Ed. note: Here’s hoping you all have a great time ringing in the New Year. Thanks to Guy (Vimeo / YouTube) from the Metro Gallery, you can also reflect back on a great night of live music from 2009: our fall showcase headlined by So Percussion this fall. Unfortunately, Microkingdom’s set was lost due to technical malfunction.

Congrats to friend of Aural States, stand-up guy, and all-around great musician (and highly underrated lyricist) J Robbins. His noted 90s project Jawbox (infamous for being one of the only artists to leave legendary Dischord Records). They delivered a taut performance of “Savory” last night on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon to commemorate the reissue and remastering of their Atlantic debut For Your Own Special Sweetheart.

If you missed it, YouTube has a version (see below), and Hulu will have a true HD 480p version later today.

And according to my chat with J, we also get two more online-exclusive performances after the jump (“FF=66″ and “68,” both also from FYOSS).

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Tonight will be an inspired night for music in Baltimore. Of course, that statement is a little biased since I’m putting it on.

Here’s some decidedly non-biased material suggesting you attend:

“Banging on Cans: And anything and everything else in So Percussion’s strange, not-just-percussion universe” (Baltimore City Paper)

“Roll Over, Beethoven: By Reimagining Format, Alt-Classical Musicians Are Going Mainstream” (Washington Post)

“Do You Hear That?” (Maryland Morning on WYPR 88.1FM)

Splice Today

and here’s what others are saying about So Percussion and their recent premiere of Imaginary City in Brooklyn:

“Drummers Map an Imaginary City” (New York Times)

“Yes In My Backyard: An Exclusive First Listen To So Percussion’s BAM Next Wave Piece Imaginary City” (Village Voice Music Blog)

“Top Live Show: So Percussion @ BAM Harvey Theater” (Time Out New York)

“So Percussion – playing ‘Imaginary City’ @ BAM” (BrooklynVegan)

Here’s some video we shot with Polygon Tree Productions of So performing Steve Reich’s Drumming Part 1:

It also bears mentioning that the line-up has expanded since our initial announcement to include two more sets. One features the premiere of a piece by local composers Adam Holofcener and Jeff Zeiders. The other is a True Vine power trio of sorts featuring Jason Willett (Leprechaun Catering, Pleasant Livers, Half Japanese), Martin Schmidt (Matmos), and Owen Gardner (Black Vatican, Janitor, ex-Teeth Mountain). Some more, press-release-y details on them after the jump.

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The True Vine
3544 Hickory Ave.
Baltimore, MD

Telephone: 410 235 4500

open hours:
Tues. to Sat. 12 – 9
Sun. & Mon. 12 – 6

hello,
this is jason speaking.  there’s alot to say & not much time to type it but i’ll give it a shot.

today is wed. oct. 21st 2009 & at some point today jad fair’s brother david will arrive from coldwater, michigan to the true vine with a truck crammed full of vinyl for us to sell. jad called me last week to tell me that he & david have decided to sell both their entire large record collections to this shop. both collections have been in storage for a long time & some of these records were from their first record purchasing days in the 70’s.

if you know some history about half japanese then you could imagine as much as i could that there would be some very interesting music in these boxes. about 20 years ago when i had a record shop in frederick, md, david dropped off a pile of amazing records on my desk for me to borrow.  everything in that stack was amazing & that was the first time i heard jandek. half of those records were jandek lps. the amount of records between the two of them is easily in the thousands & david’s drop off today will be part 1 of two drop offs. the next will be in about 3 months from now.

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So we’ve got a show coming up with So Percussion on Oct 28th. Here’s a sneak peek. The So guys were down teaching at Peabody in late September and took some time to shoot a performance of Steve Reich’s Drumming Part 1 in a Percussion studio with us and Polygon Tree, curator behind the web-show An Hour of Kindness.  Enjoy and be amazed.

I also took some photos of the shoot:

Great set by Baltimore’s Weekends. Their debut CD, which dropped earlier this year, was great.  And they even dropped the follow-up this summer!

All photos: Josh Sisk

Full set here

I have always had a giant personal dilemma in regards to hip-hop.  The genre is filled with landmines that derail my systematic approach to digesting and enjoying most other genres of music.  In my mind, the most compelling genius of music happens in live performance.  The convergence of visual, aural and atmospheric factors should make for a unique, vital and one-of-a-kind experience.

I tend to abhor live hip-hop shows (battles are a different story), as you tend to lose a large portion of the visual with the focus on one singular performer, often without any backup other than a backing track.  This has led to the egoism of the hype-up approach in order to catalyze a feedback loop of energy from the crowd to performer, and it often ends up distasteful at its worst, laughable at its best and nearly always obnoxious.  Things devolve into pep rallies reminiscent of adolescence more than should be allowed.

Jay Electronica fell into this trap horrifically.  His ‘tween song banter ranged from bad to insufferable, yet somehow the crowd seemed trained to eat it up.  Maybe that’s because when he put aside the ego and the role of hypeman, picking up the mic as a rapper, he delivered some of the best rhymes of the night.  His style is wordy, dense and filled with vivid metaphors, yet his flow is smooth and steady, like raging waters smoothing over a rocky riverbed.  Counting among his repertoire a number of cuts with J Dilla beats, his set excised from the B$ could have potentially outshined both headliners.  As it stands, the set was marred by awkward silences and particularly momentum-killing moments where he was having mic feedback and when he had his backing DJ searching for a line to play back from some unknown track.

Talib Kweli, by contrast, flowed forth not only with his words but with the show itself. Rarely, if ever letting silence rule the space between songs, Kweli packed every second with agile turns of phrase or phenomenal scratching by his DJ.  A master of crowd control, the charismatic Kweli had the perfect balance of crowd interaction and sensing when to stow it and drop knowledge on everyone in a set largely culled from his collaborative efforts with DJ Hi-Tek.  His steady and rapid-fire rhythmic skills while rapping a capella were top-notch, and his energy and intensity were off-the-charts on cuts like “Get Em High” and “Get By.”  He even gave a birthday shout-out during a Marley sing-along that proved he’s can be as gentle as he goes hard.

Mos Def most clearly recognizes the need to fill the energy gap as he has taken to becoming a more versatile, multi-instrumental performer.  The visual energy from watching him play the drums while rapping is remarkable, and its contribution to the performance immeasurable.  Unsurprisingly, Mos Def performed the majority of The Ecstatic in gripping fashion.  The end of the night heralded the reunion of Kweli and Mos Def as Black Star, the union which originally thrust them into the spotlight.  The power of that performance almost dwarfed the individuals, and makes you wonder whether either of them has truly stepped out from the shadow of their earliest, arguably finest works?

It turns out Music Without Labels had a camera crew in the house and got some great live footage of Talib Kweli, Mos Def and Soul Cannon.  Check it out after the jump.
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