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Vagrant Valentine
Vagabond Opera, or How to Make Love in Eight Languages.
Eric Stern looks like an exiled revolutionary. Black-bearded, he caps his shaved head with a high, fuzzy black hat. He could be in a Parisian dive in 1888, 1908 or 1928, hunched over a notebook, one eye on the Ruthenian nationalist at the corner table.
He could be plotting the ventilation of an Archduke, diagramming a vitriol attack on the visiting czar's cortege. He favors declarative, manifestolike statements:
"I consider myself a Jewish composer."
"I come from an Absurdist theater tradition."
"Public space should be a place of art."
Given such trappings, the facts do not surprise. His parents ran an anarchist book and record shop in Philadelphia. His grandmother danced in the Yiddish theater. He trained as an opera singer before rejecting classical elitism. He once did run off to Paris. After a five-month road trip landed him in Portland, he earned rent gelt playing accordion and singing on street corners.
Here, Stern fell in with some like-minded souls, and presto: Vagabond Opera, his band, now a six-piece of alienated classicists and romantic bohemians. Gypsy music, opera, klezmer and cabaret come-ons mingle like emigrés trading aliases at an after-hours club. It's highly cultured, with a guttersnipe's knowing sneer.
"Back at the turn of the century, poor Italian immigrants flocked to the opera," says Stern. "The classical tradition is totally valid, I think, but not when it becomes a class thing. One reason the band is called Vagabond Opera is that we're trying to create an operatic atmosphere that's for everyone."
On the night of Saint Valentine, Vagabond Opera stages a cabaret, encouraging costumes and audience participation. Stern plans to flex his tenor in Spanish, English, German, Yiddish, Arabic, Turkish, Russian and a nonsense language. The spirit of counter-cultural cosmopolitanism prevails, as the evening's timely theme is "Make Love, Not War."
"I'd say I'm on the fringes of the peace movement," Stern says. "Too often, people are flagellating themselves. We need a sense of humor, fun and community."
See? He may look like Trotsky's nephew, but Eric Stern means nothing but well. (Zach Dundas)
Vagabond Opera plays Friday, Feb. 14, at the Mississippi Rising Ballroom, 833 N Shaver St., 288-3231. Taarka Duo, the belly-dancing Vashti and fire dancers also appear. 9 pm. $6 ($5 with costume). All ages.
PREVIEW
Four Aging Indie Rockers
Who (May) Have Considered SuicideSmash hits. Melancholy men.
Rock's models for aging include chinless wonders on the McCartney-Clapton model, and now, of course, accused pedophiles and freshly indicted murder suspects. Fun!
Scrape off this geriatric excrescence, however, and you find some holding their own well past Timberlake age. Recent albums find these grizzled survivors--well, grizzled. Fortunately for Nick Cave, Michael Gira, Jon Langford and Steve Von Till, gloom is their color, always in season.
Cave is no longer a heroin-addled waster, and he chews the scenery very little on Nocturama. The Aussie's in arch-seducer mode here, intensely intense over Burt Bacharach-esque pop. His core audience of well-dressed neo-Romantics involved in sexually deviant hobbies will flip for this stuff, and much of it is truly damned good. "There Is a Town," the darkling memoir of a guy itching to get the hell out of Dodge, shows the bleak grandeur Cave can attain.
Cave's problem is typecasting. He's played gentleman doomsayer so well over the years, he risks becoming the goth Mr. T, endlessly appearing as "Himself." Michael Gira, once of "loudest band on earth" Swans, hazards the same fate. But Gira makes his post-Swans project, Angels of Light, a moving target. Everything Is Good Here/Please Come Home finds the strip of quicksand between Swans' noise, Angels' spare earlier work and the ooky cult-horror folk of Gira's recent discovery, Devendra Banhart. The delicate nuttiness is summed up on "The Family God": "There are people like us/ And we walk through this place/ And we look just like you/ But it's you that we hate." Good times, good times.
For full-immersion moroseness, however, it's hard to beat Steve Von Till's If I Should Fall to the Field. The Neurosis hetman gives voice to the hammer-of-the-Gods-down-at-the-crossroads angst behind his band's industrial storms. These songs, however, rely on naked traditional instrumentation and Von Till's sinister vocal creak. It's heavy and beautiful, and maybe should not be listened to during romantic or theological distress.
By contrast, Mekon godfather Jon Langford is ever-truculent. Mayors of the Moon, Langford's new album with the Sadies, finds the Welsh Chicagoan taking on all comers in the honky-tonk gladiatorial pool--and winning. Every weeper is chased by a bloody-knuckled tale of thievery, drunkenness and love. "I'll swallow this rum and blow coke up your bum," he threatens. And, it must be said, that beats another limp replay of "Satisfaction" any night of the week. (Zach Dundas)
MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE NEWS & OPINION
HISS & VINEGAR
RANDY SEZ EVERYTHING WILL BE OK
Alert readers contacted the Hiss Ministry this week, concerned about comments from City Commissioner Randy Leonard, as quoted in the neighborhood newspaper Northwest Examiner. The commish addressed Northwest Portland's neighborhood association, a group ever quick to assert its God-given right to COMPLETE AND ABSOLUTE CRYPTLIKE SILENCE in Oregon's most densely populated urban zone. Leonard is quoted as saying, "I have yet to hear a convincing argument why people should be able to be in a bar until 2:30 am." The paper's spin on this statement held that Leonard planned to introduce a new city ordinance smackin' down drinkery hours. Egad! Well, hold off on the panic button. According to Leonard staffer Brent Canode, Randy's simply looking into possible ways the city could possibly work to deal with problem establishments. No ordinance has been written, let alone introduced, and Canode was quick to say wholesale changes to service hours aren't on the docket. Now, H&V believes the last thing PDX's already over-regulated taverns (and, by extension, the music communities that rely on them as venues) need is more rules (man, the italics are coming hot and heavy today...). But the Editorial We are encouraged to know that the city's new commissioner charged with neighborhood affairs is proceeding with due deliberation.
GIVE ME LAND, LOTS OF LAND
For years, people have been saying that Portland has far too many music venues--more than a city this size can support, surely. And yet they keep opening. Bringing some much-needed free-form love to the west side, the arts group Liminal has opened 4,000 square feet of rumpus room at 403 NW Flanders St. It's a rental operation, suitable for all manner of events. On Feb. 20, for instance, the "performative arts" group 2 Gyrlz stages an art/music monster mash featuring sounds by Squall, Easy Tiger, to-ga-ke and Analog Priest. Go check it out, as part of our overall collective expansionist campaign to humiliate cities where clubs keep closing down (hello, Seattle).
MARCH/APRIL/MAY MADNESS
Spring is always a busy time, and we're not just talking about the paternity suits that start showing up by the score right around Valentine's Day. Lying wenches! This fiscal quarter is when the feverish months Portland musicians spent sequestered in studios or hunched over four-tracks in their own fetid basements finally bear fruit. Plastic fruit, but what can you do? King of Spain, Victoria Corrigan and Wow and Flutter just released discs. In the immediate offing, we have scheduled releases from the Thermals, Stephen Malkmus, Larry Yes, Dahlia, M. Ward and Pleasure Forever, among others. The pressure is on, people. Get jobs.
PUBLIC SELF-DENUNCIATION
Last week's music listings screwed up, performing an unauthorized informational switcheroo on a couple of shows benefiting the estimable local 'zine Sincere Brutality. As newspaper parlance sez, we regret the error. For stats on an actual-factual SB benefit show, see this week's listings.
Wish to vent anonymous grievances against a prominent local? We're here to help! Hiss@wweek.com.
WWeek 2015