Mike McGee, Robert Lashley and Cynthia French at the Green Frog - April 7th - The Green Frog

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Mike McGee, Robert Lashley and Cynthia French at the Green Frog - April 7th - The Green Frog


It’s always a joy when Mike McGee returns to town. McGee is one of the finest poets in the country, the only poet to have ever won the National and World Poetry Slams, the originating influence of the popular Kitchen Sessions and the nicest person you will ever have the pleasure to meet. Based now in his hometown of San Jose, California, Mike lived in Bellingham not too long ago and there is always a lot of love waiting for him here.

All of this was present at the Green Frog when McGee took the stage. As a working poet, he has a deceptive ease of delivery. He calls what he does “stand-up poetry”. Often, he catches you off-guard as you realize his conversational comedic  “stand-up” set-up has suddenly morphed into a poem of luminous beauty. After the alliteratively aural acrobatics of “Love Life”, he begins a piece called “Mycrophone” with the question “Is this thing turned on?” The piece unfolds as a heartfelt confession of how comfortable he is in front of a microphone. Then he seems to fight the rhyme for a moment until it bursts forth in a paroxysm of pure poetic ebullience. It’s a virtuoso performance, stopping you in your tracks and fixing you in the high-beams of language. He follows this with “Geez, Us!”, a brilliant hallucinogenic-comedic piece about him hanging out with Jesus, dreaming of the “Four Midgets of the Apocalypse” who “burned down miniature golf courses”, shaving Jesus’ head and the receiving a “Holy Burrito”.

Even though McGee is up on the stage separated from the crowd, he is actively engaged with the audience, listening to laughter and silence, watching the faces for reaction. With each new piece, you feel it is being pulled out of his bag of poems just for you. He calls Jake Werrion up to the stage to perform beautifully sparse musical echoes on guitar during the spoken monologue of “Take No Shit! (A Zoo Story)” which probably made the sorrowful ghost of Spalding Grey smile. He follows this with the powerful and poignant “Dirty Dimes” which details with a harrowing fluorescence a graveyard shift at a Walgreen’s Drugstore, describing a Dantean procession of characters who pass through in quietly desperate caricatures until the tenth customer, a woman dying of cancer or AIDS who pays with a handful of dirty dimes. It’s a powerful piece that takes all the breath away, a sublime synecdoche of the American Dream un-waking. Poetry that rings your bones like a bell.

Robert Lashley rises to the stage, his body language incarnating the Jeremiad, the mournful tenor and meter of his poetry. He tells us this day is the anniversary of the death of a woman he loved. His reading is uncompromising, the language shivering and shaking, a fist raised up in barren rage against time. The death of the loved one weighing down the words, adding black hole gravity to the lost center: “Through light and glass, the world is her laurel. / Her holly seeds filtered all light and shadow. / Sorrow is an invisible city of fabrics / from her, and the world outside.” An unrelenting obsequey performed with an almost violent rawness and fragility.

Cynthia French follows with a wonderful poetic rant about how Jane Fonda ruins everything from drive-in theaters and how one looks in spandex to not being able to set it up for your dying father to win an Academy Award. Her delivery is electric and engaging, laced with a penetrating and self-deprecating humor: “I am a fluorescent sock caught in the rusty chicken-wire fence around the drive-in movie parking lot.” She ends with a humorous story about her move across the country to Bellingham without a physical map that took her far off course of a scheduled poetry reading, which she then drove many miles back to attend. And Cynthia French is that sort of supremely talented poet who would go drive hundreds of miles for poem.

McGee returns with a selection from his most recent chapbook, Romantic Electric Camouflage, which is a “loop of poems” describing the development, denouement and dissolution of a relationship. This new work, while accented with his incisive comedy, is rooted deeper down in poetry. “I Meant to Say” as the first meeting, first impression, is one comedic riff after another, followed by what he meant to say. Imagine a Red Skelton clown trying to tell a woman he meets how he’s not kidding. This is followed by “The Winners”, full of the first bloom of love, a sublime poetic solemnity silencing the laughter: “I am the words in the night / You are the ears I exist for”. McGee takes the audience out into deeper waters with “Knightswimming” - about mid-point in the cycle where he asks the unravelling question: “Did we think we were rescuing each other? / Two anchors at sea?” He tells us the cycle is meant to be looped, when you get to the final poem, it guides you back to the beginning, Finnegan’s Wake, beginning again at the end. This is fine poetry, arcing white hot from page to performance, an absolute pleasure and privilege to bear witness to.

Mike McGee: http://www.mikemcgee.net/
Robert Lashley: https://robertlashley.wordpress.com/
Cynthia French: https://cynthiafrench.com/

This review originally appeared in What's Up! Magazine

EP Review: The Living Arrows - Set You Free

The three pieces (transcending the idea of “songs”) on The Living Arrows EP, Set You Free, resonate like the separate lines of a haiku: each is a world unto themselves but realizing a greater poetic dimensionality as a whole. On the first track, “Set You Free”, Alexandra Doumas’ warm voice, beauty laced with an unidentifiable melancholy, sings you into a poetic, almost mythic, narrative. There are elements of Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark and also something entirely its own. Traesti Luther comes in on the refrain, the perfect tonal counterpoint to Alexandra. The next piece, “Every Day I Wake”, features the rich sincere vocals of Traesti singing “Every day I wake, I try to lose my mind” over Christian’s Casolary’s captivating drum track and Loren Shaumberg’s engaging knife-like guitar riffs. Their shared vocal dynamics, the lyrical metaphysics, unfold and unfold the song over a sweet jazz-folk musical landscape. The last track, “King, Spring and Stone”, could have easily been born out of the Child Ballads, the vocal interplay between Alexandra and Traesti evoking comparison to Anais Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer - the elegant and sparse instrumentation serves as a perfect frame. While there is obvious lyrical talent and accomplished musicianship, what is most engaging is a sense of the unexpected joy that emerges out of The Living Arrows’ music. Whistles, odd vocalizations, giggles, conversation and laughter are all essential elements. This music is the soundtrack for the beauty of waking up on a Summer’s morning, of not wanting the night’s dreams to fade; the prelude to a perfect day.

http://thelivingarrows.com/

This review originally appeared in What's Up! Magazine.

CD Review: Corwin Bolt and the Wingnuts: Screwloose

CD Review: Corwin Bolt and the Wingnuts: Screwloose

Listening to Corwin Bolt and the Wingnuts latest release, Screwloose, is like tuning-in to a haunting AM radio station on a summer night where the grass is blue and you are happy lost on the backroads of a 1930s Appalachian Dream. Bob Wills, Hank Williams and Stephen Foster are conjured forth. Bolt’s voice aches and moans with his resonating steel guitar like a strange attractor, owl-wing flutter towards a Blood Moon, at once comfortable and unsettling in its authenticity and rawness. Josh Britton’s slapping bass and Tim Long’s percussive tapping raising up the ghosts of Johhny Cash’s Tennessee Two: somewhere Marshall Grant is smiling. Dancing over it all, like musical lightning melting is Jeremy Sher’s sweet sweet fiddle playing. Every track on the album is fine, a cauldron of inventive original themes such as Made of Metal and Mile After Mile mixed with traditionals that reach out from the depths of the the collective American unconscious. The Gillian Welch song, Winters Come and Gone is given a new and remarkable reading as the involuted elements of the song are turned outwards into the willful convictions of the traditional John Henry. Likewise, the Stephen Foster tune, Angeline the Baker is fused with the dark energy of the fiddle reel, Soldier’s Joy. Corwin Bolt and the Wingnuts perform a New-Time Music, dressing the bones of Old-Time Music in a fresh and mysterious skin; creating a thing of beauty, harmony and sorrowful joy.

https://corwinbolt.bandcamp.com/

WJAMC Presents Steve Davis and Josh Bruneau - Sunday, December 7th

WJAMC Presents Steve Davis and Josh Bruneau at WJMAC - The Majestic on Forest

Sunday, December 7th, 2014


On the stage at WJMAC is Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers alum, trombonist Steve Davis. Beside him, a former student from the Jackie McLean Institute of Jazz, Josh Bruneau, who just put out a new CD, "Bright Idea" on the amazing Cellar Live label. Tony Foster is on piano, Adam Thomas is on bass and Julian McDonough is on the drums. It's a good crowd here. More and more people each time. The word is getting out: you want to hear great Jazz in Bellingham? Go see a WJMAC show. Really, any of them. But this one, today, this one is going to be a great one. It is in the air.

The band starts into the first number. We all have an expectation that it will take a song or two for them to get their footing. You sense the musicians giving each other sonic space they each need - each courteously defining his territory. The rhythm section of Adam and Julian is purring like well-oiled motor. Tony sparkling across the ivories. Steve steps out in front first, the trombone singing with its muted eloquence. And they are all there of a sudden: together and as tight as can be. Steve's trombone works through such lyrical melodic lines, cutting a groove right through the center of the audience.

Then Josh steps in. It's like a sudden blast of lightning, which hangs over the audience for a moment until it is transformed into rippling ribbonlike riffs of brassified melody. It's a revelatory contrast from Steve. Each of them complimenting and not taking away from either in comparison. Josh's playing is electric, vibrant, pulsing with the energy of youth. Even how he stands on stage, trumpet help up, leaning back, arms tightly coiled as the music explodes out of him. Steve, on the other hand, elegant, balancing lyricism and volume, knowing the interior architecture of the music that only time can illuminate. Josh steps back from his solo and you can almost feel the crowd un-grip their chairs from the roller coaster beauty of that sound.

Tony's piano is perfectly subdued, as if it is making quiet commentary on the slides, charges and bright riffs that just preceded it. And there is always that solid rolling rumble of percussion from Adam and Julian that anchors it all. The first song was not a tune-up for the musicians, it was a tune-up for the crowd.

Steve lets us know the next tune will be by the incomparable trombonist, J. J. Johnson - who he calls "our Charlie Parker". They launch into "Kenya", Josh's trumpet just soaring out over the crowd, bright platinum spools unwinding with these trill-like riffs of astonishing speed. Man, is that a trumpet making that sound? Steve follows and somehow takes the groove even deeper. And we all just sit there with the simple joy of listening to a trombone sing like we have never heard it. Tony's plays as gracefully as ever, Steve and Josh to one of the stage adding soft musical commentary. Adam performs a bass solo that has that seems to let time seep in between the notes and dissolve the tune. Then at the most precarious moment, he cuts right back to the heart of the melody. Julian's percussion, as always, adds just that extra bit of temporal complexity while at the same time complimenting and giving room for the others to stretch out. As Steve says after the song, "Jazz music is one of the purest forms of Democracy."

Towards the end, Adam and Julian performed a mind-blowing percussive interplay, Adam slapping parts of his stand-up bass and Julian hitting complex rim skin cymbal combinations. It was such a virtuoso display of talent. I felt like I could listen to an entire show of just that - and how often do you hear that about a bass and drum solo section?

It was absolutely beautiful to experience such world-class jazz on a Sunday afternoon in Bellingham. At the end there was a rousing standing ovation and the musicians indulged us in an sweet encore of White Christmas. Tony Foster's piano notes making some of the sweetest sounds I've ever heard, happily reminding me of Earl Garner. And for the first time, I thought: right here and right at this moment, Christmas begins for me.

http://www.stevedavis.info/

http://www.wjmac.org/

This review originally appeared in What's Up!

Anais Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer – Green Frog – Friday, March 22nd, 2013

Anais Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer at The Green Frog

Friday, March 22nd

A standing room only crowd at the Green Frog, silent, reverent, anticipatory. On stage, opener Misty Flowers is in the middle of a plaintive haiku set, six string meditations echoing Joni Mitchell, an almost spiritual presence for the evening.

James Hardesty introduces two of his most favorite performers, Anais Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer. Unassuming and natural onstage, they begin with a song from their recently released CD, Child Ballads. What strikes one immediately is Anais’ voice: unique in timbre and tone, paradoxically delicate and strong, a thing beautiful and ancient, what you imagine the seer Cassandra to have sounded like. Jefferson harmonizes around Anais, at times in an even higher register, then right there beside her. Together they enrapture the crowd into a religious silence. Their musical compatibility reminds me of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, singing inside each other wounds and laughter.

The Child Ballads are from a collection of traditional English and Scottish popular folk ballads from the Francis James Child collection. Anais and Jefferson adapted seven of them for two guitars. The result is haunting and sublime. Their guitars braid melodic lines through each other; unusual tunings evoking English Renaissance compositions; images of stone taverns on dark nights; these ballads having been spun out of ancient myth and legend.

In between each song, Jefferson sets the theme of the ballad for the crowd, telling about witches and jealous mothers, curses and wax babies, sister maidens beguiling young travelers, sailing ships and lost loves. All the characters seem simultaneously strange and familiar. Ghosts from fairy tales and archetypes from dreams.

They break from the Child Ballads to play a handful of their own songs, Jefferson playing his elegiac, The Ragged World We Spanned, building it before the crowd like a quiet cathedral: “We set out for allegory on a ship of the damned.” And Anais played the stunning, Young Man in America:

There's a hollow in my bones
Make me cry and carry on
Make the foam fly from my tongue
Make me want what I want
Another wayward son
Waiting on oblivion

After hearing the Child Ballads, much of the imagery of their earlier work is more accessible, the traditional songs providing a thematic bridge back into each of their catalogues. Young Man in America feels less disquieting and more familiar, the language suddenly translated through the new/old context.

The crowd, now a true audience - all of us - is deeply appreciative and respectful. It is one of those shows that marries performer to space in the most harmonious manner possible. Anais and Jefferson return for an a cappella encore, standing off to the side of the microphones, singing together, purely, quietly and intimately. The music dances there amidst the hushed presence of the room, reminding us all of  why it exists in the first place.

This review originally appeared in What's Up!