Sounds That Need an Audience – Amir-El Saffar and the Two Rivers Ensemble, Wexner Center; ? And the Mysterians with Vegas 66, Rumba Cafe; both 04/10/09

Some music you’re better served listening to you in your room.  The too-delicate pop of Ariel Pink, or the strange soft-focus songs of Blank Dogs who underwhelmed me at the Summit but whose records won’t let me be.  The more ambient side of noise and solo-electronics records that just lead to fidgeting and coughing in concert.

A lot of the jazz I first came to love was like that for me, and then I found the descendents of ‘60s free jazz and there was something for me in the ecstatic quality of feeling some thing with everyone else in the room, being uplifted and heartbroken en masse, with that physical intensity blended with the thought and concentration it takes a lifetime to get down. 

And Amir El-Saffar’s group was the kind of thing where you want to have the record to dig deeper into the compositions and the connective tissue, the fine details, but you want it after the show.  I have to confess, as we all have blind spots, of genre, style, and even instrument tonality, I’ve kind of had one against the alto saxophone, unless you’re Ornette Coleman or Anthony Braxton it’s a rare case that I don’t prefer the dark fire of the bari or the greasy snarl of the tenor.  But Rudresh Mahanthrappa comes closer to winning me over every time I hear him and never better than in the set I saw, where he coaxed a gospel purity and a vocal quality at the same time out of his horn, finding ways to dialogue with El-Saffar’s trumpet and santour was as beautiful sax playing as I can ever remember hearing.

And that’s no slight on the rest of the band.  Nasheet Waits is a force of nature and an orchestra all on his own, sculpting intros, cueing other players, guiding the shifting, undulating music through a series of very organically-linked parts until it ended up somewhere that felt both surprising and inevitable.  The upright bassist and percussionist, whose names I’m forgetting, both of whom soloed tastefully and fleshed out the overall feeling of the works, and Zaafir Tawil on oud, violin, and dumbek, whose music I last heard on the Rachel Getting Married score, plus of course the leader, creating a music seared in the heat of feeling but excavated from layers of knowledge and understanding.

After, all I really wanted to do was go home, it had been that kind of day and that kind of week and I knew nothing else would be as strong musically, but I was already promised to Rumba to see ? and the Mysterians, legends of a different stripe. 

First, a brief note on Vegas 66, they have chops for days and can play anything they feel like, and going back to Th’ Flyin’ Saucers you’d be hard pressed to find a better drummer than Rex, of any style.  And I understand, with genres like rockabilly, most of us were inspired to get into it by bands several generations down the line.  As well, when you’ve got a classic band playing, you want a suitably retro opener who isn’t too much like the headliner.

But when your roots-rock trio does three Stray Cats songs, two Reverend Horton Heat songs, “Summertime Blues” and “Play Something Else”?  Really?  All of it executed with note-perfection?  Exhausting.  Fun dance music robbed of its exuberance and chewed till it’s lost its flavor.  But the playing’s so good I’m curious what their own songs are like and odds are pretty good I’ll check them out at Ravari next weekend with my pals The Beatdowns opening, after the Dave Alvin show at the Maennerchor.

By the time ? and the Mysterians, featuring original members this time, not the usual well-rehearsed sideman ? picks to tour with him, hit the stage, the room was packed, shots were downed, and old friends had come out of the woodwork, and they didn’t disappoint.  Despite the super-modern digital keyboard, it pulled off the farfisa sound just fine, and “96 Tears” and its cousins sounded just as catchy and soulful as ever and the best of the surprises, a cover of James Brown’s “Try Me” that brought the goddamn house down.  Lord almighty.  I can’t wait to see them again at the Ponderosa Stomp in New Orleans in a little more than  a week.

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Lay Down Your Head - Scrambler/Seequil, The Abandoned House EP; Mary Halvorson and Jessica Pavone – Thin Air

In the last three or so years, the Brooklyn scene I associate with the Tea Lounge and Bar4 and Issue Project Room has taken a turn towards embracing song forms, especially the folk song, with improvisation and extended technique shot through its veins to mutate it into the latest breed of creature sharing lineage with everything from Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s readings of “The Old Rugged Cross” to Rzewski’s “The People United Will Never Be Defeated”.

Scrambler/Seequil, principally the work of guitarist Mike Gamble and vocalist-painter Devin Febboriello with assistance from Walker Adams (and, live, occasionally Ari Folman-Cohen and Conor Elmes) grew out of Gamble’s solo guitar and loops project Scrambler and this debut EP is evenly split between instrument tracks and those with vocals.  Forgive me, on my copy, the vocal tracks have names but the instrumentals do not. 

One of the great pleasures of The Abandoned House EP is that every time you’ve got it pegged it finds something else in the landscape to which it can draw your attention, without making you feel like you don’t know where you are anymore.  When “Rest For Now” kicks in with its playful taunting vocals, lilting finger-picked guitar and loping country rhythm, it’s easy to settle in for another record on the mainstream edge of freak-folk, but by the following instrumental track that rhythm reappears in a haze of reverb and these chopped cymbal sounds worthy of prime-era Squarepusher and you realize it’s a stranger bird flying around your house. 

Lyrics about the absence in our lives and the effort to build new experiences out of the building blocks of what we already knew delivered with a voice like old leather cured in bourbon and layers that eschew lo-fi for a series of shifting branches that let the light hit each step down in a different way until its dancing patterns can’t be ignored.  The record of a work-in-progress, sure, but watch out:  there’s something here that’s going to to be so dazzling when it blooms in full that you’ll be scrambling to figure out how it got there.

I remember the first time I saw Mary Halvorson and Jessica Pavone as a duo, at the ACME Art Company on one of the fantastic shows Gerard Cox books periodically in town and I was stunned by the sympathetic interplay and also by the bursts of aggression.  This was music that deserved to be heard loud and listened to intently at the same time.  I’d previously seen Halvorson melt faces with Trevor Dunn’s Trio Convulsant and may have seen Pavone that same trip to NYC in a different group, but the potency of this duo was something else.  I’ve seen them a number of times since, together and apart, and I never fail to check in on what they’re up to.

Thin Air, their third album as a duo and first release on Thirsty Ear, drifts through similarly dream-tainted space as the Scrambler/Seequil record, but comes there from a place of having played together and worked with each other’s vocabulary for a long enough time the moves are more intuitive and the timing sharper.  The lyrics are almost always sung in unison, and often buried in instrumental harmonies so you have to strain and when you do catch them, it’s an under-layer of orange against the colors of blue and brown you already saw, it’s what’s darkening and deepening the tunes.  If you want to remind yourself what it feels like to hear a record and think you’re flying, Thin Air. 

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The gap between expectation and reality – Continuous City, Wexner Center, April 17, 2009

I remember the moment when I felt like I had to redress the disparity of my friends.  For dozens of folks I would talk to for hours on line, by phone, by e-mail, those were hours I wasn’t meeting anyone, wasn’t even exposing myself to the chance to meet anyone outside.  But at the same time, most of those online friends are friends to this day, and seeing them a couple of times a year or every couple of years is a joy. 

So I don’t think there’s an easy answer to how readily we can be connected with technology but how that method of connection seems to hollow the connection out.  But that was my trouble with Continuous City, that it didn’t feel like it was trying to reconcile those two ideas at all.  Or making any commentary besides just stating those things over and over again.

All of the Builders Group pieces are beautiful, and this is no exception, the use of video for distance and time and the differing grain and visual quality to represent different kinds and levels of webcams, and there’s a moment with speed lines like a sunset and the same sentence in three different places at once that’s one of the purest, most beautiful pieces of theater magic I’ve ever seen.

But I wish it had been an installation.  The de rigeur new theater technique of addressing the audience as though we’re another person in the room, a group being presented to, is tossed off and the attempts to work in the city where the play is being performed felt tacked on to the rest of the action so it wasn’t bringing the theme closer to home so much as it was the equivalent of a rock start shouting, “Hello, Columbus!” or working Broad Street into a song lyric that used to be about Ventura Boulevard.

The text references Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and in the short descriptions and an amazingly sweet long-distance game of Marco Polo, it almost works but where Calvino can use a brief glimpse to show everything imbued with meaning and magic, the people in this aren’t only ciphers, they aren’t coherent enough to represent anything, they exist to say their lines. 

I’m glad I saw it, not unhappy about the ticket cost, and glad the Wexner Center continues co-sponsoring and and bringing things like this to town, but I left bored and surly, when previous productions by this company had me staring at the stars to confirm the world was still in its right place.

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Waves of Nostalgia, Undertow Warning – Gaslight Anthem, Newport; Garotas Suecas, Rumba Cafe; 03/30/09

“Well it’s past quarter to three
And it’s past the midnight hour
Mustang Sally’s left the building
And we’re so much worse without her
If I could put down this old hammer
I’d take you somewhere new”
-Gaslight Anthem, “Casanova, Baby!”

I’ve said a million times that Gaslight Anthem reads on paper like a band I’d hate, from the pop-punk guitars so bright, clean and sharp you could shave with them to the cliché-riddled lyrics to the delivery that shifts from one influence to another as easily as if it was a G. Love and Special Sauce record… but the songs are so ingratiating, the hooks so big and swinging and they so adroitly walk the line between wistful and anthemic, between songs of death and desperation sung by what looks like the happiest guy on the planet, between the Saturday night at the party and Saturday night is the loneliest night of the week, that I was charmed when I saw them at Bernies and I’ve been charmed since.

And last night at the Newport, after a perfectly fine Heartless Bastards set - especially the steel-seared soaring title track from the new record, The Mountain – Gaslight Anthem walked onto a darkened stage before a damn-near-sold-out audience, and hit the first notes of “Great Expectations”… then lost the thread.

In their defense, sound was classically Newport-bad, within two songs shrieking feedback and completely dropped out vocals and a snare louder than everything else on the stage all made an appearance.  And maybe they were just overcompensating for that.  Maybe they’ve been on tour for a while and were worn out and drifting.  Maybe they choked on headlining this size of venue and suddenly being that band when a couple of months ago they were opening for We March at venues this size and a month or three before that they were playing rooms a quarter of its size or less (the aforementioned Bernies).

But regardless, everything came out in the same full-bore assault, a torrent of words and riffs and shout-along gang vocals that smoothed everything subtle or reflective out to one impenetrable surface.  I was surrounded by good friends to whom I’d, in many cases, talked this band up, and the room was packed with people raising cups and singing along, to a bunch of songs I’ve wanted to hear live since the last time I heard them live and I just couldn’t connect.  The guy who’d let the drummer ride the rockabilly swing a little longer, or bring a punk rock club down with “What Becomes of the Broken Hearted” was there, but his persona had a face lift.  Orpheus got an image consultant.

But maybe it wasn’t cynical, maybe it was them giving a crowd what they think the newer, bigger crowd needs and trying to be all things to all rock and roll kids.  And the packed pit crowd, shouting along and eating it all up, didn’t seem to mind.  But I couldn’t help but thinking those crazed joy-junkies were singing along to the version of the band in their hearts and minds and not the version on stage.

Needing to believe in rock and roll again, I bummed a ride and made my way to Rumba for Garotas Suecas (Swedish girls), the Brazilian band in the US for SXSW touring behind one 7” and some T-shirts, and heart and balls to spare.  Brazil has a particularly rich tradition of taking outside tradition, breathing new life into its lungs and showing it off richer, stronger, and recognizable but also recognizably new, from Villalobos to Jobim to Gil to Tom Ze to tropicalia to baile funk.  And this tradition carried on through Garotas Secuas (Swedish Girls) who hit the stage with two guitars, bass, drums, keys, and a frontman who took Otis Redding and James Chance and Greg Cartwright and turned the voltage up too high until Frankenstein’s stitches melted, such a perfect amalgam it didn’t feel like an amalgam at all.

They played to the faithful on a Monday night in a tiny club and if there were 60 people there, 50 of us were dancing, completely lost in the perfect craft of the acid fried songs and the grooves you had to trust your body to follow, give yourself over to or get lost in more than one sense.  By the walk home every bone in my body was sore and I wanted to hug anyone I saw and shout, “Did you see this?  You need to see this!”  First quarter over, already great as showgoing goes.

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Saturday Night Desire Comes in All Shades – Larkin Grimm at Cafe Bourbon Street, 02/07/09

“Pouring on the garbage and it’s filling up my car
My suffering is meaningless and sticking like the tar
That smothers all grass and lets me drive it to the bar"
And if you want to handle me, just tell me who you are”
-Larkin Grimm, “Dominican Rum”

The weather finally broke and broke so hard it felt like I was some kind of desperate explorer staggering over the cracking ice-skin of the world and just trying to keep my footing Saturday night.  But I might have been staggered in other ways, when I think about it.

First to Ruby Tuesday for the second night of the Lost Weekend 6th Anniversary weekend, after last night’s terrific sets by Night Family and Sandwich, caught the frontman of Moon High doing a solo set that was beautiful.  Maybe colored by news of her death, but he carried the sense of a Blossom Dearie or Peggy Lee in his restrained, smoky delivery. 

The Beatdowns did one of the best sets I’ve seen them break out in a while, 10 songs, one cover, no fat.  In an era where we’re choked with bands regurgitating past trends and genres without any away-from-the-scene conceptualization or care, Matt Benz’s songwriting has taken up Ray Davies gauntlet and grafted heavy emotional content and the weight of his experience to the music of his childhood.  That he does this without the songs getting too weighty or didactic is a testament to the songs and the band.  They can be inconsistent, but it’s a beautiful thing when it’s working and it was working Saturday night.

After that, trekked north to see Larkin Grimm at Cafe Bourbon Street.  Her new record, Parplar, is probably my favorite thing out of the Young God stable since the last Angels of Light record and she stopped in Columbus en route to Knoxville’s Big Ears festival.  Through a dismal, largely indifferent turn-out, she and her three band members wrung some beauty out of what was basically a public rehearsal.

And good lord, what a band.  Elizabeth Deviln, used her voice for percussion and high-pitched hillbilly shape-note singing, and her autoharp for chiming, mandolin-like runs and percussive thickening behind Grimm’s sweet snarl and guitar.  John Houx getting both pizzicato string-section stabs and low-end dulcimer-like plucking recalling Joni Mitchell’s playing on Blue, and bringing a whole drum choir out of a tiny hand-held tambourine, his leg, and a microphone, knowing exactly when he needed to be a conguero and when he was manning tympani.  And the violinist introduced as “Sha-nay-nay”, painting backgrounds out of razor-blades and orchids, somewhere between Henry Flynt and Jessica Pavone.

But as with anything, the best band in the world doesn’t matter without the songs behind it, and Grimm’s songs are a wonder.  In form, they can conjure Kurt Weill and Indonesian gamelan and echo through Hazel Dickens and Nina Simone but the singularity of the vision and the intensely individual quality never wavers.  The songs are full of a mystery that teeters on the precipice of anticipation and dread, never quite knowing where they’ll land when they inevitably fall. 

At the same, time, there’s that sense of being in love with the falling, with the tragedy.  Embracing everything that matters, spiritual and sensual, while watching the world crumble around you.  When she sings, on “Blond and Golden Johns”, “This mouth has wrapped around some things / More delicious than the songs I sing”, followed with  a sigh and a hum, it’s boastful as much as or more than seductive, you know exactly who’s in charge, and she doesn’t ever let you think she needs you for anything.  The perfect show for a night when the climate shifts suddenly and it looks like everything’s falling apart.

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The Cry of Dreams – Antony and the Johnsons, The Southern Theater, 02/04/09

“I wonder, in all of science fiction, if there have been
two universes this discordant, or what it means
that there can be a suffering so intense its balance only
exists somewhere in the next life.”
-Albert Goldbarth, “The Elements”

No, I didn’t go to the Antony show in 2002.  At the time I’d heard that record but thought it was a novelty, it didn’t click for me until the second album but that, and the new one The Crying Light, are both wonders.  So even though he’s playing in NY at Town Hall while we’re there, I wanted to see him at the Southern and support something like this coming to Columbus in the first place.

Matthea Baim opened on electric guitar and her voice and guitar, including loops and delay, set up a low key expanse of silence and expectation, the rhythms yawned wide and stretched, and I didn’t leave struck by any of the songs specifically but I also left intrigued to hear more of her.

Antony came out on piano and vocals, backed by Julia Kent on cello, Maxie Moston on violin (who I last saw playing with Baby Dee at the Knitting Factory last fall), Rob Moose on violin, acoustic guitar and vocals,  Parker Kindred on drums and vocals, Jeff Langston on bass, and Doug Wieselman on reeds and electric guitar.

The arrangements and orchestrations on record, many done by Nico Muhly and Moston, sculpt landscapes and cityscapes out of ice and spun sugar so the songs are light filtering through them, the arrangements sometimes work as a lens and aperture, changing the granulation and field of vision of the writing.  In this smallish group, every move had a chamber music purpose, the two violins dueling like two guitars, or one setting up the line while the other scraped dark maroon and brown behind the lit main imagine, like a Rembrandt painting or a Hogarth etching. 

The text matters, matters deeply, if you don’t believe in the desire to carve someone’s name on the back of the sun or a boy shedding his self like a chrysalis and becoming a girl, then not only am I sorry for you, but the songs just won’t work.  At the same time, it’s a mistake to confuse his keening, swirling vibrato and octave jumps for sadness, the cry in his voice gathers people like the preacher on the mount and as it acknowledges the way the world will fail you and betray you it reaches for the sky because things can be different and better, even if it’s only inside ourselves.

I had chills and gooseflesh all over and found myself in tears during “The Crying Light” and wanted to dance the Slim Harpo hipshake during “Shake that Devil” replete with vintage jukejoint shout-vocals and a sax solo worthy of the late Lee Allen or David “Fathead” Newman.  And the cover of “Crazy in Love” may have been the best cover of anything I’ve ever heard.  If there’s a better show this year, it will have been a great year.  And with Chuck Prophet, last night’s Larkin Grimm, and some top-notch local sets by El Jesus, The Beatdowns, Night Family, and Sandwich, the year’s already shaping up to be aces.

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Favorite Live Shows 2008

"I bought a whiskey for the gypsy
And she turned my leather back into skin
Just a fleeting sense of that rare suspense
I once thought made the world go 'round
But now there's no one to talk to
When the lines go down"
-James McMurtry, "Hurricane Party"

So yeah, like everybody else, I'm trying to blog somewhere that's not Livejournal. Also, since this is standalone and not principally social networking, my hope is that it'll force me to write more often and more substantially.

So if you don't know me, welcome, if you know me, welcome back. This'll be basically about what I'm experiencing culturally, mainly but not limited to the Columbus area. A possible detour or two into what my friends are doing but I can't imagine anyone not me would really be that interested. Not that they're much more interested in what I thought of a concert/movie/etc, but if nothing else, it helps me remember.

Last year was the first year I've felt like I missed more concerts than I went to but even so I had a hard time narrowing this down to 15 and there were definitely shows that in any other year probably would've made a top 10 list (Supersuckers at Ravari, Fleshtones at Bourbon Street, Chris Thile at the Southern, Zakir Hussain at the Southern, David Torn and Tim Berne at the Wexner Center, Gaslight Anthem at Bernie's, Robert Forster at the Wexner Center). Anything you think I'm wrong on or if there's a show I should be kicking myself for missing, leave a comment (already kicking myself about, so you'd just be throwing salt in the wound: Nalle at Skylab, Nelson Slater at Skylab, The Cute Lepers at Bernies, The Black Hollies at Carabar, and both times the Golden Boys played in town).

Without futher ado, my favorite 15 live shows of 2008. Venue is here in Columbus Ohio unless stated otherwise.



1) The Pogues, Roseland Ballroom, Manhattan - A band that first set my hair on fire when Tun Kai Poh loaned me a Best Of while I was in high school but I never thought I'd get to see them live with Shane Macgowan fronting them. And not only did I get my chance after the last few years of reunions not syncing with my ability to get to the East Coast, they were better than I ever hoped they'd be. With Macgowan in strong voice and the band playing with an energy that would make most bands half their age green. Reveling in those songs and just being together, while a crowd mirrored that, people moshing one row away from people making out. Perfect.

2) Jimmy Scott, The Iridium, Manhattan-Much the same, I remember when I first heard Jimmy Scott on Lou Reed's Magic and Loss and the next weekend went to Singing Dog and bought that compilation with "Everybody's Somebody's Fool". I'd never heard anything so ethereal and potent at the same time, with the clean enunciation of Sarah Vaughan and, later, the raspy emphasis of Ray Charles (who produced my favorite Scott record, Love is a Wonderful Thing). And there he was, in a wheelchair with a five-piece relatively anonymous but perfectly adequate and charming behind him, singing "I"m Afraid this Masquerade is Over" with so much force and heat my bourbon aged in the glass. I'd tell you I didn't cry but I'd be lying.

3) Terrastock, Mellwood Arts Center, Louisville - Fou nights of psychedelia in a broad sense but even more than that, all the acts at this festival - the first I'd ever made it to - were creating a personal language out of their grappling with tradition. The tradition of Celtic and Scottish balladry in the case of Sharron Krauss and United Bible Studies, with Krauss sounding the way I always wished Lorena McKennitt did rich and warm and dark and UBS not only joining her for a righteous stomp through her song about mid-Summer but doing a set of thier own that was all mystery and fog and beautiful misdirection. Motorpsycho, I wish would've done a little more of their three-minute Husker Du-ish material amidst the jams, but when the jams are that righteous, who really cares? MV and EE and band taking Neil Young's lead and drip-painting with the raw sonic material, with a rhythm section including the godlike Tim Barnes on drums and a bass player with a tone so rich and distorted it sounded like the tuba in Louis Armstong's Hot Sevens. Weather threatened but never got terrible, the food was good, I got to see Clayton Oliver who I hadn't seen in years, and hang out with some Columbusites I like a lot but that ol' debbil shyness always kept me from really getting to know, a perfect weekend.

4) Jandek, Wexner Center - Friends I talked to after this were to varying degrees annoyed by how little vocal presence there was in this show, with at least one suggesting he was phoning it in to make for easier touring since his bands are always pick up bands. And I think that's a fair accusation, but the songs he did, a linked suite it seemed, were more spacious by their nature. Words bob up and reveal themselves and then disappear in the storm. I thought it was gorgeous, and there couldn't have been a better band for him, with Ryan Jewell on drums and percussion, C. Spencer Yeh on violin and vocals, and Derek Dicenzo on bass. For the hour and a half they were on stage I was somewhere else but also couldn't take my eyes off Jandek.

5) Wiley and the Checkmates, Ravari Room- God bless Funkdefy. Since transitioning from their already great DJ nights to booking shows, they've brought in at least one of my shows of the year every year, usually more. And this, with the great Herbert Wiley backed by as good a band as you'll see everywhere of any genre, tearing through a set from the new record they've done together, his '60s classics, and covers of his contemporaries like Joe Tex and Clarence Carter, including a blistering 10-minute Bo Diddley medley? I don't know anyone there who wasn't losing his or her mind and dancing the whole time.

6) The Dirtbombs, The Basement - One of my favorite rock bands today who had a big year, at the end of a leg of another long tour, coming out and kicking into "Wreck My Flow" off the new record until by the end long free-jazz vamps turned into INXS covers, the opening bands had joined them on stage, and one of the drummers had drug part of a kid into the mosh pit and was hanging from the rafter, keeping time on a cymbal in the middle of the floor? Sweat-soaked and righteous, full of the past but unmistakable.

7) Lewis and Clarke with Jerry Decicca, Surly Girl Saloon - One of the best solo sets I've ever seen Decicca do, followed by a band with members of Rachel's and Man Man playing delicate folk that wasn't shy, keening strings and spacious piano, a drummer playing banjo and beautiful, honey-dark songs.

8) D. Charles Speer and the Helix, Surly Girl Saloon - Speer made one of my favorite records of last year (and what would it take to get his main gig, the No Neck Blues Band, to town?) and his band took what could've been great straightforward baritone-voiced Kris Kristofferson poetic country and opening it up to include a piano player with hints of Art Tatum and Monk in his comping and solos, a guitarist and steel player who understands warm ambience and also played some leads that reminded me of Jerry Garcia in the early '70s, and a boiling rhythm section.

9) Gnarls Barkley, The Newport- THere's no songwriter or frontman I love more than Cee-Lo, and I liked the Gnarls Barkley records, especially the second one, but I wondered how it would work live. Two drummers, two players alternating between organ and guitar, an upright bassist, Dangermouse on everything else, and Cee-Lo taking everybody to church. The songs were recognizable but transformed, exactly what you want a big pop show to do.

10) Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears, The Summit - I wish more than 15 people had come to this, but trust me, when the record comes out on Lost Highway produced by the guy from Spoon, you won't forget this voice. Neo-soul with a garage scrappiness that most bands are a little too reverent to pull off. Amazing Don Covay songs and originals, a horn section that wasn't too seamless and a drummer that knows you know more than one kinda dance. Fire.

11) Baby Dee, The Knitting Factory, Manhattan - Baby Dee was great with her full band playing with the Black Swans at Rumba Cafe here in Columbus in March, but this show with her playing piano and harp and accompanied only by a violinist in a small room, produced these hymns of sadness and the joy of discovery. Hearing her sing "Just because I can't have you / Doesn't mean that I won't love you just the same" might have been the most haunting thing I heard all year.

12) Gal Costa, The Blue Note, Manhattan - One of the great Brazillian singer-songwriters of the Tropicalia era and beyond, accompanied only by Romero Lumbambo on nylon string guitar was so phenomenal it overpowered the worst club I've ever been to, swinging and doleful, perfectly simpatico.

13) Raphael Saadiq, SOBs, Manhattan - This year Saadiq found something perfecty fresh and of the momet from a deep devotion to the soul of his childhood, and he executed it so beautifull with his five-piece band and two backup singers in NY that it proved how much his earlier work, with Tony Toni Tone and Lucy Pearl ("Dance Tonight" was a set highlight) was of a piece with and leading up to what he's doing right now.

14) Donewaiting 5th Anniversary Show, Skully's/Carabar - As with anyhting that's a good cross-section of Columbus' music scene, there was as much stuff I didn't like (Miranda Sound) as stuff I did, but what was great was way, way beyond great. Deathly Fighter's narcotic live dubstep and Sinkane's post-Mwandishi pop backed by Slide Machine at Carabar, Blueprint backed by Brainbow and Bob Starker at Skully's making music full of strong rap and real rock that wasn't anything like rap-rock, and Mike Shiflet backed by members of Lambsbread, Scenic Railroads, Moviola and Black Canary doing perfectly subtle soundscapes that filled the room, built on Reich-like cells of melodic invention.

15) Polwechsel, Issue Project Room, Brooklyn- A quartet straddlng composition and improvisation but not in the way you'd expect unless you've been following their evolution. Focused so deeply on the gesture that their abstraction feels like the fractal freezing of nature and the soul-fields of Rothko and the wash of streetlights. I don't know how to describe it, I'm not sure I understand it, but I don't think any other music would take me to this place.

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