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Recapturing Sprawling Chaos, With Attention to Detail
From The New York Times: March 3, 2007 by JON PARELES.
Technical difficulties gave the perfect caption to “Old Knit,” the concert on Thursday at Town Hall. During attempts to connect a video input for DJ Spooky, the screen kept flashing, “Not Applicable!” That phrase would apply to everything standard, from musical genres to profit-making strategies, at the original Knitting Factory, which opened in February 1987.
Located at 47 East Houston Street in the area’s last days before gentrification, the “old Knit” quickly became a magnet for musicians. New York City avant-gardists, whose survival skills rival their musical ones, latched on to the scruffy little club as a haven for experimental music. Club alumni were older but no less tumultuous when they reconvened at Town Hall.
Like any week at the old Knitting Factory, the concert encompassed songs and improvisations, delicacy and brute force, jazz and rock, melody and noise, and many things in between. While sets at the club itself were known to sprawl, the performers at Town Hall plotted their segments well, even in a concert devoted to improvisational flux.
Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth swung his guitar overhead, shook it at his amplifier, hit it with a drumstick and made a glorious, strangely consonant clangor of calibrated feedback backed by DJ Spooky spinning jazz drum solos. John Medeski on keyboards, Billy Martin on drums and Oren Bloedow on bass moved from abstract tinkling to a funk tune and halfway back to abstraction, then backed Gary Lucas in a blare of wriggling rock guitar lines.
The concert was produced by the club’s founder, Michael Dorf, who no longer runs the current Knitting Factory clubs in TriBeCa and Hollywood. It was a benefit for another small, improvisation-friendly downtown club, the Stone, a nonprofit space started by John Zorn, one of the concert’s headliners.
Mr. Zorn’s set began with a duet, for his alto saxophone and Ikue Mori’s laptop computer, that was both untamed and neatly paced, a shared percussive hailstorm of squawks, chirps, clicks and bonks. Then Marc Ribot on electric guitar, Calvin Weston on drums and Trevor Dunn on bass joined them for what became screaming, shredding, exultant free-form hard rock.
The concert began with a relatively straightforward jazz sextet led by Roy Nathanson on alto saxophone, playing a twisted freebop tune and trading solos — sometimes scurrying, sometimes piquant and quippy — with Joe Lovano on tenor saxophone, Don Byron on clarinet and Bill Ware on vibraphone. Brad Jones on bass and Ben Perowsky on drums backed them and returned to join Steven Bernstein on trumpet, Marcus Rojas on tuba and Mr. Ribot for an improvisation that led into a loose-limbed blues. Rebecca Moore led a combined string trio and rock band in a Bjorkish song.
Lou Reed played expanded versions of “Ecstasy” and “Rock Minuet.” Backed by Mike Rathke on guitar and Jane Scarpantoni on cello, and with his own lead guitar, he sang vehemently and turned the music’s drones into incantations and surges. Mr. Zorn joined him for “Rock Minuet,” magnifying the tension with controlled saxophone squeals.
Laurie Anderson’s solo performance included a new piece on which her clipped diction approached rapping as she touched sardonically on politics with the deadpan refrain, “Only an expert can deal with the problem.” Mike Doughty, who was the Knitting Factory’s doorman before achieving college-circuit fame with his band Soul Coughing, reminisced and strummed some of his cheerfully enigmatic folk-rock songs.
The finale — “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” — was four minutes of wholehearted, improvisational mess. Unlike most Knitting Factory sets, it ended on time.