Powerhouse Sound
The Drake Underground. August 5, 2010.
I was unsure when I should show up for this one. Early doors means an early show at The Drake, but I couldn't find a listing for the start time. And given the band and the presumptive demographic, I figured it'd be an older, punctual, eager-to-sit crowd. I was actually quite surprised when I stepped from bright sunlight to basement gloom to discover that there weren't seats set up. The room was almost totally empty and the airconditioning set several clicks below comfortable. I could have used a drink — possibly a hot toddy, given that my teeth were chattering — but The Drake is too pricey for the likes of me to imbibe. With the few patrons on hand reclining on the couches hugging the wall, it was positively morgue-like as I settled in, waiting for the crowd to arrive.
As it turned out, the crowd avoided this gig entirely, and it ended up being woefully underattended. So it was in front of a pretty spare room that Powerhouse Sound, playing without an opening act, took the stage. The lack of crowd was a little surprising, as saxophonist Ken Vandermark has a pretty decent following. Plus, this grouping — what one might reductively refer to as Vandermark's "rock unit" — contained additional rock-nerd cachet with Jeff Parker and John Herndon, two of the members of Chicago post-rock titans Tortoise, in its ranks.
Despite the thin attendance — I counted maybe thirty people on hand — the band threw themselves into it. The "songs" were interspersed with a series of structured duo/trio improvisations, starting off with Nate McBride's processed bass and Jeff Parker's electric guitar1 in a effects pedal powered atmospheric duet that segued into "Shocklee". That one, like most of the band's compositions, is a dedication to a musician that has inspired Ken Vandermark — in this case Bomb Squad producer Hank Shocklee. Those linkages are sometimes pretty direct and sometimes more opaque — here we had the continued scrim of complicated knob-twisting concrète backed by a steady beat giving hints of the dense sound collages the song's namesake helmed.
Then, a guitar/drum duo segued into "King to Crown (for King Tubby)", McBride's bass work riding a repetitive riff. That one owed more to an idea of dub methodology than to reggae per se, although that influence came out directly on "Exit-Salida (for Burning Spear)", which was first extended jam after the quicker explorations to start things off. The first set wrapped up with "Leap", a brand new composition. Whether this one was "for" anyone wasn't mentioned, but it lead off with little stabs of guitar, and Vandermark's sax took on a funky edge. Halfway through, it took a darker, slower turn before dropping back into the funky mode it started in.
That would make for a forty-five minute set before the break. The room cleared out with the smokers heading outside to be joined by those who needed to warm up a bit while, as usual, Ken Vandermark manned his merch table. He can usually be seen at gigs like this, putting himself face-to-face with his audience not just to shill some albums, but to share a chat with anyone willing to wander over. Meanwhile, I eyed the crowd, mentally assembling the weird Venn diagram of diverse musical types (jazzbos and "serious" music types, but also jamband heads, proggos and post-rock nerds) who unite at shows like this.
The second set led off with "Old Dictionary (for Bernie Worrell)" and then "Edges of Tape", another new one2 which had a solo in the middle from Parker that consisted mostly of artful tuning. The set ended with what, after some digging around, I'm taking to be "Broken Numbers (for Betty Davis)" — it certainly evoked that namesake, with a tough-funk sound and yowling sax line — and enough energy from John Herndon that he knocked his cymbal over. As there was throughout, there was applause from the scattered audience, but not the effusive sort. Which wasn't to say it wasn't dug, there just wasn't a critical mass of people to get each other too riled up and build up the energy in the room. Which might be why on this night there was no encore. But still, a really enjoyable show.3
Check out a couple tracks from this gig here.
1Gear fetishists would have appreciated Parker's setup here, with amps on each side of the stage to give him an extra way to pan and mix his effects.
2 It's interesting to note the lag between hearing these new ones live and seeing them emerge in recorded form. The foundational document for Powerhouse Sound is the Oslo/Chicago: Breaks double album, which contains many of these songs recorded with two different lineups on different sides of the Atlantic. The band actually has a new release, Overlap, which does indeed mostly overlap that same material with a different lineup, but still doesn't have the new jams we were hearing on this night.
3 Special thanks to BradM, who was also out this night with his recording rig, and allowed me to piggyback onto his microphone stand. It allowed me to get a pretty nice capture of the show, but it's not quite as rich as the sound from his more sophisticated setup. Brad has shared his recording at etree.org, and, at this writing, it is still being seeded.
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