I owe you reports on the shows by Jean Rohe, James Shipp, and The Schooches. It feels so good seeing three bands in one weekend. Two of them are billed as solo artists but they all have bands.
When I became acquainted with Jean and her music the first musician I thought of was Anais Mitchell? Their voices are completely different. There is little in common with their writing style. So why would I associate them? It’s the breadth of their musical ambitions. They saw the world as more than something that can be encapsulated in eight bars, a verse and a chorus, even when expressing themselves sometimes in eight bars a verse and chorus. Anais’s vision extended to a full fledged folk opera that became the Broadway show Hadestown. Till now Jean has shared her vision as art songs but now she too is building her music on a scaffolding. Her new project is called 74 Corridor. It is not an opera, it’s not one story, It’s a connected series of songs on a theme, like Handel’s Messiah, it’s an oratorio.
The theme is her father’s life and how it connected with her. The title comes from the path of the New Jersey Transit 74 bus, where her father and she spent much of their lives. The work is not organized by time but by stops on the bus; starting at the Broadway Terminal in Patterson and ending at Branch Brook Park in Newark. There is a magical transfer to Brooklyn right before the end.
You might have noticed that I remember far more details than usual. That’s because I’m cheating. There was a printed program made to look like a bus schedule.
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The inside is the cover picture. Now I don’t have to list all the songs. You can see them for yourself. Parts are recitative, form she has explored before. Some of them are instrumentals, Traveling Music and Belleville, the town that people from Nutley, Jean’s hometown, don’t like.
What struck me in the early pieces was an increased use of dissonance and rougher phrasing. The music often didn’t go where you expected. Caroline Davis’s saxophone often leaves the listener disoriented. That is a virtue, not a flaw. A song about a County Jail should leave you disoriented. The change in Jean’s style is akin to Dylan going electric and embracing French Symbolist poetry. I also thought of the darker turn of Mozart’s later works. The change was not sudden, you can see the corner being turned in Jean’s Sisterly, but now it is even clearer.
She has also moved closer to jazz, with a lot of that movement coming from Davis’s drums but also from longtime collaborator, Chris Tordini, bass line.
Some of the songs revert to a more mellifluous style, to fit the subject matter. A song about a child seeing the world from her father’s shoulders should not be disturbing. This is not a simplistic view of the world. While one should not pretend the dark isn’t there but avoiding the light creates a view of the world just as distorted.
74 Corridor is still a work in progress. Judging by the way previous albums have developed I’m expecting substantial changes. I will discover that parts that I think are perfect have been transformed and improved. Maybe Belleville will get lyrics. Maybe a new stop will be added on the map, maybe the symbolic bus will skip a stop that’s there now. I can’t wait to find out.
Wise Madness 