music hall month, part 2

The opening act tonight was Ledisi, a very talented soul singer who had pulled out all the stops by the time I got inside and didn't appear to know how to push any of them back in. This is a fine approach--it gets people up and moving, a worthy goal--but it just shouldn't be applied to "Yesterday," in which she sounded so excited at the memory of all her troubles having seemed so far away that it was impossible to reconcile her performance with the song itself. Her vocal prowess undermined the song instead of supporting it.

( Introspective interlude. )

As a singer, Meshell Ndegeocello is in some ways the opposite. She never seems to risk straining her vocal chords. Her singing is almost free of the flights of melisma that characterize so much contemporary pop-R&B singing. But her voice has a calm strength, harnessed by an intelligence that invests every syllable with emotional weight. It doesn't hurt that her music is eclectic and marked by experimentation, or that her lyrics have a strong political and philosophical grounding.

I'll confess that her latest album hasn't yet grabbed me. I blame myself. I was hoping for a synthesis of her early funk/hip-hop work and the acoustic introspection of Bitter; I was really looking forward to it. What I heard was, well, something else again, and I didn't give it many chances to tell me what it was. So that could be why I only recognized a song and a half tonight. But she apologized at one point for playing so many new songs, so I think instead what we were hearing was a preview of the next album, which I'm now excited to hear.

If tonight's set is representative, she's nearly excised hip-hop from the palette this time around (no turntables that I noticed; very little rapping), and she's pulled in a strong reggae influence, mixed with the funk-pop that's been present in all her albums. Neither of these is in itself good or bad, but the songs were all good, and they flowed together well. Something to look forward to. Meanwhile, I'm giving Cookie another spin.

(no subject)

The time for posting American thoughts was a week ago--both because of the holiday, and because the articles I'm going to cite are about to vanish behind the Times's wall of pay. But here's a ( belated, late-night note. )

gig report

Saturday Art Market, 2003-07-12

The San Jose Saturday Art Market is cool. There are a lot of street festivals in the bay area--a lot--and many of them have art as a component, but a lot of the art is pretty kitschy. The SAM has the best and most personal collection of art I've seen for sale on a sidewalk. Plus, they paid me to play the guitar and sing.

It wasn't actually that windy today, but the Paseo de San Antonio, sort of a pedestrian alleway between buildings in two blocks downtown, created a giant wind tunnel that funneled all the available breezes directly at the collapsible canopy I was playing under. The canopy frame would shake and creak, and I'd glance nervously around. During "Snake on the Sidewalk," a bunch of old show flyers that were tucked into the pocket of my looseleaf binder became untucked, and blew across the street onto the Plaza de Cesar Chavez. I guess it's all about getting your name out there.

Fortunately no one was actually watching this from the green plastic chairs they'd set up for an audience, so there aren't any witnesses to my litterbug crime spree. Sometime after my set, the wind got so strong it started blowing the chairs over. Also, I learned that, although no one was sitting and watching, the same corridor that created the wind tunnel was also carrying my music all the way down to the end of the block, so, I did have a sizable audience, it was just invisible.

gig report

Red Rock Coffee Company, 2003-07-12

Two cool things about tonight's gig with Hank and Kristina: Jon, possibly the first person who voluntarily signed up for my mailing list, showed up for the first time in a few months, and brought friends, which is always good. And pobig, whom I've known online for years and met... twice, now, completely by coincidence happened into the cafe when I was playing, recognized me (sadly, I didn't recognize him), and ended up staying for the whole show. Good to see him again.

One uncool thing: The cafe closed "early" (they do this to us often enough that you'd think we'd learn to expect it), so we had to rush through our sets. I was initially worried about not having enough guitar material, but I still ended up cutting a couple of songs out.

misery

TV Guide says KHBK is showing NewsRadio, but instead they're showing Coach.

(no subject)

So, Persepolis was great. It's a graphic novel--wait, no, it's a graphic autobiography about Marjane Satrapi's childhood in Iran, before, during, and after the Iranian revolution. The art is simple but expressive, the story is gripping, and the protagonist is completely charming.

And it touches on those questions of patriotism that are often on my mind. To what do you owe your allegiance: To a government? A history? A geography? Characters in this book--the lucky ones--have to make these decisions. The unlucky ones don't get to choose for themselves.

Books rarely affect my dreams--I'm more of a movie guy. But a few nights ago, I dreamed that my family and I were living in post-revolution Iran, and required to well, watch movies, newsreel-style footage of the heroes of the revolution. This was the first night in a while that I hadn't read from Persepolis; my theory is that my psyche was enjoying the story so much it had to fill in for the book's absence.

Next up on my Iran reading list (as soon as it gets back to the library): Reading Lolita in Tehran.