Echoes of a Bygone Era: Robin Holcomb Solo at IMA

Fame comes in all shapes and sizes, and is pursued differently by each of us. The pianist, vocalist, lyricist and composer Robin Holcomb, who gave a magical performance at the Institute for the Musical Arts on December 3, has earned a good deal of fame in her life, despite her lack of hunt for it.

A self-described recluse, Holcomb has nonetheless amassed accolades and a loyal contingent of fans over her 40 year career. A few of the 40 folks who made their way to Goshen, MA on a dark and stormy night, told me they were touched by her 1990s Elektra/Nonesuch recordings and couldn’t miss the opportunity to see her live. Quietly, out of the limelight, the fame-adjacent Holcomb has made a career sharing her unique response to early American music with all who will listen.

“The late Hal Wilner, his own kind of genius, deserves so much credit for trusting Robin on his many projects in homage to different artists,” wrote Holcomb’s husband, pianist and composer Wayne Horvitz. “At Hal’s invitation, she was often the least famous person on stage, in the company of Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed and Bono and Elvis Costello and Martha Wainwright and many, many more. But as Hal said one morning, after a very long night, on the bus back to the airport in Dublin, ‘here comes Robin, the only one whose music always comes fully baked to these half-baked affairs’”.

The songs Holcomb shared with us on Sunday were small finished gems, four minute pieces of polished perfection that illustrated the human condition in all its expression. IMA’s rustic wooden barn was the perfect venue to experience the music’s plaintive, 19th century aesthetic. She took liberties with a few “covers” by Stephen Foster and Doc Pomus, but otherwise performed original work.

Her piano playing was at once simple and layered, beautiful and tart. Her timing and touch were exquisite, and the note choices and voicings were modern and complex, qualitatively different from typical singer-songwriter fare. She performed a piece without vocals, and elsewhere gave herself ample space to stretch out and highlight her considerable, if understated, piano technique. I heard her voice as fragile, but sure of itself, and her straightforward delivery was offered without adornment or embellishment. Holcomb was there to deliver a lyric. That said, the effect was poignant and potent.

“Satie goes to Appalachia, Morricone goes to the Knitting factory, and you, dear art-folk fan, die and go to heaven,” was how the Village Voice described her impact.

I often have trouble discerning lyrics in live music settings, and on Sunday I wished the vocals had been a bit higher in the mix. But thanks to her recent solo recording, One Way or Another, Vol. 1, and her book, Lyrics, both of which I took home with me, I have been able to sit with many of the pieces she performed in concert. The feelings of that evening continue to simmer.

Holcomb gave us several pieces from song cycles she wrote inspired by Rachel Carson and the utopian communities active in the Pacific Northwest in the late-1880s. In “Copper Bottom”, she sings:

Set me up there with my daughter

I lost my voice around the corner

Don’t confuse me with my laughter

I won’t return the morning after

Don’t come looking for my blessing

I’m not coming back to the colony

no, never

Her rendition of Doc Pomus and Herb Abramson’s “I’ve Got That Feeling”, was reconfigured from a stock, 1950s-era blues about lust, to a haunting folk song that featured a mildly surprising, but very welcome swell of volume on the piano.

Holcomb, who had an avid interest in Civil War songs growing up, told us she has a love/hate relationship with Stephen Foster, before playing two of his compositions, including the oft-covered “Hard Times Come Again No More”. Her interpretation had an ache that seemed relevant to us all, whether we find ourselves on the prairie or in the parlor.

Holcomb was raised in and around Santa Cruz, CA, before she and Horvitz spent 1977-1987 in New York, where they played with the likes of John Zorn, Marty Ehrlich, Syd Straw, Bill Frisell, Butch Morris, Arto Lindsay, Elliot Sharp and many others. They’ve lived in Seattle since. They were in New York for Horvitz’ four-day Stone residency, so we were happy to extend a Jazz Shares invitation for Holcomb to perform in western Massachusetts. Horvitz, who played at IMA last April with bassoonist Sara Schoenbeck, joined his wife at the end of her set, utilizing tasteful electronic drones from his laptop, as well as playing piano and harmonica.

Holcomb has achieved her fame without fanfare, in her own way, on her own terms; it’s all the more durable for that. She is living proof that you can’t fake authentic. While a general public blinded by pomp and pizzazz has had trouble recognizing this in large numbers, her peers have had an easier time of it. William Parker called her music “a map that guides us to the house of the sages.” “Have I heard this before?” her long-time collaborator Bill Frisell wrote about her new solo recording. “Not like this. Everyone. Please LISTEN. Listen closely. We need this.”

On the Road Again: Zoh Amba and Chris Corsano Visit Holyoke

Drummer Chris Corsano and tenor saxophonist Zoh Amba are world travelers, barely burdened by quotidian concerns like mailboxes and addresses. Like Aurora Nealand, who was recently here with Tim Berne’s trio, and elders like Hamid Drake and Don Cherry before them, a look at Amba and Corsano’s touring schedules confirms that they are rarely home (or in one spot for very long.) They are itinerant musicians, modern griots.

Amba and Corsano stopped at Holyoke Media on November 19, concluding a 12-city tour with a concert produced by Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares. They gave an incendiary performance for 65 broad-eared listeners.

Rather than stay put and create a scene in a hometown, Amba and Corsano choose to travel the globe, touring and collaborating with locals in locales large and small, forging new connections and planting musical seeds where ever they go. When I asked Corsano if he lived in New Jersey, he chuckled and said he doesn’t really “live” anywhere at the moment.

Over the course of 65 minutes of map-less free jazz, our fearless troubadours used expanded vocabularies to cover a large swath of emotional territory on their way to the promised land. Despite the pure nature of their improvisation, they managed to stick a half-dozen dismounts, bringing each piece to a perfect conclusion with logic and precision.

I’ve known Chris Corsano since his Hampshire College days during the second half of the 1990s. He was mentored by writer and record collector Byron Colley, (whose Feeding Tube Records is a Jazz Shares business sponsor), and Michael Ehlers, owner of Eremite Records, who produced The Transnational Jazz Conspiracy on WMUA, and around 100 concerts in the Valley, before moving west in 2009. Suffice to say Corsano was exposed to a lot of good music. I first met him when he worked the door for Ehler’s operation, and in the interceding years, he has developed into a master of sound and rhythm.

He played two high-hat cymbals (with separate pedals, close together), and his cymbal work generally shimmered and shined. There was a point when he placed a small, metal bowl on his floor tom and created holy, resonant tones. Sometimes he used two sticks in each hand, creating a mass vibration. He could be seen flipping sticks to take advantage of the special sonorities each end provided. Corsano swung hard and had the requisite force to match Zoh Amba.

If she were not standing right in front of us, no one would imagine that the ferocious, guttural torrent of sound we were hearing was coming from a slight, 23 year old white woman from rural Tennessee, who skews shy and introverted when off-stage. But there was Zoh Amba, summoning the spirit of her role models: Albert Ayler, Frank Wright, David S. Ware and Frank Lowe, testing the soundproofing of our black box studio space, while putting her personal stamp on the “fire music” of the 1960s.

The band was in fifth gear from the first note. She produced cascades of tones broken into multiphonic shards; she displayed the pathos-filled vibrato and gospel leanings we associate with Ayler; she shared the raw, fuck-it-all attitude we get from punk and noise. But despite the music's intensity, Amba had such control of her instrument and spewed so many ideas so quickly, it didn’t feel like a demand, it felt immersive and meditative.

Amba spent hours playing saxophone in the woods near her home in Kingsport, TN, and did deep YouTube dives into her predecessors. But she has living mentors, too. She studied with David Murray for a time, and spoke kindly about Mark Dresser, who was very encouraging. She’s learned from playing with veterans like drummer Tyshawn Sorey, who’s featured on her latest release, Bhakti (Mahakala Music), and John Zorn, who produced and appears on her first recording, O, Sun (Tzadik). She has worked with William Parker, Francisco Mela, Vijay Iyer and Shahzad Ismaily. She only has a bit of post-secondary training, but she’s been well educated. Hank Shteamer wrote a wonderful profile

of her last year in the New York Times.

One of the roles of “jazz producer” I most cherish, is having musicians stay overnight at the home I share with Priscilla Page, where we provide respite and rejuvenation for musicians on the road. We supply whatever they need: morning coffee, home-made food, laundry, some Valley jazz history, mood enhancers, stories and news. We are glad to be part of the jazz world’s connective tissue, making safe spaces for musicians who flit from place to place. For one day, I was glad to share all that with Zoh Amba and Chris Corsano, two modern road warriors spreading a gospel of love through music.

Holy and Unruly: Oceans And at Wistairihurst Museum

Comfort levels are a real thing, and most concert goers rarely venture outside them. Listeners usually want to know what’s coming and how it will make them feel. Regular patrons of Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares, however, are used to venturing beyond their known universe, and have demonstrated a willingness to embrace the unfamiliar.

Some of us might have felt slightly adrift on November 4, as Oceans And filled the elegant marble music room at the Wistariahurst Museum with a dissonant beauty. The group: Tim Berne, alto saxophone, Aurora Nealand, accordion and voice, and Hank Roberts, cello, gave a dense, gnarly, fully improvised recital in Holyoke for 45 intrepid souls.

Jon King, a charter member of Jazz Shares, thought of the concert as “a prayer”. Given our current state of affairs, King mused that the twisted, discordant nature of much of Saturday’s music seemed a reaction to a world out of balance. I’m not sure if that’s how the musicians saw it, but there was a moment late in the concert which reinforced the notion that something spiritual was underway.

There were no pauses in the music. It ebbed and flowed, marked by shrills and purrs and changes in volume, but the concert was one continuous slab of music, with the performers playing virtually non-stop. About 50 minutes in, the music tapered to silence. The applause which typically comes after the music ends, never materialized. I had put my hands together, anticipating an act I had engaged in thousands of times before. But no one made any sound. The musicians kept their eyes closed, heads down, and hands on their instruments. At first, the silence served as a welcomed contrast to the immensity of the music we had just experienced. As the minutes passed, the silence turned profound, and a deep uncertainty took hold of me. How will this end? What if it never ends?

After four minutes, Nealand’s accordion slowly began to breathe, as she pushed air but no tone, through her bellows. Berne responded in kind, blowing wind through his alto sax. As they regained steam, Roberts stopped bowing and started plucking, providing the first rhythmic momentum of the evening. Berne and Nealand delivered “beautiful” tones on top, and ten minutes after the great pause, the evening was over. The sequence had quite an impact on this listener.

Oceans And were playing their 17th concert in as many days. The Holyoke gig was the last on the tour, so a certain rapport had been established. Berne told me that despite the grind, he loved this tour because his band mates were so reliable, chill and skilled.

When she’s not freely improvising with Oceans And, Aurora Nealand is doing a number of very different things. She leads The Royal Roses, a non-traditional Traditional jazz band in her home town of New Orleans, has written and directed original theatre projects, stars in performance art pieces, leads the rockabilly band Danger Dangers, plays sax, keyboards and sings in John Hollenbeck’s GEORGE, and will perform at the next Big Ear’s Festival with Tim Berne, David Torn and Bill Frisell. Berne called her one of the most amazing musicians he’s ever worked with. She brought her clarinet to Holyoke, but never picked it up.

Cellist Hank Roberts also has covered a lot of sonic territory in his almost five decades as a performing artist. I first learned of him in the 1980s and 90s when he was a mainstay at the Knitting Factory, and a big part of the downtown jazz scene, generally. At the same time, he started producing a slew of fine records for JMT, and its successor, Winter & Winter. Over the years, he has remained a steadfast collaborator with Bill Frisell, featured on ten of the guitarist’s records. Roberts stayed close to his home in Ithaca, NY for many years, but thankfully he’s venturing forth again. We saw him a month ago in Turner’s Falls with Jeff Lederer’s “Schoenberg On the Beach” project, and he has recent sextet and trio recordings that are varied and provocative.

Meeting someone after years of admiring their work is an exciting proposition, and getting to spend quality time with Hank Roberts was a treat (the band stayed overnight at our house). Our conversation stumbled upon The Horseflies, a well-known, Ithaca-based roots/rock band that includes some of Robert’s best friends. I pulled out a 1988 Daily Hampshire Gazette article I had written about The Horseflies in advance of their Iron Horse performance, which he photographed and sent his friends. Roberts reminds me of my friend David Gowler: mid-west earnest, extremely competent, kind and creative.

Tim Berne, the man who pulled together both the band and the tour, is among his generation’s most influential musicians, and also someone for whom I have a deep respect. I met Berne briefly in 2014 when he performed in Northampton with the Ingrid Laubrock Quintet, but having a chance to stretch out with him was a blessing. I’ve long been a fan of his bands Miniature (with Hank Roberts), Bloodcount and Snakeoil, not to mention his work with Paul Motian, Craig Taborn and Marc Ducret. His two Columbia records, Fulton Street Maul (1987) and Sanctified Dreams (1988) are valued parts of my collection.

Don’t be fooled by his unkept hair, indifferent dress and irreverent attitude; Berne is on it. He was inspired and mentored by the great Julius Hemphill, has released dozens of worthy recordings on Screwgun, the label he created in 1996, and worked out all the details for these 17 consecutive concerts. Berne is serious, and he's had a serious impact on the world of creative music for over 40 years. He is a fierce improviser, a sly composer and a willing collaborator.

“Beauty in music is too often confused with something that lets the ears lie back in an easy chair,” Charles Ives said. “Many sounds that we are used to do not bother us, and for that reason we are inclined to call them beautiful.”

Playing with conventions of harmony, melody and rhythm, Oceans And dove into their unconventional world of sound. It was intense and there were no easy chairs, just an opportunity to expand your comfort zone.