2019/11/23 Infinite Jets feat. Joe Russo, Scott Metzger, Sam Cohen, & Jon Shaw @ Nublu
Note: All the fucking awesome pictures were taken by my friend Rob Schmidt (note his watermark). The rest are mine.
This was fun to write…
I’m going to get this out of the way right up front, Infinite Jets blew my fucking mind. Absolutely crushing jams tempered with the softest and most delicate notes. Like a baby cub, a lion cub, actually. Cute, soft, cuddly, but a fucking lion, nontheless. And that cub grew from a baby to a full grown fucking predator, over and over, time and again, all show long. Slooooow builds, explosive peaks, blistering climaxes, and next thing I know, a gentle solitary note, again a baby cub that I wanted to hold and cuddle.
Nublu was rife with good vibes off the bat as a couple of oversized traffic cones were blocking off a primo parking spot in one of the toughest parking neighborhoods in NYC. It was like the exact opposite of “Don’t pass Go, don’t collect $200, go directly to jail.” Crossed the street to find Chris Tart at the door greeting people. I said it then, I’ll say it now, and again later, THANK YOU, Chris, for your love of music that keeps coming up with these great bookings, and for taking such good care of our community. You rock! Walked into a room of Freaky friendly faces and knew I was home.
I stood on the front steps long enough to greet the first three people I saw before I peeped a spot over Joe’s left shoulder that, IMO, is the best spot in the best room in Manhattan. I made a beeline for that lower bench and positioned myself within arm’s reach of Joe’s wallet and phone, significant only in that my proximity to these personal items describe the intimacy of my location in a way that nothing else can — I quite literally had a Joe’s-eye view for the full show. As I could’ve sipped his drink or borrowed a fiver from his wallet, the intimacy of this room is unparalleled. The friends that surrounded me in and x-y-z matrix of three dimensional space were the cherry on top. Add in the fourth dimension of time as those faces and spaces shifted, and somehow what should have been a mathematical constant was exploding exponentially. And this is where my vocabulary begins to fail me as there’s no way I can adequately describe the awesomeness of the next two and a half hours.
Full props to everyone in the band, and I use the word band loosely as, to me, it implies that they have some type of songbook to work through. This was pure improvisational excellence. I am a well documented Metzger fan and he delivered hand over fist, as per usual. But Sam Cohen blew me away. I feel like I’ve seen him before but can’t put my finger on it, so he was simultaneously both new and familiar, like my favorite dish but in new restaurant. Perhaps I was more locked onto him because he faced me most of the night, or maybe it was his relative newness, but you can officially count me as a fan. I had last seen Jon Shaw with Shakey Graves. That was good. This was fucking epic. From his sit-ins with JRAD to his frequency on all manner of stages with many of my favorite musicians, this is a fucking professional bassist whose notes still have me bopping.
But this was the Joe FUCKING Russo show. My favorite drummer not named Matt Cameron, the best drummer in New York and, by extension, the world, and I was sitting on his fucking shoulder. I noticed subtleties and nuances in his playing that I’ve never seen before, and how would I have, unless I was literally sitting on his fucking shoulder. (Note: I WAS SITTING ON HIS FUCKING SHOULDER). If ever there were a time for holyfuckingshit!, it’s now. Wait for it, okay, here it comes…HOLYFUCKINGSHIT! Joe holds his sticks every which way, upside down, rightside up, outside in, no matter. He even played a whole song with his phone on the snare. He had a xylophone of sorts set up on a cutout rectangle of egg crate to his left, squeezed in between his wallet, his drink, his sticks, and Jon’s bass amp. The metal bars in the xylophone appeared to be various sizes and thicknesses of stainless steel diamond plating, the kind you find on the walls of an industrial garage. After one first set song that started on the “xylophone,” I asked Joe if he made that up when remembered he had the bell setup, “Dude, this whole fucking thing is made up!”
I was alternately blanketed in the softness of his cub, eyes closed, the whole thing washing over me as I sat on my perch, and crushed by the ferocity of his lion, moved to my feet, dancing and shaking in a desperate attempt to match his beat. Sir Russo started a beat in the second set by playing the steel support poles {at times causing Juls to flinch as he flicked his sticks in her direction}, at first jokingly, and later to begin a song in earnest. And I shouldn’t be surprised that a drummer who puts his kit center stage in a line with his bandmates is a ham, but Joe loved interacting with the crowd, from his pole antics to his playful banter with the one liners that I just couldn’t leave unspoken.
And while I’m on the crowd…Bravo! I know we didn’t occupy the whole room, maybe only most of it, but so attentive. At one point, not realizing how silent it had been until then, a girl to Joe’s right spoke a few words during a song and the people around her were horrified. It was harmless, she was on her way to the bathroom I think, but their reaction belied the seriousness of our listening effort. I didn’t expect to dance last night, I truly didn’t. Maybe some of you knew better than me, but I expected to be a passive participant, you know, let the music surround and swallow me whole, my Jonah to their whale. And that happened. But I was also moved to get up and dance. You know, it’s funny, if I tried to dance in front of a mirror with no music, I would not know what to do. If you said, “Show me your moves,” I couldn’t. Music moves me. Literally and figuratively. Physically and emotionally. Spiritually. I was moved last night in a unique and different kind of way…with gratitude and appreciation; reverence and awe; camaraderie and friendship and love. And when they played a tune in the second set that somewhat resembled “I Shall Be Released,” I was.
So here we are, another standout of the year in week that already featured Emerald Quintet! and Tool and Live From Here with Chris Thile, Anais Mitchell, and Paul Simon. And this one just may have topped them all. I fully planned to go to Oldblu for Minglewood, but my cup had already runneth over, and I knew I’d be a better dad today if I didn’t get home at 3:00 am. So I did the only sensible thing possible…I headed for home (after not finding a parking spot outside Olblu, lol) only to slam on the brakes and swerve to the curb as the bright lights of Katz’s called my name, and devoured a full pastrami on club. Cutter #2, ftw.
