Nelson.
Sunday afternoon’s tribute at Cafe Nine to New Haven-based musician and writer Rob Nelson, who died of a heart attack on May 26 at the age of 56, began with a reading of an excerpt of Walt Whitman, from his preface to Leaves of Grass.
“This is what you shall do,” read Karen Ponzio, who served as host for the afternoon, to a full house at the club on State and Crown. (Ponzio reports for the New Haven Independent.) “Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”
Brian Slattery Photos
The reading was a more than apt opening to an afternoon dedicated to a lover of language and a pillar and supporter of the New Haven music scene, who in decades of activity produced dozens of recordings and started music projects across an astonishing range of genres, from pop to rock to folk to world music. At the time of his death, he was one half of the duo Pigeon English with Brian Larney, which explored close harmonies and expansive, poppy sounds to create something that reached back to bands like the Everly Brothers, updated with a thoroughly modern sensibility. He was also playing with Elegant Primates (of which he was a founding member), a collective of musicians that drew on Afropop and other styles to create their festive sound. And both before and during the pandemic, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), drawing in multitudes of collaborators to help on his genre-bending, catchy concoctions, whether they were poems of Emily Dickinson set to music or words and music of his devising.
His death left a hole in the social fabric of the New Haven scene. Before the pandemic, he had been a constant presence at live shows in New Haven and elsewhere in the state, always supporting the musicians around him. Before and during the pandemic, he was a perennial and benevolent social media presence. A memorial service held near New Haven shortly after his death drew dozens to a friend’s backyard to celebrate him. The crowd at Cafe Nine that came on Sunday — multigenerational and multigenre — to celebrate Nelson’s life in a more public way was testament to the way his absence, and his presence, were still felt.
The tribute took the form of several musical acts who were there to perform the music Nelson had written throughout his life, from the 1980s to this year. Throughout, the songs revealed a songwriter with a mind full of clever lyrics, catchy melodies, and delightful harmonic structures, a person who was a devout student and dedicated teacher of culture.
“Make some noise for Rob Nelson,” said Pete, who kept his introductions to first names (including band members David and David) of a group of musicians calling themselves The Friends of Rob Nelson. “You all know what an amazing spirit he was and is. He had tons of stories, but we’re not going to tell stories. We’re going to make music.” They reached back to the song “Sunday Girl,” a 1987 single Nelson had recorded with the band The Wishing Years. They followed it with the song “Go to Your Window,” which Nelson had released on May 7. It was, one of the Davids said, about “remembering to breathe and to take the time to appreciate what’s around you.” Everyone cheered the group between songs. “It’s a really good song, Rob,” David said.
They then moved into “Take a Minute,” from Nelson’s 2020 reworking and rerelease of the album Apple Green and Pear. The crowd were now their allies, as David revealed that he had made T‑shirts for everyone in honor of the day. “This is the most fun we’ve had since we got the bad news,” David said.
Brian Ebin Parker Wolfe and Bobo Lavorgna sang a song they’d released with Nelson in March of this year. Nelson had written the lyrics, Wolfe the music; Nelson had sung it with Wolfe playing guitar and Lavorgna playing bass.
Wolfe explained that Nelson had written the song to mark the death of his own father. It “seemed appropriate” for him to sing it for Nelson now. It was; the lyrics, poignant and simple, fit Wolfe’s wistful, chiming guitar.
Anne Castellano sang her collaboration with Nelson, called “Forever is Composed of Nows”; Nelson combined two Emily Dickinson poems for the lyrics, wrote the music, and recorded all the instruments. Castellano used the music from the released single as a backing track to sing it at Cafe Nine on Sunday, effectively playing with Nelson in front of an audience for a final time.
She shared what the experience of making music with Nelson had been like. “I remember I was recording the vocal and he cheered me on. He was so enthusiastic. I miss him,” she said.
Brian Larney next took the stage for a set of Pigeon English songs. He began with “Gentle in My Sleep”; to replicate the harmonies he and Nelson had sung, he took Nelson’s part while musician Lys Guillorn took his part.
“You’re probably going to get tired of me saying that was one of my favorite Rob songs,” Larney said after the song, “but that is one of my favorite Rob songs.” True to his word, he repeated the line throughout his short set (“OK, this really is my favorite Rob song”; “OK, for real, this really is my favorite Rob song”) as he played songs from the two albums he and Nelson had made together, Coo! and Places Everyone, including “Sweet and Indestructible Love,” “Say It Simply,” “Strange Tributation,” and “You Decided to Leave Me.”
Larney testified to how prolific Nelson was as a songwriter; in developing albums for Pigeon English, he said, for every one demo he would send Nelson, Nelson would send him five. “It was all strict harmonies,” Larney said halfway through his set about the music he wrote with Nelson, “so it goes without saying that something’s missing. I’m struggling, trying to figure out which notes to sing, his or mine.” The strength of the songs still shone through, as Larney ably got the audience to clap and snap their fingers for percussion parts, and sing one of the chorus hooks, filling the club with voices.
Guillorn then performed “Long Lonely Night,” from Apple Green and Peach, stripping it down to just voice and acoustic guitar to reveal the sweetness in the song’s buttery pop surface.
“I hope that we continue to play Rob Nelson’s music and work his songs into our sets, the way the Birdmen do with James Velvet.” At the back of bar was a framed photograph of Velvet, the beloved New Haven musician who died in 2015 and whose music is carried on by the Birdmen, who played with Velvet in The Mockingbirds. (New Haven musicians played a tribute to Velvet’s music in March of this year as a livestreamed event.)
The Elegant Primates finished out the music with a set of music that pulled from African, Latin, and Caribbean ideas, but still bore all the hallmarks of Nelson’s other music. The rhythms were enough to get a couple dancing in the crowd after it was pointed out that restrictions against dancing in clubs like Cafe Nine were a thing of the past.
The last words of the afternoon, however, belonged to Stephanie Hart, Nelson’s wife, reading from Nelson’s collection of poetry Accidental Hieroglyphs. She chose a piece called “The Harmony of Accidents,” which Hart described as being about music and sex, the city and love. “I hope I can do it justice,” she said.
She unfurled Nelson’s words to a silent bar, delivering a message about the aching, futile beauty of trying to capture fleeting things — music, moments of time, each other. “Just when we’re bound by a moment’s glorious ambiguity, stuck between the sunsets, music shatters us in reassembly,” she read. “Nothing we sing or shape really catches the glow in a jar, or tacks down this ballet of gorgeous mistakes that’s always ending in imbalance. We live between the chords and never see one another.” She thanked the audience for coming. Everyone erupted in applause.