Go Metric

The Other Night at Quinn’s: Mary Halvorson & Ches Smith

By Mike Faloon

“No more guitar heroes!”
—The Clash, “Complete Control”

The pine tree outside our dining room window is being cut down today. Last winter its branches—sagging with snow and ice—started snapping off and plummeting, falling fifty or sixty feet and spearing the ground. My son and I are glued to the window when the tree cutters arrive, hypnotized by the crew chief’s ascent and the sight of the first broomstick branches falling. As he scales skyward, the chainsaw clipped to his belt, slowly swaying, always running, hangs a few feet below his boots. He digs his ankle spikes into the bark and pushes higher.

***

Ches Smith’s equipment forms a semi-circle. The drums face stage right, electronics straight ahead, vibraphone stage left. A cross section of the inner sanctum, like a Jack Kirby diagram of the Baxter Building, or those scenes in Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou that show a cut away of Zissou’s ship, the Belafonte.

Smith concocts snare/bass combinations that pulverize, and the way he favors syncopation over speed allows you to savor each pop and punch. When he rotates to the synth/iPad, he plays with one stick, holds the other in his armpit, goes into a holding pattern, before emerging on the other side with something completely different. Then he returns to the set, this time with mallets, digs into increasingly abstract rhythms, climbs upward.

***

The larger branches have dinner plate diameters. The crew chief ties off them off and lowers them to the ground. The other crew members guide the branches to graceful landings. The sky opens up, shades of blue replacing browns and greens, the ground illuminated by direct sunlight for the first time in decades. The crew chief reaches the top of the tree and slices into the trunk, cuts into the very structure that’s keeping him aloft. The falling pieces grow larger, the thumps louder, the sunlight brighter. 

***

Smith rolls on his snare, discharges a blast of synthesizer then turns to the vibraphone. He runs tests and gathers results, takes stutter steps before unleashing full runs. He starts a rhythm, repeats and alters it, plays along with one looped rhythm, then two. Smith builds on and tears down traditions, cuts into the structures he’s leaned on.

Seeing him move from one instrument to another is like watching Steve Zissou aboard the Belafonte, leading a quest to find the jaguar shark, going from station to station, checking on the sauna and the lab, up to the library, and down to the editing room. Each has developed a unique system, fueled by the unpredictable, in the relentless course of running down, engaging with, and releasing something bigger than himself.

***

In the late 80s my cousin was stationed in the navy in San Diego. Near the end of his hitch he needed to get his car back to Syracuse but only had a few days. I flew out with his brother and the three of us drove back across the country, sprinted east to west in just under three days. We spent a day at Mission Beach and then drove through the night, arriving at the Grand Canyon just before dawn.

***

Mary Halvorson moves from side to side, rocks back and forth behind a hollow body guitar. Her glasses slip to the tip of her nose as she dips and dives, rises and rolls across the covers from her solo debut album, Meltframe. There’s something hypnotic yet barbed in the tones she summons. Her songs have an intimacy that might seem at odds with their circuitous paths. She moves full steam ahead before skidding to a stop, smearing the sound, momentarily reversing course before resuming forward motion, like a DJ scratching a record.

***

The park was cloaked in darkness as we approached the canyon. We pulled out blankets and waited, chilly and bleary-eyed from the all night drive, second guessing the wisdom of spending so much time on a sight that remained hidden beneath the night’s shadows. Then the expanse began to reveal itself. As first light trickled in we were struck by the depth, twenty, fifty, hundreds of feet down, no bottom in sight. Then we became aware of the width, yards then miles then lifetimes stretching further and further. Then came the awe. The dimensions melted together, could no longer be considered in isolation. We were speechless before the splendor.

***

Halvorson’s next piece opens with distress signal urgency, exhilarating fretboard dances that quickly evolve into free form freak outs, on the precipice of being too much to ingest. Then she jump cuts, slows the pace and allows her tone to mushroom, wondrously large and enveloping, inducing a subdued euphoria. A rack of pint glasses rattles beneath the counter as Halvorson continues conjuring a six-string version of that Grand Canyon sunrise.

***

I assume that Halvorson’s set is the end of the show. She and Smith are on a “double solo” tour, traveling together but playing solo. Except tonight. While setting up earlier they overhear Steve and James talking and realize that the Quinn’s contingent thinks that the guitarist and drummer will be playing together. “There was a generous spirit in the house and they responded by doing a third set together,” Steve later says. “Everything I’ve seen about their subsequent shows seems to indicate two solo sets and no more. We were privileged.”

There’s so much momentum from the previous sets that I expect the duo show to be bigger, more explosive, a relative summer popcorn blockbuster. Instead Halvorson and Smith opt for a character driven collaboration; it feels like we’re privy to a private dialogue. Across the way a woman shakes her head in disbelief while the man beside her closes his eyes and nods just behind the implied beat. The guy next to me orders a hot dog but doesn’t eat until the set’s over, waits for Halvorson and Smith to finish before taking a bite. We’re mesmerized—staring, basking, monotasking. The music gradually expands and the collective astonishment dilates in synch, Halvorson and Smith breaking down and building up, fostering continuous cycles of depth, width, and awe.

The Other Night at Quinn’s: Daniel Levin, Juan Pablo Carletti

By Mike Faloon | Photos by Michael Bogdanffy-Kriegh / Studio MBK

Some improvisers warm up, take a reading or two at the start of a set, check their bearings.  Others plunge into fathomless depths, react and respond more than think as they plummet, pulling all bystanders, innocent or otherwise, in with them.  Daniel Levin (cello) and Juan Pablo Carletti (percussion) have clearly chosen the latter.

Levin thumps his fist on the body of his cello, then saws away, excavates intensely satisfying, reedy sounds.  How does the wood withstand such pummeling, not splinter?  Carletti’s mallets roll like thunder across his floor and rack toms.  I need a chance to breathe but Levin and Carletti will have nothing of it.  The surface world is quickly fading from view and with it so many of the elements we usually use to guide ourselves.  We’re sealed in for a delightfully disorienting ride.

***

Comic book artists use the term “gutters” when referencing the white space between panels.  I’d never given them a second thought before reading Douglas Wolk’s Reading Comics.  He details howgutters give greater definition to the panels that precede as well those that follow.  They also call on the reader to do some of the lifting.  “The gutter is where the fun happens…readers get to fill in the lapse in time.”

***

Every time I look at Carletti he’s moving something different across the top of his snare drum—bells and chimes and cymbals.  He even leans back and puts his foot up there to mute the drum before bending out of sight to uncork something that I mistake for a harmonica.  When he pops up, still on high alert, he’s back to the brushes.  Meanwhile, Levin bear hugs his cello, and shakes his head from side to side as he wildly pursues rich, dark sounds.  He and Carletti push each other downward, past the point where sunlight reaches, down near the hydrothermal vents where water gushes out at 850 degrees.

***

Maine, part one: One of my first record buying experiences was in Bangor, visiting my fraternal grandparents.  We went to a department store, and I found a bin of  $3.99 albums.  I bought two.  The Genesis record, …and Then There Were Three, was clogged with gobs of syrupy keyboards; I couldn’t find the songs.  The E.L.O. record, an early best-of, was full of Roy Wood’s mad man cello antics; I couldn’t escape the songs—those woofer-punishing frequencies glued themselves to my psyche.

*** 

The duo pulls back.  Levin plays it lullaby sweet and soothing, then delicately plucks.  Carletti rotates his sticks, holds them vertically, and stirs the perimeter of his floor tom, then trades for a mallet to gently tap the top hi-hat cymbal.  Calm at the center of the storm, a gutter. 

***

Maine, part two: My friend Mike lives in Orono.  He had friends visiting from New York and they went into a gas station convenience store (ironically called The Big Apple).  The friend, accustomed to city-sized delis and bodegas, was blown away by the amount of unused space in the store, the vast acres between and at the end of aisles.  He felt like he’d landed on another planet. 

***

I used to have an aversion to white space.  In music, on the screen or on the page, blank space amounted to wasted opportunities.  I sought out music that was full throttle, full time.  When friends and I worked on fanzines every square inch was crammed with material—clip art, lists, captions, random minutia.  I loved zines like Rev. Norb’s Sic Teen, hand-stapled pages buzzing with squint-till-it-aches four-point fonts and impenetrable layers of clip art, marathon sentences and parenthetical clauses that were like funhouse mirrors.  I disliked, maybe even resented, the abundance of empty space often employed in fancier, bound magazines like Punk Planet.  The choice seemed egregious, almost boastful—We’ve got space—and by extension, money—to burn.  I didn’t recognize the thought and expression in their aesthetic, nor did I see my opportunity to slow down and absorb.

***

Carletti removes the top hi hat cymbal, strikes it as it hovers like a slow motion flying saucer and sets it on the floor tom.  Levin reaches down and pinches a string near the bridge.  A moment later he lifts his cello on to his lap and pushes his bow across the leg that usually supports the cello.  Now he’s holding two bows, playing above and beneath the strings.  The duo’s first set is comprised of three pieces.  The second, so far, just one.  Fewer gutters.  Quicker pace.  More time beneath the surface.

***

Jacques Cousteau once tried, in the early-to-mid sixties, to develop an underwater colony.  The first of these continental shelf stations, Conshelf I, was set ten meters below the surface off the coast of France.  The goal was to allow small crews—aquanauts—to live and work there for weeks at a time. 

***

The way Levin and Carletti exchange ideas so fluidly, so often without pause, sounds like two parts of the same instrument.  Talking with Levin he says, “it’s like I think (Juan Pablo) is playing cello.”  Or at least I think that’s what I hear.  Later I follow up with Levin.  “I don’t remember exactly what I said, but it is more to do with navigating our improvisation using a common language of rhythmic ideas and gestures rather than cello vs. drums like a traditional tenor sax vs. drums scenario.  Much more like I use the cello percussively.  Juan Pablo provides a backdrop landscape and I paint over it in large brush strokes.” 

 

Their collaborations feel like a very long, very wide panel, a panel continuously drawn on paper as it comes off the roll.  Or maybe a Wes Anderson scene where the camera leads a character across the horizon, allows us to move with them.  Or perhaps the inverse, a Spike Lee dolly shot, the character stationary and the camera back pedaling toward us, allowing us to see their world as it passes by.

***

Costeau’s underwater experiments were largely successful.  The researchers were active and content as they conducted experiments within and beyond their underwater dwelling.  But they learned that they were unable to remain submerged indefinitely because they couldn’t live without sunlight.

Tonight Levin and Carletti have built the latest version of Conshelf: Quinn’s, and even now, as the show comes to end and we hang out and run post-game analysis, it seems sustainable.  I see Eric for the first time in weeks, finally pass along the book I’ve been keeping in my car.  Steve gives an update on his house renovations and introduces me to Dan who knows the same pool of Central and Western New York punk bands that I came up with in the nineties.  The night moves on and we’re content in the cozy confines Conshelf: Quinn’s.  Then this:

“Every shing-a-ling-a-ling

That they’re starting to sing’s so fine”

Damn it.  Someone’s playing the Carpenters.  Sincerely and loudly.  We’ve sprung a leak.  The bubble’s going to burst, and there’s no choice but to resurface.

The Other Night at Quinn's: Ben Monder

By Mike Faloon | Photos by Michael Bogdanffy-Kriegh / Studio MBK

“If I walk quiet
I hear the bird’s pretty tune
High in the hills
Me and this beautiful moon”

Kim Deal, “Beautiful Moon”

***

Winter hates jazz.  That’s the latest joke.  Last week’s show was cancelled due to snow.  The previous week’s, too.  Until a couple of hours ago tonight seemed slated for the same fate.  We had an early release at school and I spent the afternoon shoveling the driveway and raking the roof.  I had to use a baseball bat and hammer to break up the ice clinging our front porch.

***

Ben Monder could not be more gentle as he coaxes sounds from his guitar.  His left hand strolls about the fretboard while his right hand hovers above the pick ups.  Yet the notes fly like sparks, spectacular oranges and reds too numerous to calculate.   He has a speed skater’s deceptive effort-to-movement ratio, seeming to coast great lengths on easy pushes.

Monder is seated, one foot on the floor, the other casually propped on a monitor.  He’s wearing a winter hat and unassuming pants and shirt.  He resembles Ian MacKaye (Minor Threat/Fugazi/Evens).  He looks like Emil, our plumber, too.  It’s like the old Electric Company segment—“It’s the plumber!  I’ve come to fix the sink!”—but refitted: “I’m the guitarist.  I’ve come to ease your pain.”  That could be construed on existential or philosophical levels, but right now, after the shoveling, raking, hacking, Monder’s playing brings on pure physical relief.

***

There was some solace in hearing the roar of my neighbor’s snow blower, chomping through the accumulation covering our shared driveway.  But the beast of a machine kept jamming up.  Keith had to stop every few feet, emphatically lift the handles and slam down the front to unclog the auger.  When we finished I asked if he wanted to go to Quinn’s.  He didn’t inquire who was playing, just asked when I wanted to leave.

***

The opening scenes of Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone say so much, thanks in large part to the dearth of dialogue.  Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) moves through her world showing how she is surrounded by others, to varying extents supportive of and supported by them, but very much on her own journey.

***

James Keepnews sees Keith and me looking for a table and invites us to join him.  It’s his birthday.  Well-wishers stop by.  His phone pings like a PBS pledge drive.  He’s unusually amped for tonight’s show.   He’s been talking it up for weeks.  “You have to see this one.  Have to.”  Something about best or favorite or most important modern guitarist.  I forget the words but I’ve come to trust his recommendations.  Hard to believe that all of this—the place, the people, the performances—was new to me a year ago.

Quinn’s is closing soon, shutting down for a couple of weeks for renovations.  It seemed like a natural time to pause these columns, take stock, see what I’ve got, and begin shaping the book.  Keepnews’s enthusiasm won me over, though, so here I am, notebook in hand, transfixed by the sight of Monder’s fingers spider crawling back and forth.  The guitar neck seems so small in his grasp, so deceptively easy to navigate.

 ***

Of all Jackie Chan’s stunts, the one that comes to mind most often is probably the simplest.  He’s running down an alley, desperate to escape, as always.  The wall to his left is too high to scale, just beyond his reach.  He runs at the wall, leaps, uses his feet to push toward the parallel wall, which he then uses to propel himself over the first wall.  Frightened, fleeing human turned vertical pinball.  It’s probably the least risky of his stunts, but it’s a stunning display of will and ability.  Unlike his other stunts, this one—even just the memory of it—leaves me with the momentary impression that I too could scale walls.  Even when rational thought prevails I’m left with the comforting sense that one of us can pull off such feats.

***

Keith and I go back and forth as Monder plays on.

“It’s like two guitars.” 

“It’s like two guitars and a bass—do you hear that?”

“Yes. Two guitars and bass, and a viola, too.”

We’re watching the same show.  Arguably we’re hearing the same sounds.  But neither of us has a scorecard that matches up with the sonics; we’re coming up short in establishing any sort of one-to-one correspondence.  It’s like watching close magic—I’m just a few feet away.  I can see everything.  I can explain none of it.

Monder’s motivations are different obviously; he’s not out to be coy or deceptive.  Yet still we search and poke and prod, look for tricks or codes or patterns; try to make sense of something so far beyond our reach, humanize it.  All the while marveling more than minimizing.

“Did you see that double jointed pinky move?”

“Those are finger extensions, right?”

“How can one person do that?”

***

There I am, in a dream the other night, staring across a grassy, open field on a sweet spring afternoon.  To my left, the Metro-North train that’s left us stranded.  To my right, in the distance, a hill leading to a farmhouse.  Passengers flock across the field.  An elderly woman lies at the base of the hill, on her side, scratching her dog behind the ears.

***

“It’s not really jazz, is it?”

“No.”

“Free jazz?”

“I don’t think so.”

“But it’s not rock…”

“No.”

“Or classical.”

“No.” 

“But it’s kind of all of them.”

“Yes.”

***

Ree’s most viable option is to sell off the one asset at her disposal: the trees on her family’s property.  But she’s too proud, too defiant, duty bound to do right knowing that this will propel her down the path of greatest resistance.

 ***

Monder has a streak of that.  With his talent he could easily coast down more lucrative roads, delve into the ding dong world of guitar magazine pyrotechnics, lean into the flash and glitz.  I don’t want to reduce Monder to caricature, make him seem like a monk removed from the rest of us.  Granted, he talks less than Ree Dolly but his wit comes through when he does.

Ben Monder: (Appears to be speaking to the audience, but without a mic)

Keepnews: We can get you a mic.

Monder: (Speaking into newly acquired mic) Sounds the same to me but I guess I’m being amplified somewhere.  (To Rojo, the sound guy)  Can you cut the hi-mids?  I’m kidding.  That last song was ‘Windowpane.’  It was written for younger arms.”

***

The elderly woman is smiling, inviting, as people zig zag through the rock garden that leads up to her patio.  I assume there are buses waiting out front but no one in the line is speaking, so I’m not certain.  The line is calm, orderly, with a sense of reverence.  As I walk to the front door I think to myself, How could this fit with my next Quinn’s column?

***

Both of Monder’s feet find their way to the floor for the final tune, foreshadowing a different turn.  The flourishes are more demonstrative as the volume and speed and distortion build, ramp up to monolithic masses of sound, colors streaking by, distorting what I think I know of space and time.

James Keepnews, perhaps—no, certainly—emboldened by the confluence of such an ending to such a show on such a night, makes an on-mic request for an encore.

Keepnews: (To audience) Two words: jazz, mother-------!  (To Monder) I’ve heard you do it with a trio.  How about solo—“Wichita Lineman”?

Monder: I’ll try it.  Really might not work.  I don’t know.

Keith: (To me) Stay for another?

Jason Kao Hwang’s Sing House

By Mike Faloon

Andrew Drury picks up a small, metal object, part of a sink faucet he got from a construction job. He leans over his floor tom, places the faucet on the drumhead and exhales. He works with care and precision, a jeweler placing loupe to gem, magnifying what lies within, revealing mournful, voluminous sounds. A solo sans sticks.

Sing House listens and waits. Bandleader Jason Kao Hwang brings his violin to his chin. Trombonist Steve Swell raises his mouthpiece to his lips. Drury continues. Hwang and Swell start nodding to the implied beat, they’re ready to come in. Drury continues. Hwang and Swell rest their instruments. Everyone has a voice in Sing House and right now Drury has more to say; a different way to give the drummer some.

* * *

I ask Drury how he thought to play drums like that. He says he wasn’t interested in a “grandiose display of cleverness.” He had a gig with cellist Peggy Lee in Vancouver. She couldn’t find her pick up and had to play unamplified, “which meant disaster…drum sets always bury cellos and (make) for some really boring-to-listen-to music.” Drury decided to focus “on all the quiet sounds…that drum sets make, like when you sit down and something creaks. I think I might have used sheets of crumpled paper as drum sticks that night.”

* * *

The stage is dense tonight, more so than usual. I’ve seen a lot of duos and trios at Quinn’s, along with a handful of quartets. Sing House is the first five-piece. More important than the number of names on the scorecard, though, is the scope and range of the personalities, and when everyone’s playing, thumping and bumping and wailing and flailing in wonderful unsynchronized unison, there is so much to take in, so many places for the eye and ear and mind to go. 

Yet for all the activity, the scene takes me back to one of Adrian Chi’s Bite the Cactus comics, a particularly pensive one called “Drawn to the Desert.” The panels depict the before and after of Chi’s move from the city of Toronto to the suburbs of L.A., from stimulating to numbing. Then she makes friends and starts taking weekend camping trips, discovers Joshua Tree and Matilija Falls, Death Valley and King’s Canyon. “The incredible majesty of these places made the suburbs seem far away and insignificant. There’s an indescribable ecstasy sitting in the desert, hiding in the shade of a boulder, that draws me back again and again.” 

* * *

Steve Swell’s eyes are closed. His face is clenched. His right hand, bandaged from a recent surgery, gives him the appearance of a boxer before the gloves go on. He jabs the air, strikes the space before him, rapidly, desperately pushing and pulling the slide on his trombone. But there’s more to Swell’s brand of the sweet science than just the number of punches thrown. Location and impact count too, especially when playing within the ambitious blueprints laid out by Hwang.

I run into Swell a few weeks later. He asks, “Those other things you write about, are you thinking about them while you’re listening to the music or do they come to you later?”

I’ve been writing these columns for a year. They’ve occupied so much of my thinking, but no one’s asked so directly about one of the basic building blocks of these pieces. I think he says something about schizophrenia.

“I don’t mean schizophrenia in all its bad connotations but, I believe this, there can be ‘good’ schizophrenia. When we play music or write poetry we are dealing with everything we already know or have been exposed to up to that moment just before the actual act of making music or writing poetry. It’s all we have to work with. We shut off the learning part and turn on the working part. All the information, disparate as it may seem, comes to the fore when we are creating.”

* * *

Chi’s comics appear in Razorcake, a non-profit punk magazine based in Los Angeles. Razorcake captivates me for a number of reasons. Their contributors embrace and repudiate the stereotypes of punk culture. They cover music that is loud and aggressive and filled with emphatic, thump-the-table-rattle-the-utensils lyrics. They also bring to bear considerable intelligence and a willingness to contemplate. In a recent column Razorcake co-founder Sean Carswell used the phrase “Meditate on this with me.” Not “react with me” or “get angry with me,” but rather “think with me.” They offer more than escapism; an invitation to engage in a search, one that resets, redirects. 

* * *

Bassist Ken Filiano solos. The fingertips of his left hand move in small increments, shifting and balancing on the strings beneath. His right hand goes Nadia Comaneci, leaping above and below his left—low then high, high then low, faster as he goes—plucking harmonics with each perfect landing.

The ensemble resumes, frenetic movement in all directions. Just when the whole thing might become too divergent, overextended, Filiano repeats a simple phrase, provides just enough foundation, doesn’t reign in the others but provides the background, the context, that offers shape, like Hercules digging a trench to redirect a river.

Between sets Filiano and I talk about books. I mention Larry McMurtry’s Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen in which he writes about being in his sixties, still searching for a way to balance life as a reader with life as a writer; when he reads a lot he feels that he’s neglecting his writing and vice versa. Filiano recommends Lonesome Dove. “He doesn’t create his characters, he listens to them.”

I wonder to what extent Jason Kao Hwang mirrors this approach with his Sing House compositions. It’s remarkable how well this cast of characters functions within Hwang’s structures. In that sense he reminds me of Gabriel Byrne’s character in The Usual Suspects, orchestrating a group of disparate personalities. I’m tempted to match up the five members of Sing House with their counterparts in The Usual Suspects. But who’d be the Stephen Baldwin?

* * *

Christopher Forbes sits at his keyboard, momentarily on the periphery, moving slightly, sizing up the situation, contemplating his next move. He enters quietly, pulls his fingertips across the keys, one sensitive brush stroke at a time. Then he ramps up, plays at incalculable, seemingly reckless speeds, but always sure footed; nimble movements within the turmoil, a striking combination of velocity and grace. The classic game is set aside for blitz chess.

Visually Forbes fits the image I have of Lenny Angrush from Jonathan Lethem’s Dissident Gardens. It’s the combination of beard and glasses, upturned porkpie hat and jacket-less-than-pressed. Lenny’s a chess hustler and well-read idealist. He’s also a baseball fan who tries in vain to convince the new Queens-based team (the soon-to-be Mets) to adopt a pro-labor song as their anthem. But Lenny never finds a place where his efforts as a provocateur are welcome. Forbes, on the other hand, is building a place where his are essential.

* * *

Jodorowsky’s Dune is a documentary about director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s quest to make a film adaptation of the Frank Herbert science fiction novel. The project never makes it off the launch pad but in the mid-seventies Jodorowsky and his collaborators spend months recruiting cast members, including Salvador Dalí, Orson Welles, and Mick Jagger. They also develop a shot-by-shot breakdown of their proposed movie. “Fever dream” might be more apt—the book is comprised of 3,000 illustrations and the film-to-be has a running time of fourteen hours.

* * *

Explaining the band’s name, Hwang says, “Sing is a common sound in the Chinese language. Depending upon the tone, inflection, context and dialect, the meanings and the calligraphy vary greatly. I hear Sing as a sound.”

“So in that sense it’s like a syllable,” I ask, “a building block, a part of a larger whole?”

“Yes,” Hwang replies, “I should ask a linguist as to what sonic unit this sound would be categorized.”

* * *

As with any book-to-film adaptation Jodorowsky wants to make changes to the source material. Among them is an alternate ending in which Duke Leto’s son Paul is killed. Paul’s consciousness spreads among the masses and sparks a rebirth of the planet. Dune is transformed from a desert to a garden, vast and verdant. From one can come many. Sing House inverts that dynamic: within the one there are many.

* * *

Hwang motions, leans into the beat as he counts off. There are plans afoot. Follow me. His fingers slide along the strings, inward, toward him, evoking the highest, faintest, most fragile of pitches, the smallest specks of paint that prompt you to step closer to the canvas. I’ve been so focused on Hwang’s role as composer and conductor that I’d momentarily lost sight of the performer; overemphasized his ability to work Cerebro and overlooked what an asset he is in the throes of battle.

Then there’s an explosion. The band’s back in full force yet diverging. They’re in one place physically but sonically they’ve scattered, to each his own pursuit, like a Sol LeWitt wall drawing, so many lines radiating from a series of single points yet carefully placed within the larger piece.

* * *

Jason Kao Hwang: “The music is a house, with the score’s quintessential melodies, rhythms, harmonies and textures offering rooms in which musicians extemporaneously sing. In this dramatic architecture, the unique voice of each musician is empowered to individually interpret and also, transcend interpretation to become an originating spirit that is inextricably unified to the composition’s destiny. This is how music grows greater than the imagination of one to become a meta-language of memories, dreams and hope. This is how my compositions house imagination, identity, and greater purpose. This is the jazz of Sing House.”

The Other Night at Quinn’s: Avram Fefer

By Mike Faloon | Photos by Michael Bogdanffy-Kriegh / Studio MBK

“That’s what’s most important if you want to be free: respect for and exasperation with boundaries.” – Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

***

Saxophonist Avram Fefer plays a phrase, passes it to the rhythm section and momentarily steps back.  The Michaels (Bisio and Wimberly) grab it and go, a rebound turned fastbreak.  Then they pull back, work the perimeter, set up the next play—a trio in top gear from the start.  Later Fefer says he told the band to “skip the first set and get to the second and third.”

For months I’ve been telling my neighbor, Keith, about these shows.  He was able to make it tonight and couldn’t have picked a better introduction to Quinn’s.  Early on it’s evident that this will be a memorable night.  Joe McPhee and Iva Bittova sense it.  They’re among the past performers who have returned tonight as fans.  Fefer senses it, too.  He takes a moment to snap a photo when bassist Michael Bisio solos.  Then Fefer stretches, reaches to the ceiling, twists side to side, and preps for what’s to come.

***

“You say something true, but high-minded—preferably a couple of things true, but high-minded, to set up the rhythm.  Then you deflate the whole lofty mess by saying something really true…that leaves the reader with not just a laugh, but insight.”  Art Spiegelman, Introduction to Harvey Kurtzman’s Jungle Book

***

Fefer floats on high, glides on long, sustained thoughts, as Bisio eases into a hypnotic bass line, locks in with Wimberly.  A refrain emerges.  They stay within the boundaries and it’s wonderful but it’s not to last, not in this form.  They toss aside what they’ve built, let loose a flurry, beautiful and messy, a blizzard of ideas, too many to track yet, too tantalizing to ignore.

The group changes directions once more, mixes the melodic and the manic.  The rhythm section clicks into a groove, repeats a phrase that you can latch onto, while Fefer takes off, pushes to the upper register, strains just short of piercing.  Only as he descends do I realize the extent to which my body tensed up during the ascent; I feel my shoulders drop as he releases, returns to solid ground.

***

Curses, a comic by Kevin Huizenga, revolves around the existential adventures of Glenn Ganges.  Glenn’s brother, Wayne, teaches at a seminary school.  In one story they go golfing with two of Wayne’s fellow professors.  The older professor talks about a recent visit to a bookstore.  He looks around at “all the books on display—and (thinks), Behold, the vanity of man!”

Wayne responds, “But in all those books God displays his wonders, too—through human imagination, art, history, ideas…”  Theoretically I agree with the brother, take the humanist approach.  But when I first read the comic I sided with the older professor.  There are so many books published each year, plus the articles and reviews and posts.  Why add to the heap?  Do I write to engage and connect or merely distract myself, chase the red dot on the floor?

***

Keith and I arrive early only to find the counter full.  The booths up front are occupied, too.  Yet he’s taken with the place by the time we sit down—the décor, the menu, the prospect of great music on a Monday night.  We drove up together but I haven’t asked how long he wants to stay.  I don’t want to ask.  He might have to—or want to—leave early.  A set departure time will only get stuck in my head and I’ll focus on what I might miss, rather than the experience before me.

***

Fefer and Bisio move aside, which signals a Michael Wimberly solo.  I spot an open seat.  I ask Keith if he wants to move closer.  He gives me a nod that says, I’m good right here.  By the time I walk up Wimberly has switched to mallets and they’re a blur, the white felt leaving streaks in the air.  Then he moves faster, the sticks like helicopter blades.  My eyes can only process one or two images per revolution, they can’t keep up.  It’s over too soon but I stay up front, linger with the sights I’d been missing in back—the various shades of gold on Fefer’s well-worn horns, the hairs on Bisio’s fraying bass bow, Wimberly’s fingers pushing in slow motion across the drum head of his floor tom.

***

“The very best works construct a bridge across that abyss of human loneliness.” – David Foster Wallace, “Good Old Neon”


***

Fefer, Bision and Wimberly build bridges early and often.  It’s evident when Fefer acknowledges his predecessors.  With humility and reverence he covers Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s “Volunteered Slavery.”  He talks about traveling with Archie Shepp and playing with Ornette Coleman.  And always with a sense of inclusion, big tent rather than closed circle.  It’s evident, too, when Fefer claps on the beat, invites others to join, tries to span what’s left of the performer/audience divide.  Iva Bittova moves to the front, calls out on the upbeat, bellows and beams.  It’s a well-timed response to what’s emanating from stage and quickly spreads around the room.

***

After the show Keith and I settle our tab, ready to head home.  We stop by the merch table but no one’s there.  The band is scattered around the room catching up with friends and fans.  Hundreds of dollars worth of records and CDs sit unattended.  They’re available but they’re secondary.  We find Avram Fefer and go overboard on his records.  Then we do the same with Michael Bisio.  (If Michael Wimberly had brought albums for sale we’d have completed the trifecta.)  Each of them is gracious, genuine.  The show’s over but the night’s just beginning.  Keith suggests that we stay for another drink. 

The Other Night at Quinn’s: Tarana – Ravish Momin, Rick Parker

By Mike Faloon | Photos by Michael Bogdanffy-Kriegh / Studio MBK

“So laid back but so uptight” — Sebadoh, “The Freed Pig”

* * *

“Everything is all right / Uptight” — Stevie Wonder, “Uptight”

* * *

The leaves are changing. Greens slowly yielding to reds, oranges, and yellows. There's a chill in the air and it’s getting dark early. For the first time in months I have to turn on the headlights as I drive to Beacon. It’s starting to feel like autumn but I'm not ready.

* * *

Lately I’ve been waking up with the sense that I’m further behind—at work, at home—than I was the day before, and I’m not sure that I’m ready for Tarana either. They’re an unlikely duo—a drummer and trombonist each of whom incorporates electronics. On its face the lineup seems like a longshot, the details too disparate to form a fully functional whole. Ravish Momin, Tarana’s drummer and spokesman, uses the phrase “folk music from nowhere.” This could easily and accurately be revised to “folk music from everywhere.”

One of my first notes says, “New Delhi + New Orleans + ‘Autobahn’.” My inner cynic squirms for a moment, wonders whether this will derail into a night of “everything and the kitchen sink,” a multi-genre hodgepodge desperate to display diverse tastes. But those reservations are more blip on the radar than looming threat. It’s remarkable how quickly, how well and how often Tarana get those disparate elements to gell.

* * *

Richard Brautigan’s The Hawkline Monster follows another unlikely duo, Greer and Cameron, as they travel from Hawaii to eastern Oregon in 1902. They’re hired guns. Greer’s preferred rifle is a 30:40 Krag and he jokes with Cameron about his choice of weapons, a 25:35 Winchester. Greer and Cameron are men of few words. As killers they’re also unlikely protagonists. But they’re bound by compatible temperaments and shared goals; who they are as individuals is eclipsed by what they do and how.

* * *

Tarana, like any worthy partnership—musicians, athletes, turn-of-the-century assassins—have an unspoken work dynamic of their own. Part of this is rooted in their stage personas. Ravish Momin (drums, electronics) is the extrovert, talkative on stage and off. Five minutes into a conversation you’ll know his background. (He’s lived in India, Hong Kong, London, and the Middle East.) You’ll know his outlook on music. (“You know four on the floor, right? Why not seven or thirteen?”). But it’s genuine enthusiasm more than rehearsed monologue.

* * *

Game three of the Royals/Orioles series was rained out. Bummer. I was hoping to follow the game, check the score between songs.

* * *

Rick Parker (trombone, electronics) may speak less on stage, but he’s no less a presence.

His trombone booms across the room, a big, breezy tone with wave upon wave of echoes following in its wake. Then he trades the cool currents of brass for bone rattling blasts of synthesizer. He hunches over a keyboard about the size of a power strip or surge protector. It’s remarkable that a device so small has such tremendous output. When he returns to the trombone he points the slide downward, toward the pedals resting on the floor. It’s like he’s taming them, keeping them in check, maintaining a clear “monkeys > robots” hierarchy.

* * *

“Greer and Cameron had an aura about them that they could handle any situation that came up with a minimum amount of effort and resulting in a maximum amount of effect.” – The Hawkline Monster, p. 13

* * *

Momin and Parker run the ROY G BIV gamut, color outside the lines with a wide spectrum of sounds and a fluid economy of motion. Their work-to-impact ratio rivals Greer and Cameron’s, less the body count. Yet for all of the samples and echoes and pyrotechnics, it's the drums and trombone that keep bringing me back, the basics, the fundamentals.

* * *

The Royals are in the playoffs for the first time in nearly thirty years. I watched their bandwagon from afar as they squeaked into the playoffs. I jumped on board during the late innings of their improbable comeback against the A’s. Then they knocked off the Angels, the best team in baseball, swept them aside in three straight.

* * *

Momin sings a line and loops it. The line repeats as he kicks quarter notes on the bass drum, steady and inviting. Parker enters on trombone and Momin shifts to a syncopated snare/kick pattern. Just as the ground starts to feel firm Parker trades trombone for synth, slides into sounds bubbly and expansive. I’ve nearly caught up, nearly plotted all the coordinates, when he uncages these stunning, sublime bass blasts on his synth. Momin changes lanes, accelerates from a steady beat to fills that roll across the toms. He too operates a battery of electronics, which he triggers with foot pedals. Back and forth they go, filling the room with kaleidoscopic sounds, each tune laced with melodies stretched this way and that.

* * *

Lorenzo Cain and Nori Aoki are my favorite Royals. Together they patrol thousands of square feet. Cain plays centerfield. In the past week I’ve seen him make at least three highlight reel catches. Watching him chase down a flyball is stunning. He can formulate and act on an accurate plan of pursuit so quickly. He knows his destination before he takes his first step.

Aoki plays rightfield. In the past week I’ve seen him nearly turn at least four routine plays into errors. He charges line drives too fast, nearly overruns them. He takes the most circuitous routes to flyballs. I wonder what, or if, he’s thinking. He has an uncanny ability to turn the ordinary into the nailbiting.

* * *

Momin and Parker cover even more ground than Cain and Aoki. They leapfrog across continents and timelines mixing traditional and progressive jazz with dub and Indian influences and electronics—East and West, looking back and looking ahead. Tarana keep conjuring different places, different regions, effortlessly trotting around the globe. My mental map is covered with push pins and a network of criss-crossing yarn. The world feels smaller on a night like this.

* * *

Cain is African-American. Aoki is Japanese. All too often African-American athletes are described as “natural” and “graceful,” as if they merely coast on natural talents. The implications being, among other things, that they lack intelligence and/or work habits. The stereotypes of Asian athletes lie at the other end of the spectrum; through intellect and diligence they maximize what they were born with. Cain and Aoki subvert those stereotypes, muddy the waters, which only heightens their appeal.

* * *

Director Lizzie Borden said she intended her films to portray alternate takes on feminism. Her characters lived on the fringes of society and she wanted to show that their compasses, though of different design, pointed in the same direction as their mainstream counterparts. She didn’t want to shoehorn words or attitudes into their experiences for the sake of a gaining a wider audience. “Why should we put words in the mouths of women who believe the same things? Why should they speak our language? We should have simultaneous languages."

* * *

Ravish Momin says he’s been accused of selling out with Tarana, playing it too straight. I get it. I understand that using steady beats is a step toward the norm, at least to those who play free/out there with all variables. But it’s hard to overlook the many unexpected choices Tarana pile atop those rhythms. It’s also difficult to picture a drums/trombone/ electronics band as the path to fame and fortune. Tarana is fluent in many of the simultaneous languages—musically and culturally. Arguably they’re forging their own.

* * *

Leaving Quinn’s I notice the vines on the bank across the street. Even in the dark the leaves seem unusually green, vibrant. From parts unknown I hear crickets, and it feels warmer than it has all day.

The Other Night at Quinn’s: It’s Not About Time – The Spanish Donkey

By Mike Faloon | Photos by Michael Bogdanffy-Kriegh / Studio MBK

It’s chilly tonight, cold in ways our backyard thermometer can’t measure, cold in ways that slow down everything and induce a huddle-round-a-fire feeling, trigger the need to pull in closer.

The Spanish Donkey are having a similar effect.  They push forth enormous arrays of sound—guitar and keyboards mixing and melting, drums securing the perimeter.  Maybe defining the perimeter is more apt.  The band’s outer edge is more permeable membrane than rigidly defined border—it has to be given the frequency of ideas flowing in and out; the dimensions of those ideas shifting from moment to moment.  Keyboardist Jamie Saft stomps on quarter notes.  Drummer Mike Pride pushes steady eighths, and guitarist Joe Morris moves at a pace that I can’t break down.  Yet for all the different dynamics, there’s something dense, highly concentrated, about their sound, all the parts pulling in more than pushing away, more centripetal force than centrifugal.

The band’s name has me thinking of Don Quixote, specifically Sancho Panza, the realist, the voice of practicality. 

Joe Morris looks down at his gear.  He maneuvers massive amounts of sound, yet he’s reserved in his responses, stoic, the cool-headed engineer at mission control.  (Is there something of Robert Fripp in his approach?)  I notice a new keyboard pattern, rich, vibrant organ sounds.  Did Jamie Saft just start that or has he been locked into it for the past five minutes?  I drift to the drums.  Pride fluctuates the patterns, steers clear of easily defined beats.  Before long Morris reemerges, like storm clouds you’ve seen coming for miles but still manage to startle when they open up.  When I stick with one player I lose track of the others, never sure for how long, then I’m surprised by what’s developed elsewhere.

* * *

Season 2 of House of Cards opens with a long, steady shot of a D.C. park at night.  There’s no one in sight and it’s very quiet, too quiet for a city park.  You scan the frame for movement, evidence of action, purpose.  Eventually two figures, dressed in black, enter the frame, jogging side by side.  At first they’re too distant to distinguish.  As they slowly emerge from the dark depths you realize it’s Frank and Claire.  The absence of edits lets you choose where your eye goes.  You’re given the whole and with it a chance to sift through the bits.

* * *

Last weekend I went to a reading in Brooklyn.  I ran into my friend Brendan at Grand Central.  We walked a couple blocks west to catch the F train.  Before we even got on the subway he was wondering if he should have driven.  We talked on the train but couldn’t lose track of time because neither of us was familiar with the F line.  We had to keep checking the map and trying to decode the garbled announcements.  When we got to Brooklyn we saw open parking spaces and free moving traffic, and Brendan was convinced he’d made the wrong decision.  “I should have driven.”

* * *

The Spanish Donkey can blast, play loud, push the amplitude of those sound waves.  But for all the band’s volume, their relative restraint is more striking.  It’s not about the horizontal (movement or structure) or the vertical (contrasts in pitch or tone).  It’s this sense of branching out yet staying within close proximity. 

* * *

Between sets I order a drink.  The bartender, George, chats with Joe Morris.  It takes George a moment to break away to take my order.  He apologizes but there’s no need.  Morris is holding court and I enjoy the eavesdropping.  He uses the phrase “static density.”  I’m uncertain of what the term means but it seems to fit the Spanish Donkey.  I think it fits that scene from House of Cards, too.

* * *

Back on stage Morris shoots through the stratosphere.  Meso- and thermospheres, too.  He heads for the exosphere, still somewhat bound by gravity but merging with other realms.  It’s not like other guitarists don’t hit these levels. They might do so momentarily, but as a solo, an aberration, the break from the routine.  For Morris, it’s the norm, cruising altitude, the place where he builds and sustains.

* * *

Later, still unsure of how to explain static density, I write this as a placeholder: “all three players playing at all times, overrides volume and tempo and other variables.”  But it doesn’t ring true, so I email Morris a few days later and he responds, “The forward motion of time as pulse is so slow that it feels like it’s barely moving.  Therefore we can make form without being burdened by the pulse, unless we chose to be.”

* * *

The reading was outdoors, on the front patio of Hamilton’s in Windsor Terrace.  The afternoon was roll-up-the-sleeves warm, a perfect day to listen to our friend Brian read from his new book and watch tattooed helicopter parents stroll by with canvas bags of coop veggies, trailed by scooter kids in soccer jerseys.  After the reading we all moved inside to have dinner.  The food was good and the laughter loud.  We forgot the time and stayed for another drink.  Brendan said he was glad he took the train. 

* * *

Jamie Saft, army jacket-clad, belly length beard and short cropped hair (anti-mullet?), radiates holiday cheer.  Or crush-the-state radicalism.  Maybe both.  He holds down the middle, provides stability, a foundation.  He’s the Yggdrasil that links the band.  Without him it falls apart.

* * *

In Chris Offutt’s “Sawdust” the narrator, Junior, living in the hills of Kentucky, struggles with the seeming contradictions between the values of his family and those of the outside world.  He’s considering pursuing his GED and, among other things, he’s confused by math: “a pile of stove wood doesn’t equal a tree.  It made me wonder where the sawdust went to in a math problem.” 

***

Pride lifts the massive ride cymbal from its stand.  It’s the size of a small kiddie pool.  And what’s that dangling on the side?  It's not a pair of EKG clips.  Is it a handle?  I can’t tell if he’s adjusting the cymbal or replacing it.  He takes hold of the cord, which is a handle, and I realize the cymbal is a gong.  Pride stands and bangs.  He sets the gong on top of his floor tom and wails.  Sheets of mallet-on-gong sounds rain down.  Then he drops the mallet and appears to pull a stick from behind his back, Green Arrow-style.  (Where’s the boxing glove stick?)

* * *

Morris, Saft, and Pride create different densities.  They rotate through the roles of high, medium, and low pressure.  It’s the contrasts, the differences, that generate movement, push things along.  I mention this to Mike Bogdanffy-Kriegh.  He says it reminds him of a quote from Moby Dick, “the tornadoed Atlantic of my being.”[1] 

I email a writer friend, Sean Carswell, about the scene from which the line is taken. "The Pequod (the main whaling ship) travels through some straits near Sumatra.  They encounter a pod of whales there.  They also encounter a Malay pirate ship.  They flee the pirates.  The escape leads them into an even larger pod of whales.  Ishmael describes it as being two or three square miles.  There is a birthing center in the middle.  Ishmael drops into a whaling boat (each ship has several smaller row boats for catching whales) with Queequeg (the harpooner) and Starbuck (the second mate).  Queequeg harpoons a whale.  The whale flees into the center of the pod.  He drags the boat into the birthing center. In the midst of all this chaos, the whaling boat is suddenly stuck inside a beautiful, serene, peaceful place where humans almost never tread."

There’s something about the Spanish Donkey that elicits the timeless, the epic, the classic.  Maybe it’s the way they treat time, push it aside, give it less spotlight.

* * *

Junior, a modern Sancho Panza of sorts, adds, “After all that ciphering, there wasn’t anything to show for the work, nothing to clean up, nothing to look at.”  It sounds like a description of most commercial music—linear, sequential, everything accounted for, no mess and easy to digest.

* * *

Joe Morris: “I use the term free music.  Free from any industry, institutional or critical oversight.” 

* * *

The Minutemen followed their greatest success, Double Nickels on the Dime, with an EP titled Project: Mersh EP.  “Mersh” being Minutemen speak for “commercial.” The cover art shows a trio of executives gathered in a boardroom.  Behind them a line graph.  In the foreground one exec cries out, “I got it!  We’ll have them write hit songs.”

* * *

Joe Morris: “People ask, ‘Do you make any money?  Will it be historically significant?’  My answer is, Screw you.  It took me a long time to get to that.

* * *

Nights at Quinn’s are all about the sawdust, not the mess itself, but all that goes into making the mess, insuring that there is something to show for the work.  I flash back to the Buddhist monks in Werner Herzog’s documentary, The Wheel of Time.  Gathering for an initiation ceremony, they build a sand mandala, a large, stunningly detailed sand painting the size of a ping pong table.  Hunched over the table wearing masks and holding narrow metal funnels, they work in shifts for several days, laboring 18 hours a day.  No attempt is made to presever the mandala when the ceremony ends.  The monks' work is swept aside like crumbs on the floor.  

* * *

The next day there’s an on-line dialogue about the show.  Joe Morris writes, “It's places like (Quinn’s) that are the hope and the future of all of this.  Small, local and brave as hell is always the best.”

---

[1] “But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.”

 

The Other Night at Quinn’s: Iron Dog

By Mike Faloon | Photos by Michael Bogdanffy-Kriegh / Studio MBK

There’s nothing quite like a quiet day at home, especially a beautiful, sweatshirt autumn day.  Today is one of those.  It’s also Rosh Hashanah, so there’s no school.  I’m catching up on house projects when Richard arrives, his truck filled with firewood.  The image of his battered pick-up with the homemade sidewalls dumping firewood on the driveway should evoke cozy winter fires, blankets and cocoa and soft falling snow.  Instead I see a massive, splintery pile of disorder and an afternoon of stacking wood.

***

Iron Dog take the stage and take the place by storm, albeit a storm that forms slowly before opening up.  They’re a trio from Brooklyn.  Sarah Bernstein (violin, vocals), Stuart Popejoy (bass), and Andrew Drury (drums).  For the first minutes of the show it’s like a three-ring circus, each band member working in their own spotlight.  My attention shifts from one to the next as their performances travel on parallel lines, related but separate.

My first notes seem confused.  One reads:

Violin = 16 rpm
Drums = 33 1/3 rpm
Bass = 45 rpm

Another says:

Drums = nomads of ancient Northern Africa
Bass = ships of Zhu De
Violin = strings of Renaissance Europe 

***

Slowly, piece after piece, the wood clunks into the wheelbarrow.  The driveway pile shrinks as the garage stacks rise.  I square the ends and fill the middle, wood chips snagging on my work gloves.  I have music on but it’s not loud enough to mask the sounds of leaves crunching underfoot and rustling overhead.  I’m surprised by how satisfying the work is.  (Don’t white collar types always say such things when their manual labor is optional and occasional?)

***

“Ain’t it funny how we waste our days?”
–So Little, “Waste”

***

Stuart Popejoy stands in the glow of a red neon sign.  His legs are locked in place and he bends every which way at the waist, Reed Richards freed from the lab.  Popejoy holds his bass nearly upright and both hands are in constant motion, so rapid yet so fluid.  His sound is malleable—conventional, then distorted, then synth-like—always there to serve as the gum that everything else sticks to.  Then there’s the intensity and direction of his gaze.  He stares at the ceiling, looks up and beyond.  I half expect his eyes to roll back into his head, like he’s ready to speak in tongues.

Technically Andrew Drury is the drummer but he’s revised the job description, just as much a player of strings and brass as percussion.  He bows a dust pan, then a piece of sheet metal.  He turns his sticks, holds them vertically and stirs on the floor tom.  He turns a shower fixture into a mouthpiece, places it on the head of the same drum, and blows.  Later he performs mouth-to-drum resuscitation, rotating his floor tom ninety degrees, holding it in his lap, and using the tiny hole on the side as a mouthpiece, rendering the thing a woodwind.  But the Sanford and Son equipment is only a means to an end, the emerging sounds even more interesting than the choice of tools. 

Sarah Bernstein plays strings (violin) and sings, part John Cale, part Nico.  Standing behind a semi-circle of effects pedals, her sound ranges as far as those of her bandmates.  She leaps about the upper layers, bounces and skips across the dense canopy of the band’s sound.  Then she slices through the mix, blasts down to the floor.  When she interjects lyrics, they’re more spoken than sung.  I can’t make much literal sense of the words.  They seem to volley between serious comments and “for the sake of the sound” non-sequiters, something else to consider when sorting through the sonics.  Here’s one I like: “improper contest attire.”

***

When I was growing up my friend Joe had a circular above ground pool.  If everyone walked or swam in the same direction we could create a mini-whirlpool; the water swirled round and round and carried us along.

***

For all of the band’s individual prowess, Iron Dog are best when they all push in the same direction at the same time, generate a different kind of above ground whirlpool.  How they decide when and how to converge, though, is a mystery.  One moment they’re circling around one another.  The next there they are, a three-person flash mob. 

***

So many things feel like they’re winding down, closing up for the season.  The patio furniture is stacked and stored.  Temperatures are dropping and the Mets are playing out their final games of the fall.  The exception, the new thing that cuts across the grain of the winding down/closing up, is my mom’s move last weekend.  The house-to-apartment move blurs by, months of phone calls and emails, debates and discussions dissolve in a few hours.

The movers unpack the truck—boxes, then furniture.  Mom directs traffic from the kitchen table.  We shuffle and reposition and restack, try to keep under control what’s flowing in through the front door—a horizontal version of Tetris.  We are also prepared to smooth the way emotionally, put her at ease, try once more to sell the virtues of the new apartment, but there isn’t a need.  She’s moving in and moving on.  Within days she’s calling to say that we need to move faster on the sale of the house, that it’s time to stop dragging things out, pick up the pace.  After all that’s been dumped on her in recent years she was re-establishing some sense of control.

***

The Biblical name for Rosh Hashanah is Yom Teruah, which translates to “day of shouting” or “making a noise” or “day of awakening blasts.”  Iron Dog traffic in all three, but I think awakening blasts fits best.  Some bands push boundaries.  Others deny the existence of boundaries.  Iron Dog use them to gain traction.  They know full well what the norms are and relish stomping on boundaries, pushing over them, or under or through.

***

From Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run:

Bank clerk (Uncredited): What does this say?

Fielding Melish (Woody Allen): Umm, can’t you read that?

Bank clerk: I can’t read this.  What’s this?  Apt natural?

Fielding Melish: No, it says, Please put $50,000 into this bag and act natural.

Bank clerk: (Confirming) It does say act natural.

Fielding Melish: Uh, I am pointing, uh, a gun at you.

Bank clerk: That looks like gub.  That doesn’t look like gun.

Fielding Melish: No, it’s gun.

Bank clerk: No, that’s gub.  That’s a b.

Fielding Melish: No, see, that’s an n.  G-u-n.  It’s gun.

***

Here’s another of Bernstein’s lyrics that I catch: “We make lists because we don’t want to die.”

James Keepnews catches the line, too.  He leans over when he sees me write it down, but he hears it differently: “We like lists because we don’t want to die.”

Between sets we go back and forth, our impromptu take on the old Miller Light ad (“Make!”; “No, like!”).  Then we find ourselves asking for clarification.  Bernstein indulges us.  She chuckles, too, because she can’t remember the line from memory and reaches for her lyric sheet.  (It’s “like,” not “make.”)

***

They’re variations on the same theme, deciphering lyrics and liking lists, stacking firewood, moving boxes—different ways to clear space and carve out order, reign in the chaos of the day.

The Other Night at Quinn’s -- Peter Evans and Sam Pluta

By Mike Faloon | Photos by Michael Bogdanffy-Kriegh / Studio MBK

“If you put all the knobs on your amplifier on 10 you can get a much higher reaction to effort ratio…Just a tiny tap on the strings can rattle your windows, and when you slam the strings, with your amp on 10, you can strip the paint off the walls…and with a tiny movement rule the world.”

— David Fair, from the liner notes to Half Japanese’s Greatest Hits

***

Words have been failing me lately. This afternoon a co-worker called with a simple request. I was willing to comply. I was able to comply. But I couldn’t communicate either of those facts. The more I tried to convey that all was well, that his request was reasonable and easy to fulfill, the more he felt compelled to explain what he wanted and why, and the more agitated he became. And the more I spoke, the worse it got.

***

The crickets are cranky tonight, unusually loud, rattled by something in the air. I think that Peter Evans and Sam Pluta are to blame. Our house is far from Quinn’s but apparently it’s still within the blast zone. Evans and Pluta have stirred something that’s still reverberating miles away and hours later.

*** 

The more I try to help my mom, express my support and help her sort through her situation—needing neck surgery, having to find an apartment and sell her home—the further we drift, the more she doubts my motives and the more I add to her frustration. I can’t find the right words.

***

To some extent there’s always a gap between expression and reception, some contrast between what we intend and what’s understood, the divide between output and input. With Peter Evans (trumpet) and Sam Pluta (electronics) that contrast is intentional, the juxtaposition of their instruments, analog and digital, metal and plastic, is at the core of the design.  

***

Peter Evans doesn’t play trumpet so much as survive it. I’m surprised he walks away from the experience unscathed. He blows like a man living on borrowed time, as if he’s thrown himself on a live grenade and has but a few desperate moments to divulge a deep well of secrets—You’ve got to hear this! And this! And this and these…and these…so much to say, so little time—and are you listening?

Sam Pluta, meanwhile, sits at a table of electronics—iPad, Manta keypad, laptop. He performs with equal intensity, coordinating a million missions impossible. He samples Evans’ trumpet lines, reshapes and regurgitates them. One moment he unleashes a rapid succession of piercing, shrill sixteenth notes. The next, table-rattling half notes that plunge to Mariana Trench depths. I catch myself looking over at the glass drink case behind the counter as if it might shatter.

*** 

I’m still stressed from work when I arrive at the show, frazzled by a long, taxing, head-spinning day of preparing for the start of school. Monday through Wednesday I made great strides in getting ready to kick off the new year. Today, though, I went into my last meeting with three things on my “to do” list and left with a dozen. Welcome back! 

***

Witnessing Evans push so many ideas through his mouthpiece is like watching traffic funnel into the Holland Tunnel, but this isn’t a matter of cars crawling along, lurching forward. Evans has six—or eight or twelve—lanes of ideas barreling ahead, accelerators stomped to floorboards, yet somehow converging, blurring into one stream. 

Pluta bends to rhythms I can’t hear and leans into the noise like a bowler or a ballplayer, Carlton Fisk in game six. And when he pauses to push up his glasses, take a moment before pursuing his next thought, it’s with purpose and precision, one index finger on each bow, none of this “jab at the bridge” nonsense. A perfect contrast to his willingness to smudge, smear, contribute to the unholy racket.

Watching them perform, seeing their sounds, so to speak, streak about the club reminds of the lightbike races in Tron—the speed, the turn-on-a-dime joyride thrill of breaking from norms, an “illegal exit” in Tron-speak. 

***

I run into friends and get swept up in their enthusiasm for tonight’s show. Another asks how my mom’s doing. Joe McPhee shows up and I’m able to buy him a drink. Each interaction sands down what the work day built up, takes the edge off. I’m still not sure how much I’m ready to be challenged but that’s comically irrelevant given what Evans and Pluta uncork.

***

Evans puts his hand to the trumpet’s bell, pulls out the notes, clears the way with a magician’s touch and a dynamiter’s impact. His motions can be gentle but the results continue to pummel. There’s also a dance to his movements with the microphone. In one regard, Evans is restricted physically, tethered to the mic—he needs to keep funneling sounds to Pluta—but turns that limitation, that friction, to his advantage, turns it to traction that propels him forward. The evident action is from his neck up, but like a volcano there’s much more bubbling beneath the surface, alveoli working overtime.

Pluta is more than the sum of his gear, but the tools that he utilizes are worth lingering on. The Manta keypad, designed by Jeff Snyder, became Pluta’s “main axe” about six years ago. Slightly larger than a clipboard and covered with a series of octagonal keys, it lights up with each touch, illuminating Pluta’s fingertips. Each tap a tiny explosion. As for the laptop, with its countless overlapping windows, a virus gone haywire, it’s for display purposes. “If I looked at that I’d get distracted.” The brain of his electronic nervous system is the software he designed for his doctoral dissertation.

***

When I teach it’s imperative that words affect change. It’s the essence of the gig. I’m used to delivering unwelcome information and to flat out failing, but I’m part of a dialogue in which language routinely, if inconsistently, moves things forward. But no matter what I say I can’t change things for my mom. For the longest time I thought the details were bogging me down—when she’d move and where—but they’re secondary. The hard part has been realizing that no matter what I say, no matter how carefully I select my phrasing, words cannot alleviate her physical challenges, can do nothing for her pain and frustration. Communication is moot.

Evans and Pluta don’t traffic in the elements that typically draw me to music—melody, harmony, rhythm. Yet for all the noise—and man, can they sandblast—it’s the quiet, subtle acts that provide the tractor beam, the ways in which they listen, react and create in the moment.

I need a show like this, something that overpowers the baggage I bring to it, treats my headspace like taffy on a stretching machine, and reaffirms—at jet engine decibels—why we keep trying.

The Other Night at Quinn’s — Man Forever & Mike Gamble

By Mike Faloon | Photos forthcoming

Despite my allegiance to shows at Quinn’s, I need some bait on the hook before I decide to go. Weeknight shows in Beacon involve a bit of juggling on the home front and I want some sense of the sounds I’m in for. Not the guarantee of a good time—I don’t need someone to bait my hook—but the prospect of adventure.

The name Man Forever didn’t conjure any particular images or sounds, so I went online. I found footage of the main Man, drummer Kid Millions, aka John Colpitts, playing drums in a variety of mobile settings. He performs in rush hour subway cars and aboard an airplane. He plays in a shipping container. (“One of the biggest nightmares of my performance career. I really didn’t think it through…How was I going to get a steady flow of oxygen into the container?”) There’s also a clip where he simply sits in the back seat of a luxury sedan and rolls on his snare drum while a friend drives. (“Most people were saying my career was more or less dead.”)

He doesn’t go out of his way to dazzle with his chops. It’s just him and a snare and the basics—where he is eclipses how he’s playing, which only makes his goals more ambiguous and the pieces more enticing. Are these serious pursuits or put ons? Is Millions a dude who digs drumming in different locales or a smartass with a few nickels to rub together and a twisted need for our attention? Maybe “or” is the wrong conjunction. Perhaps “and” is more apt. Some strange mix of Keith Moon and Holden Caulfield and Andy Kaufman? I’m drawn to the uncertainty, having to puzzle it out.

* * *

“Andy Kaufman went way beyond blurring the distinction between performer and persona, past the point where you wondered what separated the actor from the character; you wondered if he himself knew anymore where the boundaries were drawn. What did he get out of such performances? The joy of not telling the audience how to react, giving that decision—or maybe just the illusion of such decision making—back to the audience.” – David Shields, Reality Hunger

* * *

Mike Gamble opens the show, a one-person band, guitar, drums, and laptop. He’s wearing a white dinner jacket and a multi-colored “Won it at the state fair” hat. Combined with his leopard print guitar strap I don’t know what to expect. Van Halen in a funhouse mirror? Harmony Korine-caliber cringing?

* * *

“Fielding Melish, the president of San Marcos, goes on trial tomorrow for fraud, inciting to riot, conspiracy to overthrow the government, and using the word ‘thighs’ in mixed company.” Woody Allen, Bananas, 1972

* * *

Gamble plays guitar while sitting behind a snare drum and floor tom, a lap top to his left. His guitar parts steer toward the melodic, surfy at times yet slowed down and stretched out. Feedback lurks but doesn’t puncture as he volleys between intense strumming and tender flourishes—push, push, push, coast. Then he plays back a portion of that guitar track and searches for a beat, accompanies his moments-ago self on drums, time traveling back to the conversation he’s just initiated.

So much music is about movement, the passage of time. It’s usually linear. Verse leading to chorus. A followed by B. Gamble’s approach is more spatial, verse and chorus, A on top of B. The audience is able to make more decisions, pick up patterns, find bits we overlooked the first time amidst the one person call and response.

* * *

Fielding Melish, played by Woody Allen, is questioning himself in court, acting as his own attorney. He speaks as a lawyer, jumps into the witness stand to respond, then returns to the courtroom floor.

Fielding Melish, lawyer: I would not joke with this court if I were you.

Fielding Melish, witness: Wouldn’t you or couldn’t you?

Fielding Melish, lawyer: Does the code name Sapphire mean anything to you?

* * *

Kid Millions: “We’re going to do one piece tonight. I think you’ll be able to tell when it’s over.”

* * *

Left to right, Man Forever is Matt Evans, standing, bongos and drum sticks; Kid Millions, full kit; Max Almario, sitting, snare drum. They’re grouped together, u-shaped, clustered in the center of the stage. The sight of three percussionists reminds me of Tucson’s Lenguas Largas, mutant space punk built on three guitars, a bass, and three drummers. They’re an amazing spectacle, all those drummers bashing in unison, non-stop looks of “I can’t believe we get to do this” on their faces. Anti-prank, pure joy.

* * *

Bongos trigger one of two reactions. They shouldn’t. They’re universal in use. They should conjure countless images. But my immediate bongo menu offers college campus drum circles and Andy Kaufman, making with the gibberish. After all Gamble took me through I’ve got prank on the mind again, thinking of those Kid Millions videos, looking for a put on.

* * *

In Reality Hunger, David Shields sculpts 618 quotes into a call to arms to “ignore the laws regarding appropriation, obliterate the distinctions between fiction and non-fiction, and create new forms for the twenty-first century.” Shields doesn't attribute any of the quotes even though most of them are the work of others.[1]

* * *

Matt Evans moves back and forth, approaches and retreats from his bongos like a dance partner. Max Almario, motionless from the shoulders down, bobs his head, chicken pecks, as his snare patterns cut through the mix. Then there’s Kid Millions, eyes closed, mouth open, playing with Max Fisher[2] enthusiasm but heightening that character’s bright-eyed approach, trading aspirations and approximations for experience, a performance both loftier and more grounded.

Millions opens the set going double time on the kick drum, a barrage of eighth notes. The tempo won’t change for the next half hour. Neither will the instrumentation. All drums, all rhythm. Piles and piles of captivating rhythms, patterns always and never changing. Man Forever are relentless.

* * *

Russian Ark is a 2002 movie comprised of one 96-minute shot. There are no breaks, no edits. They employed one camera that followed the action from one set to another. It’s an astounding level of commitment but I turned it off after ten minutes. I needed to blink, I needed those momentary breaks that come from changing camera angles. Plus, I didn’t care enough about the characters. Once I’d experienced the novel approach the cupboards were bare.

* * *

David Shields appeared on The Colbert Report to promote Reality Hunger. Colbert cut out the notes and threw away the rest of the book.

* * *

We sit awestruck, dudes in a wind tunnel, the old Maxell ad come to life. Though with pints and t-shirts in place of wine glasses and leather jacket. I can see all of the sounds that Man Forever produce but it takes a moment or three to determine the drummer of origin, figure out who’s making what. A couple of minutes pass before I change tactics, decide to take in the whole rather than untangle the parts and everything falls into place. They thunder like buffalo. They move like birds in flight. One after another taking their place at the front of the flock, taking the lead without breaking the pace, then yielding to the next, pushing ahead, falling back.

* * *

David Shields: “I wish I’d thought of it (the notes in Reality Hunger) as a mock-requirement that I’d planned all along. In fact, it was a compromise worked out with (the) publisher.”

* * *

There’s no Tubby Time to close shop tonight. The King steps aside for A Tribe Called Quest. And we talk, buzzed on great music, chasing down words, Man Forever’s novel line up more springboard than stopping point.

 

---

[1] Including the quote cited above, which I wrote in an email exchange following an interview I did with Shields.

[2] Jason Schwartzman’s character in Rushmore.