Place: The Triple Door (216 Union St)
Time: 7:30 pm
Stranger Personals
It always seemed a bit strange to me that Dimitriou's Jazz Alley enjoyed something of a monopoly on high-end jazz and avant-garde acts. In a city with a sizable population of adventurous music fans, it was just plain weird that we only had one upscale jazz club. But that all changed in the wake of last year's opening of a swank, 220-seat venue underneath Wild Ginger, the Triple Door.
Despite my appreciation for this development, I still hadn't paid a visit--until the Date, Place, Time sock sent me. Accompanied by Hattie's Hat owner Kyla Fairchild, I had seen a previous performance by it-girl outsider artist Joanna Newsom, a 21-year-old freak of nature whose Drag City debut sounded to me like the aural equivalent of lemon juice on a paper cut. Childlike in timbre and accompanied by her plucked harp, Newsom's voice produces polarized reactions in listeners who either make the inevitable allusion to fingernails on a chalkboard or gush about her innate, oddball charms.
The reverent demeanor of the appreciative crowd (peppered with a cross section of Sonic Boom employees and Mighty Wind types waiting for headlining act the Incredible String Band) and the regal aesthetics of the velvet-curtained stage may have created an air of focused intensity, but I was hardly expecting to have her performance entirely reverse my negative first impression. Coming across like a brilliant genetic experiment fusing Neutral Milk Hotel's gorgeous spirit of despair with Björk's other-worldly chortle, Newsom ran through a stunning torrent of literate, enchanting songs that left me in tears by the time she left the stage at 8:15 p.m. HANNAH LEVIN
Every week the name of a club, a day of the week, and a time are pulled at random from a dirty sock. Columnist Hannah Levin reports back on what she finds at that date, place and time.
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