Stripped of the cheap—though vital—glitter of Friday nights, Silverlake’s Akbar sobers up every final Monday of the month to host Sonji Kimmons, a Los Angeles treasure, for her residency. Kimmons, a born-and-raised Angeleno, is a veteran pianist and vocalist who has toured extensively around the world, including a significant stay in Zurich, Switzerland leading the Pepe Lienhard Big Band and Split, acclaimed funk-rock-jazz group. There, she discovered a vibrant audience and unparalleled support. Something often elusive in Los Angeles in particular, much like many musicians and artists who have left the United States for Europe. (Budding Silverlake diva Vaginal Davis’s infamous exodus from Los Angeles in particular comes to mind from her recent retrospective at MoMA PS1.) Abroad, they encounter cultural ecologies structurally invested in jazz piano and the avant-garde—governments that paradoxically celebrate the vitality of nightlife yet ignore the different racial undercommons that have historically made these European scenes possible. This significant financial support animates cultural histories between the United States and Europe producing vivid romantic visions of Berlin, Paris, and London, as fugitive destinations for Americans too unconventional, too restless, too freaky to remain confined in the U.S.’s puritanical grip.

With all these winding roads within her, she takes her seat at the piano, a glass of white wine shining beside her like a mirror ball. Behind her, Akbar’s dancefloor bar frames the scene, providing a cavernous intimacy. The audience is gathered in a small room; we’re close enough to see one another, close enough for her to see all of us. In attendance are a combination of friends, family, and I assume a string of loyal regulars who all showed up early to sit in the front row. They lack the clumsiness of first timers, they get in formation, attentive waiting. Sonji begins with a crisp cover of “Don’t Go to Strangers” by Etta Jones, her voice is smooth and athletic, animating the song’s story of returning home and keeping wandering eyes at bay. She runs through nine classic jazz songs, pirouetting through “Night and Day”, “Moon River”, “Satin Doll”, “Sonny”, “See You In September”, “That’s all”, “Hello like Before”, and “Fly me To The Moon.” Her cover of The Tempo’s (1959) “See You In September” popularized by The Happening (1996), particularly stood out doubling as a reminder of the end of the summer and her bare and solemn interpretation of the kiss off track. It’s just her voice and the piano.

In a time of global collapse, it feels rare to see someone like Kimmons continue to work and perform. Musicians like Kimmons are living testament to the city’s layered history of nightlife, having played often at Silverlake’s The Other Side, among the largest gay piano bars in Los Angeles, which closed in 2012, and other queers bars like Paradise bar in Long Beach, and Maverick’s Flat in the Crenshaw district. Venues like these have all vanished, crushed by the escalating rent and expenses, or have gone stealth, where queer nights at the Green Horse in Inglewood are not announced or advertised but appear.

A darker truth looms, is there still an appetite for live music and performance that is not packaged by corporate touring conglomerates or subsumed by club cultures prioritization of hedonism over music, dancing, connecting? Has the enormity of the biggest stages (Coachella, Super Bowl Halftime Show, Grammys, Corporate Sponsored Concert Films & Livestreams) promising endless engagement swallowed up smaller essential stages and venues where artists can germinate and create scenes and by default culture, or fail, try again, no longer existent in meaningful ways? Or, have those stages been consolidated by fashion and visual art organizations fixated on bringing the subculture to elites too posh to enter any grimy warehouse? From a Keiring tower Gucci’s Demna Gvasalia underlines this classic dialectic, “What I want to bring to Gucci is cultural relevance, and cultural relevance does not come from mainstream culture — ever,...It comes from lesser-known or unknown talent. It comes from underground. ” Akbar shrugs off these anxieties to focus on its immediate locality, where its enthusiastic support of Kimmon’s is a critical acknowledgment of the artists and musicians who helped shape Silverlake in their image. Kimmons hails from Central Los Angeles and, like many Black Americans, grew up with the musical education of gospel music. At the ripe age of 13 she cut her first solo 45 with the legendary Dot Records, setting her on a trajectory of singing in various ensembles in Europe, producing a singular solo album, Fine and Mellow, released by Basner Productions in 2000.

Supporting artists like Kimmons today feels increasingly urgent. The conditions that once sustained local musicians: small venues, neighborhood audiences, different scenes incubating before exploding to a mainstream audience, are steadily eroding within a complex matrix of forces: rising rents, institutional consolidation, and a social-media economy that privileges visibility over connection. Yet in Los Angeles, a city obsessed with reinvention, that urgency carries particular weight. Our cycles of development often demolish and sanitize the communities that collectively produced the city’s cultural grandeur. When sanctified buildings, historic sites, and public art answer only to property and capital, it is artists like Kimmons who stand as honest reminders that our histories live not in monuments, but in one another. Bars and galleries are merely vessels for that communion—sometimes enabling it, sometimes obstructing it—but never its source.

It’s no shock to find the young stars of L.A. 2010’s—artists who heavily influenced contemporary dance music and culture—at the scene of uplifting Kimmons. Nnguzunuguzu (Asma Maroof and Daniel Pineda), Bobby Beethoven (formerly known as Total Freedom, Ashland Mines), alongside Ron Athey, legendary performance artist Ron Athey, led by Wu Tsang, organized a fundraiser for Kimmons in 2011. In the description Tsang writes and reminds us, “SONJI KIMMONS IS A LIVING LEGEND. THE SCORCHING VOCALIST OF MANY SEASONS AT THE OTHER SIDE PIANO BAR. SHE HAS FALLEN ON HARD TIMES--like too many of us -- because our world is not built for the unrich…IT’S TIME FOR THE CHILDREN TO GIVE BACK. GET A QUEEN BACK ON THE PIANO BENCH WHERE SHE BELONGS. INTO OUR EARS AGAIN. Whether you know Sonji personally or have been blessed by the presence of her warmth and talent — please give to this cause because all queer elders need their children to support them! Do it because you believe in queer family and growing up and growing older together. Do it because nightlife is a place of fantasy but when the lights come up we all gotta live!”

In the bubble of fantasy is where many of us, frequenters of nightlife would like to linger and dwell, and yet, life shores up every Monday with bills and responsibilities that ask us to bend and shrink ourselves. Musicians like Kimmons whose duty and work it is to channel and share the radiance of song remind us of our equal duty as an audience, to show up. The bearers of fantasy exist out of the confines of assumed leisure, and to honor them we must follow Tsang’s call to action. Their call is not one of singular diligence—to simply “show up” and “do the work,” echoing the familiar liberal refrain of self-improvement in the face of oppressive structures. Rather, it is the promotion of a culture in which care extends beyond the occasional GoFundMe donation meant to keep a bar or artist afloat. It asks instead for the cultivation of a sustained ecology of support, one that nurtures musicians, venues, and the fragile communities that gather around them. What is being asked is a lifestyle that normalizes live song over infinite scrolled through song. If nightlife is an exclusive site to solely disassociate and numb ourselves from the looming demise of our Western empire then what good is the club? Kimmon’s vibrato like the hums of altos, and the highs of sopranos exists as methods to channel and embody euphoria not to eclipse it with cheap highs. Artists like her offer small loopholes out of the predictable traps of money and fame, choosing instead grit, seriousness, and a certain splendid alienation that closes the loop with a being with rather than zoning out.

In March, I went to a Pink Siifu album release party that was so chaotic and overrun by the earnest nonchalance of YNs and their groupies and apprentices, that I began contemplating failed concerts and live performances as an entropy we need to succeed in grafting an honest performance culture onto the current one, which conflates experimentation with error and demonizes both in the service of seamless, atomized spectator/spectacle experiences that appease online algorithms above all else. The show failed in the sense that many live music endeavors do recently, it lacked focus and a social center, tried to be maximalist without adequate resources, and the hype had exceeded the preparation. We were at a rented downtown warehouse venue. The opening acts, there were maybe five (it felt like a showcase), maybe more, in an effort to build suspense and anticipation for the headliner and his new songs, extended their sets beyond coherence and relevance even as the audience stiffened and thinned out into every room of the venue besides the one that housed the music. By the time Siifu took to the stage he had maybe thirty sluggish people in the audience, and that’s a generous inflation. The hyperactive fog machine added texture to the emptying room. The bass was so loud it was distorting the speakers, which attacked our ears with reverb and static. The show ended and we went to the taco spot to debrief. Siifu met us there. He kept a brave face on, which is not to say he was or should have been dejected. The triumph was in the parking lot turned restaurant, the comedown from weeks of being forced to promote himself when an artist is best suited for making the art and being received and anchored by responses, not anchored to them. People don’t know what to do with their bodies in public these days, especially while watching live music. The phone-as-appendage and comfort animal has rendered most audiences a disarray of semi-attentive zombies. This show had suffered from that disembodied viewership. Besides the parking lot taco huddle, my favorite moment of the night was when a friend and I convinced a girl we had just met to not text her ex, with whom she seemed to be in the age-old toxic cycle. We inflated her ego to half the level of the opening-act rappers who over-performed into their friend’s slot. The gods smiled.

A few weeks later; a failed funeral. I got a text about a benefit show for Madlib on an otherwise non-descript Wednesday. His house burned down in the Altadena fire in January. I was maybe the third person he informed of this after he’d escaped the scene and checked into a downtown LA hotel. He’d been texting that same day as if he wanted to ask me something but I was on a writing deadline and ignored it. The piece I was writing was personal and emotional and I’d cried that day for the first time in a while. Then around 7PM, the invite to this benefit. My visceral response was no, and I wish I didn’t know about it. Then I thought back to nights I’d been with him at the same LA venue a decade ago and the soft spot that had opened earlier opened again. We decided to make a cameo in support. It was like walking backwards into 2013 or even earlier. The crowd was the opposite of what we found at the Siifu show, though Siifu was a performer there too. These were mostly old heads and those who didn’t know better and looked up to them, gathered to support their homie who they’d been making music or going to parties or performing with for decades. The Alchemist was the headliner, its own macabre compromise. And it was sad. I overheard several people say it felt like a funeral. Especially because O decided not to attend. We ended up with Siifu again at a Thai restaurant in East Hollywood, a consolation prize for the uneasy feeling of several eras ending and restarting all at once that we’d experienced and called a party. Elegy is what all black music is reckoning with, trying not to flippantly bypass tragedy out of shame, trying not to lament too hard and create excessive shame. And if we don’t surrender, rooms full of thousands feel as empty as cemeteries. Bad, sad, unfinished symphony parties are just as important as those that rage into legendary evenings like the one in Sinners, probably more important because why can’t a night in black life be both anticlimactic and satisfying.

make a one time contribution

As art lovers we have an urge to memorialize. Reminiscing, recreating, writing this five hundred word piece. Each act comes into being as a way to preserve what we cherish. Stepping deeper into this process, we build institutions and allot money to this same essential task of scaling something spontaneous, of museum-ifying something organic. Driving around LA Saturday March 15th, 2025 drove the phenomenon home.

We started downtown at a reception for the opening of Red Cat’s World of Echo exhibit showcasing the work and working relationship of Julius Eastman and Arthur Russell. Great artists, beautiful music, beautiful gowns, well-executed presentation of some special pieces of memorabilia and artistic responses to these two people and what they made. Picture a thoughtful arrangement of 10 speakers in a large circle in the middle of a room with framed manuscript paper, musings on Eastman and Russell from trendy musicians like Devendra Banhart and claire rousay, and other artifacts on the surrounding walls. Picture salaried curators, millionaire donors, music lovers, and some legendary old heads seated in lotus position, swirling their heads to the hi-fi sounds of Russell’s “The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc” for 10 cellos, one cello per beautiful speaker.

From there we drove to El Sereno and traipsed, in a fight between dirt / gravel versus heels / dress shoes, up elephant hill. Elephant hill is a beloved, largely un-manicured outdoor space housing a handful of residents, including our friend who hosts concerts on site organized around the moon cycle. This publicly unannounced, full-moon-lit outdoor performance by Shabaka with Carlos Niño and Diego Gaeta was not to be missed. Living in the moment of spiritual jazz commodification and the varied corporate attempts to wash it up as effectively as possible, colors you skeptical walking into any space where you don’t know exactly who and what’s happening. Our jadedness subsided and the show earned the uphill battle. Shabaka has the once in a generation sound and musicality that jazz people organize their lives around, for good reason. Exploring the improvisational space comes so naturally to a player with his ear and skill, and with Carlos following the forging with grace, it was a real masterclass in organic music. Diego Gaeta's keyboard undercurrents were worked in about halfway through the set like delicate architecture. Beaming full moon and wandering wildlife, an added bonus.

Storied lifers and newly anointed hipster music who’s whos making sound with their chiseled voices, just for the sake of doing something beautiful and expanding the artistic vocabulary. A similar story to what brought Julius Eastman and Arthur Russell together, one of shared ethos and musical urgency. Chatting with Carlos Niño before his set, he said something simple, but provocative about the World of Echo exhibit along the lines of: “I want to know more about them partying together.” It gets at something significant about the misfires between art and the art of presenting it. The organic thing and the spontaneous moments in music history come largely from places and spaces ignored by the entities who will later come to mass produce representations of how and why the organic happenings were important. In the creative moment you have a $15 suggested Venmo donation. In the re-creation you have underwriting, institutions, and the barons that be, longing for the moment. We see, reconcile and organize around both, but also long to see one see more of the other.

When we recorded this, innocent pre-disaster optimism ambounded in Los Angeles. So much so that despite my general suspicion of any broadcast even vaguely resembling a podcast, we were eager and excited to recap the year in live events, to enter into the radio imagination what we intend to transcribe extensively and globally this year. Then the city the three of us grew up in, went up in flames. One day it was really very windy, by nightfall, a hurricane of fire had obliterated neighborhoods all over Los Angeles, one neighborhood in particular that housed many musicians and artist friends, loved ones, and colleagues, was gone in a flash. Frenzy, disbelief, and nihilism robbed us of our ambitions for a while. Now, we’re back with a bit of a vengeance against disaster, false starts, the silos that keep threatening our communities with alienation and dysfunction, and our own collective complicity, however imperceptible, with ecological and socioeconomic structures that make more space for catastrophizing than daydreaming and improvising together. We’re sharing our feelings about live music from over a month ago, even though it feels like a dispatch from a former, more naive world. And we’re stepping into tomorrow and a year of forcing ourselves to live in the moment with more intention, more risk and rigor in how and what we attend. The prevailing sentiment is that if we don’t dismantle our necrotic patterns of spectatorship and performance, we will be dutifully seated in very expensive tickets to the fall of many empires at once. Since what we cherish most is music and the poetics that allow it to thrive, the stakes of our silence on the matter are higher now. Don’t mistake this banter for casual, we’re urgently forming quiet collectives made up of those who intend to shame the environments that are hostile to real feeling or ask art to try and prop up the dying neoliberal world order using mere representation and the idea of beauty and truth devoid of substance. Celestial, crunk, and gully in spirit, we proceed. Stay tuned for our first written series early next month.

In this edition of Backstage, the writers unpack the surreal spectacle of Joni Mitchell at the Hollywood Bowl, the vacuous affect of Brat summer, and the murky intentions and impact of Solange’s Eldorado Ballroom at Disney Concert Hall.

Original music by Ross Chait.

On the heels of Brat summer and four days after the release of the remix album Brat and It's Completely Different but Also Still Brat, Charli XCX and Troye Sivan bring their Sweat tour to LA’s Kia Forum for two sold-out nights. A sea of Brat-green and futuristic/Y2K-styled club looks descend upon the venue as night falls on Inglewood and the doors to the Forum open. The vibes are most of what’s going on here, which is fine. In lieu of a purpose or a genuine cultural moment, the looks will do. Everybody’s cute and we love to see the enthusiasm. 

As a Charli fan, I’ve mostly been vexed by the Brat of it all. The album itself strikes me as less compelling than much of her other music from the last decade. The rollout and ongoing promotion are a masterclass of disruptive communications, largely led by creative director Imogene Strauss and design agency SPECIAL OFFER, Inc. In terms of the landscape of contemporary design, only the Make America Great Again hat can boast such a large impact from such stark, minimal design. 

The album is perhaps the most zeitgeist-defining album since Beyoncé’s Renaissance, and had less anticipation and inbuilt fandom to start from. But upon closer inspection, it feels less like capturing the zeitgeist than tapping into the collective need for reassurance that there still is a zeitgeist, as the last vestiges of the monoculture disappear and the media landscape continues to fragment. For all the yearning and ‘vulnerable’ interpersonal intrigue on the record, there’s not a lot going on beyond reflecting the desperation and emptiness of the culture back at itself; providing a ready-made aesthetic in which to package the anomie of the age.

We arrive at the tail end of Shygirl’s opening set, and settle in as a pre-show mix including classic Aphex Twin and SOPHIE cuts plays in the background. The floor is packed with It Girls; Ayo Edibiri, Lily-Rose Depp, Kaia Gerber, Sasha and Malia Obama… Troye opens the show with three songs including fan favorites ‘Got Me Started’ and ‘My My My!’. He’s charming and has a retinue of wonderful back-up dancers, all doing their best Janet Jackson. He’s always been plausible as a pop star and the goal of his part of this tour seems to be affirming his place in that conversation. 

After Troye’s opening set, things gear up for Charli’s first appearance. Discordant synths and flashing lights work the crowd up to a fever pitch as a 20-foot tall Brat-branded curtain drops to reveal Charli, going straight into ‘365’, one of the better tracks from the album. From there, Charli and Troye trade off in sets of two to three songs each, mostly from their new albums. Charli’s stage presence elevates performances of just-okay songs into a kind of irresistible party experience; the idea of the ‘underground’ concentrated into a single, ephemeral atmosphere, minus anything truly subversive. For all the appeals to contemporary Gen Z disaffection, ‘kamala IS brat’ was the pinnacle of millennial cringe.

Troye, for his part, dutifully plays his role, earnestly delivering his material with a handful of calculated theatrics. In these moments, he seems to be asserting his status as the first openly gay pop act to reach this level, with a lap dance for TikToker (and Troye doppelganger) Vinnie Hacker and an open-mouthed kiss for one of his male backup dancers. Along with all the clumsy swearing in Troye’s stage banter, these moments feel forced and intended for something like shock value. I don’t know who’s going to be scandalized by a pair of white gays making out but whatever, girl, here we are. 

The show comes to a close with a three-part encore. First, Charli playing ‘Track 10’ from her genuine masterpiece of a mixtape, Pop 2.  Next, Troye playing his ode to poppers and the club, ‘Rush’. And finally, the two performing their Brat collab, ‘Talk talk’. There were some other antics involving Kesha (the original ‘Tik Tok’ girl) and someone called Tate McRae, but this is meant to be a micro-review and ain’t nobody got time for them. To close, we’ll leave you with some recent words from Azealia Banks:

Subscribe now

The first of two Joni Mitchell performances at the Hollywood Bowl was naturally going to be highly anticipated, but the tear-jerking renditions of “Both Sides Now” and “Case Of You” that broke the internet after her “impromptu” comeback at Newport Folk Fest in 2022 brought things to a fever pitch.  It’s impossible to measure the pre-Newport to post-Newport Joni waves, but there was of course something extramusical about the videos, something both moving and well-conditioned for the internet.  We’ve all had our heart strings pulled by watching the illness-stricken senior experience a moment of clarity from the transcendent power of music.  It’s a chord we love to strike in the modern age, a time when rare intimate moments like these are available to the public rather than just to those closest to the ailing individual.  Of course we watch, but there’s an argument for looking away. 

In the case of Joni Mitchell, we have an undeniable, once in a generation talent.  The magic of her writing and the swirling world of music mastery that she, with the likes of Jaco, Don Alias, and Pat Metheny created is indisputable.  It’s edgy, it explores, and it moves artists and audiences operating in the darkness, up toward heaven.  At the Hollywood Bowl on October 19th there were strokes in the same direction. Joni sings and moves and hears and feels with a similar direction. Her observations are artful and unfettered.  Her singing is from the heart, and her movement through the world is like a vessel. Whether from a place of YouTube video feel goodness, or challenging musical appreciation, Joni performing “The Sire of Sorrow” and “Hejira” in a world where all signs have pointed to that being an impossibility for the last several decades, was amazing. The talent and the artistry stand alone so clearly and effortlessly, Joni’s voice by itself could have compelled us for the entire three hours. In stark contrast to her voice on its own, she was accompanied by a parade.

Eagerly named and eagerly offered, The Joni Jam featured some supremely talented musicians including top-call session guitar player and music director Blake Mills, legendary songwriter and vocalist Annie Lennox, and others.  The ringleader of this Netflix-presents (in spirit rather than practice, at least for now) rebrand of the Joni experience was Brandi Carlile, who’s musical offerings left me without an opinion, but who’s conversational banter throughout the show made me sad. Her prodding of Mitchell felt again like the stolen intimacy of a YouTube hospital singalong, and the constant reminders to the audience of how lucky we were to be seeing this legend due to her own ability to coax Joni out of retirement, were a condescending surprise for an audience who certainly must have at least mostly realized how rare of a treat it was.  Was Joni in on the smoothing, or a removed bystander just happy to be doing what she does best? I lean toward the latter. And it was an unforgettable experience. But why do we need the emotionally fluffed up version of what we already know and love? Perhaps the YouTube Joni has trumped the legacy artist more than I, as a legacy lover, realize? Maybe The Joni Jam is a Starbucks music who’s who club so impenetrable that it has the power to surpass the needs and wants of an audience or even the artist herself. I know the tears being cried were real when Joni sang “Both Sides Now” and mothers and daughters, spouses and strangers started spontaneously embracing. Despite Jacob Collier’s best efforts to Jam pack the music with aimless shredding, Joni’s heart made it through.

Subscribe now

South of Los Angeles’ 10 interstate highway, Deluge, the experimental ambient series, returned architect Rudolph Schindler’s Bethlehem Baptist Church--operating today as a funeral home--to its original form: a site for worship. Billed by series organizer Kelman Duran and the London based musician Honour, together they besieged the former chancel with mixers, amps, keyboards, and microphones, elegantly bookmarked by two funeral-style heart shaped reeves, fine tuning the historic building for their music. Walking in the diamond shaped-room one is immediately confronted by the stage with church benches arranged in a v-shape mimicking the feel of congregation, minimizing anonymity. 

Duran set the tone for the night, playing a slow electronica as a base to embellish with archival digs: veering in and out of political speeches and rare rap deep-cuts. I arrived towards the last quarter of his set. Parking in Vernon is close to non-existent; in response, its Latinx residents double-park in pursuit of birthday bouncy houses and cookouts in front yards. A huge let down because anyone familiar with Duran’s musical practice knows his sets (ambient or club) are exhibitions of his recent internet archive deep dives. Duran is a researcher, inclined to trace the absences in music archives, zeroing in on forgotten and unsung heroes, sampling them in new songs aiming for them to be remembered or for the issues to be well pronounced and understood; see his tribute to Memphis rapper Princess Loko on Beyonce’s Renaissance opener “I’m That Girl,” “These (please), motherfuckers ain’t stopping me.” 

Half-history and half-philosophy lecture, his live sets collage together deep-cuts, field recordings, and political speeches, where he often cranks up a vocal to a high looney-tune pitch to recontextualize it or let it play raw--unaltered-- over a minimalist score allowing the listener to sink into its meaning. Duran’s navigation of space and atmosphere to reinterpret or create meaning distinguishes him as an artist interested in how histories are circulated, expressed, guided by how they could be given more life, in contrast to overdetermined sets with an aggressive ambition of proving a thesis statement, which often abstracts a musician’s original intent. Those familiar with Duran’s 2016 Rail Up days know his early dancefloor sketches that layer political speeches over his signature electronic-dembow. Fast forward to 2024, Duran has honed his personal signatures and sense of timing; how and when things should be blended or when things should be given room to breathe. What I was able to catch in that last quarter was Duran winding things down, stripping audio layers back to arrive at a clearer head-space, letting his personal finds, historically significant or not, shine on their own terms. 

The night’s open-ended tone took a turn for the commissioned performance by Honour, “Julianna (is this Yours?),” where the London based musician spent his hour–long set meditating on the hues of death. He arrives on stage masked and hooded like the grim reaper, dispelling his introductory music, adjusting the mood to properly begin. He deploys the first dispatch: “Heartaches,” by Charles Watkins and The Pentecostal Mass Choir (1964,) a poignant song on God’s loving grace, capable of healing the most bruised of hearts. Like an altar assistant, Honour tinkers and adjusts his music machines, surrendering the stage to Watkins’ beautiful baritone enveloping the room, “There's a song in my soul, that the world cannot hear/There is music no mortal can play/He has banished my fears.” It’s such a devastating song about the alienation of one’s despair and the gratitude for one’s God, although when played in the first quarter of the performance, it served as a centerpiece from which Honour expanded and complicated the somber gospel song’s original intent. He welded the song as a question for the individual and collective individual demons that seduce oneself or a nation to reach for the gun. 

Where the music stood on its own, the reliance on the theatrics of lasers, lighting, and fog, at times, worked against the earned intimacy the artist built with the audience. It was as if the former church rejected the secular club equipment intended for the vastness of a warehouse or stadium. Moments of contemplation and awe would be dashed by a laser beam. At their best the room engulfed in reds and whites enhanced the music’s transcendental aims. What sustained the performance was Honour’s conduction of tension, suspension or withholding and space, with the music and his body, momentarily sitting down on stage or the initial refusal of denying the audience the sight of his face. His relaxed dexterousness with himself and his music allowed him to make interesting juxtapositions.

He continued with a woman’s voice crying and begging God to guide misguided souls back to him, ”And yet if they want to end their lives, father, let them know they are not alone…Father have mercy, we speak to the spirit of suicide and we send it back to the pitts of hell where it comes from…” reminiscent to Honour’s execution of the Watkin’s song where the weight of the words required minimal musical support to let the message sink in the audience. He then heightened the sentiment even more by blending in a new clip recounting the beloved Louisiana rapper Lil Wayne retelling his suicide attempt at the age of 12 on the Uncomfortable Conversations podcast, personifying the ghoul of suicide into the charming rap champion. Retelling his suicide scene Lil Wayne remembers a young Dwayne Michael Carter Jr. looking in the mirror with the gun in his hand and mind racing frustrated that he had been caught ditching school and lying to his mom, coincidently watching Biggie Small’s “One More Chance” music video through a mirror before the bullet entered his chest. Ominous coincidences like these transcend the definition of fate for something more extreme, like what the artist and DJ Crystallmess has theorized as a hyperfate, describing the prophetic intimacy rappers share with death, which often functions as a sadistic right-of-passage plaguing rappers and hip-hop culture at-large. When asked what it was that kept him alive that day Wayne replied, “God. Plain and simple.” Juxtapositions like these so well-researched and thought-through shined in Honour’s performance, where the exhibitionist aspects of death and suicide were dismissed for a deeper study on the pervasive nature of death in black music, inflicting ruin and inhabiting those ruins.

With the cerebral force the performance invoked, even if it required spending time with the performance’s footnotes, it proved a difficult challenge to neatly land and conclude. How do you end a performance about spiritual warfare and death? The artist exited the stage leaving the audience with an electronic chug of a glitched gospel hymn. He reappears on the church’s visible second floor right above the stage, microphone in hand, masked and with a bandana draped over his head, chanting along as the music picks up speed. A default gesture reminiscent to the grandeur of arena tours of Ye’s Donda or his junior Travis Scott's AstroWorld (which was its own hyperfated and deeply problematic death note) but in the tininess of the former church it fell flat. However, the artist did have the correct impulse. One must first exit the stage. 

(Image Credit: Julian Dakdouk)

Subscribe now

The apex of Ye’s The Life of Pablo era was the spectacular and austere Saint Pablo Tour. Much has been made of the audacity of the floating stage. A heaving, mechanical monstrosity upon which Ye descended and ascended above and amongst the crowd, befitted with dozens of vintage PAR cans for a singular tone and texture of light. Certain moments of the performance felt dizzyingly intimate, in which he felt close enough to reach out and touch. Others, grandiose and surreal, as the opening of the show in which the motorized stage gasped to life and lurched towards the crowd, accompanied by Cudi’s wailing refrain on ‘Father Stretch My Hands Pt. 1’. 

The ephemeral situation created by the tour’s unique spatial configuration was one of the most vivid expressions of Ye’s singular, problematic, transcendent vision. With the crowd shrouded in a dense fog and the conceptual boundary of the stage removed, we became part of his world for just a moment, whether we liked it or not. The space directly below the stage turned into a roving, diffuse mosh pit, coalescing in a frenzy during a breathless performance of ‘Black Skinhead’. Up top, Ye was tethered to the stage platform by a rope and harness, which limited his range of movement to keep him from falling over the edge. His presence tested the limits of restraint in the face of the desire to dissolve the boundary between himself and the audience. 

Just a few weeks later, the tour would come to an unexpected close in Sacramento, with Ye playing a three-song set before leaving the stage and canceling the remaining dates. Despite the increasing scale and intricacy of global pop tours in the years since, none have succeeded in executing spectacle with this level of focus and rigor.

The simulation waits patiently to materialize in a body or song (what I cannot say, I can sing) and the inevitability of this blurring of lyricism and confession in coherent physical form is our proof that God exists as the chances that anything we are brave enough to imagine, we create. Rappers learn to imagine in code like war heroes and sample from the whole history of black imagining. Take a chance on love. Chances, you are my chances, Bob Marley sings, one of the best lines in music. Biggie sings of chances less wistfully, as if he’s a vicious judiciary or already wounded by his innermost wishes. He also complains about being denied chances by matriarchs throughout his lyrics and skits the mother figure recurs, refusing him love and material security. He’s robbing people because the mother won’t give him money. He wonders if she’ll mourn his impending homicide or curse him in the afterlife. There’s this telling handful of lyrics about mothers denying sons, but no mention of fathers. The foil for this perceived maternal neglect in the broken inventory of the music, is death wishes, suicide ideation, alienation that becomes aggression, an addiction to crime stemming from the need to be punished. 

Biggie’s final live syndicated television performance was as emcee at his own funeral, choreographed premonition live at The Ghetto, The 1996 Soul Train Awards in Los Angeles. A year later he was shot and killed on Wilshire and Fairfax, in the petit district the city calls Miracle Mile, after leaving a nearby Vibe Magazine party. He was in Los Angeles to promote his soon to be released album and in retrospect his death seems like a planned part of the PR. His cadaver stretched out and shared as sacrament between social obligations or a servant’s sneer behind the backs of his smug employers. It’s as if he spent his final days brilliantly warning the forces that killed him of their own impending sin, just by being present, daring them to cannibalize him. 

For this performance that kicks off his final year on earth, he quotes the “Gin House Blues” in quiet echo, help me cause I’m in my sin, then descends into the den of it, onto the Soul Train stage in a cage-like coffin-like contraption with sadness halved by vengeance blurting from his eyes, a hushed head nod, and the line you’re nobody till somebody kills you strapped to his skin and numinous, moonlit or doom-lit. So macabre as to be a gospel as suicide note, a phantom surrender to alert his saboteurs he was onto them, didn’t even care. Some acts of violence become urban legends before they can be investigated. Emotionalism suspends the crime in disbelief and follows the money to the thief, to the one who orchestrates the tragedies to stack like billfolds between tour dates. Does the spectacle of ritual sacrifice create Christ consciousness or is this just another black martyr to stay the Nation Time beast threatening to charge. It’s said that Biggie wanted to start his own label and leave the famous and perhaps counterfeit East Coast/ West Coast beef behind, abandon his handlers at Big Boy, escape the sycophantic delusions of “Puff Daddy,” and be glad. In his final televised interview, filmed a couple of weeks before his death for Rap City, he announced his forthcoming album Life After Death, looking as regal as a king on a fold out chair at a concrete playground. He discusses himself and recently assassinated West Coast rival Tupac as a unit in the past tense: I realized how powerful me and Pac were. And we go from spectators at a show to uninvited guests at a double funeral that is still ongoing. Maybe Biggie helped teach a generation how to let go of grievances and just grieve.

John Coltrane’s last international tour in the summer of 1966 found the group peaking. Coltrane was famously known at the time to be the biggest musician in Japan, as evidenced by the thousands of fans who greeted him and the band at the airport.  Their 17 concerts over the course of the 14 day visit shook the nation and the world.  

They open with “Afro-Blue”.  John’s signature four note beckoning fills the room, with Pharoah Sanders jumping in on seizing tambourines.  Rashied Ali’s snares and cymbals spill into space like an exorcism, while Jimmy Garrison drills the bass figures into the center of the earth.  And that’s just the groundwork.  Coltrane’s horn sings to heaven, hell and everywhere in between, he delivers non-stop eruptions lasting nearly an hour each.  Rising toward the world above, the saxophone screams and uproots convention, not by dismissing it, by levitating.  Alice Coltrane’s piano is an angelic gift, where we also hear an eternal story.  In it we experience the openings of doors through which her beloved husband enters the divine.  The intervals and chord structures in her solos preempt the harp playing she’d begin exploring shortly after this concert with her late spouse.  We hear the John Coltrane group moving beyond the musical sum of its parts into a free and urgent realm.  As we listen we try to catch up and meet them there.

From the Editors:

Mainstream newspapers used to devote a section to daily reviews of live music. Many of us would look to those tucked-away corners in the paper as guidelines for how to live, which live shows to attend and what trendy philistine music to pretend away until its inevitable muting. As a graduate student in New York, I cold-wrote NY Times jazz journalist Ben Ratliff after reading his daily reviews for a while, and asked to apprentice him. I wanted to understand what that job was like, because I’d realized that I found academia restrictive to my creative life and would not return to it professionally if I could help it. I would have to be a writer in the world, at the mercy of the daily whims of life outside of those institutions, distributing the petit mercies that are my personal attention to sound and aesthetics. I spent years going to see live music with Ben all over the city, and that led to future years of attending shows solo in other cities, and eventually, to curating shows and line-ups in Los Angeles and elsewhere, always with emphasis on jazz, which thrives in live settings and needs to be experienced that way to be truly parsed and appreciated.

This summer while in Detroit for the city’s annual jazz festival and speaking with friends, and before that while speaking with curator and friend Angelique Rosales Salgado, it became clear to me (to us, a shared epiphany in real time) that there is a vast disconnect between people who only listen to music at home or on AirPods, and those who regularly experience live music and performance. We realized we’ve been working as translators of the energy of liveness and mediating our experiences as such, offering a steady stream of disclaimers for why to see and offer something that disappears when it’s over in a world where eternity lives on these screens.

It’s one of the only remaining luxuries that matters. That’s why. For a couple years we almost lost it forever. Now the traumatic amnesia induced by the threat of perpetual isolation has manifested in a glut of live music and events, a spamming of the outside world with sound, hyper-stimulation. and the territory of liveness is moving so quickly and in a different dimension than digital and now analog worlds, that we are without any archive or even a casual inventory of its evolution or devolution. It matters how a solo piano show sounds in person, feels on your skin, even if the pianist is playing from an album she just released which you can stream online. It matters who was in the room, how the room breathed and behaved. What was happening that day in the world, how did the air feel when you walked back out into the night or when the resonance shifted it into soft wind?

Of all the ways we voyeuristically observe one another’s lives, or think we know what each other’s lives, based on oft-atemporal curated photos and statements, what great live music someone is seeing or hoping to see is really the only thing we really need to know to understand the current running through someone, what is your acoustic condition, how do you sound. The person comes through these sound into the fullness of his personality, and this matter. I think newspapers would have been wise to cut some of the PR-style album reviews and save real estate for discussion of live music daily— but what do I know? What do my friends and I know? 

With the “lila” or divine and rigorous play asked of certain mystics, that’s what Performance Review will express. Here you’ll find frequent micro-reviews of live music we love, or hope to love, as witnessed in cities across the U.S. and internationally. We’ll also offer a monthly archival series honoring live shows past. We need a living archive that doesn’t align seamlessly with the market. Touring has become more arduous, but it’s one of the primary sources of income for musicians now that streaming services openly intercept their profits. If you love music, you love live music. It’s too easy with things as they are, to deprioritize that in favor of the idea that you were there because your friend was and you saw an Instagram post of a live event’s likeness, a deep fake, a counterfeit attendance. We hope this endeavor makes people with anxiety about seeing the artists they enjoy, bolder and more carefree. There’s more to life than this. Sound heals faster than the stunted glow of the endless scroll. Stand too close to the speaker, let it defeat your will to hide from sensation or to sensationalize the meme imitation of life in resonance. Hiding from love is more embarrassing than surrendering to it in the long run. Hiding from the song in your heart is what causes it to break and numb. 

Performance Review will offer a bi-monthly week-long series of micro-reviews of live music and related live events by a group of writers, photographers, artists, and musicians who attend or program live music so frequently we sometimes forget how unique each event is, and how important it is to keep a record of them in relation to one another now that big media has abandoned the task or outsourced it to the annals of social media, where beauty goes to be reduced to an idea of itself. We’re returning to the sacred basics of the scribe, the small secular scripture of daily ritualized remembering by storytelling.  This is a tool we’ve needed, and we’re sharing it because we can’t be the only ones.

3.7.1970 | Miles Davis | Fillmore East

Subscribe now