is an absolute wonder.  It takes a steady hand to make a contemporary audience care about that guy in a play that seems most dated in its dealing with relationships.  We see him hit his wife, be indifferent to his son at best (there’s a sequence at a baseball game one song after he complains about only getting his son on the weekends where all he can do is bitch about how much he hates baseball and “Oh, there’s the guy I used to fuck”), it’s stated that he gave his wife syphilis, and he comes off as a raging hypocrite.  But it's all handled perfectly; Wilson gets exactly the understated tone he needs to shoot for and his singing is the best in the show.  He manages to keep us engaged in this dark star that all the action and other characters swirl around.  It’s as good a performance as I’ve seen all year and his shrug in the opening of the second act as he sings “It’s time to grow up, don’t you think?” is something that will stick with me for a long, long time.

Kim Garrison Hopcraft as Trina has kind of a strange, underwritten role, almost there to show the effects that Marvin has on other people, but she wrings every bit of potency and power 0ut of it.  Her rage and her joy always bubble through even when the character threatens to be as shadowy as Marvin himself.  Even in the more complicated melodies and emotional territory you always feel the character is grounded in something real, something behind everything.  Adam Crawford as Jason, their son, is quite good, nailing his songs, especially on his heart-rending part of “Father and Son”. 

Chistopher Storer as Whizzer has kind of a thankless role, he gets laughs and appears as contrast to Marvin more than a developed person of his own.  But it’s played wonderfully and sung even better, with the strongest sense of timing in the entire piece.  Nick Lingnofski has the showiest, most broadly comic part in the show and he destroys with it, it’s a dash of classic musical theater showmanship in the middle of a dark piece but he reins it in just enough that he doesn’t feel out of place among everything else.  Danielle Mann and Kate Gersing as Marvin’s neighbors/lesbians who own a catering company in the second act are both very fine, I wish they had a little more to do but it’s nice having different, leavening voices thrown into the mix after the hermetic first act.

The only concern I have with the production is it seems to overplay the dated aspects. With a set as minimal as this – one semi-opaque wall dotted with mirrors, picture frames (for the characters to comment during)  and really nicely done nods to Allan McCollum’s “Substitute Paintings”; a few sections of a late ‘70s couch, a kitchen table, a hospital bed, and lights – everything seems to carry a little more importance and everything very specifically grounds the play in the dynamics of its time.  Other than that, everything good in the play is great and everything not as good is moved past quickly, it’s a production that really moves and really gets this audience member focused on the gorgeous construction of the songs and the wit on the lyrics.  Something anyone interested in theatre should be seeing.

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Craig Taborn, Avenging Angel

“I learned to write
I learned to write
what might be read
on nights like this
by one like me”
-Leonard Cohen, “The only poem”

The Cohen above has been a motto and a signpost for me since I first discovered it my Freshman year of high school and it was the first thing that came to mind while listening to the new Craig Taborn solo record on ECM, Avenging Angel.  It’s a blistering July day where even walking home from lunch will drain and drench you.  I sat down to do some writing and listen to Avenging Angel, and after a draft of a poem what I really want to do is tell somebody how gorgeous this record is.  My real life friends thank you for your indulgence because it’s sparing them – or at least buying them a short reprieve.

In a way I associate with most ECM records but ever so slightly askew, this record is a crisp, clear recording of a beautiful haze.  The first track, “The Broad Day King”, strings melodic cells together along a rhythm that acquires depth and brings volume to the tune through a combination of a strong left hand and deep spaces.   It’s a tune that feels like a day very much like this one. 

Much of the record is very modern pastorals.  “Broad Day King”, which we discussed in the last paragraph.  “Diamond Turning Dream” with its jagged mirror-shard melody.  “A Difficult Thing Said Simply”, maybe my favorite song on the record, with a remarkably apt title; a clear melody that stops and stretches the notes out, this Merce Cunningham dance over and among tall pikes, and then slumps into a meditative state, a glowing repetition.

The other tracks – and this is a wild oversimplification – feel like an abstraction of older jazz tradition, a Willem De Kooning or Franz Kline take on technique that’s such a part of the genre of a solo piano record that in most cases seems rarely questioned, only used or not used.  The one-two punch of “Spirit Hard Knock” followed by “Neither-Nor”  illustrates this, with the first sounding like a Cecil Taylor piece laid over a Bud Powell, that swinging intensity belied by the fact that its swinging in multiple directions and on different axes all at the same time, and the second Art Tatum with a roll of quarters in his fist when you’re not looking.  “Gift Horse – Over the Water” plays with Meredith Monk and Jaki Byard with those seemingly off-kilter rhythms that both add up to a whole that makes sense and makes the tune even catchier and even more swinging.  The closing track, “Forgetful”, feels like a take on film noir cocktail piano, the kind of thing Sinatra could’ve sung over but it never would’ve occurred to him.

I was already a Taborn fan, going back to college when I heard him on Tim Berne’s Shell Game, Bill Laswell’s Dub Chamber, and a couple of James Carter records (it took me a while to realize the same guy was on these wildly different records I loved for such different reasons), but this gave me such a new appreciation for what he does as a composer and an improviser.  There’s so much music here I’ll be digging into it for a long, long time.

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