Brian Slattery Photos
Fernanda and the Ephemeral.
On Tuesday night, the crowded house at Cafe Nine on State and Crown learned that Fernanda Franco was a driver’s education instructor and an art teacher at a school in Danbury. We learned, too, that fellow bandmember Alex Patrie was an ace songwriter.
Perhaps most of all, we learned that Franco and headliner Tameca Jones have voices more than powerful enough to fill the club, and we reveled in the results.
Fernanda and the Ephemeral — Franco on vocals, Patrie on guitar, keyboards, and background vocals, Zack Rosenberg on guitar, Zack Ross on keys, guitar, and background vocals, Jeff Moro on bass guitar, and Jacob Habegger on drums and background vocals — could easily have been mistaken for the headlining act. The band delivered a polished set of R&B that had drums and bass in tight sync while guitars and keyboards layered on textures and counterrhythms. A cover of a usually gritty Macy Gray song was rendered sweeter and deeper. An original song borrowed a couple ideas from country music, until slide guitar gave way to a slinky groove.
The band could range sonically far because with a singer like Franco, it was hard to miss. Whether bringing her voice down to breathy whisper or wailing to beat the electric guitar soloing next to her, Franco commanded center stage, yet did so with kindness. She took time to introduce the band (“I am flanked by Zacks”), take herself down a peg (“I tell my driver’s ed students about my flip phone and they’re like ‘what?’ I tell them I used to pay per text and they’re like, ‘excuse me?’”), and throw some love to the next band.
“We have one more and then you get to hear the most amazing mama,” Franco said at the end of the band’s set. “This one is about nefarious things, so we’re going to pretend that’s not true.” The last song was one of the band’s finest, a big, slow groove that featuring slippery keys and guitar work, all anchored by Franco’s voice.
Tameca Jones.
The Austin, Tex.-based Tameca Jones threw the love right back. “Can we give it up for FaTE?” Jones said. “You spoke to me with that voice, girl. And that band is killer.”
Jones then showed that she had a killer band herself. With a crack drummer and an electric guitar player who did double-duty manning a laptop for further backup sounds, Jones partially followed the tradition of great R&B singers who take well-known songs and make them so much their own that for a minute it’s hard to believe they were performed any other way. Jones did that to an Elton John song, to a Rolling Stones song, and to an Isley Brothers song.
But it was on her originals that Jones shone the most, crooning and caterwauling over pulsing grooves that had people up and dancing halfway through her set. They never sat still again after that.
“Sexy songs, sexy times,” she said. “Sexy songs for sexy times.” That was to introduce a particular number about calling up an ex for a final one-night fling, but it could have applied to the energy and fun Jones had brought to the stage from the beginning. By the end of the set, Jones and her trio had made Cafe Nine their own.
“So this next song, we wrote two weeks ago,” Jones said coyly. “So it’s still little.”
“Give it to us!” someone in the audience demanded. And Tameca Jones did.