Some paintings are about the brushes and cloth, emotions and accidents that created them much more than the supposed subject. Scrap Relation makes music like that, about itself, about its own creation, its own beauty and dissonance: this humming, stuttering moment of live sound.
The Stone, a perfect dark corner of the Lower East Side, was filled tonight with a sea of seated bodes and the flash of the brass on the head of the upright bass. At times that bass and the drums melted into one instrument. The sax and guitar asked and answered each other’s questions. I tuned my attention from one instrument to the four voices splashing together in delicate conversation. Then to the room, the audience, and once, when a siren briefly joined the music, to the world outside. All the way back in then, the musicians’ faces, wild fingers flying.
I don’t know enough to place this complicated sound into a larger story about music, as I do, chapter and verse, genre and decade, with pop music. To call it timeless feels cheap, and not accurate, anyway. Instead, I will say that it hung in the present, in that blade of time where it was created. There, then, it filled the air around us, beautifully.
This Joyful Noise 