Streets of Your Town: Mingus Big Band, Patti Smith, Deer Tick, and more treats to ring in the new year
Patti Smith. Man Alive! via flickr.
2:11 pm Dec. 27, 2011
The week between Christmas and New Year's Eve feels like a social purgatory, purposeless and vacant, in some ways; an ellipsis before the Dec. 31 exclamation point in live music. This year anyway, there’s plenty of action in that odd ellipsis.
Ben Greenberg, guitarist for the Brooklyn psych band Zs who has lately been recording as Hubble (Dec. 28., The Stone), writes songs that could also be considered ellipses. Constructed from needlepoint guitars that are looped and bent and tangled around one another, Greenberg's compositions gather momentum as they go. But where most bands double down on the crescendo, for Greenberg, tension is the trick: "Hubble Escape" is built on a series of repeated guitar lines that stand as straight as steel girder, mimicking the precision and severity of krautrock. On top, Greenberg smears distorted chords and stretches bands of sound like taffy. The longer it goes—and it goes for some 25 minutes—the more the desire for resolution grows. But Greenberg cannily avoids one, stretching and sustaining the mood and allowing his songs to live in that divine moment of expectation. It's like staring breathlessly at a ball that never drops.
If the run-up to New Year's Eve can be fraught with expectation, it can also be a time for reflection—looking back over the course of the past year and trying to sort out what can be learned from it. That, in a way, has been the mission of the Mingus Big Band (Dec. 26, Jazz Standard) since the jazz giant's widow, Sue, founded the group in 1991. The ensemble's aim is as simple as it is sublime: to preserve the legacy of Sue’s late husband's music. Along the way, it has spawned some jazz giants of its own; its alumni include Randy Brecker and John Stubblefield. Like Hubble, Mingus favored a sustained mood, but where Hubble's music is dreamlike and filmy, Mingus's was rhythmic and propulsive, pulling gospel, soul, and blues into its erratic orbit. Mingus Big Band preserves these elements, and because, more so than pop music, jazz favors revisitation and reinterpretation, the ensemble can play selections from across the Mingus repertoire without seeming kitschy or cloying. Instead, they capture the cool demeanor and proud, swaggering gait of their namesake. It's a stirring reminder that not every old acquaintance needs to be forgot.
And speaking of old acquaintances: Patti Smith’s New Year’s Eve shows at the Bowery Ballroom (Dec 29 – 31, Bowery Ballroom) have, at this point, become something of a cherished institution. A combination of songs from Smith's own catalog intermingled with carefully-selected and artfully-performed covers (last year included runs through "Strawberry Fields Forever," "Boots of Spanish Leather," and "Daydream Believer"), the shows allow for audience members to indulge their jones for nostalgia in ways that don't feel cheap or cheesy. A lot of that has to do with Smith herself; her 40-year career has borne the clear imprint of her inspirations—the Beats, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix—but has always refracted them through Smith's own defiant point of view. And despite her reputation for earthy and unsparing poetry, there's something undeniably uplifting about Smith's live shows, her bared-teeth, bruised-knuckle rockers transforming into proud affirmations of the resilience of the human spirit. Who doesn't want to start a new year with that?
In fact, there are plenty of places to hear echoes of the past on New Year's Eve, and anyone looking to ring in the new with a touch of something old could drop by shows by the Rhode Island band Deer Tick (Dec. 31, Brooklyn Bowl) or the LA soul group Fitz & the Tantrums (Dec. 31, Gramercy Theatre). The former sounds like what might happen if Bob Dylan had been appointed the godfather of grunge in the early '90s instead of Neil Young and bashed out an album of blind-drunk country-rock backed by members of Mudhoney. This is not to be misconstrued as a sleight: Deer Tick have figured out a way to draw a straight, clean line connecting the shitkicking orneriness of roots rock with grunge's bleeding-throat fury. That they once played in a Nirvana cover band—jokingly dubbed Deervana—comes as no surprise. Fitz & the Tantrums, led by vocalists Michael Fitzpatrick and Noelle Scaggs, blow the dust off another vintage sound, sanding down the edges of late-'60s soul so it's sleeker and a bit shinier. Fitzgerald has a smooth, supple voice—more Daryl Hall than David Ruffin—and the band’s live shows are as light and fizzy as prosecco. It's the perfect soundtrack for someone looking to welcome the New Year with a measure of class.
There's a different kind of fizziness to the music of the New York producers Parveen Sharma and Travis Stewart, who record as Sepalcure (Dec. 29, Cameo Gallery). On their self-titled debut, released earlier this year, bright, buoyant synthesizers bubble up to the surface and burst slowly, punctured by dense, thudding percussion. Over the course of the past year, electronic music has favored either a kind of urban menace, best heard in the queasy dubstep of artists like Burial, or the bug-eyed freneticism of arena acts like Deadmau5 and Skrillex. Sepalcure offer another perspective entirely, their big bags of sound containing shades of everything from house to dub. You can hear elements of the past here, too, mostly in the snippets of soul and gospel vocals that sashay across their songs like models down a runway. It's the perfect soundtrack for watching the woozy late night turn into early morning.
So, for that matter is Dive (Dec. 30, Big Snow Buffalo Lodge), another of a seemingly endless number of spinoffs of the heavy-lidded Brooklyn group Beach Fossils. Like Sepalcure, the vocals in Dive's songs drift in and out of focus, lurking in the distance or pawing their way out from beneath gauzy layers of guitar, The band's blend of minimal synths with razor-edge guitars recalls early New Order, but where that band gradually sharpened its focus to suit the clubs, with each new single Dive seems to be receding further into the distance. "Human," released on the excellent label Captured Tracks just six days ago, practically submerges Zachary Cole Smith's voice; guitars glimmer on the surface like the sun on the top of the sea while Cole Smith calls up balefully from below. Whether he'll swim up to the surface in time to usher in 2012 is anybody's guess.
