Jandek, Harrison Center for the Arts, 12.9.2006

During the second song of Jandek’s performance in Indianapolis Saturday night, I scribbled down a couplet he’d just bellowed into the microphone: “It’s a gamble for me, but I’m rolling sevens. So I might just take the chance.” Considering the current trajectory of his artistic career, it’s a very fitting sentiment. Jandek is currently undergoing the sort of late-career rejuvenation and public image re-coding that very few artists enjoy. From 1978 until a few years ago, he was only known to a handful of geeks as the spectral presence on his album covers; the outsider musician from somewhere in Texas. Never giving interviews or making public appearances, just releasing 40 or so records of spare, uncompromising, and often harrowing, primitive blues music. Then, in 2003, the documentary Jandek on Corwood came out, and for two hours guys like Richie Unterberger fawned over Jandek’s legend and speculated as to his motivations—was he really a hurt, howling soul with no fixed address, or was it all a carefully calculated game, with no planned end in sight? The film brought him into the public consciousness—or, at least the consciousnesses of indie video store clerks and people with arthouse theatres in their neighborhoods.

And then he played a live show. Glasgow Sunday, which I wrote about here, was released in 2005, and everyone who saw J on C now had a face to put with the legend—a gaunt, emaciated assemblage of bones trying to poke through skin, but a face nonetheless—and his process of image transformation thus started. I’m not trying to say that this is a calculated move by Jandek, or the long-planned second half of his career (not that that’s out of the range of logic, though), but his reception is definitely going through a change, the more shows he plays. He’d reached iconic status to a select group of critics and indie geeks, and now that’s mutating into something new. Now, with his unique live-gig methodology and all, he’s starting to take the shape of a free-jazz bandleader; slowly making his way from town to town, writing new material along the way, recruiting local musicians, practicing for a few hours, then going live. Each show is then guaranteed to be remarkably different from the prior and subsequent; a reliance on aura which fits perfectly with how he’s managed his career thus far.

He played at the Harrison Center for the Arts in Indianapolis on Saturday night. The Harrison Center is in the old Northside of Indianapolis, which means the part of town with lots of old buildings right north of downtown. It’s a huge old church that’s been renovated into an arts complex. I saw Danielson earlier this year in the building’s basement, but Jandek got the main church hall. It’s a stunning venue (sorry, they didn’t want “unapproved photography”, but I did snap one surreptitious picture, below), with massive vaulted ceilings, padded wooden pews and creaky floors, and one wall that’s 70% stained-glass window. It was also, as you can imagine, pretty perfect for Jandek’s 7th-ever North American performance–there’s a musty, sort of creepy history to the place that lends itself well to a performance from a spooky recluse. The place was really quiet when we entered; it seemed like no one wanted to frighten Jandek or something. I don’t think anyone was planning on moshing or anything, but a guy came to the microphone before the show and asked politely that no one make any noise during the performance.

Then, at 7pm sharp, a large, older, and very hip-looking black man walked on stage and started slowly playing an upright bass. This is Lester “Lammy” Johnson, formerly of the cultishly-admired Indianapolis funk band from the 1970s, Ebony Rhythm Band. They released one album that I know of, called Soul Heart Transplant, and the title track (mp3) was a minor regional hit. Then, another man entered the frame, a thinner guy, also black, and started playing a flute. I can’t find much information on him, but he’s known as “local improviser” George “Sparky” Smith. He would also play xylophone during the set. Then, the drummer came out, and took me aback for a moment. He was Nathan Vollmar, a Bloomington-based musician who records with Half-Handed Cloud and with his brother as Vollmar, but I knew him as the guy who works at the Cinemat, where I go to rent obscure French films on weekends. He’s a shy, taciturn guy who looks surprisingly like Jake Gyllenhaal. He’s also an amazing drummer, which I’ll get to later. Next on stage was Liz Janes, a singer-songwriter and violist signed to Asthmatic Kitty. Then, Jandek.

He looked like a cross between the elderly William S. Burroughs and the cowboy at the top of the hill from Mulholland Drive; he was dressed head-to-toe in black, complete with a black fedora, and carried with him a black leather satchel that, for a second, I worried might contain an antique pistol, but turned out only held his notebook. At this point, I realized that he’s got to be actively maintaining a large part of this image—otherwise, why not just carry out the notebook, instead of walking out looking like some backwoods doctor? He strapped on his guitar and melded in with the improvised rhythms around him—they sounded like stabs or scrapes, but once he turned around and faced the audience about 4 minutes in, it revealed itself as something completely different. His guitar-playing style is like nothing I’ve ever seen; he’s obviously not playing notes, or adhering to any melodic structure of which I’m aware, but he gingerly and delicately moves his hands across the frets and strings, like he’s calmly petting a kitten, or working with raw clay on a potter’s wheel. The guitar is more than just a musical instrument for Jandek—it’s a tool that provides comfort for him, and expresses those parts of his unconscious too harsh to put into words.

The band played about 9 or 10 songs—I lost count—with a surprising and satisfying amount of range and differentiation between them. Each song started with Vollmar and Johnson finding a basic rhythmic structure, which Jandek would recognize, followed by Smith and Janes, who were there mostly to provide texture. Vollmar, who caused a bit of concern re: his chops before the show, proved to be an incredibly competent improviser, often emerging within songs as the most striking feature. He alternated between rhythmic styles well—from a John McIntire-ish horizontal splay of ride cymbal and snare on the opening song, to a stunning Buddy Rich-style polyrhythmic march on another, and many, many stylistic shifts in between. Johnson veered eerily close to funk vamps on several numbers, which, when combined with Smith’s flute, channeled Eric Burdon-era War, or Gil Scott-Heron’s early 1970s backing bands, which made for a strange friction when Jandek was simultaneously singing lines like “if I unscrew your head, are you full of sand?” The third and fourth songs were sort of revelatory in this regard—Johnson and Vollmar locked into a thing that reminded me of On the Corner, over which Jandek worked out a blues lament: “Good bye mama, I must go over, to see what’s on the other side.” We’re not talking Sonny Boy Williamson here, but we are talking something I clearly did not expect to hear.

The biggest surprise of the evening was Janes, whom I suppose many expected would just scrape and pluck sounds from her viola (which would have been fine with me—it worked really well). However, she stood up during the fifth song (the one with the amazingly thunderous Vollmar drumming), walked to a microphone, and started singing. Which was unfortunate. Not because she isn’t good, because she’s fine, but because she was trying to work Jandek’s lyrics into a completely different idiom—a modern and very polished blues howl. Janes seems very proficient at what she does, but in the context of this performance, she seemed severely out of place; slick and linear in the middle of a tempestuous frenzy. She ended up singing five songs, which sort of shocked me, and on one of them she tried to work in a spoken-word vibe, which gave the song an amateur-night coffee-shop vibe that was strangely out of place. Not that Jandek seemed to mind, though—she’s no Nancy, to be sure, but he apparently likes hearing his lyrics interpreted by a female voice. He turned his back to the crowd during Liz’s parts, and could actually be seen bobbing to the rhythm at a few points. They played for over two hours, much longer than I would have imagined, and then left the stage in a single-file line, walking in front of the crowd on the way out.

Despite the occasional incongruity, the show was pretty great—easily one of the best and most interesting things I’ve seen this year—but I’m still trying to locate why I enjoyed it so much. Most of my attention during the show was devoted to watching the interactions between band members; not knowing much about improvisation, it was pretty great to watch the wordless cues they would give one another. This was due in large part, I think, to the fact that Jandek is as much of a non-presence on stage as he was for the last quarter-century. Even when he stepped to the microphone to sing, he receded into the noise around him, his lyrics just another textural element in the simultaneous torrent of sound. I think that what I enjoyed about Jandek was what I like so much about Chair Beside A Window, or Telegraph Melts—the impression of presence. Personally, I’m not able to listen to Jandek—never have been able to—without unconsciously acknowledging his mystery and lack of backstory. And even though he was standing right there in front of me, playing and singing, I think I was paying more attention to what wasn’t there, and that lack of presence is what made the show so memorable.

UPDATE: Another review and much better photographs available here.