Brian Slattery Photos
Jeremy Cooney of Brother Beauty gave the audience a sly smile from the stage. “Feeling good, feeling loose, and that’s a good way to feel,” he said at the beginning of his set. It set the tone for a two-band bill at Cafe Nine Wednesday night that matched a new New Haven band with a well-traveled touring act from Kentucky, with pleasing, relaxed, and spaced-out results.
The trio of Cooney, Bobby Dyckman, and Rob Galvin — three-fifths of the full band, Dyckman mentioned, and all singing and playing acoustic guitars — used a range of guitar techniques, three-part harmonies, and the occasional harmonica to create songs that were by turns full and energetic, intricate, and delicate, unified by a sense of easy-going positivity.
In between songs the members of the New Haven-based Brother Beauty had a similar easy amiability, as when Cooney asked if anyone had seen The Many Saints of Newark, the new Sopranos movie.
“Fuhgeddaboudit,” someone in the audience said.
“Actually,” Cooney said, “that’s one thing they didn’t say.” Displaying his nerdy fandom, he talked about how showrunner David Chase had forbidden the writers to use the phrase. “They could say ‘whaddayagonnado,’ but not ‘fuhgeddaboudit,’” he said amiably.
“Fuhgeddabout ‘fuhgeddaboudit,’” the audience member said.
The trio got even better as their set progressed. Dyckman’s voice rang out strong. Cooney showed that he knew his way around his instrument’s fingerboard, wrapping the songs in long threads of textured notes. Galvin held things down, giving the other two the support they needed to make the songs whole. Brother Beauty, a band that according to its social media presence played its first show only a few months ago, was already comfortably more than skin deep.
The musicians in the Wooks — CJ Cain on guitar, Harry Clark on mandolin, George Guthrie on banjo, Allen Cooke on dobro, and Jeff Saunders on bass — started their set with a sunny, stomping song that grabbing attention from the first note. “Thank you folks!” Clark said. “Thank you for clapping for bluegrass music. I’ll try not to say too much because I don’t know many words.”
That, of course, was a lie, as the Wooks sprawled out over a set of originals and covers that had most of the band singing long lines of melody in tight harmonies while also displaying consummate mastery of their instruments. Early in their set the musicians in the five-piece unleashed an instrumental that made someone in the audience yell “shred!” afterward. They could trade solos as well as any bluegrass band, but specialized in the kind of group improvisation that let each of the musicians explore the possibilities for their instruments.
It was bluegrass with a healthy dose of jam-band attitude, musically and lyrically. One song late in the set, for instance, recounted the story of a friend of the band’s shoplifting a cheetah-print body suit out of necessity after she tried it on in the dressing room and was unable to get out of it. But the band showed its true colors in the music itself. The banter between the songs got shorter and shorter (“here’s another song—” Guthrie said, then trailed off into repeating “here’s another song,” eliciting laughter). The jams got longer and longer. The musicians let their songs get spacy, deploying rhythms that borrowed from rock, funk, and R&B as well as more folk idioms, and transported the audience with them, too, without breaking a sweat. It was, as one listener put it succinctly after a particularly smoking improvisation, “fucking unreal.”