Gig: Jennifer Castle

Jennifer Castle (Bahamas / Carl Didur)

The Horseshoe Tavern. Thursday, May 19, 2011.

The previous time I had seen a set by Carl Didur had been in a much more beautifully park-like environment, but I had made my out early to the 'Shoe to catch him regardless of relative dankitude. The stage was packed full of gear as Didur stepped up — though looking it over, I figured a lot of it wasn't his stuff and that the standup piano, say, would be used further along in the night. I was right in guessing that the sound-activated light was his, though.

Still, it was enough stuff that I wondered if this was going to be a solo set — especially as I could see several of his musical peers and collaborators hanging out in front of the stage. But as he began, he was on his own with a couple keybs on the table in front of him. He also had a reel-to-reel unit with a long tape loop reaching over to a spindle about six feet away on top of the piano, and there was a boombox tilted back against the monitor making bird noises.

Those birdcalls, a loop of tapping percussion and Didur's minor key playing led off the set, with all of the elements slowly rubbing up against each other in different ways. The looped keyb ostinados and kosmiche percussion created a regular framework under his playing. After about six minutes of the birdcall song, Didur flipped the switch on an ancient rhythm box and moved on to a new idea.

A couple minutes later, a drummer came on stage and settled in, but more as if he was just there to watch, too. It was several minutes before the next piece began and he joined in, Didur's little repeated phrases on the keyboard shifting in octave and tempo to provide a throughline as the drummer countered with a propulsive buildup.

There were about five distinct "songs" in the continuous twenty-five minute performance. So far as I know, Didur is a little cagey with song titles, but if you see him play a few times, you realize that he's working with a defined set of compositions.¹ His solo work is simply quite excellent right now, and this stuff works on several levels — musically it's soothing and groovy all at once and the underlying tonal warmth pulls you in. Plus, for one guy hunched behind a keyboard, light flickering away, it's interesting in that technical sense of how's-he-doing-it? but you can just as easily close your eyes, lean back and zone out a bit.²

Listen to an excerpt from this set here.

The night's middle set was a mystery guest who had been listed only as "Tex Message" — a name that'd be less obscure now, but I was surprised to see Afie Jurvanen take the stage to set up his gear.³ So, as Jason Tait adjusted his drums up front on stage left, I knew it was going to be a Bahamas set, but I was confused by the pair of microphones on the other side of the stage. I was musing on the possibility that Jurvanen had added a horn section as a pair of backing vocalists emerged. I recognized Felicity Williams (from THOMAS, Hobson's Choice and many more projects) and her partner turned out to be Carleigh Aikins (formerly of Fox Jaws).

This unorthodox quartet is now the standard configuration for Bahamas, but was pretty new at the time, so it's no surprise that the setlist skewed towards the songs with more-developed arrangements for the backing vocals — which meant the set was loaded with material that would later emerge on Barchords. In fact, what would be that album's opening pair ("Lost In The Light" and "Caught Me Thinkin") led off the set. Of course, some of these songs had been around for almost as long as the ones on debut album Pink Strat — I remember seeing "Caught Me Thinking" back in October 2009 — but they were certainly less known to the crowd. It wasn't until "Already Yours" that Jurvanen revisited Pink Strat, and that would turn out to be one of only a couple, though there was an amusing version of "Hockey Teeth" as performed "from the set of Grease", with the vocals going back and forth between Jurvanen and the backing vocalists.

Williams and Aikins got to handle a few diverse tasks, from reeling off a commercial jingle between songs to adding a double-kazoo solo during "Okay Alright I'm Alive". That also shows the carefree vibe of the set — although there's a fair amount of sadness and regret in Jurvanen's lyrics, he's always maintained a genial stage presence. In fact, in some of the times I had seen him in the past, Jurvanen verged on being slightly goofy onstage; this time 'round, he was more relaxed and mellow.

For an artist who is now a hot commodity, the crowd at this show was semi-indifferent to his set, with far more people content to stand back and chat — or, increasingly, just get chatty right up front. Jurvanen wasn't in the mood to counter and in fact closed the nine-song set on the spare, quiet "Snow Plow". The murmuring around me took me out of this to some extent, but I was certainly impressed with how Jurvanen was presenting his newer stuff.

Listen to a track from this set here.

That made for quite a contrast in two opening acts who might not have fit with each other, but who each felt like musical kin with Jennifer Castle. Both a sound explorer and a singer-songwriter, she sometimes operates with Didur's obliqueness — such as sets where she'd play continuously, seguing from one unfamiliar song to the next, blurring the distinctions between them — but she can also write tunes that are as catchy and well-constructed as any of Bahamas' pop confections.

This show was being held to celebrate the release of Castlemusic, which reconciles those opposing ideas. It also de-obfuscates the artist a bit, moving Castle's own name out front and relegating her previous "Castlemusic" moniker to the album's title. The show felt really well-constructed to let all these contradictions play off each other without appearing to be mutually exclusive.

Castle emerged alone, borrowing a lighter from someone in the crowd to light the candle on top of the piano⁴ before starting the set solo and a capella. Her voice managed to transfix the audience, and the room was whisper quiet at the set's beginning. Building the sound one step at a time, she picked up her guitar to play "Neverride" — the first selection from what would ultimately be the whole of the new album. Castle is a transfixing guitarist, playing in a blues-based style revolving around drone-y, circular figures. It's a subtle approach that sometimes gets covered over in a group context, so I'm glad the show took the time to spotlight this before moving along.

But I'm also glad she brought along a band, and once again that dual musical identity was on display in its composition. On the one hand there was a couple members of roots-rockers One Hundred Dollars, with Paul Mortimer on guitar and Dave Clarke on drums.⁵ But there were also a pair of players who slide back and forth through a lot of shape-shifty projects in the improvised music community, with longtime collaborator Ryan Driver on piano (and also adding some flute on "Misguided"), as well as bassist Mike Overton.⁶ Of course, not everyone was playing to "type" here — Driver can play a mean barrelhouse piano line when called for, and Mortimer/Clark have tricks far beyond the honkytonks.

And in the middle of it all, Castle still has a propensity to combine similar songs into mini-suites — here, the new album's "Misguided" moved effortlessly into "Who" (from the previous You Can't Take Anyone). In a mid-set solo spot there was a newer, untitled one that Castle's been singing for a little while now — it might end up being called "Sailing Away" — that celebrates the old itinerant bluesman's rootlessness: "don't need a home, I don't need a lover, I'll be out on my own, come hell or high water". And yet, that was combined with an instrumental called "The Friend".

The band returned, but the quieter material continued, and "You Don't Have To Be" used their accompaniment for colour more than volume. They got a little louder after that, though still with a mellow vibe for fantastic renditions of "Way of The Crow" and "Powers". The latter was in an especially slowed-down, moody version, again featuring Driver's flute.

Sadly, as the clock hit midnight, a few people started to trickle out of the venue, and it seemed like everyone that was left decided to get involved in a conversation, threatening to drown the music out. The band overcame the chattering with a rollicking version of "For My Friends" to close out the main set. For the encore, Castle took to the piano for "Remembering", and that seemed to re-capture people's attention. On the whole, a really good show, worthy of the excellent album it was celebrating.

Perhaps appropriately, there's a couple flavours on offer from this set: check out something loud and raucous here, or something quieter and meditative here.

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¹ There's a similar ambiguity in the work of Zacht Automaat, Didur's "band" project with Michael McLean, with most of the superb music that the band has released being divided only into cassette sides. Slim Twig's annotation of the ZA discography is the best account of this material, which comes with my highest recommendation.

² As of this writing, Didur has just posted a new recording on his soundcloud page which "sounds different than my other recent doings", mentioning in a tantalizing aside that this was an exercise undertaken during "a break from the final assembly of the new Zacht Automaat double album." Keep your eyes peeled!

³ Later on, Jurvanen would use this handle mainly for his covers sets when he would tackle some of Willie Nelson's Stardust appropriations of the Great American Songbook.

⁴ Let's pause here to note that The 'Shoe does not have a house piano — it was considered important enough for this gig that the band brought one in.

⁵ I have seen Mortimer and Clarke backing Castle before, and they also play alongside her in Doloro. And while thinking of the latter, it's worth pointing out that with their self-titled album, Castle was involved into two of the best albums of 2011. You really need to own them both.

⁶ Overton plays with Saint Dirt Elementary School and a lot of other Tranzac-y units, but he has also performed with Great Lake Swimmers.