Music Dissolves Water: 2014-03-23

Is there a band with more unimpeachable indie cred than Yo La Tengo? It's hard to imagine anyone having more. This year will mark their 30th anniversary as a band, and over the years, they've managed to release a remarkable series of recordings and perform in every imaginable type of both dive bar and concert hall, and all on their own terms.

Last night, Yo La Tengo performed at Variety Playhouse as part of something called the Atlanta Jewish Music Festival.

Yo La Tengo have always embraced their Jewish roots, most notably with their annual Eight Days of Hanukkah shows at Hoboken's now defunct Maxwells (RIP), so it's not surprising that they'd be invited to participate in this event. But some indie music fans I know were leery of the event, thinking that perhaps it would be an evening exclusively of ethnic music (as it that were a bad thing) and not sets by musicians who happened to be Jewish playing their own individual music and bringing their heritage to their music in their own individual ways.

My friends' fears might have been reinforced, if they had shown up, by the house dj, who did play ethnic musics (klezmer, folk, and genres I couldn't identify) before and between the sets.

The first musician on stage was Basya Schecter of the band Pharoah's Daughter. "Blending a psychedelic sensibility and a pan-Mediterranean sensuality" (according to her bio), Basya played swirling Hasidic chants, Mizrachi and Sephardi folk-rock, and spiritual stylings filtered through percussion, strings and electronic flourishes.

Basya's sound has been cultivated by her Hasidic music background and a series of trips to the Middle East, Africa, Israel, Egypt, Central Africa, Turkey, Kurdistan and Greece. It was difficult to identify a single style in her music, and her sound, at least to my ears, would have seemed as appropriate at a Palestinian Music Festival, a Persian Music Festival, or a Saharan Music Festival, as at the Atlanta Jewish Music Festival.

Even though she had a guitar with her on stage, she played an oud exclusively through her set, backed by an electric guitar and a fine percussionist playing in odd, Middle Eastern time signatures. It was an interesting performance, although she wasn't able to get the level of audience participation that she seemed to want at times during her set.

SoCal's Mikey Pauker was up next. Pauker plays folk rock influenced as much by reggae, hip-hop, and pop as by his interests in Jewish mysticism, yoga, the Torah, and Chassidic study. His music is relentlessly sunny and upbeat, and reminds me more of Michael Franti or even J Love than Tevye from Fiddler On the Roof.

His lyrics were sung in English and Yiddish (or Hebrew, I don't know) and concerned Kabbalah, the soul, and global unity, among other things. He was somewhat more successful than Basya Schecter before him in soliciting audience participation, probably due to his energetic stage presence.

Here's a video of one of his songs that captures the flavor of his music and his stage presence.

So, all of this was just a prelude for headliners Yo La Tengo, who performed a YLT set and didn't make references to Kabbalah, the pan-Shephardic experience, or their heritage, other than greeting the audience with a "shalom" at the start of the set before launching into their opening song, Stupid Things from their latest album Fade, followed by their earlier song Barnaby, Hardly Working, both of which included extended passages of glorious noise and feedback not even hinted at by the album versions of the songs.

This was our second time seeing Yo La Tengo, after a concert a little over a year ago at the Buckhead Theater. Like at the previous show (like on most of their albums), the band alternated between sections of pastoral, acoustic songs and of shrieking, guitar-driven noise rock, but last night, even more than last year, guitarist Ira Kaplan seemed in a mood to shred, and treated the audience to several extended improvisations of the musical and non-musical sounds that can be produced on stage by an electric guitar and an inventive mind. It was fantastic. Also, I was fortunate enough to get a stage-side position almost directly underneath Ira Kaplan, mere feet from his, um, feet.

James McNew played drums on the first two songs, and occasionally played guitar, but most of the time he anchored the rhythm section with his bass. When not shredding guitar, Kaplan played keyboards.

Georgia Hubley played drums during most of the set, except when she didn't and McNew filled in, or during some of the quiet, acoustic passages, where she sang and accompanied the band with maracas.

The acoustic portion of their set included a tender rendition of Is That Enough, also from Fade, and I'll Be Around, which, Kaplan told us, was one of the few songs from Fade that they didn't play during last year's Buckhead Theater set. The spellbound audience was appropriately silent during these quieter passages.

The set ultimately climaxed with Ohm and Pass The Hatchet and more feedback drenched pyrotechnics from Kaplan, most notably during an extended Pass The Hatchet, when Kaplan seemingly explored every conceivable option for eliciting sound out of his guitar over the hypnotic repeated bass line of the song, ultimately winding up on his knees a la James Brown as he tortured the guitar strings with the microphone stand and the floor.

For their encore, they performed a quiet, acoustic rendition of a Bob Dylan song, a newer song, apparently, and one that I didn't recognize.

In all, it was a great set, maybe not as diverse as last year's Buckhead Theater show, but probably more exciting for all of the guitar heroics. The band at time brought to mind past masters like the Velvet Underground, post-rock bands like Godspeed! and Swans, and both the electric and acoustic versions of Crazy Horse. Here's last night's set list in the band's shorthand: