O.K. Company and Jessy Griz brought down the house and soothed the soul at Cafe Nine on Thursday night, with an evening of strong voices, deep grooves, and big emotions.
Jessy Griz started her set alone behind a keyboard, a beaming smile on her face. “Welcome to the Nine!” she said. “So good to see your faces. O.K. Company will keep you happy. I’ll play things to keep you crying. I’m here to make you feel things — it’s what I do.”
It was an apt opening to a set of intense originals, sprinkled with a couple choice covers, that proved Griz was as good as her word. Griz’s powerful voice could take famous songs, like Frankie Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You,” and make them her own. But she wowed the most with her originals, which told emotionally open stories of trauma and recovery, sadness and hope. In between songs, Griz was a perfect balance of confident and self-deprecating; when she told the crowd point-blank that she was on stage to make them give her money, her tone invited the audience to laugh, and she laughed back. “It’s my pastoral training,” she said.
She also savvily built up and took down her set. Trumpeter Tim Kane joined Griz onstage for her second song to round out the sound. Guitarist Pete Greco followed for the third song. By the fourth song, drummer Austin Morrison had taken his place at the back of the stage. Together the four of them shredded a Griz original that drew raucous cheers at the end.
“Aren’t these guys the best?” she said of her backup musicians. But after a couple songs, Griz then brought her set full circle, performing her last few songs solo again, with guitar. By this time, the audience was eating out of her hand, going dead quiet during the songs and sending out raw-throated cheers at the end.
“Are you kidding me?” someone shouted.
“You just made me cry,” Griz said, still smiling. “That’s what I get for trying to make you cry.”
But though the songs were often sad and personal, they always pointed toward hope, as in another song, about generational trauma, that the crowd listened to in silence. “You got to love that lie,” she sang, “love it to death / let it die / let it resurrect / into your standing tall / into the sparkle in your eye / the love that stands beside / the love you find inside.”
As O.K. Company — LaQruishia Gill on vocals, Joshua Wyrtzen on keyboards, Pete Greco on guitar, Lamar Smith on bass, and Austin Morrison on drums — quickly took their places on the stage, the audience started cheering. “Look at you guys,” Gill said with approval, “clapping, and we haven’t even done anything yet. We’re O.K. Company and we hope, at a minimum, that we’re O.K. Company. We’re just going to jump right in.”
With a minimum of fuss, that’s what the band did. Gill explained that the band’s set was a walk through their recorded output, starting with 2020’s A Mini EP and proceeding through 2022’s Stronglove, then moving into new material that the band is planning on recording this weekend. The result, in keeping with a band that has grown seemingly with every recording and every gig, was a set that gathered strength and intensity with every song. It hit a first peak a few songs in with a number for which Gill invited Kane to join them. The result was a big, classic sound that started slow and spare and built into a lush climax.
“That song came about because I asked Josh to write us a gospel, Motown number, and he clearly delivered,” Gill said. “That’s Joshua A. Wyrtzen, for anyone trying to steal his identity.”
The new songs, meanwhile, showed that O.K. Company was in the process of broadening its sound even further, exploring new grooves, new textures, new energies. The upbeat “Nothing Is Still Matter” found the band reaching back to a classic Otis Redding-style dance feel that gave the band a chance to strut. Meanwhile, new song “Sunny Day” proved to be a perfect wind-down for the evening, matching the audience’s mood precisely, as some chatted with friends, others swayed to the rhythm, and a still others just stood there, listening, taking it all in.