Let's quash a few rumors: No, DEP has not left Relapse; the brand-new Irony Is a Dead Scene is a one-off with Epitaph, in full compliance with the band's contract rider. It's just too bad Mike Patton, who produced and played on the new four-song EP, was MIA. Rewind an hour to the Icarus Line, brooding glam toughs whose depressed cock-rock was satisfying and artfully oblique, except when temperamental guitarist Aaron North was flipping off the audience. "Just calm down, man," he sputtered. "You'll get your metal in 20 minutes." (Andrew Lentz)
MAUDE MAGGART
at the Gardenia Room, October 5
Overheard murmur: "I don't like tripods shooting people," and then the pall of conversational absurdity is suddenly suspended by the crystalline tones of Maude Maggart's clear, lush vibrato. Names from the slowly yellowing past -- Flo Ziegfeld, Irving Berlin, Fanny Brice -- mesh with the surrealism of her story of feather-headed showgirls sliding down a collapsing stairway. Chins are stroked to the dulcet harmonies of "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody." At "Second Hand Rose," the light runs red across the piano-inflected jaunt of the moment as hidden feelings are exhumed from the iced earth of memory. "My Man" unveils Maggart's voice (exceptionally well-suited for the downtown Broadway theater district) as something rarely heard in today's vale of woe and atonality; a cabaret of light forms as the smoke of her voice enters the air and swings gently in the evanescent evening.
Tales of her grandmother (a 1926 Georgie White "Scandals" ballerina) dressed as a tassel on the stage curtain segue into invocation of Helen "Show Boat" Morgan, mother of all torch songs, on "Nobody Wants Me." Perched atop piano (played by John Boswell), she sings "Bill" with a joyous laugh in her voice that celebrates somehow, despite feeling like a hundred bucks, or when one gets nothing and likes it. "Why Was I Born," "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man" -- all sung so persuasively that it seems, in fact, she sings directly to you. The songs brim with the conflict of the double-entendre 1920s clashing with chaste Victorian mores to create a fountain of fervent desire and heartfelt confessions. Around the corner, a venerable neighborhood car wash is razed. "Love Me or Leave Me"? "More Than You Know"? Bitter, sweet, etc. (David Cotner)
PARISA, DARIUSH TALAI, HOUMAN POURMEHDI at Wadsworth Theater, October 5
Performances of traditional Persian music are relatively abundant in Southern California, where the Iranian ex-pat population numbers over 100,000. Yet this night featuring two musicians now approaching legendary status, and a third well on his way, had the aura of something rare and precious.
Vocalist Parisa, tar and setar master Dariush Talai and tombak player Houman Pourmehdi entered the stage to tumultuous applause and took their places on a stage adorned with flowers, silk and candles, and proceeded to cast their spell. In a program divided into two halves, the trio interpreted poems of revered Persian poets Rumi and Hafiz via improvisations within a dastgah or mode decided upon by vocalist Parisa. Particular modes chosen determine a set of goushehs (melodies or sequences) upon which the musicians may base their melodic and rhythmic variations; these melodies specify further note intervals and the form of the movement of the melodies within them; the rhythms selected can be symmetric, asymmetric or freeform and are also subject to the meters of the poetry being interpreted.
It's a complicated musical system that has developed over several centuries (and bears certain structural similarities to the Indian raga), and it has the capacity to force a deeper listening that, like the raga, the contemporary frenzied mind initially feels resistant to but whose patience, refinement, extraordinarily interlinked parts and occasional flashes of melodic simplicity can soothe and stimulate as it plays with the listener's sense of time. A trilling, yodeling Parisa delivered the poems flawlessly, with an inviting purity of tone and an impressive arsenal of inflective techniques; Talai's tar and setar (lutes) work was a truly spectacular show of control, speed and melodic invention; Pourmehdi on tombak (hand drum) laced the music with light rains of rhythmic counterpoint and unison play.
Tonight's trio was composed of exiles, owing to the fact that performances of secular Persian classical music is for the most part now banned in Iran. But that's our gain. Their work can be heard on discs available on the superb L.A. label Kereshmeh (www.keresh meh.com); and check out the Persian music, poetry and literature program Havaye Tazeh on KIRN 670 AM, Wednesdays from 7 to 9 p.m. (John Payne)
