9.25.05: New Yorker Hurricane Katrina Benefit

Participated in a benefit for New Orleans organized by The New Yorker at Town Hall last night. I decided to resurrect the brass band I worked with on The Knee Plays with Robert Wilson 20 years ago. Although this local band, Les Misérables, are not really a New Orleans brass band, the music I wrote was at least partly inspired by The Dirty Dozen, an amazing NO band that I’d seen many times at a NO joint called the Glass House. The stuff I wrote was, no surprise, a little stiffer and more herky-jerky than the traditional NO stuff — but with some funky parts snuck in. My usual benefit mode is familiar songs of mine, unplugged, but this time I wanted to try something different, so I tracked down these guys and they agreed to participate. Thank you all. Here we are backstage (minus drummer Curtis Hasselbring who was packing up.) Thanks Jeanne for the pic. And thanks Toni Morrison for the use of the dressing room.

Here we are onstage (thanks to Tony Orlando for the photo):

[Click here for a Knee Plays review]

As it was a New Yorker sponsored event there were lots of writers represented. Greg Mosher was brought in as director, so there was nice pacing — writers interspersed with musical acts, no one allowed more than 5 minutes.

High points for me were the PowerPoint slides of New Orleans (parades, funerals, bands in clubs, the quarter,) Kevin Klein doing Randy Newman’s song “Louisiana” about the ’27 flood, Phillip Seymour Hoffman reading the first few pages of “Confederacy of Dunces”, Elvis Costello singing a new song, Audra McDonald singing a song I didn’t know, Calvin Trillin telling his own beautiful New Orleans stories with a message, and Patricia Clarkson reading some Tennessee Williams letters. Some of the musical acts like Queen Ida and Little Queenie were great, but maybe due to Town Hall’s acoustics their too-short single song sets never had the chance or sound to achieve true liftoff. Maybe music in this venue tends to stay “contained” due to the space and its acoustics — it’s a space which works in favor of more intimate performances.

We had one rehearsal at my place earlier in the day and after a couple of hours the piece sounded pretty damn good. It balances a fine line between funk and stiff mechanical rigidity, and we pretty much got that. The text, a series of contradictory predictions about the future, now seems to be about the present.

At the afterparty a man introduced himself as a fan — he looked like Harvey Keitel with a skinhead haircut, and that’s who I thought it was. Turns out it was the NYC Police Commissioner. If only I had parking tickets! If only I had a car!