Brian Slattery Photos
Posen.
Ariel Posen — acclaimed guitar hero on tour from Canada — had something to say near the beginning of his set at Cafe Nine Wednesday.
“This is equally amazing and equally strange,” he said. “Something you do pretty regularly for kind of forever stops for what feels like forever … then we’re expected to just jump back into it like nothing happened.”
He smiled.
“It wouldn’t feel like it used to if it wasn’t for you guys, so give yourselves a round of applause.”
The packed audience of entirely masked people clapped their hands. At a show at which proof of vaccination was required at the door and wearing a mask was the rule, Posen and the Connecticut-based Joey Wit and the Definition served up two sets of guitar music straight from the heart.
Joey Wit and the Definition.
Joey Wit and the Definition — on this night a duo composed of Wit and guitarist Clay Selmont — took the stage with grace and humility. “Man, that guy can really play guitar,” Wit said of Posen at the beginning of their set. “Thanks for listening to us while you’re waiting to hear him play.” Mentioning that it took “a lot of work” to put the show together (believable, given that Posen was traveling from Canada), Wit also thanked the audience for “being cool with the regulations” regarding vaccines and masks.
“If you follow me” on social media, “I’ll follow you back. I’m not one of those guys who just wants the followers. I actually want to know what’s going on in your life,” he added amiably.
Wit and Selmont gave the audience songs about falling in and out of love, delivering them with style. Wit’s voice was by turns low and gritty and high and clear. His acoustic guitar gave the songs their backbone while Selmont fleshed them out with textures, slides, and solos from his electric guitar. They stopped and started their songs using the telepathy of familiar bandmates, infusing the material with dynamics that let the music go from a roar to a whisper of fingerpicking from one beat to the next.
But even Wit was looking forward to hearing Posen. “It’s a pleasure to have a certified guitar player, as Chet Atkins would say, here at Cafe Nine,” he said, as he ceded the stage.
Posen said that “we have not played a show in 17 months, and I could not be happier to be sharing this experience with you since what feels like forever.” It didn’t sound like it. Julian Bradford on bass and Jon Smith on drums provided rock-solid, muscular rhythm, redolent of both late Beatles and 1970s R&B. But this was really Posen’s show. He sang his songs in an easy, laid-back way; the drama was all in the guitar, as Posen’s mastery of his chosen style was evident from the first note, in the way he articulated his chords. His first solos gave the keen sense of a musician who could probably play whatever he wanted, and just didn’t feel the need to show it all at once.
He also didn’t take himself very seriously. “I can’t do two things at once,” he joked while trying to talk and tune at the same time.
“Seems like you can!” someone yelled from the crowd.
“Okay, fine,” Posen said. “Singing and playing guitar. Those are the only two things.” It gave him a chance to talk a bit more about the pandemic we were all still going through. “At the end of the day it’s like music always wins,” he said, mentioning that, in addition to the complications and dangers wrought by Covid-19, for touring musicians there was still also the fractious drudgery of crummy motel rooms and bad road food. “What makes it worth it to us is to be playing to a room packed with you guys.”
In the second half of his set, Posen really settled in. The jams got longer, more expressive, more ornate, more aggressive, more lyrical. Posen filled his playing with phrases that pauses that surprised, delighted, and stunned, drawing whoops and whistles from the crowd at several turns. Most telling, there was no conversation at all from the audience — not during the songs, not between them. People were there to listen, and had in some sense risked their health to do it. Posen was there to make music that was worth that risk to hear.
For an encore, Posen gave his most extended jam yet — but not before giving the audience a way to participate directly in the music itself. He split the audience into three sections and made a choir of them, teaching each section their musical line in a three-part harmony that turned the chorus into an event. It was a song about longing and love and sadness, so the line the audience was singing carried just the right amount of irony. They sang “it really don’t matter,” but it really did.