A Deck of Masks, Three Takes on Where Theater is in Columbus – Love Stories and Negotiations, Raconteur Theater, 06/06/09; God’s Ear, Available Light, 06/11/09; Blackbird, Catco, 06/14/09

Sometimes it takes me a while to catch up with and take the temperature of a theater company, with Raconteur I’m sorry to say it had been an entire year, so last weekend I trekked out to see their one-year anniversary show.  I like the theory that you can pay for one half or the other of this series of one acts (7 in total), and I like the space above Club Diversity, where I hadn’t been in quite a while.

The show is basically a series of cute comedy skits and it feels like it’s not sharp enough as comedy and not thought-through enough as theater.  “Plugged In” by David Grant is basically a monologue that’s all reactions to outside forces, characters unseen and unheard-from, showing how a modern college student is distanced from the rest of his life with electronic gizmos while still being a college student who wants to get laid and milk his parents for the money he can and you expect it to build to a punchline or, well, something, and it never does.”Roger’s Beard” by Jimmy Mak is two people about to go on a date with the married couple they’re both sleeping with, and ends in a reversal that has you going “Huh?” more than anything else.  “Forever Again” is about trying to move past the mistakes you’ve made and embrace the love you’ve found, with the personification of the two wronged-lovers interrupting an important moment and muddying the action as it happens, the kind of thing theater does great… but you don’t feel like you know the motivations that well.  “His Return” is about the return of a soldier but from which war?  His uniform looks like World War I or II, the clothes are Victorian, he mentions “joining up with the Canadians” which sounds like Spanish Civil War, and the fact that I’m thinking about all of these things means the text didn’t engage me (though having seen the latest revival of Mourning Becomes Electra with Lili Taylor probably made me judge this a little harsher).

Also, while I realize this wasn’t written for Club Diversity, and there’s a great diversity of ages and races among the characters, every single relationship we see depicted is straight.  Who in the year 2009 trying to write about the perils and pitfalls of romance thinks in terms of it being solely heterosexual?  In seven pieces?  Maybe they didn’t get any gay-themed submissions, but it feels like laziness somewhere.

The acting’s quite good on average in all the pieces, especially Sam Blythe in two pieces, Jennifer Nitri in “Forever Again”, Elizabeth Huff-Williams and Robert Foor in “Fast, Light, and Brilliant”, Heather Fidler in “Rock-a-Bye Bullet”, Shantelle Marie in “Walking Distance”.  And the direction of the individual pieces have a surprising amount of grace and creativity with the paucity of things the actors have to actually do, especially “Forever Again” and “Fast, Light, and Brilliant”.  But the overall direction seems weirdly sloppy in sequencing the skits, and is plagued with   loud, obvious pop songs (“You Can’t Always Get What You Want”? “Find Me Somebody to Love”?).

But mostly you come out wondering what the point was besides having a night of theater for the sole purpose of having a night of theater.  I want to see something else they do, but hopefully with more thought to finding a script.

Available Light continues their trend of bringing emotionally and intellectually risky plays that no one else is bringing to Columbus and Jenny Schwartz’s God’s Ear is a home run, anchored by a heart-breaking performance by Michelle Schroder who spends most of the play trying to talk long-distance to her husband (Richard Furlong) who always seems like he’s on a plane to somewhere, could be Topeka or could be Purgatory. 

He’s collapsed in on himself after the death of their son by drowning, every person he meets also seems to have a dead son, the way when you have a “special circumstance”you suddenly see people with the same circumstance everywhere.  She’s coming undone and talking almost entirely in cliches, the ways you perceive the world that give soft comfort but don’t really say anything, they’re placeholders for content, and strung together, as in an amazing monologue, it’s like language is an ice-floe that’s cracking in the heat of her personality and the pieces are falling into the void of her mind, of the world.

By the time GI Joe and the Tooth Fairy have both shown up, the temptation would normally be to shout “Come on!” but it all feels like one mind busting open.  The feelings are an open wound and the surface is cracking day-glo, and it’s marvelous.  If you leave and you’re able to speak in sentences other than effusive fragments, you’re made of stronger stuff than I am, or you’re dead inside.

Catco this year had two plays I wanted to see, and didn’t make it to Sarah Ruhl’s the Clean House, but I made a point of getting out to see Blackbird.  the David Harrower play about the fallout of child abuse and the danger of trying to bury who you are.  It’s nice seeing this theater troupe do a piece on one set, with two actors, that’s all tension and ferocity.  The language, as everyone’s said, is derived from Pinter and Mamet, but it seems to be less interested in language as a tool to conceal and reveal the way those two writers are and more interested in the lies we tell about our past.

Anna Paniccia is terrific, stumbling over words and losing her nerve then exploding.  Jonathan Putnam is fantastic, every word and every nuance seems measured, like a man who’s been keeping everything about himself deep inside.  And the rhythms are perfect, especially culminating in the moment full of terrible ambiguity at the end.  But I don’t have much to say about this, it’s a good play, well-acted and well-directed.  It’s easy to see why Catco’s the gold standard for theater troupes in town, and it’s just as easy to see the joy of the risk=taking the smaller companies are doing.

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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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