Performance Review
What it is.
From the Editors:
Mainstream newspapers used to devote a section to daily reviews of live music. Many of us would look to those tucked-away corners in the paper as guidelines for how to live, which live shows to attend and what trendy philistine music to pretend away until its inevitable muting. As a graduate student in New York, I cold-wrote NY Times jazz journalist Ben Ratliff after reading his daily reviews for a while, and asked to apprentice him. I wanted to understand what that job was like, because I’d realized that I found academia restrictive to my creative life and would not return to it professionally if I could help it. I would have to be a writer in the world, at the mercy of the daily whims of life outside of those institutions, distributing the petit mercies that are my personal attention to sound and aesthetics. I spent years going to see live music with Ben all over the city, and that led to future years of attending shows solo in other cities, and eventually, to curating shows and line-ups in Los Angeles and elsewhere, always with emphasis on jazz, which thrives in live settings and needs to be experienced that way to be truly parsed and appreciated.
This summer while in Detroit for the city’s annual jazz festival and speaking with friends, and before that while speaking with curator and friend Angelique Rosales Salgado, it became clear to me (to us, a shared epiphany in real time) that there is a vast disconnect between people who only listen to music at home or on AirPods, and those who regularly experience live music and performance. We realized we’ve been working as translators of the energy of liveness and mediating our experiences as such, offering a steady stream of disclaimers for why to see and offer something that disappears when it’s over in a world where eternity lives on these screens.
It’s one of the only remaining luxuries that matters. That’s why. For a couple years we almost lost it forever. Now the traumatic amnesia induced by the threat of perpetual isolation has manifested in a glut of live music and events, a spamming of the outside world with sound, hyper-stimulation. and the territory of liveness is moving so quickly and in a different dimension than digital and now analog worlds, that we are without any archive or even a casual inventory of its evolution or devolution. It matters how a solo piano show sounds in person, feels on your skin, even if the pianist is playing from an album she just released which you can stream online. It matters who was in the room, how the room breathed and behaved. What was happening that day in the world, how did the air feel when you walked back out into the night or when the resonance shifted it into soft wind?
Of all the ways we voyeuristically observe one another’s lives, or think we know what each other’s lives, based on oft-atemporal curated photos and statements, what great live music someone is seeing or hoping to see is really the only thing we really need to know to understand the current running through someone, what is your acoustic condition, how do you sound. The person comes through these sound into the fullness of his personality, and this matter. I think newspapers would have been wise to cut some of the PR-style album reviews and save real estate for discussion of live music daily— but what do I know? What do my friends and I know?
With the “lila” or divine and rigorous play asked of certain mystics, that’s what Performance Review will express. Here you’ll find frequent micro-reviews of live music we love, or hope to love, as witnessed in cities across the U.S. and internationally. We’ll also offer a monthly archival series honoring live shows past. We need a living archive that doesn’t align seamlessly with the market. Touring has become more arduous, but it’s one of the primary sources of income for musicians now that streaming services openly intercept their profits. If you love music, you love live music. It’s too easy with things as they are, to deprioritize that in favor of the idea that you were there because your friend was and you saw an Instagram post of a live event’s likeness, a deep fake, a counterfeit attendance. We hope this endeavor makes people with anxiety about seeing the artists they enjoy, bolder and more carefree. There’s more to life than this. Sound heals faster than the stunted glow of the endless scroll. Stand too close to the speaker, let it defeat your will to hide from sensation or to sensationalize the meme imitation of life in resonance. Hiding from love is more embarrassing than surrendering to it in the long run. Hiding from the song in your heart is what causes it to break and numb.
Performance Review will offer a bi-monthly week-long series of micro-reviews of live music and related live events by a group of writers, photographers, artists, and musicians who attend or program live music so frequently we sometimes forget how unique each event is, and how important it is to keep a record of them in relation to one another now that big media has abandoned the task or outsourced it to the annals of social media, where beauty goes to be reduced to an idea of itself. We’re returning to the sacred basics of the scribe, the small secular scripture of daily ritualized remembering by storytelling. This is a tool we’ve needed, and we’re sharing it because we can’t be the only ones.
3.7.1970 | Miles Davis | Fillmore East
"jazz con cert" (mistranscription poetry?)
Exciting!