Album Reviews
Movie Reviews
Concert Reviews
Past Concerts
Book Reviews

Top 10

Contact Us

The stage of the trendy new underground venue is dark and extremely close to the audience: an amalgam of mostly thirty, forty and fifty-somethings, seated facing each other across the club’s narrow tables, which are packed so tightly that you really need the body of a twenty-something to squeeze through sideways.  Le Poisson Rouge (“the red fish,” in English – go figure) is one of the newest music spots in New York’s East Village, on the equally famous/infamous Bleeker Street. On this Thursday night in September it might as well have been a bistro somewhere in France, as chanteuse Sam Phillips and her eclectic entourage, appropriately festooned with violin and accordion in addition to the expected guitars and percussion, emerge from the darkness to fill the night with her occasionally melancholy and always insightful songs about life and love, hope and disappointment, passion and perception. 

This is a concert about substance over form. There are no animated lights (in fact, the stage remained dim through the entire show, the strongest lights creating a bright back-lit edge from three-quarters behind Sam) and no choreography. Phillips and her band (Eric Gorfain on violin and electric guitar, Ted Wrightman on accordion, string synth, piano and guitar, and Jay Bellerose on drums and various types of percussion) brought a hand-made ambiance to songs from the recently-released Don’t Do Anything, as well as songs from Phillips’ previous albums, and even one brand-new tune. As if to emphasize the fact that this was not going to be pump-your-fist-in-the-air kind of show, Phillips started the set with her electric guitar set to a low-fi distortion as she started “I Need Love” in the most minimalist way possible, going through the entire opening verse and chorus solo, before the rest of the band joined in. Phillips, looking very Sally Kellerman-esque in black dress and boots, delivered her songs in a self-effacing way, engaging in a kind of ironic banter as she navigated through the show, as if she recognized that, in the end, audience and performer are all in the same life-boat together.

Alternating between acoustic and electric guitar (and, at one point, what appeared to be a mini-tape player), Sam’s voice carried her well-crafted lyrics over the able accompaniment of the three-man band that has backed her up on this tour. The absence of a bass-player went unnoticed due to the unusual sonic elements that make up the ‘Sam Phillips sound,’ if you will. Gorfain’s evocative violin lines and Wrightman’s accordion often created a kind-of European gypsy feeling (the ghost of Django Rheinhardt wouldn’t have felt out of place) while Bellerose maintained a bass drum-heavy heartbeat foundation to the songs, often playing with a shaker in one hand and a mallet or stick in the other. Add in Wrightman’s occasional string synth for a Beatles-like effect, and Gorfain’s use of a somewhat miniature electric guitar for some tasty high-end rhythm and lead work, and you have a group of musicians capable of producing a wide range of sounds – and that’s exactly what they did. On “Shake it Down,” a tour-de-force of a song that ends with a controlled meltdown, the entire band did their best to shake the stage down, with Phillips herself joining the fray playing on and inside the onstage acoustic piano. 

The bulk of the show on this night was made up of songs from the new album, highlighted by strong performances of “No Explanations, “Can’t Come Down,” “Don’t Do Anything,” “Little Plastic Life,” “My Career in Chemistry,” “Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us,” “Shake it Down,” “Signal,’ and “Watching Out of This World.”  The show was rounded out by Sam Phillips standards like “I Need Love,” from Martinis and Bikinis, to  “Animals on Wheels,” from Omnipop, which was sung sans band to the accompaniment of a home-made sounding backing track played on a micro-recorder held up to the microphone, which was strategically shaken to produce a vibrato effect.

At the end of the very satisfying hour-plus set, Phillips nixed the inevitable Encore Routine by announcing that, following the ‘last’ song she would do two more songs as an encore. Sam Phillips isn’t about playing the superstar game – her music is part of her art, and her art is part of her life.

You don’t play games with that.

Bert Saraco: words, pictures, design