Night After Night

Concert review: Irving Stone Memorial Concert, July 5, 2003

I recall writing this review, which predates this blog by just over two years, but I don't remember for what outlet I wrote it. I located it today on a whim – after posting the image you see above on Twitter – on Acoustic Levitation, an online journal edited and published by Steve Koenig, a poet, teacher, and activist based in Brooklyn. A bit of introductory text on that site states "we are transplanting this from our former website," but I don't know what that other website was. I do recall distinctly that this review caused some passing friction between myself and one of the artists cited herein, until I'd clarified what I'd meant by a certain comparison—and that what I'd intended was the absolute highest of praise.

It's difficult for me to read this now, given its endless, seemingly unedited gush. But I'm always glad to find and preserve bits of my past, and the account absolutely does bring back some very, very good memories. I'll always be grateful to Stone… and to Stephanie Stone, his wife, who passed away in 2014, and Steve Dalachinsky, so present herein, who we lost in 2019.

Irving Stone Memorial Concert
Saturday, July 5, 2003
Tonic, New York City

Published previously by Acoustic Levitation
Photographs (below): Peter Gannushkin/downtownmusic.net

What are the odds that a little old man with a big heart, a sharp tongue and a taste for wild music and sweet herb could unite an all-star array of New York avant-jazzers and free improvisers and inspire them to perform all day long on a sweltering Saturday afternoon in July? Irving Stone probably could have given you an exact answer. After all, he'd spent decades employed as a statistician for the New York City Housing Authority. Stone, as he was universally known, was a fixture at pretty much every concert of exploratory jazz and downtown experimentation since Coltrane was blowing the roof off the Vanguard. (I used to use "Ayler" in that sentence, until his wife Stephanie once corrected me: She and Stone never saw Ayler at the Vanguard, though they saw him plenty of other places.)

As has been noted in countless other places, the Stones were treated like royalty among the circles in which they traveled. Yet conversely, they were – and Stephanie remains – among the most generous and welcoming of all souls on that scene. Again, as more than one observer has mentioned, when you saw them at a gig you were attending, you felt like you were visiting family. For at least one generation of downtown musicians, and likely more, the mere presence of the Stones at a gig felt like artistic validation.

All of those points, and many more like them, were brought up during two hours of heartfelt reminiscences of Stone that preceded Saturday's memorial music marathon, which was organized by longtime Stone favorite John Zorn with help from numerous close friends, including poet Steve Dalachinsky, critic Kevin Whitehead and many others. Though we heard tales that we'd all heard before, or perhaps even witnessed firsthand, still, there was more revealed that gave us a better image of who Stone had been before he became the Stone we all knew. "Irving Stone taught Harry Partch how to balance a checkbook," said Mrs. Gosfield, an old family friend whose daughter Annie has become a significant downtown composer in the Zorn orbit. "Irving Stone could sing Gilbert and Sullivan operettas in the voice of Louis Armstrong."

And on it went, as local luminaries traded tales with longtime friends. Barely able to catch his breath in a headlong rush of emotion, step-grandson Jesse lamented that he wished he'd known his step-grandfather nearly as well as the sizeable audience assembled in the room. Steve Dalachinsky (who said he was unable to complete a serious poem about Stone because he knew the dedicatee would not approve) instead read a well-known poem by another late friend of his, Ted Joans, adapting certain phrases to better capture Stone's preferences.

Stephanie Stone, no doubt overwhelmed, addressed the audience from a seat in the front row. Normally a gregarious figure, she was clearly affected by the outpouring. The next, and last voice, belonged to Stone himself. No one in the room was spared a tear at the voice, nor a laugh as, in a pre-recorded interview, he recalled a conversation with Mark Feldman. The violinist had asked Stone if he'd noticed any difference in the way he sounded that evening, when he had used an expensive new bow for the first time. Stone politely replied that he hadn't.

"What? You mean you can't tell the difference between when I use a $2,000 bow and when I use a $500 bow?" Feldman had asked, incredulous.

"No, but I can tell the difference between when you're playing for real and when you're just fucking around," was the sincere reply. ("Fuck," we were told more than a few times, was a potent component in Stone's vocabulary.)

Further reminiscences detailed whimsical close encounters with Kenny Dorham, Salvador Dali and Charlie Chaplin—all of which served notice that Stone was a man who lived life to the fullest, and shared everything that he had. For the rest of the afternoon and well into the evening, many of the artists who Stone nurtured over the years came forward to pay tribute on behalf of everyone assembled, in the manner that Stone had loved best.

Welcome (Back) to Night After Night.

Change is upon us once again, and with it a fresh start for Night After Night—elsewhere. As of Thursday, April 23, the primary focus of my work has shifted over to a newly launched Substack newsletter, also called Night After Night. That title has provided my online identity – my "brand" – for more than two decades; no reason I would change that now.

From the new site, my explanatory preamble:

As in all of my previous ventures – from blogging and freelancing through stints with Time Out New York, The New York Times, the Boston Globe, and National Sawdust Log – I’ll be covering music in its infinite richness and variety, emphasizing what’s happening here and now. I’ll interview composers and performers about their newest projects, as well as bigger, broader ideas. I’ll review current recordings… and concerts, too, when the opportunity returns. I’ll direct your attention toward pertinent news and reviews published elsewhere, too.

I plan to post twice a week, and some posts will be available to everyone. But paying subscribers will have access to premium content now in planning stages… stay tuned.

Following that preamble, the first real entry – a biographical prelude, an extensive interview with Quince Ensemble and composer David Lang, and a postlude to my New York Times obituary of Richard Teitelbaum – was sent out on April 23. You can read it now, for free.

You'll notice that subscriptions are available, and at some point soon I'll start to roll out features meant exclusively for those who subscribe. That said, I completely recognize that this is a difficult time, and I intend to keep a substantial portion of my work freely accessible to all.

As for this long-serving Typepad blog, well, it's staying right where it is, and shifting to serve, even more than it does already, as an archive for past writings—both my original posts and the work I make for others. The playlists will stay here, too, and I'll try to be diligent about them.

I'll continue to add more past content when I find time (ha!). But for now, the Substack newsletter is where I'll be moving forward.

I hope that you'll join me…

Caught: Shots, Blank Forms, Feb. 27, 2020.

Shots
Blank Forms, Brooklyn, NY
February 27, 2020
General admission

Personnel:

Daniel DiMaggio, amplified objects, recordings
John Friberg, amplified objects, recordings
Matthew Friberg, amplified objects, movement

On Thursday night at Blank Forms, the intimate third-floor walk-up gallery space recently opened in Clinton Hill by the curatorial organization of the same name, the trio Shots played a brief show for a room filled to capacity with visibly intent listeners. What the group does is difficult to describe, but the summary Blank Forms provided neatly conveys the basics:

Their understated amalgam of barely-there object rustling—clanging metal, broken glass, running water, tempered feedback, timid drumming and strumming—could be mistaken for distracted dishwashing, a rusted fence squeaking in the wind, a raccoon in your shed.… Shots teeter, precariously, on a ledge between environmental and performed sound, but with a sincere carelessness and deliberate ineptitude more deeply rooted in hardcore than the bleached fossils of virtuosic improvisation.

Demand had prompted Blank Forms to add a prior performance on Wednesday. On Thursday the room was well filled but relaxed and comfortable, with listeners seated on the floor or standing along the peripheries. An exhibition of visual art by Graham Lambkin was hung around the space, the finely wrought, fantastical pencil and collage works subtly foreshadowing the balance of mundane and surreal qualities in the performance to come.

There's an intrinsic mystery of means in performances of this sort, wherein artists hunch over tables filled with electrical gear, patch cords, and contact microphones, and desperate critics cite "electronics" instead of enumerating specifics. A more diligent writer might have scanned the table at which John Friberg was stationed, scribbling an inventory of the black and silver objects it held. Likewise Dan DiMaggio, on the opposite side of the room with his own implements—one of which quite obviously was an old open-reel tape recorder.

But the make and model of each gadget employed seems less important than an elementary observation: what these two were doing essentially amounted to amplifying sounds – whether produced by some action or played from a recording – and distributing them throughout the room, not always in natural or intuitive ways. Between them, Matthew Friberg tapped and scraped objects – finger cymbals, painted rocks – on a wooden tray table, when he wasn't stepping away to perform choreographed gestures and steps nearby.

There's a lineage to this kind of performance, extending from John Cage, David Tudor, and the New York School through improvisers like AMM, Taku Unami, Sachiko M, and Jeph Jerman, and onward to disparate sound artists like Gabi Losoncy, Arek Gulbenkoglu, Vanessa Rossetto, and Graham Lambkin himself. There also are writers better qualified to discuss this lineage; an excellent place to start is the premiere issue of Tone Glow, a blog-turned-newsletter by Joshua Minsoo Kim, which includes revealing conversations with Shots and with Dan Gilmore, whose Careful Catalog label issued last year's brilliantly opaque Shots LP, Private Hate.

None of this is meant to suggest that Shots sounded like any or all of those forebears or colleagues, but rather simply to note that DiMaggio and the Fribergs are extending a fertile tradition of sonic practice in rich, provocative ways.

The low, indeterminate murmur that opened the performance sounded metallic and vaguely aqueous, something like being inside a ship's hull among drips and echoes. DiMaggio stalked around his bit of territory, nursing a beer bottle and occasionally adjusting some out-of-sight control. A recording of trucks or buses idling and rumbling forth seemed to emanate from his sector; other such outdoor recordings – human voices, honking fowl – surfaced now and again throughout the performance. But small, discrete noises, or bursts of them, punctuated the sound field with evidence of individuals performing.

The notion of intent came into question frequently. When John Friberg laid spent batteries from a handheld recorder aside on his tabletop, that minute action, and the sound it produced, seemed no less intrinsic to the performance than did the sounds the reanimated recorder might have produced—to say nothing of the more literal sounds he added with a snare drum, a suspended cymbal, or a stimulated metal plate. Likewise, when DiMaggio opened another beer on a window sill, abruptly and loudly, or when he allowed the wooden chair on which his feet were propped to fall with a clatter, those sounds, too, seemed performative. Chance also had its place: a roll of aluminum foil affixed to the window behind DiMaggio obviously was meant to flutter and wrinkle on rising gusts, but the specific rattle and crinkle produced, and how it interacted with other audible elements at play, clearly were beyond anyone's control.

The performance lasted only around 30 minutes. It felt complete, sufficient and satisfying; still, I'd gladly have stayed to listen a great deal longer. "Non-music" is a term that seems to have taken hold concerning the area of sonic activity under discussion here. But from my perspective, what Shots created in this live event was music, unequivocally.

Caught: Charles Curtis, Issue Project Room, Feb. 21, 2020.

Charles Curtis, Abigail Levine, Dancers, and Wind Ensemble
Issue Project Room, Brooklyn, NY
February 21, 2020
General admission

Personnel:

Charles Curtis, cello
Abigail Levine, dancer, choreographer
Amanda Brown, design
Rob Besserer, Elena Demyanenko, Kentoria Earle, Ayano Elson, Maho Ogawa, Kristopher K.Q. Pourzal, dancers
Michael Matsuno, Teresa Diaz de Cossio, flutes
Nicolee Kuester, French horn
Rachel Allen, Alexandria Smith, trumpets
Berk Schneider, Mike Lormand, trombones

On Friday night at Issue Project Room, the eminent cellist Charles Curtis presented an intense and beautiful evening of recent works by Alvin Lucier, in the presence of the composer and a capacity crowd. Glacier, for unaccompanied cello, found Curtis obscured from view, playing long tones that calved into a plethora of singing and groaning harmonics. In Orpheus Variations, for cello with seven wind instruments and seven dancers, Lucier transformed a sonority recalled from a Stravinsky ballet into an elegant ritual in sound and motion, the latter choreographed by Abigail Levine.

I'll have a more complete review on National Sawdust Log in the week ahead. The program repeats on Saturday night, but appears to be sold out in advance… definitely check in before you head out.

Caught: Tiger Trio, Whitney Museum of American Art, Jan. 4, 2020.

Tiger Trio
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
January 4, 2020
General admission

Personnel:

Joëlle Léandre, bass, vocals
Myra Melford, piano
Nicole Mitchell, flute, alto flute, piccolo

Back in the heyday of live jazz on New York City's 52nd Street, from the end of Prohibition in 1933 until the early '50s, the Three Deuces occupied a prime spot on the south side of the street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Bebop's architects – Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Miles Davis, and the like – played the intimate room at 72 West 52nd St., where, freed from the demands of the dance floor, they innovated collaboratively, pushing each other to greater heights of virtuosity and bravado.

South side of W. 52nd Street in 1948, photographed by William P. Gottlieb

Swing Street, as it was known, started to fade in the late '40s, and the last 52nd Street club shuttered in 1968. But just recently, thanks to the enterprise of pianist, composer, bandleader, and visual artist Jason Moran, the Three Deuces has had a second life. STAGED: Three Deuces, a crafted facsimile of a portion of the club, has materialized now, Brigadoon-like, at the Venice Biennale in 2015… at Luhring Augustine's Bushwick gallery in 2016… at the Walker Art Center and the ICA Boston in 2018.

And, after a late summer appearance at the Wexner Center for the Arts last year, the Three Deuces finally came home to Manhattan late in 2019, sharing space with two other historical apparitions, the Savoy Ballroom and Slug's Saloon, in an eighth-floor gallery at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

STAGED: Three Deuces (2015). Photograph by Farzad Owrang,
courtesy of Jason Moran and Luhring Augustine

During most gallery hours, a digital grand piano in the Three Deuces set played back performances by Moran. But the exhibition also included an impressive live-performance series, comprising Friday night and Saturday afternoon engagements by artists and groups ranging from Archie Shepp and Joanne Brackeen to Fay Victor and Jamire Williams.

Early in the afternoon on January 4, I attended the last live event with my family: a beautifully brainy, brawny, and varied set by Tiger Trio, a collaborative venture featuring bassist Joëlle Léandre (who also vocalized playfully and robustly), pianist Myra Melford, and flutist Nicole Mitchell.

I won't pretend to pass off this essay as a review—not least because we arrived just as the folding chairs were running out, so I spent the first 30-40 minutes of the set standing in the back with The Girl on my shoulders. Suffice it to say that these musicians are among the most inventive thinkers, writers, and players now active, and their collaboration worked at an empathic level: something like Jimmy Giuffre's chamber trio with Paul Bley and Steve Swallow, actually. The trio has two records out on the French label Rogue Art, and deserves the widest possible attention.

I do have to relate one serious reservation about the presentation, though honestly I feel conflicted in raising the issue. The gallery that included Moran's three STAGED set pieces also featured three large video screens, on which a series of Moran's collaborations with other artists played in a ceaseless loop. As a general observation, I'd have found it much more agreeable if the Whitney had deactivated these screens for the duration of the live performances, as a show of respect to the musicians.

More specifically, a wall label clearly indicated that one work in the video sequence – National Archives Microfilm M999 Roll 34: Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands: Six Miles from Springfield on the Franklin Road, a terrifying 2009 film by Kara Walker, scored by Moran and his wife, singer/composer Alicia Hall Moran – included graphic scenes of racial and sexual violence. But in a gallery darkened for performance, the label and its warning were easy to miss. As well, ticket holders weren't forewarned that the video screenings would coincide with the concert.

Walker's art is undeniably powerful, illustrating uncomfortable truths with macabre charisma. But when I set out for this concert, I hadn't foreseen needing to prevent a not-quite six-year-old girl, drawn to a flickering screen like a moth to a light bulb, from glimpsing images she wasn't prepared to interpret or understand.

Next time, I suppose, I probably should think to ask.

I'd like to have spent more time investigating Moran's show at greater length, but circumstances prevented my doing so. If you're curious to know what critics outside of mainstream media outlets thought, you'll find an insightful appreciation by Martin Johnson here, and a considered critique by George Grella here.

Caught: Forest Speech, Museum of Modern Art, Nov. 17, 2019.

David Tudor: Forest Speech
Performed by Lea Bertucci, John Driscoll, Ed Potokar, Margaret Anne Schedel, and Philip White
Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
November 17, 2019

Sunday afternoon, after my daughter attended a performance of David Tudor's Forest Speech at the Museum of Modern Art with her mother and me, I asked her what she'd thought. "It was amazing," she proclaimed. "It was my second-favorite concert, ever." Surprised and delighted, I had to know: what had been No. 1? The Girl thought hard, evincing some frustration. "You know what it was… I can't remember the name." Prompted for some kind of recognizable detail, she said, "The one with all the animals."

Ah: Aesop's Fables, performed by Isango Ensemble at the New Victory Theater earlier this month. That made sense: a vivid show, still fresh in her memory. Still, thinking back on her strong response to a concert she'd seen in March, I had to ask: "But what about Kiss?!" The Girl thought for a moment, grinned, and held up three fingers.

How perfectly remarkable to think that a piece Tudor completed in 1979 – meant to reshape the avian chirps, simian hoots, and leonine roars of the Rainforest menagerie, which he'd cultivated with his fellow explorers in Composers Inside Electronics, into something more closely resembling speech – might thoroughly captivate a not-quite six-year-old listener in 2019.

Then again, what's the surprise? As I mentioned in a previous post, Rainforest V (variation 1) remains as beguiling and enchanting as ever: an uncanny arboreal soundscape, fashioned with Seussian assemblages of junk, electricity, and ingenuity. "Collectively they become a kind of urban jungle, suspended like Calder mobiles with the anti-utilitarian aesthetic of Duchamp readymades," Alastair Macauley wrote in an elegant, perceptive review for The New York Times, which also includes an account of a previous Forest Speech performance.

The present installation is the latest development in a long historical process, boiled down concisely on the MoMA website (where you also can download a longer essay in PDF format):

Tudor’s first Rainforest, from 1968, served as the musical score for choreographer Merce Cunningham’s dance of the same name. In 1973, working together with a group of young artists and musicians, Tudor expanded the work from a musical composition to a performance installation titled Rainforest IV. Composer Gordon Mumma described their collective artistic process as “a garden of shared ideas with minimal fences.” The group would later be named Composers Inside Electronics (CIE) (active 1973–present), and to this day includes John Driscoll and Phil Edelstein, among others. Tudor continued to work with CIE on multiple iterations of Rainforest over the next several decades. This last evolution of the work, Rainforest V (variation 1), transforms an installation once activated by performers into a rich visual environment animated by a computer program.

Rainforest V (variation 1), now part of the permanent MoMA collection, has been chirping, hooting, and howling autonomously since the museum reopened in October, its sounds perceptible not only in its assigned alcove, but also throughout a fair portion of the closest neighboring fourth-floor galleries. But Forest Speech transforms the installation back into something activated by performers—here, John Driscoll of Composers Inside Electronics, along with fellow composers, improvisers, and inventors Lea Bertucci, Ed Potokar, Margaret Anne Schedel, and Philip White.

Sliding wall panels, which I'd not noticed on my previous visit, closed off the Kravis Studio space from the adjoining gallery. The floor-to-ceiling window that dominates one side of the space was covered, creating a no-frills performance chamber. Audience members sat on benches surrounding the installation, or grabbed pillows on the floor underneath it.

The music sounded good in the space: clear and well defined, loud at times but never too loud. Familiar Rainforest sounds mingled with new voices (almost literally, at times) as the five musicians shaped a not-quite hour-long performance using laptops, weight- and touch-sensitive pads, controllers covered with ranks of identical buttons, and other gadgets not so easily recognized—I'm thinking now of the foil-wrapped whirligig on Driscoll's desk. You heard murmurs, snatches of conversation, bursts of laughter. At one point everyone converged into a zone of steady rhythm patterns—incongruous, maybe, but no less appealing for it.

Rainforest V (variation 1) remains on exhibit through January 5, 2020; it's open to all visitors at no additional charge, and makes for a charming encounter for visitors of all ages. One last round of Forest Voices performances is coming up in December, featuring Ginny Benson, Cecilia Lopez, Daniel Neumann, Sergei Tcherepnin, and C. Spencer Yeh. Tickets for the evening events on December 12 and 14 are sold out already, so remaining availability is limited to two daytime performances on December 15, at noon and 3pm. Those events are free with museum admission but require a separate ticket, available at the fourth-floor information desk. (Be forewarned: studio capacity is extremely limited, so you can count on tickets going quickly.)

Rainforest V (variation 1), photographed on Oct. 19, 2019

L-R Margaret Anne Schedel, John Driscoll, Philip White, Lea Bertucci

Caught: Dead & Company, Madison Square Garden, Nov. 1, 2019.

Dead & Company
Madison Square Garden, New York, NY
November 1, 2019
Section 210, Row 12, Seat 2

Personnel:

Bob Weir, guitar & vocals
Bill Kreutzmann, drums
Mickey Hart, percussion
John Mayer, guitar & vocals
Oteil Burbridge, bass, vocals, drums
Jeff Chimenti, keyboards & vocals
Maggie Rogers, guest vocals (*)

First set:

Cold Rain and Snow
Hell in a Bucket
Row Jimmy
Ramble On Rose
Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo
Mr. Charlie
Friend of the Devil *
Bird Song

Second set:

Scarlet Begonias >
Fire on the Mountain >
He's Gone > Smokestack Lightning > He's Gone >
China Cat Sunflower >
I Know You Rider >
Drums >
Space >
Althea >
Morning Dew

Encore:

The Weight *
Brokedown Palace

My fifth Dead & Company show, and a really strong outing for the band… so strong, in fact, that for the first time ever I had this weird sensation of a Dead band that was too good—by which I mean almost too clean and proficient to convey authentically the ragged glory this institution represents.

The first set was mind blowing, something I rarely feel about a first set, at least not until the home stretch. But this one was ON from the word go, Mayer playing at a level of energy and excitement that carried everyone along with it.

It was SO good, so ideal in fact, that at some point late in the first set, I started to get the sense of a Disney animatronic facsimile of the Dead: clean and perfect, everything just where it belonged, warts airbrushed off. I was strangely relieved, then, by a couple of really awkward transitions between songs in the second set, which served to prove that this remains a new version of the same old daredevil band, and simply having a really good night.

My general response is that the first set was heavier than the second, but I'm willing to admit that it had been a long, long day, and I was growing tired—I look forward to listening to the show again on Nugs to hear that second set in the clear light of day. I definitely recall the back half of "He's Gone" went into a hard blues direction; Setlist.fm presently calls this a transition to "Smokestack Lightning" and back again, but I heard it more as a passing allusion and Nugs agrees. Whatever your view, this hit Mayer's sweet spot dead on, and he lifted the whole bandstand, luring Weir into some righteous growling. Or maybe it was the other way around?

Maggie Rogers, unknown to me, did some lovely, soulful singing on "Friend of the Devil" and "The Weight." (A friend later reminded me she'd been the subject of the subject of much coverage in 2016, as an NYU student whose demo had floored Pharell Williams in a video clip that went viral.) Hearing her in the mix, I thought again about a Dead & Co. show I was supposed to see, but didn't: Fenway Park in 2016, during the band's one tour with Donna Jean Godchaux. Not that Rogers sounded anything like that famous forebear; it was just the sound of a woman's voice in the mix, making me nostalgic for the one that got away.

Far too many photos after the jump…

Caught: Dead & Company, Citi Field, Flushing, NY, June 23, 2019.

Dead & Company
Citi Field, Flushing, NY
June 23, 2019
Section 122, Row 22, Seat 2

Personnel:

Bob Weir, guitar & vocals
Bill Kreutzmann, drums
Mickey Hart, percussion
John Mayer, guitar & vocals
Oteil Burbridge, bass, vocals, drums
Jeff Chimenti, keyboards & vocals

First set:

St. Stephen
Cold Rain and Snow
Samson and Delilah
High Time
They Love Each Other
Ramble On Rose
Sugaree
Jack Straw

Second set:

Terrapin Station >
Althea >
Scarlet Begonias >
Fire on the Mountain >
Drums >
Space >
The Wheel >
The Other One >
Morning Dew

Encore:

Brokedown Palace

I didn't think I was going to make it to this summer's Dead & Company visit to Citi Field. For starters, I'd presumed I'd be too recently returned from London, where I had plans (and tickets) to attend King Crimson's three-night 50th-anniversary home stand at the Royal Albert Hall—until cataract surgery last Monday put paid to that notion. But recovery has been surprisingly smooth, my left eye is as startlingly sharp as I'd been promised, and a chance encounter with an amiable Deadhead on the Times Square subway platform Saturday afternoon made me think I really ought to be going. What's more, the weather Sunday was picture-perfect, and my Citi Field companion for the last two summers was available and eager to extend our streak.

So away we went. A good thing, too, because Sunday night's show was inspired from start to finish—and the band managed to keep things going despite not one but two complete P.A. failures: during the climactic home stretch of "Fire on the Mountain," and again during "Drums." If you listen to the official recording of the show, you might not even notice anything going around. But trust me, when we audience members start singing "fire on the mountain" really loudly and insistently, it's because at that point we weren't hearing anything from the stage.

Heads on Twitter pointed out – some with delight, others with outrage – that John Mayer appeared to be playing Jerry Garcia's famed "Wolf" guitar Sunday night. I don't know whether that's what caused Mayer to play a supernaturally abundant show… but whatever the case, I won't be skipping any opportunities to see Dead & Co. from this point forward. Long may they run.

A note about Caught: Look, I know better to make promises at this point… but obviously I continue to attend a lot of concerts, including many for which I lack the bandwidth and/or the proper platform to write about in any official capacity. But my urge to document what I'm seeing and hearing remains as powerful as ever, especially since quite a lot of it goes undocumented by the mass media. That being the case, I'll be making a renewed effort to write some little something here about everything I attend.

Wish me luck.

Auld lang syne.

Up until about 15 years ago, I maintained a document whose existence I cherished: a near-complete listing of all the concerts I'd attended during my lifetime up to that point. "Near-complete," because I'm pretty sure it started with Spyro Gyra at the Agora Ballroom in Houston (Nov. 16, 1980) and not my actual first concert: the Osmond Brothers at the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo, at the Astrodome, either in February 1975 or more likely March 1977. Also "near-complete" because for some reason I didn't deem it necessary to include the increasing number of classical music performances I was attending until very, very late in the game.

That was a strange and inexplicable omission. I know beyond any shadow of a doubt that my first opera ever was Peter Grimes and the lead was Jon Vickers (Houston Grand Opera, 1983). But not so long ago I had to ask a friend who had been there what singers had portrayed Donna Anna and Donna Elvira in a 1991 HGO Don Giovanni, in which I'd admired Thomas Allen in the title role. After shaking off his disbelief, my friend reminded me that those roles had been sung by, respectively, Karita Mattila and Renée Fleming.

My attention was prioritized a bit differently back then.

I'm thinking about this now because on Sunday night (Dec. 30, 2018, at 9:30pm, euphemistically speaking), I attended the last regular show presented at Cornelia Street Café in Greenwich Village. Both the restaurant and the performance space downstairs are slated to close permanently on January 2 after 41 years in business, victims of obscene Manhattan real estate prices and a resultantly exorbitant rent. I turned up to pay my respects during the late set by drummer Tom Rainey's trio with saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and guitarist Mary Halvorson. And in thinking about that modest yet much loved space and what it's meant to me over the years, I'd love to have at my disposal a complete tally of all the shows I'd attended there previously.

Alas, I lost my Concert Ledger to a hard-drive meltdown, the last known print copy having been recycled only a few weeks before. It's a loss that still gives me pangs. Try as I might, I can't seem to work up sufficient enthusiasm to begin anew at this point, with shows attendant to 12+ years at Time Out New York, seven at The New York Times, two at the Boston Globe, and two in my current phase at National Sawdust under my belt now.

Many of those shows are documented on this blog, or in those publications. Many more are not.

The basement at Cornelia Street Café never was what you'd think of as a first-class venue, to be perfectly frank. The room was long, narrow, and crowded. If you weren't close to the stage, you probably couldn't see so well. For the longest time, as I recall, the only piano was a tatty upright, until composer, pianist, curator, and writer Jed Distler, whose ComposersCollaborative, Inc. presented "Serial Underground" concerts there frequently, donated a baby grand, or at least caused one to be donated.

I always was inclined to think of the venue as (and I know how Frippish this sounds) an available room for honest work. I heard a lot of honest work done at Cornelia Street over the years. It was the site for what I'm reasonably sure was the second or third New York City show I ever saw – Tim Berne, Michael Formanek, and Jeff Hirshfield playing as Loose Cannon – a few years before I moved to New York from Texas. (New York magazine reveals that one such show took place on May 18, 1991, which is exactly the right time frame.) I even recall that because of some unspecified delay that evening, Joey Baron jumped up to open with a few jokes, and possibly a magic trick.

I'm positive that Cornelia Street Café is the first place I ever got to hear Sheila Jordan perform live, in a band billed under bassist Cameron Brown's name. I believe I heard a performance of music by my friend Frank J. Oteri, composer and musical citizen of the world; I'm positive that I heard several concerts in the series Frank used to curate there, 21st Century Schizoid Music—the notion of which was to allow contemporary composers to present their work in "classical" and "non-classical" varieties. I wonder now if that's where I first heard Corey Dargel? Possibly NOW Ensemble, as well?

I remember a tremendous set by trumpeter-composer Rob Blakeslee with the quartet that made his superb 1999 LP, Waterloo Ice House: saxophonist Rich Halley – with whom I'd been in contact since my college days via mail, telephone, and e-mail, but had never met or heard in person – bassist Clyde Reed, and drummer Dave Storrs. The concert, alas, was poorly attended; one cause, we reasoned, might have been that Nels Cline, who didn't yet live in Brooklyn, was playing the Knitting Factory that night.

Surely I must have seen some band or another led by saxophonist Tony Malaby, who, as expert witness and communications guru-for-hire Matt Merewitz just reminded me, worked up a great many of his best-known projects there. Malaby's association with Cornelia Street wasn't the only lengthy one; the show by Rainey's trio was the last in an almost unbroken 10-year run of December 30 shows by that band in that room, though somehow I'd never seen any of the previous ones.

The truth is, I hadn't been to Cornelia Street Café in a very long time when I lined up outside the door – in fact, directly outside the door of 25 Cornelia Street, where I'd actually lived in 1997-98 – to wait in the cold along with everyone else who'd made reservations, and possibly twice as many who hadn't. The cause for my absence had everything to do with the nature and frequency of my work for The New York Times, which redirected very nearly all of my time and attention away from venues where improvisation holds sway, toward concert halls and alternative spaces and agendas more in keeping with a classical-music mindset. (Yes, classical-music events happened at Cornelia Street, too—but because the venue never was especially adept at publicity, often I'd learn about bookings at the last minute, or after they'd happened already.)

It's not that I loved my previous rounds any less; I simply didn't have time for them anymore. (Here's a clear indicator: Right now I'm trying to decide whether I can catch any of this year's Winter JazzFest—an event I have never previously attended.)

Once inside, I sat at a table just close enough to the stage, by chance sharing it with Giovanni Russonello, the excellent current jazz critic for The New York Times, and his very nice friend. I scribbled into a reporter's notebook throughout the set, thinking that I'd write something like an actual review, and took the photos that accompany this post.

The trio played four longish tunes like the organic creature it's had the opportunity to become over the past decade, thanks in part to Cornelia Street Café and other similarly available rooms for honest work. I have always loved watching Tom Rainey play: his beats and accents all akimbo even as his groove cuts deep, his physical core rod-straight, limbs circling a pillar like a wild maypole dance. I can't think of another drummer who could have held a position with Tim Berne's free-improv outfit Paraphrase and Fred Hersch's elegant piano trio simultaneously. (What a time that was.)

Mary Halvorson maintains a cool presence, while wringing from her big guitar and signature pedals punctilious lines and feathery flurries and tape-unspooling slippage and, occasionally, big, fuzzy chord crunch. Ingrid Laubrock listens and listens, and comes up with consistently interesting things to say with her tenor, whether brash or pensive; her soprano is contemplative, airy, and lovely. The trio works so sympathetically that – as in Paul Motian's sublime group with Joe Lovano and Bill Frisell – you never miss the presence of a bassist, because everyone's collaborating to effect a shared gravitational pull.

There also are surprises. After the set, Steve Dalachinsky, a poet and scene fixture who almost certainly was present at any and every great improvisation-oriented show you ever saw, came over where Gio and I were sitting, and enthused mightily about a certain trio passage that Mary had accompanied with a stinging tremelo figure. Steve sounded off at length about how the music seemed to evoke finality and continuity at once.

"That's really lovely," I said, and meant it. "And here I was just going to say that bit reminded me of this old Butthole Surfers song I love." (The song is "Cherub" on the album Psychic… Powerless… Another Man's Sac, an old favorite that I'd pulled out for a spin stream the day before.)

All things considered, though, I'm not sure a review is what's needed. What I'm thinking about now is the role Cornelia Street Café – and the Internet Café, and the Bowery Poetry Club, and alt.coffee, and their ilk – played in the development of countless musicians, and how those rooms are gone now. I'm not really thinking about the landmark joints with genuine personalities, like the original Knitting Factory or Tonic or the Stone or the three incarnations of Issue Project Room that preceded the current one. I'm thinking about the dozens of available rooms for honest work that no longer are available, in Manhattan at least. I'm wondering what possibly could replace them, at this stage.

I'm wondering where that honest work will take place, when the last available room turns off the lights. And I'm thinking about memories I no longer can access, and spaces I no longer can revisit.

And on we go.

Tony Malaby at the Internet Café (Village Voice R.I.P.).

I wrote for the Village Voice only one time, very early in my professional career, at the tail end of the full-time jazz journalism stage that preceded my return to classical music after around five years of estrangement. The article was published Feb. 27, 2001, or so the website tells me. That I never returned to the Voice was not because of dissatisfaction on anyone's part; I was just getting too busy with my new line of work for Billboard.

There are plenty of things I still like about the article, a "Regulars" column on Tony Malaby in residence at the Internet Café, one of the crucial hangs in the mid-to-late '90s. I'm especially fond of the bit about Malaby and Tim Berne repeatedly bending at the waist while they played, "like the insatiable 'drinking birds' everyone's grandfather used to have." One detail I reported and enjoyed was cut by the editor: while Malaby and Berne were blowing fire, Wynton Marsalis was directly overhead, pontificating at length in the Ken Burns Jazz series on a TV with the sound turned off.

But there's also a bit in the article that embarrasses me so profoundly now that I've never shared it, either on this blog or on social media. It's a passing bit of casual snobbery meant to help evoke the setting, the inclusion of which now smells too much like a sexist jibe for me to make peace with it. I regret writing it, and I'm sorry it's out there as part of my permanent record.

Still, if today is the day the Village Voice died, then I suppose I can celebrate my one little, tiny piece of it. As for the rest: we live, we learn, we atone and try to do better.

The Tony Malaby column is here, but I'm going to quote the complete text after the page break… just in case.