Start Him Up: Keith Richards Spills the Book Beans

http://www.looseleafreport.com/start-him-up-keith-richards-spills-the-book-beans.html

Opera, Opulence and Oysters: Hola, Valencia

http://www.looseleafreport.com/opera-opulence-and-oysters-hola-valencia.html

Dancing Dreams: Pina Bausch Lives

http://www.looseleafreport.com/dancing-dreams-pina-bausch-lives.html

On Equal Footing – Or Not

http://www.looseleafreport.com/on-equal-footing-–-or-not.html

Her Body Was Music: Isadora & Abraham on the Page

http://www.looseleafreport.com/her-body-was-music-isadora-abraham-on-the-page.html

Three for the Road

The prolific guitarist/composer 

Howard Fishman.

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

Jazzy singer-songwriter Howard Fishman—who as a guitarist has played with such luminaries as Nellie McKay—recently released not one, not two, but three CDs of his songs. “I kind of lost my mind” was his explanation of the unusual outpouring to the filmmaker Marie Le Claire, who has been documenting the making of the trilogy. Though held together by his affecting, Lou-Reedish-I’m-not-quite-singing vocals and his superb musicality (as well as, as fellow blogger Robert Rosen commented, “a good vibe”), the three works are nonetheless quite different from each other: Better Get Right is Howard’s “love letter to New Orleans,” as he puts it on his website, with the sounds of his Biting Fish Brass Band reflecting that city’s sometimes raucous street jams; No Further Instructions, perhaps the most intriguing, turns a trip through Romania with his friend the photojournalist Michael Benanav into a folkish (in the pure sense) song cycle, complete with violins and accordion (and spoons?); and The World Will Be Different involves, fittingly, a different kind of journey, an interior, thoughtful one after a romantic breakup, with, primarily, a four-piece combo. (Bonus for New Yorker subscribers: the lyric “I’ve been on a roll/Even my stack of New Yorkers is under control.” If Howard can do it, maybe I can too!)

What does one do after delivering such a creative triptych? If you’re Howard—who made some noise a few years ago by recording his own interpretation of Dylan’s Basement Tapes—you play them all live, successively over three nights, November 4–6, at Abrons Art Center in NYC. Howard says he expects to find these performances “both emotionally draining and positively cathartic.” Of the final night’s songs, his reliving of The World Will Be Different’s stormy love affair, he adds, “I don’t think I’ll ever want to play them all together again.” Take the ride with him, while you can!

Blond Harmonies and a Timeless Troubadour

Christopher Paul Stelling

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

Caught a couple of promising acts on Saturday, the last day of this year’s CMJ festival, both of them playing at Rockwood Music Hall on the Lower East Side—a marvel of a tiny space put to excellent use. (Drew the sound guy was up the built-in ladder sitting with his legs dangling from the sound booth.)

With his been-around-the-block guitar inscribed with various symbols (“CPS” being the easiest to figure out), his unruly hair in a modified ponytail, and his blue eyes at times almost alarming in their intensity, Christopher Paul Stelling comes across as a kind of neo-Testament prophet. His imagery-rich songs, involving suicide, murder, heaven, hell, ocean depths, bayous, and of course lost love, hearken back to 18^th-century Scottish ballads (“Barbara Allen,” anyone?) even as they tap into the perpetual human condition.

After his gripping concert—disarmingly, in between the Gothic-tinged songs he commented on the quality of his Bloody Mary and, in an oblique comment on his strenuous performance (he uses his booted foot as percussion), informed us that his mother was an aerobics instructor—Chris told me that he'd like to go to Scotland, partly because, he said, they sing there without amplification. “I hope we’re heading toward more sincerity, less production,” he added. (No Auto-Tune for this guy.) Onstage he did occasionally stray from the mic, with no sound diminishment that I could detect.

Check out a video of Chris in action; I haven’t even mentioned his extraordinary finger-picking stylings, by turns muscular, breakneck, and celestial (and at times all three).

Delta Rae

In their first, a cappella song, the North Carolina group Delta Rae also stomped the beat—is this a trend? Composed of the baby-blond siblings Ian (who looks like Woody Harrelson), Eric, and Brittany Hölljes and their childhood friend Elizabeth Hopkins (they were smart to bring in a brunette; it cuts the sunniness factor), the band specializes in close harmonies. While a couple of their original songs were pretty good—such as “Ooh Caroline,” the subject of which they claimed materialized, uninvited, at one of their NYC concerts as they were performing the song—the four really showed their talents in the two covers they did: a revved-up “California Dreamin’” (just as I was thinking that Brittany Hölljes reminded me of Michelle Phillips) and their “model” (as Brittany told us) Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain,” in a thrilling rendition. Though it doesn’t come across quite as well recorded in, we’re told, a bathroom, they did upload that one to YouTube.