Yesterday did not start off well, my therapist canceled for the second time in a row. As I can get off on an insanity plea for the next week, I suggest you be very nice to me. I am very trusting that people will understand when I’m joking. Fortunately, my other mental health treatment, live music, wasn’t canceled. I ventured down to Brooklyn to see Cole Quest and the City Pickers at Atlantic BKLN, a new venue. I left later than I planned but arrived just as the show was about to start. I saw Cole in front of the stage, not on it, and talked to him. There was an opening act on first. I didn’t expect that. Certainly, didn’t expect to see people I knew, The four members of the Sean Trischka Trio. See what teaching common core math leads to? This is what was projected on the screen behind them.
This is what we saw on the stage.
The unnamed member is Eleanor Buckland. Before this year I had only see her on stage with Lula Wiles. Then she did the Brooklyn Americana Fest and John Platt’s On Your Radar and now she stalks me. Remember to understand when I’m joking. I do love how someone can go from someone I didn’t know at all to someone I see often without a conscious effort on either of our parts. I bet that happens to you too. Yet people feel something nefarious is going on when they things start popping up often online.
Atlantic BKLN has a strange layout. You enter on the balcony. You walk down a flight of stairs and if you exit right, you are on the stage, So you exit left. Almost all the seats are under the balcony while the loudspeakers are at balcony level. That doesn’t make for the best sound. If you are in the balcony, you can’t see the stage. As I didn’t arrive early, I was at a table under the balcony. During Sean’s set the people around me would not keep quiet which combined with the not great acoustics made it difficult to hear. When Cole came on and people were quiet, I could hear fine though they should still redesign the sound system. The place is new and it’s not always easy to predict the acoustics until music is played in a room with an audience. The sound at the original Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center was notoriously bad. I heard a lecture buy a sound physicist, he said there was one good seat in the house. They fixed it but it took years. I’m not saying to avoid the venue. I liked the people and when the audience was quiet, I heard fine.
I saw Dave standing near the front on the side, where the sound was better and got up to walk over to congratulate him on his engagement. As soon as I got up and started walking, I saw Andrea, his fiancé right behind me standing with former bandmate Doug. We were then joined by Vincent. I ended up spending the break with them. Till then I was surprised that there was no one I knew at the show. They were there, just hiding.
Cole Quest and the City Pickers is a band I always feel I don’t see often enough. They impressed me from the first hearing. I had not seen them as much as I liked and then the pandemic hit. They released an album last year, Self [En-Titled], that made my best of the year list. More than a year later they finally had the release show. As good as they were before last night, they were better. This was a special show, everything clicked. They appealed to my intellect and to my gut. My body wanted to move and there was food for thought. The last year was not wasted. Cole’s friend did animations that were projected behind the band. Here’s one of them.
Does anyone else think that the animated Christian Apuzzo, the guitar player looks like cartoon Richard Thompson? That’s based on Christian pre-plague. His hair is longer now. This is what the band looks like now.
I’m not happy with myself; I am not painting a suitable word picture of what made the show extraordinary. Partially it’s the unusual songwriting, bluegrass with clever singer/songwriter lyrics. Part it’s that all the musicianship is spot on. Part of it is the stage patter and the feel the band instills in the audience. I almost said, “Energy” I try to never say energy in a non-physics contest. People use it to mean so many nebulous things that it now means nothing.
After playing the entire album Cole invited some friends that had released albums during the pandemic that they could not support do a song a piece. The first was Kate Prascher who I met at a Ditmas Park porch concert. I got her CD then and played it on Gord’s Gold. Then came someone new to me, Olivia Ellen Lloyd. I loved her song and talked to hear after the show. She’s going to email me her album and I’ll play that. I discovered that she’s also in a band with Andrea. It’s such a small musical world.
The show ended with a singalong, the way so many great shows do. To make it easier the lyrics were posted on the screen. The song was Woody Guthrie’s This Train but there were new timely verses added. Here are two of them.
A great perk of Atlantic BKLN is that it’s catty-corner from The Mile End Deli, the home of New York’s greatest poutine. Sadly, I didn’t leave early enough to eat there before the show, and it was closed afterward. I did not plan things well. I ended up having cereal for dinner when I got home. That was delayed by a subway issue. First there was a guy laid out on the ground outside a train. He was helped by MTA workers until the police arrived. I don’t know what was wrong, but I doubt it was too serious. He was all, “It’s no big deal.” That was an A train. There was a wait until the D train that was supposed to be two minutes behind it arrived. After it pulled out it stopped in the tunnel, and they made an announcement that there was a signal problem ahead. The upshot was I didn’t get home until 11:45. It was a late and hungry night but well worth it, a great night, put a circle around it.
I should post more pictures but I’m going to the Met game, and I have to start getting ready. It’s fireworks night! I love ballpark fireworks even though they are not as good as the ones he Gruccis put on at Shea Stadium in the 50s. Perhaps the new management got someone better than the old management did, and it will match that 80s peak.
I couldn’t post this before I left for the Met game because I had issues including the photos. I figured it out right before I left and had no time so here’s a rare middle of the night edition of Wise Madness. There was a time this was when I usually posted.
Wise Madness 