Brian Slattery Photo
“I like playing music, and I like playing for you guys, because it seems like you’re listening. So let’s keep it going.
So said Darian Cunning — armed with just his voice, a hollow-body Guild electric, a pedal rack, and an amp — halfway through a set that kept a lot of people at Cafe Nine up a lot later than usual.
Cunning was the third of three songwriters featured in the fourth installment of The Almighty Co-Sign, an ongoing series curated and hosted by acclaimed Waterbury hip-hop artist Sketch Tha Cataclysm. The lineup of Chelsea Genzano, Ada Pasternak, and Cunning, with interludes by DJ Mo Niklz, blithely disregarded silly things like genre boundaries to deliver an evening that only seemed to get deeper and richer as it continued.
Niklz started off the evening with a DJ set that accompanied a film tribute to Sean Price and Rowdy Roddy Piper, culminating in his famous lines from John Carpenter’s 1988 classic They Live. The crowd began to fill in as Sketch took the stage for a few songs.
“Maybe you weren’t expecting a rapper” at a songwriter night, he joked, but then started with a short solo piece that set the mood for the night, as he pulled a driving groove out of nothing more than his voice and his hand, pounding out a beat through a single microphone.
“Thanks for coming out on a Monday,” he said. “That’s cool. Music is important to you.”
Genzano insisted a couple times in her set that she doesn’t play out much. “This is tiring!” she said. “I don’t know how you real musicians do this night after night.” She sounded plenty seasoned, though, as she set her propulsive guitar work under a voice completely at ease in the territory where country and soul meet, whether she was performing songs she said she finished that afternoon, or numbers that felt like old favorites.
Likewise, for her first two pieces, Pasternak — on just voice and violin — expanded a simple riff and lyrics into explorations that encompassed both contemporary violin techniques and a small fragment of Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins. She ended her set by turning the violin into a ukulele to perform a disarmingly charming song this reporter is sorry not to have captured, about someone who might be falling in love with her; maybe, she suggested, she just might be falling in love in return.
The rest of the night, though, belonged to Cunning. Well-known as a ridiculously talented guitar player, he’s been busy playing with the Bridgeport-based reggae band Black Rock Social (which will be playing Pacific Standard Tavern on Aug. 15) and many others. On his debut record, 2010’s The Lost and Found Channel, he plays virtually all the instruments on the album. These days, thanks to the creative use of a loop pedal and just the right guitar tones, he can play virtually all the instruments he needs live, out of one instrument. The sound he made — a bit like a soul band coming in hot over an AM station — brought most of the room to a standstill for the duration of his set, whether he piled on the layers for something close to the roar of a full lineup or stripped it all the back down to just his guitar and his voice. He kept it going late. No one really wanted to leave.