I turned 58 since I last penned any blogs, and some days I feel that old, some days I still feel 23 and a half. The night I will describe here was one of the latter, and I will tell you why. Sometimes, in Saratoga, if you drink from the right spring, it’s as if it’s a fountain of youth.
My wife and I left a great party near downtown thrown by a client of mine, and fully intended to go home, but decided instead to check on our teen daughter’s locale, found she was safely ensconced at her friend’s house for the night, then we took a cruise up Broadway from south to north…as the prime part of Saturday night was just beginning to percolate.
Once past Congress Park, we crept along slowly to get a taste of what was happening on the street. My lady said roll down the windows and I did. The barricades which swerve traffic in front of the new Northshire Bookstore Building were still in place, a site worth diverting traffic for…and that slowed things down on the busy strip, right at the core of town: the traffic light where Division Street heads west, and the Downtowner Motel is on the northwest corner. Across Division from that up until recently had been the barren site of the closed BORDER’S Bookstore, but now was brightly lit up even at 11 pm, as if to assert the emergence of a sparkling new business, dubbed FINGERPAINT. Apparently it is an advertising or public relations firm, but whatever it is, it’s an impressive use of the space. That will be a knockout upgrade for visitors who’ve been away for most of the last year. I hadn’t noticed how good it looks at night before this.
Since we voluntarily caught a red light, & were fortuitously stopped right in front of the Circus Cafe… we turned our heads right and both said, ummm whatzatt? The sound coming out of that open door cafe was amazing and unique and clearly live. There was a band of some sort that I cdrtainly hadn’t heard before, splashing electronic colors above a wicked rhythm groove, with a sinuous sax emanating from the mix… a sound I equated with Jan Garbarek on the ECM label, but with a burlier rhythm track, and you don’t hear that everyday in this town. I quickly parked up around the corner, and we went back in to see if this were indeed live, recorded, or sampled music…
Indeed it was LIVE, and quite different from the normal rock, pop, or blues fare one hears around here, according to the earnest young dude who was orchestrating the scene. When we caught the last part of one set and they took a break, I called him over to compliment him on his distinctive group sound, telling him I hadn’t heard anything local that was quite like it, and he said There’s no one doing anything like what we’re doing, and he was right. His name was Nick Kopp. We had stumbled upon the band, or shifting aggregation, called le Rubb.
We sat center front, bewitched from beer one. What we saw and heard was compelling and sophisticated stuff, from about 4 feet away, with almost no one else listening, except the girlfriend of the drummer, and a couple of friends of the band, and the bartenders. Other people came and went for the next hour or two, but the musicians seemed not to notice. They were entranced in their own groove.
When the set ended, just that one song, each musician goes their own way and it seems a loose, friendly bunch of talented individuals, four guys and a female guitar player, Megan Duffy, whom we seen before, but here in a different role. The core duo, multi-instrumentalist Kopp, and bassist James Gascoyne, ran the show and set the mode, and what they played became not songs but creations of a sublime nature.
I’ll say again: it was amazing. The lengthy second set was hypnotic. Again the sax player’s tone grabbed me right away with a kind of gentle keening, searing sound on alto, directly into the mike, then he’d insinuate brief snippets of meloldies on a repeated basis, with little twists and reverberations that stuck in your mind and gave you something to latch onto in the rhythmic turbulence that swirled around it. Kopp was playing with and tapping his sampler, his mysterious scratching and programming punctuated by electronic tomtom pummels and percussive emphasis with his padded sticks. Gascoyne supplied a writhing groove, winding tightly within the vortex of Kopp and drummer (on this occasion) Joseph Barna. He seamed so well I thought he was a regular, but later claimed it was an impromptu gig–also amazing. What we witnessed, and were drawn to, was an improvisational performance that is not usually allowed or condoned or commercially sanctioned in upstate drinking spots, as a rule. But when it is, and there is no cover, and you can wander right in, I’d call it a hell of a treat.
This is what I would dub: MUSIC YOU CAN’T GET AT HOME.
You could go back to your music collection for late night tunes you already knew about, and one more beer or nightcap. But instead you decide to spend a few twenties supporting live local music, as we are always encouraged to do on radio stations WEXT and WEQX, and reading about in METROLAND. When they stipulate listening to “local music” they don’t usually mean this: a new-age space groove as if performed by the new generation of figurative grandchildren of Miles Davis. When Nick Kopp mentioned him as a musical influence, I told him I had loved “Bitches Brew” and his other albums of the early-mid 70’s so much that I had named my first son after him. Nick admitted he was born in 1984, and had missed the era I was referring to altogether, but clearly was a student of the genre, and had absorbed the best part of the trumpeter/composer’s style and work into his own musical DNA. Polyrhythms mixed with electronica and experimental envelope-pushing seemed to have come back to life.
Guitarist Meg Duffy had played Lark Fest earlier in the day down in Albany with one of her other bands “Hand Habits.” Here she played the role of John McLaughlin or Mike Stern in Miles’s bands, while a slight white dude with black rimmed glasses and a downward demeanor at all times played the role of Wayne Shorter, riding above the mix. His name was Adam Seigel (hope I spelled that right). Like the others, he struck me as non-egoic, caught up in the groove, no showboating or histrionics, just pure sound. He and Meg painted with audial colors, and it was beautiful.
I was told that the only two “regulars” in this rotating aggregation were Kopp, and Gascoyne, the bass player, and that they would be bringing in different horn players, drummers, and guitarists to augment the not-so-basic mix, and no two performances would be alike. The drummer confessed that he had never rehearsed with this band, nothing was written out, and all of it was improvised on the spot– hard to believe, it all meshed so well.
For examples of what Kopp and his friends produce, he mentioned that “le Rubb” could be found on bandcamp, soundcloud, and albanyjazz.com websites…though I haven’t sought those links out myself. They will purportedly play every other Saturday night at Circus Cafe on Broadway in Saratoga Springs, and I hope they attract more of a following, starting with
the June 22nd gig. Nick also mentioned a trio named “Chronicles” and a band his girlfriend was in, so over the course of summer I hope to experience those musical occasions as well. I commend the owners of Circus Cafe– Christe & Colin MacLean– for hiring such innovative musicians, playing original music, not just familiar covers.
Tell them Wayne advised you to hear them, if you go… The fountain of musical youth still percolates along the downtown fault line, I am glad to report. Vive le Rubb!
Peace,
Wayne Perras
for WaynesWord2 June 2013