PERFORMING ARTS

Saturday, January 13, 2007

The Last Poets

There isn't a more crucial strand of hip-hop DNA than the Last Poets.

The spoken-word troupe emerged from Harlem in the late '60s, reciting thunderous poetry over minimal hand-percussion in an effort to enact social change -- and planted the seeds of rap music in the process.

Core members Umar Bin Hassan, Abiodun Oyewole and drummer Don "Babatunde" Eaton delivered a riveting program Tuesday at the National Museum of Natural History's Baird Auditorium. Oyewole thanked the Smithsonian for hosting the event, but Bin Hassan was quick to interject: "This is where they hang relics! Don't be too happy to be here!"

The Last Poets are older than old-school, but their words sounded as timely as ever. They updated some of their most popular and controversial poems for the terror age, mingling images of the civil rights movement with post-9/11 paranoia and the war in Iraq.

Babatunde, who tapped out a serviceable beat at times, broke out into a dizzying turbulence with "This Is Madness." Over the frenetic beat, Bin Hassan declared, "All of my dreams have turned into psychedelic nightmares." The ghosts of H. Rap Brown, Malcolm X, John Coltrane -- even Bin Hassan's parents -- came swarming into the piece, the poet's impassioned shouts distorting over the auditorium speakers. The piece came to a thrilling crescendo with Bin Hassan and Oyewole screaming, "Please stop all this madness!" The madness they speak of might never end, and let's hope the Last Poets' legacy lasts just as long.

-- Chris Richards

Emily Haines

Emily Haines certainly benefited from the 9:30 club's rare configuration as a seated venue on Wednesday night. The Toronto singer's hushed, pensive songs -- a far cry from her energetic indie-rock band Metric -- required the silent focus forced by such an arrangement.

Throughout Haines's hour-long set, her brooding delivery made her sound constantly lost in thought, and songs such as the slow, reflective "Nothing & Nowhere" would have been disrupted by the slightest chatter. Her raspy voice only added to that effect, with the smoky, just-woke-up feel on the show-opening "Our Hell" and "Doctor Blind." On the trancelike "Crowd Surf Off a Cliff," her hoarseness turned her measured statement of "I wake up lonely" into a devastating confession.

The sparse instrumentation of Haines's piano lines and three-piece backing band the Soft Skeleton added to her songs' contemplative feel, as with the simple, rolling piano melody of "The Maid Needs a Maid." Rarely, the group slipped into a denser instrumentation that detracted from Haines's voice; the lush ending of "The Last Page" seemed incongruous to its mellower opening. But her solo encore, a cover of the Neil Young-penned Buffalo Springfield song "Expecting to Fly," was a return to her most striking qualities: a simple arrangement, soft vocals and a heartfelt performance.

-- Catherine P. Lewis

Go-Go at Meeting Place

Every Wednesday night at the Meeting Place, a go-go band gathers that includes three stalwarts of D.C.'s indigenous dance music: keyboardist/vocalist "Sweet Cherie" Mitchell, drummer JuJu House and bandleader/party starter Sugar Bear. (Sugar Bear is known outside the Washington area for leading his band, Experience Unlimited, in the irresistible crowd favorite "Da Butt.") The latest installment featured the usual go-go delights: a clutch of canny covers of pop tunes and a bushel of beats as bountiful as anything you can hear for 10 bucks.

Robin Thicke's "Lost Without You" got the most engaging cover, one that retained Thicke's ethereal falsetto melody but swept away his gossamer guitar accompaniment in favor of a series of locked-in go-go beats ranging from subtle to boisterous; these were anchored by swelling chords that made the harmonies suggested by the original rump-shakingly explicit. The band also delivered two fine covers of Snoop Dogg songs, "Drop It Like It's Hot" and "That's That [expletive]," tapping out a wickedly syncopated version of the former's tongue-click rhythm and draping a warm blanket of synths over a crankin' beat in the latter. Mitchell's soulful cover of "Enough Cryin' " was familiar but satisfying as well, and the band threw in a couple go-go oldies like "One on One."

The beat was at its mightiest at the end of the show, which featured a series of devastating dance rhythms; House got maximum volume and charge from his tuned drums, and Sugar Bear and Mitchell shouted terse, crowd-moving catchphrases. The possibilities of the beat seemed infinite, but it fell silent early -- after all, it was just another Wednesday show, and people had to go to work in the morning.

-- Andrew Lindemann Malone

Georgie James

Officially, Georgie James is a duo that channels the departed spirits of mid-1960s pop. Yet on Thursday night at an almost-packed Rock & Roll Hotel, the D.C. group's retro orientation was expressed most strongly by the logo on its souvenir T-shirts -- very 1962 -- and the closing encore of "El Condor Pasa," a lilting 1970 Simon and Garfunkel number. With a rhythm section driving all of the other songs, Georgie James sounded like, well, a rock band -- and even a fairly noisy one. There were hints of such '60s baroque-pop acts as the Left Banke, and glimmers of various Latin styles, but they were often overwhelmed by John Davis's guitar and Andrew Black's drums.

It's true that Georgie James's style is a significant shift from Davis's previous outfit, the popular punk-funk trio Q and Not U. And the new group features some timbres, notably Laura Burhenn's electric piano and the blend of her and Davis's voice in boy-girl harmony or unison, that are rare in the sometimes excessively virile world of D.C. indie-rock. The intent of such tunes as the jaunty "Places" and the slightly jazzy "Hard Feelings" came across, even if the material was occasionally handled a little roughly.

Conveying the more delicate aspects of their styles in concert is a long-standing problem for pop and folk-rock bands, and it's likely that Georgie James will achieve a better balance on its upcoming single -- which, Burhenn and Davis repeatedly apologized, was supposed to be ready for this gig. In the meantime, Davis's power chords and Black's surf-rock intros may not exactly fit the group's concept, but they sound fine.

-- Mark Jenkins

Johnny Winter

Things seem to be looking up a bit for Johnny Winter. Beset with health and financial problems, the Texas blues guitar legend has appeared exceedingly frail on recent tours and sometimes leaned on harmonica vet James Montgomery to help carry his shows. But at the Rams Head Tavern in Annapolis on Wednesday night, the old lion in Winter often roared.

Not that the 62-year-old appears ready to run a marathon. Now touring without Montgomery, Winter hobbled onstage, pulled up a chair and cradled his snub-nosed Lazer guitar in his lap. His voice, however, sounded stronger than it has on recent concert stops, rising over a nearly white-noise din as his power trio moved through a set of tunes that frequently pointed to lasting influences -- Muddy Waters ("Hoochie Coochie Man"), Lazy Lester ("Sugar Coated Love") and Freddie King ("Tore Down"), among others.

Though the show opened with a brief, ZZ Top-flavored showcase for guitarist Paul Nelson, Winter wasn't out of the spotlight for long. His concerts still center on a timeworn mix of shuffles and boogie tunes, but few bluesmen know more ways to traverse a 12-bar progression or evoke Lightnin' Hopkins-like turnarounds with thumb-pick and fingers. Trading his Lazer for a vintage Gibson Firebird, Winter saved his slashing slide guitar work for the end of the show, as no doubt most fans hoped he would, when he tore into Bob Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited" with the vigorous support of bassist Scott Spray and drummer Wayne June.

-- Mike Joyce

BosmaDance

The theater space was the size of a closet. The stage was the size of a pea. The chairs were hard and the audience so close to the dancers that the first row was in danger of getting smacked by flying feet. All of this was part of the rough charm at Flashpoint's Mead Theatre Lab on Wednesday when BosmaDance presented its 45-minute "Violet in My Winter," a work inspired by the poems and letters by Emily Dickenson.

That Meisha Bosma can successfully choreograph a four-person work for such a small stage is a feat in and of itself. This work has her charming signature combination of dance and gesture. She cleverly uses repetition to create surprise, repeating certain movement phrases and gestures in unexpected places. Here and there, the index finger of one hand counts the digits of the other, or a cupped hand scoops the air.

Bosma's works generally are thoughtful, well structured and inventive. This piece was no different. Yet the theme felt forced, as if she'd taken it on as an assignment. In fact, this work was jointly commissioned by a number of groups, including the Emily Dickinson International Society, and it was first performed at one of its conferences. Perhaps there was an effort here to explore Dickinson-inspired emotional landscapes, but the plethora of pencils and papers on the stage, as well as a desk at which someone often sat writing, racheted this work down a peg down from emotional to descriptive.

Still, the intimacy of the setting and the cleverness of the choreography made for a delightful albeit brief evening. "Violet in My Winter" runs tonight at 8 p.m., tomorrow and Jan. 21 at 4 p.m., and Jan. 18-20 at 8 p.m.

-- Pamela Squires