REVIEW: A Tribute to Arthur Russell

May 15-17
New York, NY
http://www.thekitchen.org/

Though his groundbreaking dance tracks became late-night mainstays at Larry Levan's Paradise Garage, cellist/underground dance icon Arthur Russell's real home was New York's legendary Kitchen. As the SoHo art space's musical director in the mid-70s, he coordinated performances by Downtown avant-garde luminaries while cultivating a cavernous collection of his own darkly resonant dance songs (many of which are only now seeing the light of day). As such, there's couldn't be a better place to honor Russell's life and music than the venue's more recent uptown incarnation.

Curated by Matthew Lyons and Chris McIntyre, the Kitchen's weekend-long salute kicked off with the New York premiere of Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell, Matt Wolf's new documentary on the musician's life and growing legacy. Using artful reconstruction and the few bits of archival footage that exist, the film follows Russell from his home in Oskaloosa, IA — where his parents Chuck and Emily still live — to his East Village apartment. While Russell also makes a pit stop in San Francisco, where he meets future friend and neighbor Allen Ginsberg, it's in New York that he truly hits his stride. It was there that he lived with his boyfriend, Tom Lee, until his tragic death of AIDS in 1992.

Rather than give a detailed account of Russell's life, Wolf approaches his subject as an Impressionist painter does a landscape, giving us a blurred glimpse into a man whose life was the music he made. Part of this approach is, of course, due to the lack of first-hand footage, but this handicap ends up being Wolf's strongest weapon: Russell's music almost plays better over washes of color and light, interspersed with photos. At the film's end, one gets the feeling that Wolf has but briefly captured a ghost, and that Russell's spirit remains as elusive as ever.

On Friday and Saturday, a slew of musicians performed excerpts from Russell's vast oeuvre. Solo performers and small groups stuck to his pop songs, while larger ensembles performed long-form, orchestral pieces. While they covered a great deal of ground, however, Russell's inimitable disco — recorded under names like Dinosaur L, Loose Joints, and Indian Ocean — was mostly missing. At least the night's DJ, Daniel Marcellus Givens, had the sense to play a few choice cuts.

On Saturday, former Dirty Projector Nat Baldwin kicked off the evening with a nearly perfect rendition of Russell's heartbreakingly boyish "A Little Lost." Playing double-bass, he went on to sing a series of tunes inspired by Russell's World of Echo. Rebecca Gates, meanwhile, murmured the hushed lines of "Losing My Taste for the Night Life" over skeletal guitar lines. Joel Gibb, whose version of "That's Us / Wild Combination" was featured on the Jens Lekman-curated Four Songs by Arthur Russell, sang the song with all the glee and wonder that its lyrics demand. The final group — comprised of Nick Hallett and Alex Waterman — performed "Eli," a highly atypical work featured in Wolf's film that places Russell's usually soft, subdued voice harshly upfront. Bob Rosenthal, former secretary to Allen Ginsberg, later joined the duo in a spoken-word collaboration originally performed by Russell and Ginsberg at the Kitchen.

Of course, it was Saturday's performance of The Singing Tractors presented fans with an opportunity to hear the rarest Russell work. As Peter Zummo wrote in the program notes, the free-form piece, made up of dyadic harmonies set against repetitious melodies, "is clearly modular music, as Arthur had cut and pasted sequences prior to photocopying." As the sounds of trombone, cello, violin, and synthesizer drifted in and out, repeating and mutating the main theme, the evening's listeners could almost see Russell standing on the deck of the Staten Island Ferry, listening to his demos through headphones, forever searching for that perfect, elusive mix.

-Axel Anderson