Ambiguity between the notes...my Sam Amidon review

I might have mentioned I was going to this...review's up today at Blurt.

Sam Amidon 9/12/13, Northampton MA
September 12, 2013
The Iron Horse, Northampton MA

It’s a family affair: the show at the Iron Horse included Wes Hartley and the Tall Trees.


TEXT & PHOTOS BY JENNIFER KELLY

“All music is folk music,” Sam Amidon says, midway through a stripped down, unaccompanied set of plaintive shape note hymns, shaded in intriguingly modern ways. He goes so far as to include Gangstarr in the “folk music” category, since rap is, obviously, a music of the people, but he might as well be making room for his own very traditional, but also not, form of folk music, which finds doubt and ambiguity between the notes of even the most righteous of sacred harp certainties.

Amidon is playing at the Iron Horse in Northampton, just a stone’s throw from the southern Vermont community where he first learned to sing (and play guitar, banjo and fiddle) at sacred harp gatherings. His father and mother, still active in local singing groups, are in the audience this evening, and it turns out that 1936 Gibson Amidon is playing (and which has beautiful, luminous tone) belongs to his father. His regular guitar has a hole in it, courtesy of the TSA, who put the capo under the body of the guitar in its case after inspecting it.

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He did a nice interview show for New Hampshire Public Radio yesterday, too.

Barbez's lovely, hard-to-describe Bella Ciao

Very cool, completely unclassifiable album from Barbez...reviewed yesterday at Blurt.

BARBEZ – Bella Ciao
Tzadik

By JENNIFER KELLY

Barbez is hard to classify, but let’s give it a shot. They are a large ensemble, ethnically curious, jazz-experimental, proggily complex outfit with a tendency to explore beautifully obscure corners not just of the music world, but also of literature. Their last album Force of Light set the poetry of Romanian holocaust survivor Paul Celan to restless, rhythmically complex music. This current one, Bella Ciao performs a similar kind of alchemy with Roman Jewish liturgical song, taking ancient, archetypical melodies and embellishing them with complex swathes of stringed instruments, clarinet, Theremin, malleted percussion, guitar, bass and drums.

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They are streaming the whole album at PopMatters.

I'm also about halfway done transcribing my interview with Oneohtrix Point Never's Dan Lopatin, and it's a good one, stay tuned. And further, I am going to see Sam Amidon play live for the first time, despite the fact that I've been following his career since 2007's But This Chicken Proved False Hearted, and he grew up 25 miles from here, and his dad once wrote a musical for New England Youth Theater (my son's home turf). (I also got some good quotes from him for my sacred harp story, which was never published except on this blog, but which still draws hits pretty regularly.) Anyway, about time, wouldn't you say? I hope it stops thundering before 5 when I have to leave.

Sam Amidon's Bright Sunny South

It's been a long time since I had a review up...this is a good one. It's from Brattleboro's own Sam Amidon.

SAM AMIDON – Bright Sunny South
Nonesuch

BY JENNIFER KELLY

“He’s Taken My Feet” is an old song, a hymn that has been sung in churches for 100 years, celebrating one of the humblest moments of the New Testament, when Jesus washes his disciples’ feet. It’s a homespun melody, ringed in by melancholy but buoyed by the hope of resurrection. Its simplicity, humility and certainty are as foreign to our age as hoop skirts and mutton chops, but when Sam Amidon strips it down, as he does in its ghostly opening, it seems perfectly modern. It is streamlined and unfussy, but like a Bauhaus building, rather than a Shaker box. Later on, a lovely trumpet solo (that’s Kenny Wheeler, a free jazz titan, who has played with Derek Bailey and Anthony Braxton) shades the tune further towards the modern day, and, near the track’s end, it twists suddenly into drum-pounding, guitar-distorting, improvisatory mayhem. It’s the kind of track that you could really only do if you were Sam Amidon, raised on the folk and shape-note-singing customs of rural Vermont and educated as a young man in the post-modern anti-traditions of free jazz.

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