I mute the sound on the ballgame and start listening to Accept When by Caroline Davis and Wendy Eisenberg. With my turntable in the repair shop, I have to settle for listening to the album on my laptop. I sink into the couch and the music flows. A light rain starts to fall outside the window and drops are visible at the game, though not enough to pause the action.
***
Tubby’s is usually closed on Sundays, but the Kingston, NY club makes occasional exceptions chief among them the “So, What Do You Think? series curated by Clifford Allen. The music is always compelling. Last spring, two of my favorite musicians, drummer Tcheser Holmes and cellist Lester St. Louis, were on the same bill. Tubby’s is an hour away and makes for a late school night, but I had to go. That’s when I first heard guitarist Wendy Eisenberg. Their playing was so graceful and acrobatic, with an intoxicating disregard for gravity, and still so connected to their bandmates. I attempted to write in response to the music but bailed after stumbling through a jumbled mess of false starts and clunky analogies. Some nights it’s best to yield.
***
“Crashing upon the shore
Yes, one more time
I like having you on my mind”
–“Flounced”
***
My partner Joh and I talked for a long time when we first met up, but something felt different when we met for a hike at Fahnstock Park a few days later. The trail was narrow and had us walking single file most of the way. After a half hour we reached a lake and stopped for lunch. It was the first time since we stood by the trail map we’d been able to look at each other for any length of time. I was surprised by the sudden urge to kiss her. I’d been the one to say I wanted to keep things platonic. That washed away by the time we sat by the lake, but I was hesitant. What if she said no? That would yield a big bowl of awkward for both of us on the long walk back to the parking lot.
***
The next time I saw Wendy Eisenberg at Tubby’s they performed with Caroline Davis (saxophone, vocals, synthesizer) in support of Accept When. My attempts to take notes were no more fruitful, but it was a strikingly different performance, more song-oriented and filled with funny stage banter. (Clifford Allen: “Metallagher, the watermelon-smashing metal band, might’ve factored in somewhere.”) They generated such an empathetic, enveloping feeling, a club-sized cocoon.
***
“Friendship, how we relate to each other, is our nucleus: the central and essential part of our movement; the positively charged central core of our atom.”
-From the liner notes to Accept When
***
Joh: “We refer to this as our ‘second date,’ but at the time I think its status as a ‘date’ was unclear. I was six months pregnant as a single mom and Mike was recently divorced and so we were both approaching this as perhaps a new friendship, but not likely a relationship. When we got to the lake I remember wondering if there was the possibility of more than friendship, but I didn’t want to go there with my mind too much. So I was surprised when he asked if could kiss me when we said goodbye. Pleasantly surprised and curious.”
***
That welcoming feeling from Davis and Eisenberg’s show permeates Accept When, their first album as a duo. The record is inviting and grounded, yet also takes us places unexpected and unimagined, a sonic magical realism. Eisenberg’s guitar lines can be so crisp and definitive, like the bold outlines curving across the panels of a Brian Bolland or Jared Sams comic, providing definition for what lies within and beyond their boundaries. Eisenberg also weaves in the exhilarating exploration I heard at that first Tubby’s show, though it unfolds differently in their dialogues with Davis.
Meanwhile Davis’s saxophone sounds like beams of light, dense at the core then dispersing as they radiate outward, especially as the notes trail off (like the end of “Flounced”). Granted, all sounds follow similar patterns as they fade, but with Davis I can visualize the particles drifting apart and the space among them growing. Davis layers in synth sounds, too, evoking a range of moods and scenes—whether comparable to a slide guitar or waves gently lapping on shore at dawn or the sounds of a spaceship cruising on autopilot while the crew slumbers, everything functioning as planned yet still look-over-your-shoulder ominous.
The duo also veers in a variety directions, jagged and cutting on “Slynx,” or shifting into dissonant contrast on “Concrete,” the saxophone obtuse and piercing, the guitar mellow and warm. But even when they’re in contrasting motions, there’s a complementary vibe that binds and illuminates.
***
I close the window halfway when the rain picks up, the sounds of precipitation mingling with those of the record. I’ve lost track of the game but notice showers falling there, too. The players clear out as the grounds crew springs into motion, unrolling a massive tarp and pulling it across the diamond, covering the most vulnerable parts of the field in minutes.
***
Joh planted wildflowers along her driveway last spring. The space along the neighbor’s fence had become overgrown with weeds. She bought a seed mix of pollinator-friendly, native wildflowers. She had a sense of what might blossom in the ensuing weeks, but wasn’t prepared for the beautiful array of pinks, yellows, oranges, reds, and purples that were blooming by mid-summer, a striking sea of colors every time she stepped outside or came home from work.
***
“‘Let’s rock!’
No, thanks. I don’t want to rock.”
-Banner posted on Wendy Eisenberg’s social media
***
Accept When is a delightfully unpredictable meadow of an album, colors and shapes varying with each spin. Davis and Eisenberg created a safe place to play and explore. The record is largely subdued and intimate, which might seem to radiate a sense of looking inward, perhaps being closed off, but it’s so open and nourishing, the sound of friendship blossoming and reveling in the joy of connection. Listen to how they dance, so to speak, on “How Sensitive.” Hearing people move together through such complex patterns, dart in and around their shared space, is rejuvenating. The balance of clarity, precision, daring, and melody reminds me of the opening cut on Anthony Braxton’s New York, Fall 1974.
***
If you like novels with fast-paced action and/or intricate plotting, James McBride’s Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is not for you. If, however, you enjoy long fuse plots and are drawn to nuanced characters with in-depth backstories, Heaven & Earth, set in the racially and ethnically diverse fictional town of Pottsville, Pennsylvania, is likely to charm.
***
I’d never planted flowers, never tried to care for so much as a houseplant, but Joh helped me see the appeal, so I decided to try wildflowers in my front yard. I saved cardboard boxes through the winter and spread them across the grass once the snow was gone. I trimmed the remaining grass, we planted seeds and soon I began my daily maintenance, watering the soil each morning, especially during the early summer heat wave, angling the hose upward and watching the water arc and slightly splatter the dirt, looking for signs of growth. Weeks later, wildflowers were sprouting, and a mini meadow emerged in my front yard. By the late summer that beautiful array of pinks, yellows, oranges, reds, and purples was taller than me, slightly arching like a wave about to crash.
***
“Ghosts are only figures of my imagination…accept when they’re real”
or is it:
“Ghosts are only figures of my imagination…except when they’re real”
-“Accept When”
The vocals are the crowning touch on Accept When, delightfully luminous and prismatic. Davis and Eisenberg have patient, perfectly paced deliveries, enunciating every lyric. Proper and considered on the one hand, playful and spontaneous on the other. The way they match words, pitches, and rhythms—with Eisenberg following suit on guitar—reminds me of the Shaggs, so earnest and devoid of kitsch, all the elements intertwined. A friend of mine once had a guitar teacher who expressed his desire to unlearn the skills he’d developed over the years, start fresh so he could hear and play and write with greater openness. Davis and Eisenberg surf that seeming contrast of masterful technique and bright-eyed inventiveness.
***
Later in The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store Chona, who runs the titular grocery store, looks upon her husband, Moshe, while he sleeps and thinks of their first meeting. “The young man who wandered into her father’s basement…so funny and innocent, with a pocket full of flyers and not a dime to his name, so charming, always so positive…He was a true Jew, a man of ideas and wit who understood the meaning of celebration and music and that the blend of those things meant life itself.”
***
After a while thunder booms and lightning lights up the sky. Wind pushes the curtains, rain spritzes through the screen, and the power cuts out. I close the laptop to diminish the screen’s glare but not all the way so Accept When will keep playing and I can bask in the glow of its celebratory ideas and wit.
Photos: Clifford Allen
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