It’s that time of year when nominations for the Boston Music Awards drop, and I wonder whether Cambridge needs a celebratory, rah rah sis boom bah, arts and culture awards shindig of its own. We like to pat ourselves on the back too, don’t we? Of course we do!
But here we are with tastemakers on the other side of the river eating food right off our plate. Look at all the local spots voted for Live Music Venue of the Year: Arts at the Armory, Crystal Ballroom, Middle East Downstairs, Sonia, The Sinclair, Club Passim, Deep Cuts, Lilypad, Lizard Lounge, The 4th Wall, The Burren, The Rockwell and The Jungle. In fact, more than half of the venue nominations are going to locations outside of Boston …
“Exactly right,” a massive oily slug, materializing amid a satrap’s den of plush pillows and nubile harem girls, replied, “If the BMAs limited their nominations to Boston, you might have a point about Cambridge needing its own awards. But we’re good at playing the role of impartial judge, jury and executioner. You mentioned Deep Cuts. That’s in Medford. You mentioned Crystal Ballroom. That’s in Somerville. Who’s going to speak up for music excellence in New England, aka Boston, ‘broadly construed,’ if not for us?”
“Hey,” interrupted one of the harem girls, “That’s the stated mission of the New England Music Awards.”
“Silence, wench!” With a wave of the slug’s shiny proboscis, a pair of armed guards hustled the offending party out of the room. “Now let us all eat cake and carrion!”
And so they did with glee.
Hit this
Saturday: Actors, Pilgrims of Yearning, Llynks (Middle East, Cambridge)
Dark Spring Boston presents a darkwave bill. Like New Wave, except, you know, darkier, clubbier, gothier. Expect lots of black leather, tight fits and throbbing synth lines. Headliner Actors are touring out of their native Vancouver, performing a handful of North American dates, before gearing up for a European tour in the new year. I’m eyeing that Berlin gig on Feb. 13. The German club scene is going to love this crew. Maybe they already do. And opener Llynks, nominated for a BMA Dance/Electronic Artist of the Year, adds a little darkpop to the mix.
Sunday: Sadie Gustafson-Zook & Julie Williams (Club Passim, Cambridge)
A little bit of folk and a little bit of country in the double stack lineup at Cambridge’s favorite garden-level club. Indiana’s Sadie Gustafson-Zook spins out sparkling solo acoustic folk numbers when she’s not carving linoleum blocks, sewing pencil cases out of scraps or admiring the way the ink in her Pilot G2 glides over her journal. Julie Williams brings the country. She’s a Nashville transplant, originally from Florida, wowing Music City with the pop-informed, Americana strains on her latest EP “Tennessee Moon.”
Nov. 21: Third Thursdays with Srinivasan Raghuraman, Upasak Mukherjee, Shivaraj, Mike Rivard and Jacob William (Harvard-Epworth United Methodist Church, Cambridge)
The jazz series, featuring a guest artist each month, returns with a concert combining Indian Carnatic singing, North and South Indian percussion, the Moroccan sintir and keyboards. How closely the performance dovetails with the series’ stated mission of promoting the harmolodic concepts of jazz great Ornette Coleman, who can say? When a world music program this choice is on offer, you just shut up and listen.
As always, Third Thursdays is underwritten by the mysterious Appalachian Springs Foundation. The private org supports diverse arts and culture initiatives, including the Thoreau Polymonophonic Journal Project (in beta testing since 2017) and the thoroughly un-Googleable world premiere of the video “Henhawk” (2021), which garnered “good reviews” and scored 30,000 New York Times ad hits. If they ran that ad twice as long, I bet they would’ve hit 60,000, easy.
Live: Orla Gartland at the Armory
Pop sensation Orla Gartland regaled a sold-out Armory on Thursday with a set that proved you need only two things to make a show sparkle: a kick-ass artist and a kick-ass audience. It’s just about the connection between the two, and you can forget about the rest if you have that. The lights, the props, the gimmicks, the hype – all of it.
And you can forget about the sound too, which might seem counterintuitive at a music concert, but Gartland proved that a musician can rise above a faulty PA if the energy in the room is just right. Woeful technical issues bedeviled the Armory soundboard, cutting out the speakers midsong more than once, twice and thrice. Lucky for all involved, the throbbing vessels of adulation in the crowd knew the songs so well off her latest LP “Everybody Needs A Hero” that the fans filled in the blanks with their own chorus.
Gartland can play the pop star when she wants to, leaning into catchy refrains and soaking up the adoration of a room full of young women, canoodling couples and cool dads bringing their little girls to their first concert. But the texture of her music is more Haim than Jem (Truly Outrageous!), and the text is anything beside vapid pop sloganeering.
A solo acoustic performance of “Mine” proved the haunting climax of the evening. The song, which is subject to interpretation but sounds for all the world like a victim of abuse sharing her story, stopped the room in its tracks.
Gartland played it like a lullaby, finger picking and serenading with a voice that mixed equal parts frailty and strength, until the final upward ascending note tipped the balance in favor of an uncontested, if quiet, victory. You could nearly see the young women in the crowd tipping over the front of their toes, leaning into a kind of shared trauma, and wondering whether they could find in themselves the same strength that they see in the singer on stage.
Emma Harner opened with a solo set of math folk – a subgenre I’ve never heard of, but listening to the complex progressions she produced made me see in a flash the gorgeous possibilities. More of that, please!
Michael Gutierrez is an author, educator, activist and editor-in-chief at Hump Day News.
A stronger
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It’s funny how people forget….especially self-proclaimed music snobs.
BMA was founded as an awards programs for artists from New England who were ignored by other music programs. You know….things like…the Grammy’s , MTV VMA’s, etc.
Boston eats off Cambridge’s plate? Seems without Boston Cambridge would not even have a table.
“2023 New England Music Awards were hosted at Six String Grill and Bar in Foxboro, Massachusetts”
Yup, nothing says “New England” like a podunk bar out in the middle of ….. where’s Foxboro again? I don’t own any Patriots gear so I have no idea.