Our Girl and I have been holding forth about the paradoxical provincialness of New York City, so I thought it might be worth posting some fugitive reflections on the subject of why I do live here and not in, say, Washington or San Francisco, or even my beloved Chicago.
Last night was a case in point. I met a writer friend for dinner in the East Village at one of the dozen-odd inexpensive Indian restaurants on Sixth Street, all on a single block and widely rumored to share a single kitchen as well. It’s also said that there are no cats in that neighborhood, but we had a very good meal, after which we made our way through the wintry mix to an off-Broadway theater in the vicinity, the New York Theatre Workshop, where we saw the penultimate preview of Valhalla, Paul Rudnick’s new play, which opens Thursday. (Watch this space Friday to see what I wrote about it for my theater column in The Wall Street Journal.) That’s one kind of weeknight in Manhattan.
And tonight? Well, I stuck to my own neighborhood, the Upper West Side, but the evening ended up having a downtown flavor anyway: I took a singer friend to hear Dave’s True Story
and the Lascivious Biddies at Makor. Regular readers of this blog will recall admiring references to both groups, about whom I last wrote a couple of months ago in my Washington Post column:
I ventured down to the Village to hear two hip bands, Dave’s True Story and the Lascivious Biddies, at Fez. DTS, previously praised in this space, is a volatile blend of two seemingly incompatible ingredients, the coolly kinky songs of David Cantor and the warmly engaging vocals of Kelly Flint. Hearing Flint sing about the wild side of downtown life in so comforting a voice is guaranteed to knock your dreams a bubble or two off plumb. As for the Biddies, they’re a pop-jazz quartet of clever women who yoke two similarly dissimilar styles–girl-group vocals and King Cole Trio-style instrumentals–to charming effect.
Part of what makes DTS and the Biddies two of the most interesting bands in town is that they don’t lend themselves to ready categorization. Both make music that is rooted in jazz but open to all manner of sounds, and both sing smart self-composed songs–often witty, sometimes wry, occasionally rueful–that float free of the up-with-love trap. (The Biddies’ “Famous,” for example, is a cruelly comic piece of celebrity mockery: “I wanna be famous/Tabloids will print what I eat/I wanna be famous/Who I do will be news on the street.”) They fit no pigeonholes, not even the made-in-downtown-New-York label that accurately describes the clubs where they’re usually to be found.
What, I asked myself, were two such exotic groups doing north of Noho, working a room one block from Lincoln Center and a few doors away from Caf