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LISTEN HERE
Ad Hoc Rock By John Rodat. Metroland. April 6, 2000.
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Follow the bouncing musician: It's Sunday night and the Lionheart is packed. The Kamikaze Hearts are onstage with a relatively new addition to their lineup, Matt Loiacono. Better known to the regulars who are comfortably slumped on the venue's thrift-store couches as Paddy Kilrain's drummer, Loiacono is tonight wielding a mandolin and confidently whooping it up in the off-kilter country style of the Hearts. Loiacono shakes his wild, dense mop of hair with abandon, aping dramatic guitar-god poses without a trace of irony. The crowd, thick with local musicians, hoots and applauds familiarly, calling out to the players by name. As the set ends and the band spills from the stage, Loiacono remains behind, tinkering with the drum kit for a minute before taking his place on the throne behind the night's next act, Bryan Thomas. Neither the transition of styles - bluegrass-tinged indie-rock to funk-inflected acoustic soul - nor the switch in instrumental responsibilities seems to slow Loiacono in the least. Nor does the gear-shifting and role-hopping throw the audience, who cheer with unabated enthusiasm.
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On the following Monday at Savannah's, Loiacono, guitarists George Muscatello and Tom Burre and bassist Eric Johnson perform at the weekly jazz jam billed in Muscatello's name. The audience is again musician-rich, including the Kamikaze Hearts, Bryan Thomas, members of the Amy Abdou Band and drummer-about-town Steve Candlen. Guitar and sax cases lay at the feet of those seated before the stage. In the darkly intimate live room of the club, the quartet let loose a genre-bending romp through improvisational avant-jazz, rock and pop. Selections range in style from a free-form electric freakout to a highly tweaked (though utterly sincere and surprisingly pretty) rendition of Carole King's "So Far Away." Patrons' heads bob throughout the performance, and individual fills and figures are greeted with spontaneous shouts of encouragement and pleasure. These performances are not merely isolated events, but examples of an ongoing trend that has recently cohered loosely around the Lionheart, Savannah's, and, privately, at a certain Spring Street address. Is this scene downtown Albany's best-kept musical secret? Is this inclusive network of musical coconspirators even a scene? When several of the participants - Burre, Loiacono, Muscatello, keyboardist Adrian Cohen and drummer Danny Whelchel - gathered recently at the aforementioned Spring Street apartment, they shied away from the "scene" tag, but allowed that there is something special going on.
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"What's the word 'scene' mean?," Muscatello asks with a shrug. "It's kind of weird to talk about, I think. I just look at myself as a guy, just putzing around the neighborhood, just completely consumed with music and playing with friends." Cohen, a frequent collaborator with both Muscatello and Burre, says: "It's not like a scene. We're just friends and there's, like, two places to play in Albany, and we all just happen to play at them." The casual disdain for the word seems rooted in a belief that it connotes cynicism, artificiality. It's a word for marketers, not musicians. Instead, members of the ad hoc group credit happenstance, luck or - if not fate - a type of laissez-faire inevitability for their collaborations. "It's a very fine line between a scene and just a bunch of friends," Thomas says. "The thing about this that interests me most is how diverse these styles and people are. When you think of scenes, you think of specific genres, but with this, you've got mad overlap. It's defined less by style and more by approach and perspective." Cohen further identifies the tie that binds: "Basically, we're all individual instrumentalists studying our instruments. We're trying to get our knowledge together, and we like playing together because we're all doing that." This is in sharp contrast to the more traditional notion of a scene in which several discrete musical groups vie for the attention of a limited audience, Cohen claims. So, though he has high praise for many specific local rock acts, he criticizes what he sees as needless competition and petty jealousies. "Bands are like supermodels," he explains. "If you've got three bands on a bill, they're all friendly up to the point where they get hammered, and then they bitch about each other behind one another's backs."
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The star-tripping tendencies that Cohen describes might be expected to make an appearance among this affiliation, as the avant garde has always had its share of egos. But each of these individuals is kept modest by the scope of their ambitions. Because their shared aim - mastery - is something more transcendent and elusive than a commercial coup, they eschew the "auteur" tag for something more craftsmanlike. "My conception of who I am musically is Bela Bartok, someone who can create on the spot," Muscatello says, referring to the late Hungarian composer. "But that's not the reality of it. It's just a lot of working shit out." "Whether in this combination or that combination," Burre pipes in, "that's what we're all doing." "It's like a big web," adds Whelchel. "And we probably only represent 10 percent of it." Whelchel's broad view inspires Cohen to wax philosophical: "You know, they say the universe is expanding, stars are growing away from each other. It's the same with us, but we all come back together in different configurations." Eyes widening at the metaphor, Burre enthuses: "Yeah, every now and then, you wind up in someone else's galaxy. You know, gasses get together and you form a new solar system." These musicians share the belief that their collaborations are the result of a natural, almost gravitational force, one more easily experienced than discussed. Fortunately, as most aficionados would prefer the work to the description thereof, the, um, you know, shows no signs of faltering. The tentatively proposed future projects, the combinations and permutations discussed, are too numerous to map here - but there are plans to preserve them. "We're putting together - informally - this record company called Numerical Records," Burre informs. The first Numerical release, scheduled for early May, will be of Burre's own project, Bone Oil; but an improvisational series titled Ghost Names also is in the works. It will feature experimental jams performed by an ever-changing roster of musicians. As if summing up not only the organization of Numerical Records, but the gathering's whole aesthetic, Burre shrugs off a request for more detailed information: "It's me and Matt officially, but it's everybody. You know, anybody who wants to be part of it." - Much props to Mr. John Rodat for recognizin'.
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