"Hey, Fred!" 08/07-08/13/2025
Thoughts on the Benefit of Reviews and Listings, and Goings On in Columbus, OH: Nesting returns | 614 Funk Fest | Nikki Hill | Jon Lampley | The Vandoliers
Drafted part of the following last week before I realized that cold I’d contracted was my latest round of COVID and had to limp last week’s “Hey, Fred,” across the finish line in the midst of a demanding work week.
Many people have written about the most recent “pivot” using that word extremely generously at the New York Times including writers I’ve read for years who’ve been personally inspirational, both as a goal for my writing and if I saw them at the same show on my semi-annual New York trips I knew I was in the right place: Jon Pareles, Zachary Woolf, and Jesse Green.
Obviously, I think written reviews are valuable; I’m lucky enough to get paid for the theater writing from my benevolent masters at Columbus Underground and occasionally other sources, and before that I wrote much more infrequently for a personal blog (which provided the samples that got CU to hire me). I was honored to be in the tradition of people - both here in Columbus and far afield - who shone a light on what was interesting about something, what didn’t work, and especially put what the work of art is doing in one or more contexts. I still am. One of the best analyses of that shift came from Richard Brody’s stirring piece for The New Yorker, “In Defense of the Traditional Review,” which included the following, among many lines that struck me:
When writing reviews, critics are in the position of the public: watching a movie, attending a concert, seeing a play, buying a record. Reviews are rooted in the most fundamental unit of the art business—the personal encounter with individual works (or exhibits of many works)—and in the economic implications of that encounter. The specificity of the review is both aesthetic and social. For starters, it’s a consumer guide, an intrinsic variety of service journalism. Critics are simultaneously consumers and avatars of consumers; as Pauline Kael wrote in 1971, in The New Yorker, “Without a few independent critics, there’s nothing between the public and the advertisers.” What’s commercially crucial about reviews, which serve as something like a consumer-protection file, is precisely this independence, both editorial and textual.
Nate Chinen’s indispensable The Gig column, also provided some vital context around all of this:
As did one of my favorite writers about opera, Olivia Giovetti, with “9.5 Theses on Art and Politics.”
One of my bigger goals for this space is to have at least one review a month of something I saw, written up in this space before the listings. Eventually, I’d like that to be once a week, but we’ll see.
Deeply tied in with all of this is the continued death of arts listings. From being a child who would pick up the (two, sometimes three or four) weekly papers from my suburban library, or whose Mom would bring home from the boxes near her office, weekly listings opened whole worlds to me of what was going on in my town, and are the fundamental reason my tastes are as wide ranging as they are. Without those weekly tantalizing blurbs, if I’d been in a world where an algorithm fed me what it already thought I wanted, I might have never moved past jazz, science fiction, and beat poetry (to name three things I was deeply invested in around High School and which I found through friends or home).
It’s not an exaggeration to say 95% of my best experiences and my best friends can all be traced back (maybe sometimes circutitously) to those listings - The Columbus Alive, The Other Paper, the Weekender section in the Columbus Dispatch - through me saying “Hey, this sounds interesting,” and going to a show.
Even more, those listings used to be a lighthouse for going out of town. Two particular examples I was just talking about recently were our first two trips to New York. In 2008, our very first trip, Ben Ratliff wrote up the trio of Marilyn Crispell, Mark Helias, and Paul Motian playing the Village Vanguard (in the same column he wrote up the Pogues which was our impetus for going that weekend in the first place). On our return in the Fall, a mention caught our eye in either Time Out New York or the Village Voice (I grabbed both religiously as soon as I got off the train from the airport, for years) of Raphael Saadiq playing SOBs (the archives aren’t as complete as the NYT but this Flickr page confirms it happened) during the trip. Two things we wouldn’t have known about otherwise that were absolute highlights of our times in the city.
Gabriel Kahane wrote a brilliant tribute to that form in The Atlantic, “A Love Letter to Music Listings,” one I was so moved by that I read paragraphs out loud to Anne at lunch last weekend, including this introduction:
When I graduated from college and moved to the city in 2003, Time Out quickly became my bible, syllabus, and road map. The listings guided me through the cobwebbed bowels of St. Mark’s Church and into the Ontological-Hysteric Theater hidden within, where Richard Foreman’s mind-bending plays made an indelible impression on me. The listings brought me to Southpaw to hear Neko Case’s bloodshot voice; to the Village Vanguard for Jason Moran or Paul Motian; and to a tin-ceilinged basement bar in Park Slope, where I saw a baby-faced Sharon Van Etten sing her earliest songs, and then bashfully hand out CDs burned with her demos, rich with high-frequency hiss from the tape deck onto which she’d recorded them.
That nostalgia is why I donate a few hours a week to “Hey, Fred,” and I hope this, in turn, inspires someone with an open eye and tastes very different from mine to start the next one and the next one and the next one. And I hope I find them all. It seems more important than ever to acknowledge beauty and community - and the promise of both - where we find them. The things we’re excited and hopeful for.
Music
Skylab Presents: Nesting Lite with Sinceer, Negroyokio b2b sourd, and Tonedeft
Land Grant Brewing, 424 W Town St
August 8: 6:00 pm to 10:00 pm
Free
Anything under the Skylab banner I’m going to promote here as long as I know about it before this is writen and scheduled. And this also seems like a good time to link to the GoFundMe to aid in Skylab’s ongoing search for a new location. One of my favorite recurring series in its last few years was the dance music umbrella nesting, which has made several appearances since losing the original space, including a couple of fantastic nights at the Pizzuti over the winter.
It makes an earlier-evening - happy for those of us trying to daisy chain multiple events in a night - appearance in the yard at Land Grant as a centerpiece to a particularly stacked Franklinton Friday. I can attest to how good that space sounds and how much fun it is to dance out there, hearing more left-of-center grooves through that system should be a delight.
The bill is rife with heavy hitters who have a history with the series. Tonedeft, who Resident Advisor said, is “known for their impeccable taste and curated sets that promise intrigue and sexiness,” knocked me over in a b2b with Chris McKee last winter. Sinceer takes house as a jumping point and sets it on fire, as seen in his own work and sets like the Bobo fireball I linked to below.
Most intriguing for my taste, Negroyokio (whom Blessed Up Gang gave one of my favorite descriptions to, “connecting the dots between club, queerness, and being a hottie,”) does an unbroken b2b with sourd who I couldn’t find much about but being in this company is recommendation enough.
614 Funk Fest
featuring Zapp, Midnight Star, Karyn White, Ready for the World, and Mix Master Ice
Columbus Commons, 160 S High St
August 9: 4:00 pm doors
Tickets starting at $42.18 at Eventbrite
Anything Al Battle and Audra Cheek’s Fame Productions brings through town is worth checking out, and they’re bringing a magical evening of late ‘70s-early ‘90s sounds to the Commons, most of which have roots in the region, tied together by one of our other local heroes Mix Master Ice spinning before and between acts.
Flint, Michigan’s Ready for the World would live forever just for “Oh, Sheila,” and “Love You Down,” but digging into their catalog to write this, I was astonished at how many killer songs are on those first three records. Karyn White’s stunning eponymous record still holds up, and she’s still in astonishing voice. Get there early.
Cincinnati’s Midnight Star is one of my perennial jukebox and party mix go-tos - I had people spontaneously getting down to “Freakazoid” in a bar last weekend - but until I saw them live 20ish years ago, I didn’t realize how big the slow jams are to most of their audience. “Play Another Slow Jam” might have gotten the most exuberant reaction of the entire night, in a set list that included “No Parking on the Dance Floor,” “Freakazoid,” and “Midas Touch.”
It’s almost impossible to separate Zapp from the tragic murder-suicide of Roger and Larry Troutman, but the original rhythm section of Lester and Terry Troutman carry on the lineage and this will be a reminder of how groundbreaking that work originally was and how much of a funky good time it still is.
Nikki Hill featuring Laura Chavez with Austin and the Syd Experience
Natalie’s Grandview, 945 King Ave
August 9: 8:00 pm show
$41 Tickets at nataliesgrandview.com
Nikki Hill hit my radar around a decade ago, when my friend - and one of my guiding lights for anything of a roots persuasion - Jeff Eaton told me he and his partner Jackie had seen her and it was “Tina Turner fronting AC/DC.” I caught her and her crackling band a couple of years later when my St Louis pals at Twangfest booked her for a barn-burning set, and the next year I was out of town but she played Hot Times and apparently walked away with the show. Since the last time I saw her, she added the great Laura Chavez, a master of every blues-based groove style of the 20th century, from ragtime to swamp blues to the Texas shuffle, and made her best record yet, Feline Roots, so expectations are high.
Columbus’s finest newer funk band, Austin and the Syd Experience, whose originals are getting stronger and they’re tied with a deep understanding of the great repertorie of the genre, are the icing on the cake of this bill.
An Evening with Jon Lampley
Natalie’s Grandview, 945 King Ave
August 11: Early show sold out, tickets available as of writing for 9:30 pm show
$36 Tickets at nataliesgrandview.com
Since making his name with Columbus breakout jam-funk band The Huntertones, trumpeter and sousaphone player Jon Lampley has enhanced acts including Jon Batiste, Louis Cato, Lake Street Dive, and Kurt Elling and Charlie Hunter. His first record as a leader, last year’s Night Service: Live at LunÀtico, is a magnificent example of how to set a vibe and a quintessential small-group ensemble for the here and now. This return to the site of so many triumphs, pairing him with longtime collaborators guitarist Josh Hill and organist/guitarist Theron Brown, should be magical.
Vandoliers with Nate Bergman
Rumba Cafe, 2507 Summit St
August 12: 8:00 pm show
$25.65 tickets at columbusrumbacafe.com
I’ve been a fan of Vandoliers since their 2019 record Forever, the most exciting new band carrying on the punk-infused country tradition of the Dallas-Fort Worth area (the soil that gave me so many of my favorite bands of my teenage/early 20s years including Old 97s, Slobberbone, Centro-Matic) I’d heard in years, bringing in elements of Tejano and swing in ways I wasn’t expecting.
But I was unprepared for this year’s Life Behind Bars. With technicolor-bright and titanium-hard production from Ted Hutt (Gaslight Anthem, Dropkick Murphys, Jesse Malin), and songs that go deeper than the earlier work, delving into singer Jenni Rose’s struggles with addiction and gender dysphorian (there’s a terrific interview with Brittney McKenna for Nashville Scene), it’s a heavy contender for my favorite record of the year. And word from my friends who’ve seen this tour is they’re leveling every room they play. Highest recommendation. I haven’t really delved into the opener Nate Bergman, but the couple of songs I checked out have an appealing raucous-and-wounded thing that I think would resonate with anyone who likes Lucero, and being on this tour I’m showing up early to check him out.