Noah Macey Photo
Alexa Rose.
“Boy, it’s nice to play for such a quiet room,” folksinger Alexa Rose commented between songs on Friday night at Café Nine.
The club was full, but the patrons were more interested in hearing from her than from each other. The only real noise was the hoots and wolf whistles every time she finished a song or one of her musicians stuck the landing of a solo.
Alexa Rose and her band (pictured) — Tim Comstock on bass, Zack Strum on the drums, and Jackson Dulaney on the ethereal pedal steel — mostly performed songs off her new album, Medicine for Living. Released by Legal Mess Records last month, the music rings of Appalachian folkways, with gleaming Southern vowels and delicate vocals interspersed with pulses of instrumentation.
The lyrics had the folk penchant for metaphor. Take “The Leaving Kind,” a track off Medicine for Living that features the lyric, “This distance is a weight that I don’t carry well.” Rose balanced the emotion of the music with an utterly charming audience rapport. When an audience member sneezed, she stopped discussing her album to interject a heartfelt, “bless you!”
And when she advertised the CDs of Medicine for Living on sale at the merchandise table, she made sure to tell the audience how to use them— “They make good coasters,” she joked. She also suggested using them as tiny Frisbees, though she did also mention something called a CD player.
Lucky 5.
The Lucky 5 (pictured), who followed Alexa at Friday night’s show (which was put together by promoter Fernando Pinto) also remarked on the quietness of the club. The five-piece jazz band from Great Barrington, Mass., features a bass, clarinet, guitar, violin, and trombone. Though the pace ramped up when they took the stage from Rose, the similar twangs of their string-jazz and the Appalachian music unified the night’s soundscape in an unexpected way. The crowd at Café Nine found itself in the middle of an eclectic collective from the Berkshires and young Appalachian performers who mixed similar folksy string-picking into very different cocktails.
Over the course of their set, The Lucky 5 covered territory ranging from jug-band music to classical violin to of “Coucou” by Django Reinhardt, the Romani jazz guitarist who invented “gypsy jazz.” The band also played his arrangement of “Clair de Lune,” during which Alexa Rose started a bout of slow dancing that swept up several audience members.The trombonist Carolyn Dufraine added vocals to her instrumental role in these songs — an impressive feat of lung capacity, and in French, no less. She’s been taking opera history classes at University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and clearly something has crossed over from theory to practice.