Live Review: Shoup/Moore/Makihara
The Tonic Lounge, NYC, 9/19/99
By Trey Hatch - The Tentacle
When Sonic Youth is not touring, usually one of its members
may be seen and heard performing as a solo artist or collaborator in one
of a handful of clubs around New York. All four members of the band seem
to have become increasingly familiar presences here, and have collaborated
with a wider range of jazz and new music players in mostly instrumental
explorations. It is probably not fair to members of the group to compare
their forays into relatively hardcore improvised music to the exploitation
of foreign ethnic musics by the like of the Beatles or Paul Simon, especially
considering the fact that the group did stretch the boundries of "alternative
music" for its first several albums. They are, nevertheless, rich rock
stars and they can afford to dabble in music which, in its purest form,
will never be commercially successful, without having to worry about starving
if they play that music too often. I believe they mean well, and I'm glad
they're doing what they're doing. I, for one, much prefer listening to any
combination of Sonic Youth members and non-Sonic Youth musicians than I
do the music of the band as a group, or any of its members solo.
Thurston Moore recently invited Seattle saxophonist Wally
Shoup and Philadelphia-based percussionist Toshi Makihara a player
familiar to many Seattleites from his multiple appearances in the city
to join him and tour as a trio for five or six shows here in the Northeast.
Having been one of the dozen or so audience members at a duet performance
by Shoup and Makihara somewhere in the basement of the Knitting Factory
last year, and also having remembered the surpisingly enthusiatic reception
which Shoup and his trio, Project W, received from thousands of (mostly
teen-aged) Sonic Youth fans when opening up for that band a couple years
ago in Seattle, my curiosity and enthusiasm were running high as I set out
for the Tonic, stoked even more by the fact that the venue is one of my
favorites in the city.
I was satisfied that I attended the show, but I did pay
dearly for the pleasure. The trio was booked as the second half of the club's
"Sunday night songwriter series" and the first act was horrible.
I kept thinking that I must have been mistaken when I thought that I would
only rarely encounter the kind of hands-in-pockets, whining sort of amateurism
displayed by the six members of The Scene is Now, as the band was called,
here in the Big City. This wasn't the first lame performance I've seen in
New York, but it was probably the worst.
As members of that band and their many family members slinked
out of the club, all of the standing room of the space filled with hordes
of youngish-to-middling people that looked like they were probably Thurston
Moore fans. The object of their affection approached the stage, introduced
Shoup and Makihara to polite applause, and proceeded to play five or six
solo songs on acoustic guitar, almost all of which consisted of long, annoyingly
repetitive plunkings and dronings as he extended into instrumental "improvisations"
for what must have been the delight of a stony-faced crowd of downtown hipsters.
Having come to hear the fiery onslaught of Shoup's saxophone and witness
the shamanistic genius of Makihara's percussion, I began to get a little
angry at this point, and uncomfortable, considering the fact that I had
been responsible for four or five friends' attending this show, one of whom,
a guitarist, commented that Moore had one of worst sounding tones he'd heard.
(In Moore's defense, Sonic Youth did just have a whole truck of musical
equipment stolen, so he may still be trying out new axes.) Finally, after
the applause following a particularly long piece of droning acoustic noodling
died down, Moore reintroduced the men who had been sitting quietly on stage
for 20 minutes, strapped on an electric guitar, and redeemed himself.
Moore's enthusiasm and respect for this trio project were
undeniable, and for some reason he looked like an apprentice as he stood,
legs apart, staring intently across the small stage at his cohorts, and
as his distorted, scattershot guitar noise intertwined with the chortles
and screams from Shoup's saxophone and the surprisingly straight-ahead drumming
of Makihara. The energy level increased tenfold in the room, and the audience
seemed to shake off some of its alternative post-punk stupor. The trio had
obviously learned to click in the few dates it had played before coming
to New York. Moore's fuzzy guitar lines matched Shoup's growling sax, to
the point where it became hard sometimes to pull them apart and tell who
was playing what. Makihara, usually armed to the armpits with boxes of strange
toys and noisemakers, kept up a steady beat with a minimum amount of goofing
off, although his drumming was still as distinctly strange and intelligent
as always, and the audience sat breathless at one point when he wove a strange
percussive web by dragging a plastic cat-o-nine-tails across his small drum
kit for a few minutes.
The trio played as such for 30 or 40 minutes, pounding,
screaming and sputtering at times, at others settling into surprisingly
warm washes of sound, sometimes opening up into silent spaces into which
one of the trio would venture a solo statement. The players maintained their
pop appeal partially through one of the tricks that Project W fans have
grown to appreciate: Most of the pieces had distinct beginnings and endings,
and clocked in around pop-song length, thus concentrating the musical statements,
allowing the musicians to express different beginnings and endings, and
preventing the kind of totally indulgent aimlessness that often occurs when
musicians improvise for an hour or two without a breather. Although the
first half of Moore's set scared me, the second was exactly what I had come
downtown to hear, and constituted one of those redeeming moments which makes
high-risk nightcrawling worthwhile. |
