SOUNDTRACK: GoGo PENGUIN-Tiny Desk Concert #786 (September 14, 2018).
I’d never heard of GoGo Penguin before, but I was blown away by this Tiny Desk Concert.
The band is a trio: piano, upright bass, and drums. They play jazz, I suppose. But there are elements that are prog-rockish and avant garde (none of which makes it not jazz, I realize) such that their music, while instrumental, is genre defying.
GoGo Penguin models closely the leaderless jazz power trio set in motion by forbearers in The Bad Plus, but you can also hear the drippings of electronica groups like Bonobo, and drum-and-bass foundations akin to Roni Size with a bit more acoustic rattle (Turner even fashions his own prepared drum accessories from rope, duct tape, and metal rings, which you can see resting atop his ride cymbal and snare. He tells me he usually has more, but he hasn’t made new ones in a while).
This trio found a way to wedge themselves in the middle of the Venn diagram that overlaps musicians and music heads. Among my colleagues at NPR, I witnessed expressions ranging from studious squints to closed-eye meditation, those in the room experiencing GoGo Penguin’s tunes like they would a collage: the fine details as valuable as the larger shape.
It’s true that Nick Blacka’s fretless bass maintains a very jazz sound and Chris Illingworth has the fluidity of a jazz master on piano. But it’s pointless to try to define it when you could just enjoy it.
“Raven” was inspired by a dream Chris had of playing chess with a raven. It opens with ringing piano notes and a bowed double bass. Then Blacka switches to plucked high notes while Turner plays the cymbals. After about a minute the song kicks into high gear. The piano hasn’t change, but the bass is pulsing quickly and the drums are playing a fast but quiet rhythm on primarily the snare, but with flourishes left and right. And it’s all really catchy too. The rhythm section anchors Chris’ melodic piano lead as the song careens to a close that hearkens back to the opening.
The next one is called “Bardo.”
During his setup, GoGo Penguin’s pianist Chris Illingworth asked if he could remove our piano cover to “access the inside” and, after a few rotations of a screwdriver, he soon handed me a long plank of black painted maple, which has no convenient place to rest in the NPR Music office. If you look closely at the piano innards during “Bardo,” you can see a strip of black tape stretched over a few strings, opposite Illingworth’s bobbing head. It mutes a group of strings, turning them into percussive jabs and dividing the instrument into more explicit rhythmic and melodic sections. What you can’t see: GoGo Penguin’s audio engineer a few feet to the left of frame, dialing-in reverb effects on the piano, which we heard in the room. These two elements, in tandem with bassist Nick Blacka’s precise canvasing and drummer Rob Turner’s charged and delicate pulse, have heavily contributed to the sonic identity of this trio – a signal to jazz jukebox listeners that, “Ah yes, that’s a GoGo Penguin tune.”
It is so neat watching him the piano but making distinctly not piano sounds. I would have argued that it was a synth making those sounds (which I guess it sort of is). But the fact that he can do that while also playing a pretty piano melody is great. I love the way Blacka repeats a simple high note–sliding up the neck of the bass before returning to that incredibly low note that really grounds the song. All the way through this, Turner is playing some great drum parts–great off kilter rhythms that marry the snare with the toms in complex patterns. And then ending the song by sliding his stick across the top of the cymbals to create a high-pitched squeak.
The final song “Window” opens with a kind of contemporary classical piano melody. The drums and bass starts playing a great counterpoint and the song just takes off from there. There’s a false ending where everything stops, just briefly before resuming once more. It’s never clear who to pay attention to during any of these songs, there’s all so fun to watch.
[READ: January 4, 2017] “The Book of Simon”
Simon Rich continues to write very funny, rather blasphemous stories.
This one begins with the story of Job, the righteous Hebrew in the land of Uz. He had more faith in God than anyone. Satan made a wager with God that Job would not be so faithful if his life was hard. And so Satan made Job’s life miserable but still Job praised God.
Four thousand years later however, the Hebrews had become less religious. Oh there were still bar mitzvahs, but the themes were about Broadway or sports and the parents would hire dancers to come and teach the children dances, may of which were sexually suggestive.
So Satan started gloating.
And by the 21st century he would lean in and say “What’s yup now? Or even more aggressively, ‘Sup now?” And this put God’s self-esteem at an all time low. (more…)
I Just Read About That... 