Firmed up the details enough to announce the Know Your Poll Party, a get-out-the-vote rally & concert sponsored by WXDU, the Pinhook, and Democracy NC (and organized by the tireless & endlessly persistent Reid Johnson).
Next Sunday, October 26, from 2-7 p.m, with bands playing both inside the Pinhook and outside on Main Street. Early Voting will be happening that afternoon just a few blocks away, at the recently-relocated Durham County Board of Elections, which is now at the corner of Parrish & Roxboro.
Lineup:
PIPE
Shirlette Ammons
Daniel Bachman
Hammer No More The Fingers
Some Army
Midnight Plus One
SOON
DJ Direwolf
(not necessarily in that order)
We are VERY EXCITED about this show & I hope everyone (especially parents!! no excuses!!) will stop by, see some music, and then walk over & vote.
The rest of the day was kinda meh, so much so that a trip to Target was actually a welcome diversion. Another welcome diversion: buying two of the last four bottles of Fidencio mezcal left in Durham County, since apparently it’s never coming back.
A measure of just how generally meh the day turned out to be: we had dinner at the Whole Foods hot bar.
But! That was because we needed to eat in time to go to Baldwin to see The Bad Plus, augmented by Tim Berne, Ron Miles & Sam Newsome, blasting their way through Ornette Coleman’s Science Fiction album, a record which I have never heard.
I was pretty exhausted, so I spent the entire show kind of drifting in & out of focus – not really dozing off, but definitely drifting, which let the music do all kinds of weird things to my brain. Not a bad way to take it all in, really, even if I wasn’t completely following every line.
The piano was kind of hard to hear, but all three of the horn players were very audible and pretty fucking mindblowing. I’ve seen Tim Berne a few times before, and I remain a fan – he was able to channel Coleman’s emotive feel without overtly aping him. Cornetist Ron Miles was a revelation & I want to seek out more of his work.
I still find whole sets of balls-out frenetic everything-a-16th-note nonstop flailing free-jazz drumming pretty hard to take, though, especially when there are extended passages of simultaneous two-handed wailing on the cymbals. I’m a notorious cymbal-hater.
That room is a tricky room, too – it was redesigned beautifully to be a space for chamber music, which means it projects sound out from the stage rather moreso than in a club. Sit too close for a loud/amplified show, and you risk an unbalanced mix. We were getting a LOT of drums out in the 4th row, even on the opposite side of the stage.
I need to remember that when buying tickets for loud shows in Baldwin. It’s an amazing space for quiet music, though.