Colin Stetson/Sara Neufeld/Gregory Rogove - Mississippi Studios, May 3rd, 2012
Sometimes you find yourself at a show where the roster of artists is barely known to you but, due to what you've heard
about them and what you've actually
heard - via videos, NPR links, what-have-you - you're fully intrigued by the potential inherent. So it is on a promising spring evening in May I find myself, again, at Mississippi Studios (and how about a quick shout out to the place, a truly neighborhood venue that despite its relatively young age feels as if it's been there for decades). Gregory Rogove is a fully unknown quantity to me, as I would guess he is to many. It is only by the parenthetical association included on the club's handbill - "(Devendra Banhart)" - that I have any context at all. Sarah Neufeld's name, on the other hand, is at least recognizable from Arcade Fire and of course Colin Stetson's work has begun to penetrate the cerebral cortex more steadily over the past year via (invariably glowing) reviews and appearances on facebook threads. Despite my relative ignorance, however, all three, from what I've gleaned pre-show (thank you, youtube) promise a splendid, slightly left field and possibly more classical evening than maybe I'm used to.
With that as pretext, then, it is with some delighted surprise that the visuals accompanying Gregory Rogove's first piece involve monkey sex. Or, more accurately, a primate depiction of the fall of man. Turns out every solo piano piece Rogove plays is backdropped by imagistic videos that were commissioned from various artists ("What does this song look like" was the only instruction) and that run a gamut from allegorical to playful, coy to whimsically disturbing and more besides. The playing itself is stark and declaratively beautiful as only an acoustic piano can be. Neufeld is enlisted as an extra pair of hands for "Conti," a selection that to these ears is driven by the power of loneliness. The next, "Love Cherries," comes back with a kind of demanding hopefulness, what I suppose might more simply be called love. Just impressions, mind, and I could be wildly off, but Rogove's style is explicitly impressionistic, emotional, mysterious, often chilling, a parlor recital mixed with the Whitney Biennial, and it invites such responses. The audio doesn't always sync with the visual yet the effect is no less arresting and possibly more so. Short set, twenty minutes, but the presentation is fresh enough, the music kind of daringly naked enough, it won't be soon forgotten.
If it's just you and a violin up there on stage you best be powerful, compelling, mesmerizing. Sarah Neufeld is, at the very least, these three things. By turns frantic and passionate, gentle and bursting with pathos, she is no less than commanding the entire time. Between pieces, talking, she's sweet and deflective, but with bow in hand she's fiercely present, the playing spellbinding and confident. No doubt these pieces have names attached but never has it mattered less. At time it sounds Cajun, square-dancey and good time, other times contemplative and raw. Mostly, she sounds like a wild child that flew the coop and discovered the fiddle as a means of salvation. Technology fails her at one point - the reverb hasn't kicked in - and she apologizes but we don't care, seeing as what's just gone by was visceral and quite wonderful and pin-drop quiet-making. Few moments later she's playing bass to her own slicing leads and it's as if a hypnotist has stepped on stage but no, wait, the fact is her whole set has been like that and it's been a privilege to hear it, as it's not likely she'll be touring in an intimate solo capacity like this again any time soon.
According to Wikipedia, circular breathing "is used extensively in playing the Australian
didgeridoo, the Sardinian
launeddas and Egyptian
arghul, as well as many traditional
oboes and
flutes of Asia and the Middle East. A few
jazz and classical wind and brass players also utilize some form of circular breathing." A fairly recently developed (20th C.) technique, it allows for almost endlessly sustained playing as the musician breathes in through the nose and always has an extra store of air in the cheeks. It's been used by the likes of Evan Parker, Clark Terry, Roscoe Mitchell, Ian Anderson, Wynton Marsalis and scores of others, a list to which must now be added the name of legend-to-be Colin Stetson.
Bellowing immensely, exquisitely, through a colossal bass saxophone that looks like a relic salvaged from a Welsh colliery band circa 1908, the prowess on display here is simply a deafening wonder. By deafening I don't mean loud per se - though it lacks not for decibels - but deafening in the sense of stopping you in your tracks. It truly is hard to believe so much sound is coming from one person. Sounding at once like a herd of crying pissed-off elephants
and the aloneness of a post-bop dude blowing on the Brooklyn Bridge at 4 in the morning, one is simply stupefied by the mastery. Using effects as a rhythm base (often it's his own breath, and/or his own voice murmured from within a complex of sound), he's constantly intense. Opening with a new song called Hurting, which is stunning and no less, then into The Righteous Wrath Of An Honorable Man (off new album "New History Warfare Vol. 2 - Judges" on Constellation), where he repeats similar tricks on a tenor sax, it is ten minutes into his set and his status as a singular phenom is so irrevocably established it's hard to believe he hasn't already been on the cover of Time. The intensity is palpable and there's no turning it down the entire time. How well tuned his own body must be to turn this stuff out night after night is unfathomable. Really, intensity-wise, it's like seeing Battles in the form of a one-man brass band that has just graduated from John Coltrane Summer Camp. This is the kind of music where you marvel at the blood vessels not burst.
Watching him can be, umm, breathtaking, though not just because of the physicality alone but the expressiveness as well. A Dream Of Water is a perfect example, based on the (true) story of a whale forever lost to its pod, and I dare you to hear those unearthly, submarine cries of floating despair and tell me your heartstrings aren't plucked. Such a powerful 'lostness' in there you may not recover. Remarkable.
Not long after that an almost-tuba sound comes 'round the corner - not surprisingly originating from that enormous bass sax - and on it builds a slow, low keen of a groove like a wolf playing back its howl with the tape slowed down. It is sad, is it forlorn, but then it begins to gallop and you think 'Ahh, the genius of Colin Stetson, that animal's gonna run free after all.' Again, one man's interpretation, of course, but you get the idea of the utter gripping primal nature on offer here. Like nothing you've ever heard, it's crazy abandon under the strictest control. And the amazing thing is, it's not so much the virtuosity - though of course there's plenty of that - as it is tone and shading, the place where the emotions are, and there are a lot of them. Forceful, angry, regretful, melancholic, hopeful, dreaming and redemptive, it's all there. Melody may come second but boy does it come, lifting itself out of the middle of cacophonous strands like a moaning wind. The evening's last piece, "A Part Of Me Apart From You" is almost lullaby-like like in its waves of yearning, and is an ideal note to bring an extraordinarily artful night to a close. It's nights like this you're thrilled to be alive, lucky to have ears and the human capacity to interpret sound. I found it difficult to get to sleep once I got home and when it comes down to it, that's what you want, isn't it? You can't really ask much more from a night of live music than that, so thank you, Colin (and Sarah, and Gregory).
