People // David Munczinski // Blog

When Dan presented the idea of getting tickets for a David Byrne show at Carnegie Hall, I jumped at the opportunity. Having never been to this city’s pantheon of classical music, I felt a small subversive joy in my first show being a psych folk showcase curated by art rock iconoclast, David Byrne. Welcome to Dreamland, the show introduced by Byrne last night featured CocoRosie, Cibelle, Adem, Vashti Bunyan, Vetiver, and Devendra Banhart – artists and groups loosely identified as belonging to the New Weird America movement, a ‘00s rebirth of the psych folk tradition of the ‘60s. Influences from the jam scene, electronica and world music traditions add to the freshness and vitality of strong instrumental and lyrical folk foundations. I had no idea where the night would go; I had never listened to the music of any of the performers, although similar folk group and sometime collaborator, Antony and the Johnsons, is on heavy Sunday morning rotation around here. The concert delivered on every level. The technical skill of the musicians and singers was delivered with a lot of unassuming gratitude and a few self-deprecating jokes. But the audience caught on to Byrne’s secret quickly, their patience for innovating music puts their talent well beyond the banging of many of their 20 year old peers. Welcome to Dreamland was an all too fitting title for the meticulously crafted show, and I left the concert eager to hear more from each musician. What struck me as I read over wikipedia articles and music blogs, watched performance snippets on youtube and bought songs from memory on itunes this morning, is the free-form collaborative spirit of these artists. I couldn’t stop the thought that followed: Indaba is the perfect platform for these artists. They travel the world and record in places as distant from one another as Paris, Atlanta, San Francisco and New York. When they come together to play, they sound like intimate collaborators, bringing all those experiences of the folk road together. To capture some of that spirit is what we hope musicians can find here. For a closer look at the concert: The sister duo CocoRosie began the evening with songs from their first and second albums accompanied by film art. They closed with a surprisingly poignant and sexual cover of “Turn Me On”. (For a decent video version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2hoP9CllbI ). I like songs “By Your Side” from their debut album and “K-Hole” from their follow up. Cibelle, a Brazilian influenced by the diversity of that country’s musical traditions and the world of her stage mates continued with her beautiful feminine voice. I kept thinking about what her voice with the dynamic instrumentality of Forro in the Dark would sound like. Check out her album here: http://www.cibelle.net/. Moby look-a-like folk import, Adem came on next, followed by Vashti Bunyan, whom he also accompanied. I found their music the most conventionally folk, which was great book-ended by the others. Vetiver and Devendra Banhart, frequent collaborators, brought the place to life with electric folk rock and Banhart’s modern troubadour songs. Banhart, by far the most familiar and accessible artist of the evening, set out squarely to rock a concert hall used to symphonies and opera singers, and the audience responded in kind. Check him out: http://www.cripplecrow.com/. The evening closed with everyone back on stage together for a final number that featured not only the piano and cello, but the beatboxing of CocoRosie’s backing artists and most notably the harmony of the night’s female and male performers clustered on opposite ends of the stage. Congratulations goes out the onstage engineer, who from our vantage point in the front row, stage left, expertly mixed well over 15 performers simultaneously at points.