The NY Sun Files: Zeena Parkins

Globalism is nothing new for Zeena Parkins. She routinely zigzags between New York, where she has lived since 1985, and various concert dates in Europe and behind what used to be the Iron Curtain. Years before Mikhail Gorbachev was implored to tear down the Berlin Wall, American avantgardists were burrowing underneath it. Two decades on, Ms. Parkins — a one-of-a-kind musician who composes and improvises on electric harp — may play an electronic music festival in Moscow one night, come back home, then fly back for a gig in Lithuania.

“I have my bag of toys that literally expands or contracts depending on how far I’m going,” Ms. Parkins, who also employs various keyboards, samplers, acoustic harps, and a Foley setup in her performances, said. Getting through JFK airport can sometimes be a challenge, but nothing in her travels prepared her for her biggest and most recent move: across the East River from downtown Manhattan to Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

“I got kicked out,” she said recently, sitting at a 1950s modern dining table in a nook of her new apartment, with a sunny view of a garden and the waterfront a few blocks away. A Brooklynite for all of two days when we spoke, Ms. Parkins was catching her breath before another long trip. “I don’t even know where the coffee shop is where I’m supposed to meet someone later.”

If Ms. Parkins feels a bit symbolic — part of an artistic diaspora that has accompanied the real estate boom in lower Manhattan — at least she is accustomed to thinking fast on her feet. It’s a major part of her process. She has become to the harp, an instrument that suffers from an antiquated image, what Jimi Hendrix was to the electric guitar: She plays it in ways no one has ever thought to, and extracts sounds — often manipulated in mid-strum — that have never been imagined.

Whether her soundscapes evoke pyrotechnic frenzies or cast lyrically hypnogogic spells, Ms. Parkins compels attention with the swirling ease of her hands at play. She often collaborates with choreographers; presently, she’s working on a piece with John Jasperse that will make its premiere this fall at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave festival. It’s a natural fit: She can make the most immobile of orchestral instruments seem as kinetic as a rocket ship.

Ms. Parkins’s approach, which tends to de-emphasize the harp’s “harpiness,” put her in immediate demand when she first arrived in New York from San Francisco 22 years ago. She began gigging immediately, hooking up with the protean guitarist Fred Frith (with whom she will perform tonight at the Stone) and the late cello player Tom Cora in the trio Skeleton Crew. Over the years, she’s been a versatile collaborator, playing alongside such pop acts as Sonic Youth and Björk, on whose 2001 album “Vespertine” she proved essential.

“I lucked out,” Ms. Parkins said, eager to note that the harp was forced on her while she took music classes at her Detroit high school. “I came to New York and started playing in John Zorn’s game pieces — like ‘Cobra’ and ‘Darts’ — and met Fred and Tom.” She also began working with the percussionist Ikue Mori. A few years ago, the pair formed the band Phantom Orchard, which will perform Friday at the Issue Project Room in Brooklyn.

“With any improvisation, it’s all about being profoundly in the moment and out of the moment,” Ms. Parkins said. “It’s really a moment of inhabiting opposite states. It’s a unique position to be in, and I think it’s taken me a long time to be able to articulate that. You can say: ‘I don’t know what happens.’ But it’s much more than that.”

Her work with Ms. Mori actually comes closer to the song form — or what the duo calls songs. The partnership has evolved such that Ms. Parkins handles the hardware — an array of keyboards, her harps, and various baubles — and Ms. Mori peddles the software, conjuring homemade percussive samples on her laptop and projecting short films she has made.

The duo’s performance this week will take advantage of a 16-channel speaker array installed at the Issue Project Room, a former oil silo adjacent to the Gowanus Canal. The venue will move at the end of June, according to its director, Suzanne Fiol, due partly to landlord issues but also because a pending shutdown of the canal will turn the area into “a rat-infested garbage bath.” The show will be one of the last at what has been one of the city’s most distinctive performance spaces, although Ms. Fiol intends to continue at a new Brooklyn address in July.

“We’ve never played there,” Ms. Parkins said. “So it will be a first and a last. It’s not often that Ikue and I are here at the same time, so it’s nice to play for our friends in New York.”

Speaking of final shows, the recent closing of the Lower East Side experimental music club Tonic has sent a chill through Ms. Parkins and many of her peers. It’s the first time in more than a decade that Manhattan has lacked a sizable venue catering to the amorphous avant-garde scene, which is most visibly championed by Mr. Zorn’s tiny nonprofit club, the Stone.

“It’s kind of inexcusable that the city can’t support it,” she said. “Hopefully, this is some kind of strange transitory moment. It’s an economic problem and it has to do with greed and all those tall buildings going up downtown.”

Ms. Parkins, who still manages to keep a rehearsal studio in Manhattan, is nonetheless happy to embrace Brooklyn. She’s carved such a singular niche for herself, that the relative inconvenience of the G train will not impede her career. “If you want that thing I do, you know where to go,” she said with a laugh. “You thought it was in Manhattan, but check that new address.”

The NY Sun Files: Nico Muhly

Originally published Aug. 22, 2008.

Nico Muhly may not get the kind of attention that is lavished upon some of his collaborators, such as Björk or Rufus Wainwright, but the New York-based composer may be the most buzzed-about musician in the city right now.

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Michael Schmelling

TONGUE-TIED The composer Nico Muhly.

The prolific Mr. Muhly, who turns 27 on Tuesday, has had his pieces performed uptown (at Carnegie Hall) and downtown (at the Kitchen), created music that was adapted from sources as unlikely as “The Elements of Style,” and worked closely for a spell with the almost painfully ethereal vocalist Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons. As obsessed with choral music a millennium gone as he is with next-generation electronics — he pays the rent working as a keyboardist and conductor for Philip Glass — Mr. Muhly has no problem constructing pieces through instant messaging while digging back into the primal sources that make music at once visceral, ecstatic, and cerebral.

“He is not afraid,” Mr. Hegarty said of his colleague. “He hears things vividly.”

Mr. Muhly also speaks vividly. Grabbing a happy-hour cocktail at Good World, an Orchard Street bar not far from his Chinatown loft, the composer, who is nearly always described as boyish, was indeed … boyish. But if he looks a good bit younger than his years, the Vermont native displays a thriving intellect that connects seemingly random topics as swiftly as a Google search — whether he’s talking about Thomas Tallis or “Top Chef.”

“There’s something so manic about the chefs,” Mr. Muhly, who graduated from Columbia and Juilliard with dual degrees in English and music composition, said. “The knives and the heat. And Padma. She’s so out of control. Have you read her cookbook? It’s ridiculous. Like this fake Nigella Lawson supermodel vibe.” He mimed Padma Lakshmi, host of the hit Bravo reality series “Top Chef”: “‘I love to go and pamper myself silly and eat so much Korean barbecue. Because I’m wild!’”

Mr. Muhly laughed so hard he was about to fall off his chair.

“It’s great.”

Maybe one day Mr. Muhly will write an opera based on “Top Chef.” If you spend a little time with him, the idea begins to seem awfully normal. Or, spend some time listening to his new album “Mothertongue” (Bedroom Community/Brassland). His fusion of folk music and electronics provides a backdrop for Saturday’s performance at (Le) Poissin Rouge in Greenwich Village. The show, which Mr. Muhly described as a “bistro version” of the recording, also features his key collaborators Sam Amidon, Thomas Bartlett (aka Doveman), and the violist Nadia Sirota.

Though he cheerfully concedes the pervasive influence of new-music kingpins such as Mr. Glass and John Adams on his own writing, Mr. Muhly took on “Mothertongue” as an occasion to reimagine much earlier incursions into his aesthetic consciousness. His original influences were his parents, whom he described as being “older than hippies” yet devoted enthusiasts of the folk-music revival of the early 1960s, as symbolized by such singers as Joan Baez and Pete Seeger.

Check out Mr. Muhly’s seemingly radical adaptation of a lyric called “The Two Sisters.” Titled “The Only Tune,” it features Mr. Amidon’s singing and string-plucking, a lot of electronic manipulation, and three separate variations on the song that veer from sonic chaos to a transcendently soulful viola solo by Ms. Sirota that ties everything — the lyric’s tragic theme and Mr. Muhly’s extremely creative interpretations of it — together, juxtaposing the analytical and the passionate. The composer’s reaction against one tradition is actually a re-embrace of an older one.

“I hate seeing people singing folk songs and smiling,” he said. “When you listen to the Child Ballads, it’s some crazy old man in Scotland and you know he’s not smiling. Because the songs are all so horrible. They’re so vicious and pagan. Even the ones that aren’t pagan. I’m way more interested in these heavily stylized things. Like [English countertenor] Alfred Deller singing Elizabethan minstrel songs. It’s like Butoh, but way more text-appropriate.”

As a child, Mr. Muhly remembered, his parents sang him the song about the two sisters. The older one pushes the younger one into a stream. Later, the body is fished out of a mill pond and gets refashioned into a violin, an instrument whose only sound is of cold wind and rain.

“I’m like, ‘I can’t believe you’re singing this like it’s nothing. This is infanticide.’ There’s this texture of chilled-out-ness in folk music. So I was trying to do a piece to insist on how nasty it is. I want to own the murder. Jerry Garcia made a recording of it. It’s so dopey. It plods along. I mean, they push her in and make a fiddle.”

Mr. Muhly, whose speech can carom a bit like a pinball going “ding-ding-ding-ding,” has a way of making a strongly felt point through a tone of sheer dumbstruck wonder rather than, say, assuming the role of a didactic snoot.

“Someone took a girl’s body and made a violin. Like, that’s amazing. It requires some focus. We’re going to have bone. We’re going to have flesh. We’re going to have hair. Making that cut was the most fun thing ever. It was crazy to do and it felt so delicious.”

Recorded in Iceland at the studio run by the producer and Bedroom Community founder Valgeir Sigurðsson, “Mothertongue” is the product of a highly inclusive process.

“When you think about classical composers, you think about the composer being isolated,” Mr. Amidon said in a separate interview. “But with Nico, there’s a social element that’s really important.” The guitarist also noted Mr. Muhly’s reluctance to prefabricate anything. “We started with drawings on a piece of paper,” he said. “There was no score until the piece was done. And it’s very harmonically complex. I would mess something up, and he clearly was so open to the moment that he would keep my accident-laden version.”

Cracks in the veneer are valuable to Mr. Muhly, who actively resists the incessant pigeonholing that American popular culture imposes on its artists. It’s one reason he enjoys working in Iceland, where, he said, someone is either “indie” or is not.

“You can get away with a breadth of influence there,” he said.

As a cozily somnambulant ballad by Cat Power drifted into the early-evening bustle of the street corner outside, Mr. Muhly mimicked those who don’t quite get that there’s nothing to get. It’s all there. Always. All the time.

“People here, there is no end to asking, ‘How do you reconcile this plus this?’ It’s really boring. People asking, ‘How do you bridge the two different worlds?’ What worlds are you talking about?”

The composer mentioned a well-known music critic whose approach drives him crazy. “It’s unbearable. It’s always in the first person, and it’s always, ‘It sounds like this plus this.’ It does not. This is your dumb hermeneutical exercise. What is that narrative? If people ask me what my music sounds like and I’m feeling charitable, I’ll be like, ‘Oh, well, it’s like John Adams plus 16th-century choral music.’ And then I feel stupid for six weeks after. Dirty. I have to loofah.”

The NY Sun Files: Sunn O)))

Heavy metal is a joke. Right? Its eldritch trappings, thudding chords, and gothic pomp make it an easy target for sympathetic parody, from Spinal Tap to Tenacious D. Yet the really funny thing is that “the metal,” as Jack Black calls it, has stealthily morphed into a new kind of art music.

“I’m really inspired by the aesthetic and spirit of jazz, like Miles Davis in the late ’60s and early ’70s,” said the guitarist Greg Anderson, who forms Sunn O))), the leading exponent of underground metal, along with fellow guitarist Stephen O’Malley. “I love the freedom of that music, the concept of pushing boundaries.”

Mr. Anderson, whose shoulder-length black hair and beard would certainly fit the period, also runs a record label, Southern Lord, which has released 70 albums since 1998. To expand on the jazz connection, the Los Angeles-based label seems to represent for the most creative factions of metal what the fabled Blue Note label did for jazz in the 1960s. Unlike Blue Note, however, which recorded both avant-garde landmarks and hard-bop standards, Southern Lord’s most popular releases tend to be its most far out. They fall into a loose category that fans call “stoner doom.”

Doom’s glacial tempos take their cues from Black Sabbath, often simulating the blurry consciousness experienced by marijuana smokers. But then it begins to free-associate, veering toward psychedelia, hypnotic drones, and a feedback-laden wash of impure sound that roots in the ambient experiments of Brian Eno and the minimalist throb of 1960s innovators like Tony Conrad and La Monte Young.

“We’re at a very cool place right now,” Mr. Anderson said. “There’s not too much analysis of what we’re doing, and that’s part of the magic.” Bands like Sunn O))) — pronounced “sun” and named after a brand of amplifier — and Boris, a Japanese trio inspired by the Melvins and fronted by a skinny female guitarist named Wata, are redefining the genre’s frontiers by essentially ignoring them. How far they’ve pushed became obvious when Sunn O))) toured as the opening act for the more conventional Swiss black metal act Celtic Frost.

Mr. O’Malley, who is now based in New York, recalled the first show, at the Fillmore in San Francisco. “I looked out at their crowd and realized we do not have a metal crowd by any means compared to this,” he said. “Imagine if it was 10,000 years ago and you had your tribe and you thought you were a metal tribe, and then the real metal tribe came over. You’d lose your territory pretty fast.”

In truth, though, the performers all come from the same place as that audience: a profoundly obsessive fanhood. Mr. Anderson makes a joke about how he first hooked up with Mr. O’Malley when both lived in grunge-era Seattle and idolized a Sub-Pop act called Earth — whose founder, Dylan Carlson, is now signed to Southern Lord. “It was all about getting really stoned and getting as many amps together as we could,” he said. After forming bands with the more conventionally metallic names Goatsnake and Burning Witch, the pair came up with Sunn O))), and Mr. Anderson launched the Southern Lord label to put out their records.

The band’s live shows often act as endurance tests for the audience, with sound waves generated as much for tactile sensation as audible comprehension, and the ever-impending threat of the so-called brown note — an extreme subharmonic rumble reputed to challenge the intestinal fortitude of more sensitive fans. Meanwhile, fog machines whir and the musicians vanish beneath the hoods of their dark monk robes.

Last year, such ritual intensity won Mr. Anderson and Mr. O’Malley a cover story in the countercultural monthly “Arthur,” which more often champions freak-folk heroes such as Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom. “Blacker Sabbath” was the headline, and while the musicians enjoy some of the drama inherent in metal, they also are having a bit of a laugh. The name Southern Lord indulges some of Mr. Anderson’s affection for religious imagery, but he’s the first to acknowledge its actual source. “We were drinking a lot of Southern Comfort, and listening to a lot of Lynyrd Skynyrd,” he said. “We thought it was a cool-sounding name.”

The label is even more Dixie-fied than that. The Hidden Hand, a Maryland-based band that performs tonight at Club Midway in the East Village, is one of the standard-bearing acts on Southern Lord — although front-man Scott “Wino” Weinrich has an epic reputation as a member of such defunct bands as Saint Vitus and the Obsessed. While tracks on the new album, “The Resurrection of Whiskey Foote,” deploy that exaggerated bass drone that Black Sabbath minted on “Iron Man” and evoke the seismic dread of a leviathan trawling through sludge — with a high-hat marking time — much of the record flat-out boogies. The springy rhythms and choogling guitars of “Lightning Hill” are pure Southern rock, as is the wailing harmonica that keeps up the locomotive pace. And with its song cycle about a mythic “first American” — a renegade heir to African slaves and native tribes — the album reaches for consonance with a literary landscape mapped by Constance Rourke in her classic study “American Humor.”

Mr. Weinrich, much like his peers, doesn’t analyze things too much. He credits the lyrical themes to bassist Bruce Falkinburg. “You’ll find him reading ‘The Iliad,’” he said. But the performer does enjoy telling a good story. “We still like to sing,” he said, calling from an Arby’s drive-through lane somewhere in the heartland, where his band was on tour. “Singing isn’t popular anymore.” Instead, metal vocalists are still in love with the Cookie Monster, the slang phrase for the slow, guttural “Narrrrrghhh” sound that approximates speech on many death metal recordings. Like a blues singer, Mr. Weinrich would rather belt it out, enunciating his syllables with passion and verve.

Even if its signature acts spiral off into interstellar orbits, Southern Lord remains grounded in those essential qualities. “It’s really important to have a strong voice in the underground,” Mr. Weinrich said. “Greg’s tenacity is crucial, man.”

Even Jack Black can bow to that.

The NY Sun Files: Kidd Jordan

Even people who aren’t sure they’ve heard of Kidd Jordan have probably heard him. Now 73, the tenor saxophonist has been playing since the early 1950s. And since Mr. Jordan’s spirited adolescence coincided with the dawn of rock ‘n’ roll and the explosion of new sounds coming out of New Orleans’s fertile rhythm-and-blues scene, the Crescent City native was at the right place at the right time.

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Luciano Rossetti

ON THE HORN The saxophonist Kidd Jordan.

Mr. Jordan was barely out of his teens when he began gigging with the Hawkettes, a band featuring future New Orleans musical royalty Art and Aaron Neville, whose 1954 hit “Mardi Gras Mambo” became a parade anthem. In the half-century since, the avuncular multi-reedist has backed up everyone from Ray Charles to Martha and the Vandellas to Stevie Wonder, worked alongside Professor Longhair and Little Richard, and recorded with Elvis Costello and R.E.M. But for all his session and stage credits, Mr. Jordan has always pursued a parallel path as a jazz avant-gardist of the purest intent. It’s in that role that the saxophonist visits New York this week, headlining a Wednesday night tribute to his career at the 13th annual Vision Festival, the world’s leading free-jazz summit. This year’s edition will present more than 50 events, including music and dance performances, poetry readings, film and visual art projections, and panel discussions.

“It’s like a love-in,” Mr. Jordan said of the festival, where he has performed nearly every year since it was launched in 1996 by the dancer-choreographer Patricia Nicholson Parker and her husband, the bassist and bandleader William Parker. “All the cats that I love are playing. It’s a family thing. You just get up and assert yourself. You play and you do what you do.” Talking by phone from his daughter’s house in New Orleans, Mr. Jordan often displayed an amused regard for the world and for himself. “You know, other than in Chicago, New York, and Europe, people always look at me strange.”

Mr. Jordan is no stranger to the Vision Festival, where his fierce and lyrical style can erupt in whatever impromptu pattern he chooses, without puncturing decorum.

The weeklong lollapalooza first emerged as an alternative to the city’s big-ticket corporate jazz festivals of the mid-1990s, namely the mainstream JVC festival and the long-defunct Bell Atlantic and Verizon festivals organized by former Knitting Factory owner Michael Dorf. Though the Vision Festival has an amorphous relationship to genre — it has hosted artists as non-jazz as Cat Power, and has long fostered an appeal to indie-rock fans — it revels in old-school free improvisation and next-wave jazz exploration. There’s a particular focus on the long tail of influence extending from the revolutionary sounds of such 1960s icons as John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and Albert Ayler. It’s a continuum into which Mr. Jordan slips seamlessly, as he will demonstrate when he plays four sets in a variety of combos featuring such favored associates as Mr. Parker, the drummer Hamid Drake, and Chicago tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson, another unsung hero who was previously honored by the festival.

“We’re used to playing together,” Mr. Jordan said of Messrs. Parker and Drake, who are to this kind of music what, say, Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare were to reggae in the 1970s, and who have collaborated with the saxophonist in various settings during the past decade. Thanks to such a high degree of almost telepathic chemistry, the musicians can move together like a breeze gathering force, capable of radical and unexpected shifts. In the quartet with Mr. Anderson, the rhythm section may become the front line, musically speaking, while the saxophonists create a modulating background of rushing, roiling tones. “They’ll throw different things at you; that’s what I like about improvised music. You don’t get stuck in ruts. You can’t look for nothing!”

A fifth ensemble, formed around two of his musician sons — trumpeter Marlon and flautist Kent — as well as alto saxophonist Donald Harrison, will pay a New Orleans-themed tribute to Mr. Jordan.

It’s appropriate, given that the musician chose to stay in his hometown rather than join a generation of his peers who left for Los Angeles and studio work in the 1960s, or spent most of their time on tour. Instead, Mr. Jordan became an educator, teaching at Southern University in Baton Rouge, running summer music camps for kids, and raising seven children of his own, four of whom are now professional musicians.

“I figured if I always had a job teaching, I could play what I wanted to play,” he said. The only thing that pushed Mr. Jordan out of the city was Hurricane Katrina, which forced him to relocate to Baton Rouge until his home is finally repaired. (“Nobody’s getting nothing done,” he said. “But you got to put up with it. You can’t do nothing about it.”)

While Mr. Jordan became a valued resource in New Orleans, his work as a soulful improviser with a surplus of old-school R&B shout in his heart has filtered out to free-jazz fans through a network of independent labels in America and Europe. As a young man, Mr. Jordan said, he was another horn player copying Charlie Parker’s licks. Then one day, someone played him “Something Else!!!!” a new album by a then little-known musician named Ornette Coleman. “And I said, ‘This is it! I know I’m in the right direction now,’” he said. “Oh, man. When I heard that … Hallelujah!”

As far as lifetime recognition goes, though, Mr. Jordan has no worries. The characteristically self-effacing performer may appear modest, but beneath his New Orleans charm he’s just as tough and singular as Mr. Coleman — and as purely individualistic as any of his now-legendary bandmates from the 1950s and ’60s. As we spoke, he cracked a joke about the time someone was trying to track him down.

“I said, ‘Man! If you want to hear me play then come by my house. As long as I can practice, I don’t care if I play nowhere.’”

Miles Davis: Back “On the Corner”

When it hit the streets in 1972, On the Corner was, to paraphrase James Brown, the new, new, super-heavy funk. One step beyond the already mindblowing electrification project that was Bitches Brew, this was Miles Davis’ boldest, blackest recording yet. And it still is. Underrated even by critics who defended the trumpeter’s transformation from the modal genius of the mid-1960s to the switched-on starchild of the ’70s, On the Corner was a festering soup of sonic experimentation that was all about collective jamming and deep amorphous polyrhythms. Open-ended sessions, shot through with a potent, R&B-influenced pulse, psychedelic vibes, grinding organ and dancing tables, were radically edited into form by producer Teo Macero – extrapolating the improvisatory impulse of jazz into the computer-lab world of electronic music.

The Sly-Stone-Meets-Stockhausen mash-up was several galaxies far removed from the music Davis made indelible in the late 1950s – beginning with Kind of Blue, through several Gil Evans collaborations, and onto his latter-day supergroup with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, and Tony Williams, who all followed their leader into the brave new world of jazz-rock fusion. Critics argue that the movement was a dead-end for jazz, and it’s hard to argue away the fact that, aside from a few amazing albums, a lot of what came in the wake of Davis’ new sound was stridently commercial schlock. But what’s heard here isn’t a cul-de-sac, it’s a visionary path to the future of popular music. Like some protean fungi sprouting from a stump in the Rain Forest, the music has seeped into the post-1970s consciousness that shaped disco and dub, ambient and trip-hop, and the outré chic mixes of avant-ribshack producers like Timbaland and the Neptunes. At least, that’s what it sounds like now. What it sounded like then (or close, I think I first heard On the Corner in 1978, which may or may not have been more impressively dense and wild under the frequent influence of hallucinogens) was something like a thick syrup crawling with bees, or sweat dripping off of a provocatively naked thigh, or a lucid dream in a cybernetic jungle.

These six CDs are a map through a hypnotic thicket, offering a chronological survey of the sessions that yielded Corner and subsequent studio albums (Big Fun, Get Up With It) leading up to Davis’ retirement in late 1975. Though Davis would return in 1981, these are his last records that matter. Tracks like “Helen Butte/Mr. Freedom X” and “Black Satin” are at once bad-ass and immaculate, cosmic and streetwise: these stoned-out grooves suspend time. Fret-freaks will grab this to hear legendary guitarist Pete Cosey’s contributions, while connoisseurs of spectral funk will dig into the half-hour dirge “He Loved Him Madly,” a meditation on the death of Duke Ellington that might as easily be a eulogy for jazz itself. Columbia’s vaults may have given up the last of its Milesian ghosts with this extravagantly packaged metal box (with tactile facsimiles of the ghetto cartoon characters Davis inked for the original album cover). The eighth and final set sends out the archival series with a big bang.

Cat Power: “Jukebox”

I’m not sure what the moment was when Cat Power “broke.” Was it her singing “Sea of Love” on some Connecticut Life insurance commercial, or doing that Cat Stevens song on the diamond commercial, or having her gawky/glamour/gamine form projected sky-high into the exterior of the Museum of Modern Art as part of video artist Doug Aitken’s Sleepwalkers, or was it that shot of her taken by Richard Avedon, not long before he died, that ran in The New Yorker: atypically slathered in heavy eye makeup, wearing a Bob Dylan T-shirt and a pair of jeans provocatively untucked enough to reveal a thatch of pubic hair? Oooooh, eat that, Britney!

Our not-quite-pop anti-diva is more likely to frame the desire of Italian fashion photographers and neurotic teen girls on LiveJournal (is that still going?) than the paparazzi. She’s always crept under the radar of Big Media, which is the genius of culty-cult status: You can be famous, but you can also get left alone. It’s allowed Chan Marshall, the erstwhile Atlantan – Fellini’s Pizza, holla! – who records as Cat Power, to steadily, even sneakily, build up an impressive career while seeming to be in the process of dismantling the notion of “career.” I swear, without her sotto voce, somnambulatory alto, and its earthy Southern elements, there might never have been a Norah Jones, or a generation of Starbuck’s-approved, post-Lilith Fair, singer-songwriters. Leslie Feist may be the best of them, but Leslie Feist never kept me awake at night, listening, and Leslie Feist probably has the eccentric edges of her personality tucked away somewhere for later. The thing about Marshall is she always wears it on her sleeve. She’s not quite professional, which makes it oddly gratifying when she really, really tries to be.

The new Jukebox capitalizes on the breakthrough of Marshall’s radiant The Greatest (2006), which saw the singer step up to the challenge of working with a “real” band – an all-star assortment of old-school Memphis studio masters, such as guitarist Mabon “Teeny” Hodges, who co-wrote many of Al Green’s hits, and drummer Steve Potts from Booker T. & the MGs. The project reflected Marshall’s personal obsessions with the iconic aura of Memphis as a key site in the Civil Rights-era South, and gave her the chance to mesh her formerly bare-boned songs with those lush, simmering Stax/Volt grooves. As many YouTube clips attest, it worked transformative wonders in concert, as a performer who formerly verged on the autistic flowered into something like professional maturity. Last summer, as she headlined at Chicago’s Pitchfork Media Music Festival, Marshall still had her mojo intact. Her group was killer, an offshoot called the Dirty Delta Blues Band that featured the tastefully nuanced Mr. White on drums and Judah Bauer, the eruptive guitarist from Jon Spencer’s Blues Explosion. The outfit’s rewired versions of Dusty Springfield and Otis Redding felt at once classic and contemporary, Marshall’s self-conscious mannerisms undoing memories of the pop standards even as she remade them.

Jukebox works entirely in that vein. Amid songs by Joni Mitchell, Hank Williams, and Janis Joplin, there’s stuff here that just sounds odd (“New York, New York”), because it thoroughly discards the original melody and becomes a caprice. And there’s stuff here that sounds perfect, like the version of Bob Dylan’s hymn “I Believe in You,” with Marshall emoting over rough drums and raw guitar that could be an outtake from Exile on Main St. The Rolling Stones are frequently evoked (and not only on the cover image of the singer copping a Mick Jagger strut). George Jackson’s “Aretha, Sing One for Me” is a joyous evocation of the late-1960s gospel-grunge that the band claimed during its own infatuation with Southern roots music. A retake of James Brown’s “Lost Someone” strips away even that veneer. Delivering the lyrics with a spartan ardor, the singer is accompanied only by some echoing guitar and brushed drums.

As much as Jukebox is about hero worship, Marshall achieves her own pinnacle when she pens the lyrics, about hero worship, in “Song to Bobby.” It’s a catalogue of moments in which her life might have intersected with that of Bob Dylan. The music, with subtle piano notes and a contemplative medium tempo, is gently imagined as a backing track from some circa-1965 Dylan studio session, Marshall singing at her wispiest, here and there inflecting with a bit of Bob in her larynx (as she does on a resplendent version of “Stuck Inside of Mobile (with the Memphis Blues Again)” from the I’m Not There soundtrack). It’s moving, because it’s so personal, and because her voice gives way when she pushes for meaning. There are no mannerisms, and no professional poise, either. In her desire to embrace her own spiritual heroes, Marshall may not become their equal, but perversely enough she’s never sounded more original.

Double Fantasy: The Watson Twins

Now more than ever, America needs the Watson Twins.

The sisters from Louisville, Ky., were the secret, double-barreled weapon on singer Jenny Lewis’s 2006 album Rabbit Fur Coat, on which they helped the former child star break out as a countrified solo artist after years of indie-rock success with the Los Angeles quartet Rilo Kiley. And they did so often subliminally, like the fine details in the fancy embroidery on a Western-style shirt. The more deeply one listens to that record, the more one hears the Watsons, whose gospel-inspired harmonies gave Lewis’s confessions both unanticipated emotional depth and a celestial glow.

As might be expected, Fire Songs (Vanguard), the Watsons’ full-length debut, is more than a little bit country. When you’re talking about vocalizing siblings from bluegrass territory, all you need is a banjo or a pedal steel, a slower beat, and some studio echo to make it all sound like it’s about Jesus. Even if the ladies did a version of “Hot for Teacher” it would still make a rank heathen want to drop to his worthless sinful knees and beseech the heavens for absolution of his wickedness. That spooky devotional quality, unearthly enough to qualify for the next David Lynch film, is a major part of the vibe the Watsons brought to Rabbit Fur Coat — a calling card. It’s everything that country and western devotees in the rock business — Jack White, Jeff Tweedy, Billy Bragg, et al. — aspire to, with their ancient tube amplifiers and Hank Williams envy. But the Watsons have it in their blood.

What’s more authentically redemptive about Chandra and Leigh Watson, however, is not that they are the reincarnation of some Carter Family-era hillbilly hoodoo. The overall effect of Fire Songs is closer to the current Los Angeles neo-hippie folk-pop demimonde. The gals have lived for nearly a decade in hipster Silver Lake, sort of the 21st-century Laurel Canyon, and reside on the earthier side of a scene fostered by venues such as Spaceland and culture ’zines such as Arthur. They aren’t freak-folk, and they aren’t psychedelic. But when the guitar twangs and shimmers over a stately rhythm at the beginning of “Sky Open Up,” for instance, evoking Neil Young and Fairport Convention, it could be 1972 all over again.

Smoky, mid-tempo balladry is a favored mode for the twins, who indulge in the high lonesomes on such tracks as “Dig a Little Deeper” and “Old Ways,” bittersweet and tangy romantic reveries that work well enough without making anyone forget about Lucinda Williams. But the album is a lot more fun when the singers embrace retro confections like “How Am I To Be,” a throwback to early-1960s girl-group pop with toy xylophone chimes and “wooo-ooh-ooh” choruses that works its charms in a succinct three minutes. “Fall,” probably the best-realized performance on the album, dispenses with all but some acoustic guitars, eventual strings, and a haunted, echoing bit of piano for a coda, as one of the Watsons (it can be difficult discerning which) sings against a spare backdrop. It’s all about romantic madness and dissolution, but the delivery is so straightforward, the song becomes a meditative balm.

The sisters up the ante into goose-bump territory with the album’s not-unexpected cover song. What is unexpected is that it’s not a Wednesday night prayer-meeting ditty. Instead, the twins take up the 1987 Cure hit “Just Like Heaven,” slowed down a notch so the melody glimmers off the guitar strings like little droplets of rain, a harmonica wheezing with just the right amount of “sad.” The beauty of this kind of remake, with the verses rendered in close-miked harmony, is that the listener not only gets to hear the lyrics — stripped, as they are, away from their original new-wave trappings — but also to feel them. When the Watsons hit the line, “Found myself alone, alone, alone above a raging sea / Stole the only girl I loved and drowned her deep inside of me,” their voices delicate and dreamy in their evocation of loss, it approaches the suspended animation of a Wong Kar-Wai scene.

Drawn like the prodigal wayfarer, I followed those harmonies down to the Mercury Lounge in Manhattan one recent afternoon where I found Chandra and Leigh fussing over their T-shirt concession display. I grabbed a beer and flicked on the tape recorder as the sisters each took a barstool, and we started talking.
So how did you guys wind up in Los Angeles?

Chandra: It was a twist of fate. We had been traveling around the country visiting friends and when we got home to Kentucky, it just so happens that a friend called us from L.A. and said his roommates were moving out and he had a couple of extra rooms. We had promised each other that when the time came and the door opened we would just go. And that was the door. We packed up our truck and drove to L.A.

What kind of truck?

Chandra: We still have it. Ford Ranger. Proudly.

Did you play around Kentucky a lot?

Chandra: Leigh and I had been in Indiana going to school, and we were doing a little bit of playing there. Just bars and coffeeshops.

Leigh: We had started writing our own music. We had a band back then for a little bit, but it wasn’t anything serious. We were wasting time more than anything else. Right before we left school we started getting a little more serious about it. L.A. is a good music city, and we got really lucky to be part of a neighborhood where everyone was into music. We landed in the right spot.

This was ten years ago. What was the scene like then?

Chandra: Strangely enough it’s the people from that neighborhood now. Rilo Kiley, Silversun Pickups, Earlimart, Sea Wolf …

Leigh: Dengue Fever, Radar Brothers.

Chandra: They’ve all been happening for years, but only become recognizable in the last few years.

Leigh: Elliot Smith was living there and Beck and people doing it on a much more professional level than all of us. It turned into something that was really special. I feel lucky to have been a part of that fetal state. And now feeling like wow, seeing all my friends doing well and getting recognized for their music.

Chandra: It’s just a matter of time. You plug away long enough and you get better and you meet more people. If your head is in the right place it evolves into something bigger.

Is it pure natural for you two to sing together?

Chandra: We sing along to the radio and harmonize. I was telling someone the other day that it’s harder to… I mean, I can sing the melody but my head automatically goes to the harmony.

Leigh: It’s pretty instinctual. We challenge ourselves by thinking outside what our natural instinct is and try to do something different.

What’s the cheesiest song you’d sing along to?

Chandra: We sing along to everything.

Leigh: We were like rocking out to Wham! on the way out here from LA.

Chandra: Whatever comes on the radio.

Leigh: Whitney Houston, Janet Jackson, lay it on us.

After the Jenny Lewis record, what was it like to be on the radar?

Leigh: We were singing backup vocals in bands for so long, it was a comfortable place for us to operate in. We were excited that “Oh this record is getting so much attention,” but we really had no idea what we were about to embark on. It just kind of rolled out. There wasn’t too much fuss about it. Ultimately, it set the stage for now. We talk with Jenny and that whole project was such timing. All these people came to a quiet spot and a beautiful thing sprung out of it.
Is it weird if people come up to you and say they think your music is spooky? Sometimes it makes me feel like I’m in a David Lynch movie…

[They laugh]

Leigh: I think there’s that visual element, too.

It reminds me of Roy Orbison, too. There’s a timeless, ethereal quality. Maybe it’s what happens…

Chandra: When three ladies come together?

Leigh: The spiritual essence. It’s weird. Someone asked me, “Well what do you think about people calling you ‘white soul’?” And everybody is allowed to have their own opinion. It’s not a negative opinion in any way. If people are tapping into that it’s a-OK with me.

Chandra: There were a lot of different interpretations of the music. Some people found it eerie. Some people are like, hey it’s really country, or old soul, or old folk. It touched on a lot of genres that we all enjoy.

When you were growing up, what was important? TV, church, indie rock?

Leigh: A little bit of everything. We started out in church but then we got very involved in the hardcore and punk-rock scene in Lousiville, and that scene turned into indie-rock. It’s a weird thing.

Squirrel Bait?

Leigh: They were a little bit older than us. But bands like Slint and Crane and Palace, weird bands that no one really knew how to clarify.

Chandra: You went to every show.

Leigh: There was nothing else to do. When someone gives you a venue that you can play and sing in, and feel some sort of spiritual lift and connection from that then yeah, you want to experience it again. It’s the same high you get from performing the raddest gospel song you ever heard in your life. That really elevates consciousness in some weird way, that singing and harmonizing with people.

What’s the raddest gospel song ever?

Leigh: If you asked my great-grandmother she’d say “Old Rugged Cross,” but that’s not necessarily a rejoicing song.

What’s the soundtrack for your roadtrip?

Leigh: Beirut, the new Elbow, our friends Stars from Canada, some Feist, the new Cat Power – I guess it’s not that new anymore – it kinda floats everywhere. Of course, there’s some Dylan on there.

Chandra: Good roadtrip music.

Leigh: Good roadtrip music. We just listened to the Grateful Dead the other day. American Beauty. We’re Grateful Dead fans.

Well, alright! What’s your favorite Dead album?

Leigh: The pretty mainstream stuff. [Chandra chimes in at the same time] “St. Stephen.” It’s a great song. I just like the changes in it and the harmonies are amazing and musically it’s a journey and I appreciate that.

I don’t really think it was the same after Pigpen died. It’s a different band.

Chandra: You’re old school.

Bukkake of Sound: Smile, it’s Boris!

Dry ice billowed across the main stage at the Knitting Factory back one night in March, bathing the audience in a pale, sepulchral mist. Stacks of amplifiers groaned like lungs caked in black fuzz. Short, choppy guitar shards spat furiously, while thick bass chords oozed beneath the seismic shudder of the drums. Few bands alive make the walls sweat like Boris.

The Japanese trio, which has been gigging in one form or another since 1992, has become more prevalent on the American rock club circuit since the breakthrough success of its 2005 album Pink (Southern Lord). The recording sold about 15,000 copies to the kinds of fans who would not likely be seen at Ozzfest, the annual tour that serves as a summit for everything heavy metal. Indeed, the crowd that jammed into the Knitting Factory this week qualified as more nerdy than diabolical, despite its excess of facial hair. And though there was a semblance of a mosh pit, there also was a sizable young female element to the demographic, savvy and amused, perhaps, to have strayed so far from the L train – the automated artery that pumps hipster blood through the heart of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, America’s capital of the next groovy thing.

But, as is obvious to anyone who has indulged their ears in Pink, or for that matter in last year’s collaboration with the guitarist Michio Kurihara of Ghost, Rainbow, Boris really isn’t a heavy metal band. It’s more accurate to label them “heavy meta.” The outfit’s fluid chemistry and ease with extreme dynamic swerves allow it to deploy stop-on-a-dime transitions that can carry a set list across the universe, from skull-cracking rhythmic assaults to beatific nature reveries laced with sun-dappled psychedelia.

One song off Boris’ brand new album, Smile, illustrates this perfectly: “Buzz In” begins with a 4-year-old child singing a jingle, all giggles and innocence, before lead guitarist Wata cranks in with the über-riffage and the drums start to wallop. Yet, every song Boris performs achieves the same effect. “Flower Sun Rain” bodes some kind of lyrical impressionism, but to get to bassist-vocalist Takeshi’s wistful refrain, you have to submit to extensive feedback, drone and hum, manipulated like the sonic equivalent of a hall of mirrors. The effect is at once ghostly and sincere, ephemeral and emphatic, and in the end it feels as if the singer has invited you to drizzle away with him into a soulful, introspective guitar solo that might have been inspired by the late Funkadelic fret wizard Eddie Hazel.

In the world in general, we’re always moving between beautiful and ugly,” Atsuo, the band’s drummer and driving creative force, said recently. It was the afternoon after the show, and the musician and artist was sitting in the lobby of a hotel on West 94th Street with his young American translator. Thankfully, this skinny white dude was more artful at articulating Japanese idioms and parlance than 98 percent of the interviews I’ve done with musicians who don’t speak romance languages. No need to make every time Suntory time, thank Saint Ozu. Instead, what Atsuo often spoke came across as poetic, occasionally a tad mystifying, and generally edged with the crafty intentions of the unreconstructed Dadaist, dishing up the epigrams. “People say about every album, that it’s a pendulum, swinging between opposites. That’s the reality of life.”

Atsuo, like his bandmates, uses only his first name professionally. Now in his late 30s, he seems to approach Boris as part of a more general ongoing art project, one that extends to visual art and literature, as well as more marketable facets such as the band’s often extravagant collectible record and CD packages and its endless collaborations with peers in Japan (guitarist Keiji Haino, Merzbow) and America (label-mates Sunn O)))). His intensity was calm but deep, as an introductory comment turned into a discussion about the meaning of “ambivalence” in Japanese culture, and how Boris’ pursuit of extremes is a method for questioning a kind of national complacency.

Maybe that’s why the group is so eager to embrace an American audience. “When there is a conversation between two people who have their own unique perspective, what comes out is a synthesis of love,” Atsuo said. As he sat in a deep leather armchair, his fingers fluttered over upturned palms like a spider flexing. His long, jet-black hair was offset by a white suit and white loafers, worn with pinstriped black socks. He scarcely needed the dark sunglasses to complete the effect. “The point of the conversation between Boris and music is to destroy the music,” he continued. “The point of the conversation between Boris and the audience is to destroy the audience’s expectation for what Boris sounds like as they listen to it.”

As a child, Atsuo said, his earliest cultural memories were of musical themes used in cartoons. His favorite was a robot show that usually climaxed with a huge battle. “Every week, there was a fight song,” he said. “And it always had a sense of courageousness, of putting your shoulders up and going forward.” The bandleader also nodded to the 1970s theatrical artist Shuji Terayama, whose shows typically subverted reality. “One of his performances was a performance that you couldn’t see,” Atsuo said. “He made everyone who was coming drink a sedative to fall asleep. He was doing quite dangerous things.”

On the flip side, Atsuo lamented that he hasn’t made much of an impact back home. “Japan doesn’t really understand me,” he said. “Yet.” But pudgy, hairy-faced American guys and their hipster chicklet counterparts? They do. They’ll lick the sweat off those walls.

The NY Sun Files: Jonathan Kane

Originally published in the NY Sun, Aug. 26, 2008. Not revised, as yet.

As a drummer, Jonathan Kane has worked for such demanding bandleaders as the minimalist godfather LaMonte Young, and Michael Gira of post-punk brutalists Swans. But before all that, Mr. Kane was a teenage blues addict with a fake ID who toured up and down the East Coast with his harmonica-wielding older brother Anthony, in the Kane Brothers Blues Band. It was the 1970s.

Click Image to Enlarge

Sheri Hausey

KANE IS ABLE Jonathan Kane (on drums) and his band February.

The combo lasted only a few years, breaking up about the time Mr. Kane reached legal drinking age. One day, on one of his frequent pilgrimages to the heavily black South Side of Chicago, the white Mr. Kane found himself performing in Theresa’s Lounge, a club in which white patrons were best advised to sprint from the taxicab to the door. As he played a favorite beat, he heard a gruff voice call out.

“Where’d you learn how to do the whorehouse shuffle like that?”

It was Junior Wells, the legendary Chicago singer and harmonica player. Mr. Kane had never heard the rhythm called that before, but the comment was high praise. The “whorehouse shuffle” has since become a signature for Mr. Kane.

“It’s characterized by a little grace note just before the backbeat,” he said. “It makes the backbeat swing a little harder. Most bluesers know it as the ‘double shuffle.’”

It’s a major component in the music Mr. Kane performs with his band February, a five-piece rock outfit that headlines the Saturday finale of P.S.1’s Summer Warm-Up, a series of free outdoor concerts at the Long Island City art museum. The band, which will release its second album, “Ear Jet Party” (Radium), early next year, boasts three guitarists. The front line generates the same textured harmonic effects that Mr. Kane has loved so much about his 20-year collaboration with the composer Rhys Chatham, in whose armies of 100 or more guitarists the drummer served as the sole percussive source.

Mr. Kane’s propulsive verve imports the infectious, hip-shake rhythms of Chicago blues, while the guitars mass and drone behind a simple, slippery theme of a few choice notes. There’s a lot of moonshine in it, and a lot of old-school New York art-rock spirit. Only there’s no pretension — it’s party music.

“We played our own style of very high-octane Chicago-style blues,” Mr. Kane, speaking by phone recently, said as he recalled his days gigging with his brother. “Very, very aggressive super-charged blues. And I just never escaped it.”

Even the drummer’s tenure with the Swans, whose stark and abrasive aesthetic he helped create with Mr. Gira, came to an end when the band’s style began to shift.

“The whole rhythmic subdivision thing was fun,” he said. “But then the band lost a sense of swing and became more of a Teutonic grind. I liked it when it had a little bit of a lilt.”

Mr. Kane also suffered hearing damage in his right ear, for which he blames a faulty monitor at the Mudd Club, a downtown hot spot circa 1982.

Saturday’s concert harks back to those days, which were recently celebrated in a book, “No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York 1976-1980″ (Abrams Image), by Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and the rock critic Byron Coley. Sharing the bill is another figure who made his name in the early-1980s “no wave” era of New York rock, the saxophonist, soul shouter, and occasional pugilist James Chance.

“We’re both acts that have taken the black American musical experience — whether it’s blues, jazz, or funk — and pulled it into a direction of our own,” Mr. Kane said. “Both bands have credibility with people who don’t like that kind of music.”

Mr. Kane is sanguine on the topic of reunions, which have been popular with rock bands of early-’80s vintage.

“I mean, Mission of Burma sounds better than ever,” he said. “But I’m just trying to have a reunion with myself!” Several years ago, the musician took a full-time job as a photographic editor for Time Life. He also oversees the archives of his father, the photographer Art Kane, who is best known for his 1958 Esquire magazine photo of 57 jazz giants, “A Great Day in Harlem.” Art Kane, whose wide variety of work included portraits and album covers for the likes of Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, the Who, Janis Joplin, and Lester Young, gave his son an early introduction to the music world. But Mr. Kane found that it was difficult to sustain a financially sensible career from it.

“The [photography] job had the opposite effect, though,” he said. “Since I was less stressed financially, I became 10 times more productive.” An invitation to record a one-off vinyl single for the independent art-music label Table of the Elements, which had released a box set of Mr. Chatham’s older recordings, led to an ongoing series of albums and festival performances for February.

The band features young musicians from the Brooklyn bands Bear in Heaven and Clara Venus, as well as longtime friends and guests, such as the singer-songwriters Peg Simone and Lisa B. Burns. Ultimately, the group testifies to Mr. Kane’s almost glandular connection to a peculiar rhythmic concept: the whorehouse shuffle.

“I don’t know anybody in New York who can play a double shuffle who’s a straight blueser,” he said. “They can’t swing, unless they’re jazzers.”

But the jazzers just don’t have the thump.

“I need to play it with the power of a rock drummer and the freedom of an improviser,” Mr. Kane continued, paying heed to the imperative to keep some figurative grease on top of the beat. It’s allowed the drummer to come full circle, though he still laughs pretty hard about the glory days.

“What was fun was people’s reactions,” he said, remembering those assaultive performances with the Swans. “These dyed-in-the-wool, seen-it-all New York crowds were shocked. But I didn’t like people coming up and saying, ‘My stomach hurts.’ I like to see people dance. When we’re having a great time, people really seem to lose themselves, and when people seem to lose themselves, so do I.”

The NY Sun Files: Eri Yamamoto

Originally published in the NY Sun, Sept. 26, 2008. Not revised.

Manhattan’s landscape can change in a flash, yet even near the busiest thoroughfares, a half-forgotten pocket exists where time stands still and only the escalating beer prices alert a patron to the approximate decade. Straddle a barstool inside the musty, West Village cocoon that is Arthur’s Tavern and marvel. Balloons dangle from the ceiling, slowly deflating, their candy-shop hues faded with the years. The tobacco-brown wall paneling is dotted with ratty decorations that celebrate every occasion: Cupid silhouettes for Valentine’s Day, fake cobwebs for Halloween. If there’s a ghost of Greenwich Village past, it probably abides here, harmonizing with the creaking furniture.

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Eri Yamamoto

Pianist Eri Yamamoto’s new album, ‘Redwoods,’ is out now on AUM Fidelity Records.

Dump that it is, Arthur’s makes a great bet for jazz fans. Almost every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday for the past nine years, the pianist Eri Yamamoto has led her trio through a couple of early evening sets at the Grove Street bar. It’s the sort of open-ended residency that seems rare these days, a holdover from the era when Charlie Parker would drop by and jam. Ms. Yamamoto’s focused, sensitive touch and the easy flow of her rhythm section sometimes mark a brave stand against the chatter that fills the bar.

There’s no cover charge, so people wander in and out. A ring of chairs in the back of the room, where the pianist plays on an enclosed stage, offers an over-the-shoulder vantage point.

“It’s a challenge,” Ms. Yamamoto said recently. “Sometimes it’s very noisy, but sometimes it’s fantastic.”

The pianist, who is in her early 30s, was sitting in her Hell’s Kitchen apartment on a recent Saturday morning. She was still excited about the evening before, when a full house of European tourists had sat in rapt attention during the performance. And she had other reasons to feel cheerful. The week before was spent in Milan, where Ms. Yamamoto appeared as part of a soulful sextet led by the indefatigable bassist William Parker. And there was her new album, “Redwoods,” a sparkling trio session that complements a release from earlier this summer, “Duologue.” Both were released on the Brooklyn-based label AUM Fidelity.

Where “Redwoods” presents a cycle of nature-inspired compositions that emphasize the melodic mesh of a working band (with bassist Ikuo Takeuchi and drummer David Ambrosio), “Duologue” is a departure, a collection of improvisatory duets among Mr. Yamamoto and Mr. Parker, the drummers Hamid Drake and Federico Ughi, and the saxophonist Daniel Carter.

“I had a dream,” Ms. Yamamoto said. “It was a very clear dream. I was recording a duo album with these musicians. I woke up and thought, ‘That’s perfect.’” She had dreamt up specific melodies for each musician and wrote them down immediately. With the songs in tow, Ms. Yamamoto contacted the producer Steven Joerg, whose AUM Fidelity label released numerous albums by Mr. Parker’s group, including the 2008 “Corn Meal Dance” with Ms. Yamamoto on piano.

“To me, William’s music is very natural,” she said of the kaleidoscopic composer, with whom she has toured the past two years. “I didn’t feel any difference between that and what I’ve been doing. I don’t feel like I’m writing music ‘for jazz.’ It’s been the same since I was little.”

Trained in classical music, Ms. Yamamoto decided while in college to become a teacher. The native of Osaka, Japan, might still be doing that if not for an invitation, 13 years ago, to visit her sister in Manhattan.

“I had no idea about jazz,” she said. Picking a show at random from the Village Voice, the sisters went to Tavern on the Green to see the pianist Tommy Flanagan. Ms. Yamamoto was disturbed to see that the great pianist, who died in 2001, needed assistance to reach to the bandstand.

“I thought, ‘Oh my gosh. I paid $40 to see that old guy?’ But once he started playing, it was very strong. That moment, I knew I wanted to be like him.”

Flanagan told Ms. Yamamoto that if she intended to play jazz she had to move to New York. A few months later she did. After meeting the bassist Reggie Workman, Ms. Yamamoto enrolled for the next three years at the New School, where he taught. She immersed herself in the study of Bud Powell and other canonical figures, but it took a while for the student to gain enough self-confidence to begin playing her own music in public.

That changed in 1996 when she saw Paul Bley lead a trio, with the drummer Paul Motian and bassist Gary Peacock, at the Knitting Factory. She heard in the group’s language, with its sources in the freer forms that began emerging in the late 1950s, a way to unlock her own voice.

“I was very relieved,” she said. “I knew I wasn’t going to be a musician like Bud Powell. His life was so different from how I’d grown up. But when I heard this trio, the music reminded me of my own roots. I didn’t have to be the next Bud Powell fake. I could play what I wanted.”

Ms. Yamamoto’s jazz career began in earnest in 1997, when she picked up a regular gig at the Avenue B Social Club. The short-lived East Village bar was a favorite after-hours hangout for several generations of Lower East Side avant-garde musicians, literary types, artists, deadbeats, couples who would slip downstairs to make out, and drug addicts too stoned to snap out of their spells: an ideal audience for a novice.

“I saw her many times get a bar full of yuppies to get quiet and actually listen,” the pianist Matthew Shipp said. Mr. Shipp, whose often aggressive and deconstructive style might seem the opposite of Ms. Yamamoto’s, first heard her at Avenue B and became an ardent booster, eventually bringing her to the attention of his record label, Thirsty Ear.

“What struck me about her playing was that it had heart and soul and actually moved me, which is so unusual for a ‘jazz student.’ They’re usually caught up in chords and scales. But somehow she had already gotten to the artist part of this.”

Mr. Shipp also offered advice to the aspiring pianist.

“He told me, ‘Move your finger a half-step and you might find a different world,’” Ms. Yamamoto said.

There was no looking back. She has since developed a style that is laced with subtle colors that can rise as she blends notes in unexpected ways. The style rewards close attention. And as a seasoned bar player, Ms. Yamamoto knows how to plant flowers in the dustbin.

“My voicing is not traditional at all,” she said. “If I can hear a melody, I feel good.”