Eclectic Company: Incidental Music

My Oxford buddy Mairi had a birthday on Bastille Day, and invited me to her summer house rental to spend it with her, beaching it up, visiting boutique clothing and museum gift shops in picture-perfect far eastern Long Island towns inhabited by celebrities, eating fabulous, if overpriced, gourmet meals, and, incidentally, attending a hot concert by New Orleans’ own Rebirth Brass Band at Amagansett’s Stephen Talkhouse, a small but highly regarded bar-with-music that’s hosted every major act on its way up as well as down since 1970.

Mairi had never seen the Rebirth, but thought they sounded like they’d be fun. Now I’ve seen the band dozens of times over the last nearly thirty years since the tuba/sousaphone blowing and mic-stand mounted bass drumming Frazier brothers with trumpeter Kermit Ruffins took some hammering funkadelic vibes, some trad jazz and bop, some soul riffs, and a healthy spoonful of hip hop, arranged well-known and new songs in those various styles, and then pushed it all out through the bells of school marching band brass and woodwinds to produce a mighty mighty sound. In less than a year, following their first appearance at Jazzfest, Rebirth had reinvented the brass band canon, and set the standard for all such to come. Or at least that’s how I see it. Even when they’re playing at less than their best, whether outdoors at festivals or indoors at clubs like the Maple Leaf, they are always big fun, getting us up onto the dance floor to flip, flop and fly. But I also knew you need a roomful of distance or at least a drummer’s earplugs to come away with your hearing intact from any brass band’s reverberant club set, and in the tiny Stephen Talkhouse, with the mighty Rebirth about to take the stage, we were fresh out of both.

So what could we do? Numb up, baby, numb up! We’d had a lot of champagne with dinner, and more at the Talkhouse; having arrived at the advertised start, we turned out to have loads of time to hurry up and wait before the Rebirth finally hit the stage nearly 90 minutes after we’d gotten there, and after we’d laughed it up plenty with other folks sharing the group W bench, saying yes to the waitress every time she walked by, until a fair amount of grape had been imbibed.

Then Rebirth sauntered onstage, casually gripping trumpets and trombone, sousaphone, saxophone, and bass and snare drums (the cymbals had been fitted to their stands and placed onstage earlier), and in deceptively shambling fashion, lifted their instruments and slammed right into New Orleans-native Fats Domino’s “I’m Walking,” 20 feet from our pew, across an empty dancefloor. And, ta-da! Magic. If you haven’t heard Rebirth, or haven’t heard them in a while, now’s the season, and their new album, Rebirth of New Orleans, is the reason. After they’d played some of my old favorites among their standard Michael Jackson and Beatles covers — Hugh Masekela’s “Grazing In The Grass,” Louis Jordan’s “Caledonia,” and the Duke Ellington big band hit, “Caravan” — they slipped into a new groove to play “I Like It Like That” and others of their own compositions, those songs featured on the new CD. Mairi and I, and our new best friends, all sitting on the group W bench there, were both literally and figuratively blown away. The neighbors left early, but we sat until the last chord had drifted away. My ears are still ringing. www.rebirthbrassband.com.

I drifted back to my family in close-to-the-city Long Island on the Friday, gladly missing the bumper to bumper traffic making its way east for the weekend, when my brother called to say that he was coming up from Philly because his friend since childhood, David Mills, a powerful drummer with eclectic musical tastes, and his roots-rock band, Whisperado, would be incidentally playing at “City of Water Day” on Governor’s Island, between Manhattan and Brooklyn. My brother’s friends are way cooler than I am, so I was delighted to be invited out to the ice cream cone-shaped island’s green lushness to hear them. David’s quartet’s remained a semi-professional outfit over many years of rehearsing and gigging, laying down a heavy-bottomed eclectic rock beat and some well-written original tunes that crackle with lyrical goodness courtesy of bassplayer/professional business writer Jon Sobel, and some tasty guitar riffs, played now by Patrick Neilsen Hayden, an editor of science fiction books. This fall, they’ll be showcasing a music video of their “Teenage Popstar Girl,” courtesy of first-time director Dan Azarian. www.whisperado.com will bring you to Jon Sobel’s website of further delights.

Whisperado. Photo by Phil Kawesch

Incidentally, the best music of the afternoon of water was turned in by singer/writer Elisa Peimer, whose delicious and thought-provoking pop songs have been and should continue to be featured in soundtracks and cover versions by all and sundry, if the gods of getting-what-you-deserve get their collective act in gear. Peimer’s been buzzing around the fringes of the about-to-make-it-big circuit for a while now, and her sweet and sultry vocals on her albums and EPs do justice to her tuneful, soulful music. After overhearing her first song, I began to listen with intent, and soon found myself the owner of one of her CDs, courtesy of my ever-thoughtful brother. We discussed Peimer’s chops and the to-ing and fro-ing of her success between numbers, falling silent each time she began to sing. Why hasn’t she made it big yet, we both wondered? Well, there is that power-ballad sensibility, and most young artists are doing their best to avoid the wall of sound, except if they’re selling tunes to TV shows that love the lush life. But though her songs seem familiar, even if they’re nothing you’ve ever heard before, they also offer unexpected musical twists, and I for one hope Elisa Peimer never tires of making music. If I knew that new music like this would be coming at me for the rest of my life, I could be content. www.elisapeimer.com.