Hospitality

Hospitality at The Basement, April 2012

Best new band of 2012?  It's hard to think of too many other bands with a songwriter as creative and original as Amber Papini.

Hospitality at 529, Rocktober 2012

Lost In The Trees

Somehow, between the technical problems over at the LiveJournal site and the crash of my computer, I forgot to post the pictures of Lost In The Trees performance at The Earl back on November 3 - which is a shame, because it was a really terrific show. It wasn't until I stumbled across their Morning Becomes Eclectic set over at KCRW that I remembered that I had forgotten.

  

The opening act was Atlanta's Oryx and Crake, a fine orchestral pop outfit worthy of wider attention.

Touring with Lost In The Trees were North Carolina's Midtown Dickens, who played a spirited set of Appalachia-influenced Americana.

Headliners Lost In The Trees played a magnificent set, mainly performing songs from their latest album A Church To Fit Our Needs, a cycle of songs frontman Ari Picker wrote about the passing away of his mother, but also including some older songs, such as Walk Around The Lake.

In addition to violin, cello, and even french horn accompaniment, Picker had Midtown Dickens join them on stage late in the set to provide even more strings and, yes, that's a bowed saw being played behind him.

For the end-of-the-set finale, Picker and company left the stage to perform an acoustic and unamplified version of Song for the Painter, one of my favorite of their songs.  An encore after that touching and intimate performance would have been superfluous.

I'm just now realizing that I haven't been to The Earl since that November 3 set - maybe not a record for me, but certainly an exception to my usual behavior.

Dave Brubeck

Innovative jazzman Dave Brubeck passed today at the age of 91, just one day short of what would have been his 92nd birthday.

During a period of the 1970s, between, say, the demise of "progressive rock" and the advent of punk, when  disco, mellow California pop, and Stevie Nicks ruled the airwaves, I very nearly stopped listening to rock music altogether and retreated into a world of jazz.  I was amazed at the richness and variety of this American art form that was largely ignored by the American public.  Coltrane, Miles, Mingus, and Monk became my new John, George, Paul, and Ringo, and as I went further down the rabbit hole of the avant garde, Shepp, Pharoah, Braxton, and Sun Ra became my new Coltrane, Miles, Mingus, and Monk. Speaking of Monk, though, there's a link to a great, nearly half-hour performance by Monk in all of his eccentric genius at the end of the Brubeck clip above.

Somewhere in the background of all this great music, though, there was always the Dave Brubeck Quartet.  They weren't my favorites, and I don't think I ever owned an album of theirs, although I had managed to accumulate a fairly prodigious collection of vinyl.  They were cool and cerebral, and my interests in jazz leaned more toward the visceral and the emotive.  No disrespect toward the departed today or the living back then, but it simply wasn't my thing.

I always did have an appreciation, though, for the playing of Brubeck's alto saxophonist, Paul Desmond.  In 1977, at the height of my jazz enthusiasm, Desmond died of lung cancer, the result of chronic chain smoking.  He was 52 when he passed, and I remember thinking that he was an old man then, even though I'm older than that now.

In any event, at some point around the rise of late 70s punk and the emergence of New Wave, rock music got interesting again.  At the same time, the number of musicians playing music that could legitimately be called jazz had already started to diminish due to sickness, old age, and death, as well as to the economics of the music industry.  I still appreciate jazz and my musical tastes today are informed and influenced by the freedom and creativity I encountered in jazz, but rather than listen and re-listen to the same old recordings over and over, I continue to explore the new and the different, just like Brubeck had during his lifetime.

A Preview

Oh, look.  Japanese violinist Kishi Bashi is coming to The Earl on March 14 (strangely, not a Monday).  I skipped Bashi's performance at the Doug Fir Lounge during MFNW, where he opened for Moonface, so this will be a chance to make up for what I missed.  

On top of the recently announced Alt-J show at the god-forsaken Masquerade (March 6) and the Thao & The Get Down Stay Down / Sallie Ford & The Sound Outside billing at Smith's Olde Bar on March 18, it looks like the annual March Madness event (the vernal equivalent to the autumnal Rocktober) is starting to take shape.

The Winter Doldrums may extend through December and January, but should end by February 9 when Jonathan Richman comes to Atlanta for a two-night stand at The Goat Farm.

I've already got my tickets for Richman, and looking further ahead, have already bought tickets for Seattle's Bumbershoot 2013 on Labor Day weekend.

Thao And the Get Down Stay Down

Thao Nguyen at Variety Playhouse, September 21, 2011

Right now, we're in the Winter Doldrums when a lot of good music generally does not pass through Atlanta.  However, Thao & the Get Down Stay Down just announced their new album, We the Common, will be released in February, and in support of the album, Thao will go on tour with Sallie Ford & The Sound Outside.  The tour comes to Atlanta's intimate Smith's Olde Bar in Atlanta on March 18, for what is clearly a must-see show.

The vinyl version of the record is to include a limited edition 7” with covers of Melanie’s Brand New Key and The Troggs’ With A Girl Like You. You can download a copy of the album's first single, Holy Roller, from their Facebook page (you got to Like them first).

The bad news (at least for me) is that March 18 falls on a Monday in 2013, and what with my obligation to Monday Night Zazen, I won't be able to go.  Are you sure about that?, ask Daniel Higgs and Om.  Never say never, say I.


Pictures of Sallie Ford at Pioneer Courthouse Square during MFNW 2011, where they opened for Iron & Wine, and Thao at Variety Playhouse during Rocktober 2011, where they opened for The Head & The Heart, below.

Sallie Ford & The Sound Outside

Thao Nguyen & The Get Down Stay Down

Taken By Trees

Taken By Trees at Variety Playhouse, October 2012

Oh, look.  Gothenberg, Sweden's Taken By Trees, fronted by the incomparable Victoria Bergsman,. performed a Tiny Desk Concert at NPR, playing I Want You (not the Beatles' song) and Only You.  

Gentle, laid back and almost hypnagogic, their set opening for Jens Lekman (who also did a Tiny Desk concert) was one of the highlights of Rocktober 2012.

Moonface

Canadian musician Moonface, aka Spencer Krug of Wolf Parade and other bands, has released the video for the song Headed For The Door from his excellent album with the Finnish band Siinai, Heartbreaking Bravery.  

Unfortuantely, the rights to the video are owned by Warner Music Group, which is blocking the video from being embedded on sites such as this.  You can see the video, though, over here at YouTube, but in the meantime, here's a Soundcloud clip of the song.



I've seen Moonface perform with Sinaii at The Earl back last June, where he picked up a book and started reading aloud when he got to the letter portion of Headed For The Door.

I saw Moonface perform again last September at Portland's Doug Fir Lounge during MusicFest Northwest. Overall, I thought the Earl set was better, principally because he and Siinai played a few mind-bending, extended instrumentals during that earlier show.  As he set up at MFNW, Krug announced that the Doug Fir was concerned about time so they were going to have to “muscle through” their set.  Perhaps that's the reason they didn't perform the extended instrumentals, but coincidentally, just before the announcement was made, I had somehow gotten into a conversation with some bookish guy who was fervently scribbling in a notebook near the front of the stage.  We were discussing Zen Master Dogen's 13th Century essay titled Uji ("Existence/Time"), in which Dogen claims that all time is flexible and relative, and that time is a product of our own minds, not some fixed absolute through which we move.  Don't ask me how this got started because I don't remember, but it's the kind of thing that seems to only happen to me. Anyway, when Krug made the announcement, I couldn't resist telling him, since I was right up at the edge of the stage and it was the whole point of the conversation I was in, "You are not in time, time is in you."

"Whatever," Krug told me, and launched the band into Teary Eyes and Bloody Lips.

I didn't stay for the entire set and don't know if Krug again read from the book, as a friend I had met that week wanted to walk over to Holocene a couple of blocks away to catch the rest of the set by the band Trust.  You can say we headed for the door before Headed For The Door.  However, I never got to post any but one of the pictures from Moonface's Doug Fir set, though, so here they are:

One other thing - at both Moonface sets, both at The Earl and at Doug Fir, his audience included a large number of bros.  Among other definitions at urbandictionary.com, "bros" are:

"Obnoxious partying males who are often seen at college parties. When they aren’t making an ass of themselves they usually just stand around holding a red plastic cup waiting for something exciting to happen so they can scream something that demonstrates how much they enjoy partying. Nearly everyone in a fraternity is a bro but there are also many bros who are not in a fraternity. They often wear a rugby shirt and a baseball cap. It is not uncommon for them to have spiked hair with frosted tips. 

Bros actually chose this name for themselves as they often refer to each other as "bro" even though they are not related. 

I couldn't go to sleep last night because some bros at the party next door kept screaming, "Whoooooo!!! YEAAHHHHH! Whooooooo!" 

It might be something about the epic quality of Moonface songs or Siinai's surging, anthemic sweep of sound,   but I saw more bros at the Moonface show at The Earl than I've ever seen at The Earl before or since, and I saw more bros at Moonface's Doug Fir show than at any other MFNW event in the two years I've been going.  This is not a negative reflection on Moonface in any way, but the question that I can't answer is how did both Southeastern and Northwestern bros ever get to hear of Moonface in the first place?