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Adam.
“Welcome to Cafe Nine,” Seth Adam said from the stage as he tuned his guitar. “You’re in a building with a lot of history, and this particular venue means a lot to me. I love playing here.”
The healthy-sized crowd gave a round of applause.
Making his nod to the club’s nickname of the “musicians’ living room,” the New Haven-based musician then explained that he was going to do a song called “Not Sad to See You Leave.”
“It’s not about you guys,” he assured the audience. “Well, not most of you.”
With affable charm, tight musicianship, and solid songwriting, the Seth Adam Band — Adam on guitar and vocals, David Keith on drums and backup vocals — rocked through a set of Adam’s originals that brought a crowd and kept them there on Thursday night. Adam’s clear, direct voice filled the space as he switched with ease between often intricate rhythm guitar work and dextrous soloing. On drums, Keith showed his ability to create spacious, driving rhythms as well as quiet atmosphere, sometimes switching from one to the other on a dime.
Adam’s and Keith’s own history showed their New Haven roots. Adam explained that he and Keith connected when they formed the rhythm section for a Mighty Purple reunion, with Adam on bass and Keith on drums. Keith had an act with his sister as well — until she moved to the West Coast, leaving Keith with gig obligations. He asked if Adam would be interested in filling in. (Adam joked that this was because he owned a PA.) Adam said yes. They have now been playing together for two years, and it showed in the musical and personal camaraderie between them.
“It’s a pleasure to have you here,” Adam said to Keith early in their set.
“It’s a pleasure to be had,” Keith responded, then addressed the audience. “I hope all of you have as much pleasure as I’m about to have.”
“Tonight is all about pleasure,” Adam added. He then played a song that he mentioned he wrote with Steve Rodgers of Mighty Purple in mind. The song was called “The Real Ones.”
“You can tell who the real ones are,” Adam sang. “They never let you down.”
As the set went on, it became more expansive. There was a round of applause at Adam’s request — because of the socialist in him, he explained — for Hannah, running sound, and Dan, tending bar. Adam and Keith ended their set with a song that allowed Adam to deploy seemingly every pedal he had onstage to create a highly arranged loop that he then faded out expertly, with Keith riding the volume down. But they ended their set by leaving the stage and walking to the center of the bar with just an acoustic guitar and tambourine. They sang “With a Little Help from My Friends” in clear harmonies. The audience sang along.
Dolzani.
Before the second act, Brian Dolzani. took the stage, Adam described him as “New England’s best-kept secret, because he has great songs, he sings from the heart — and he sings in key.” Dolzani and his band — George Ramirez on guitar, Bill Conroy on bass, and John Macchia on drums — had all that and more. With Conroy and Macchia laying down a solid foundation and Ramirez proving equally adept with fingers and slide, the Brian Dolzani band produced a warm gritty sound for Dolzani’s strong singing voice to cut through.
In between songs, Dolzani parceled out just enough details about his songwriting life to reveal that he travels a lot. At least three of the songs were written on highways, whether I‑95, or a road in western Pennsylvania, or another road in Indiana with a seedy motel on it that caught his eye. Still more songs were written in southern cities. The Connecticut-based songwriter’s affinity for the South even extended to the historical, as he constructed one song from details in The Land Where the Blues Began, the book by musicologist Alan Lomax about his sojourns in the South decades ago to “discover” new musicians.
Of course, Dolzani said, “Lomax discovered Leadbelly the way Columbus discovered America” — that is, there were plenty of people who already knew about Leadbelly before Lomax did. That sense of wry and sometimes dark humor showed up in Dolzani’s songwriting, with evocations of hangings, dusty highways, and fleeting romances in motels just like the one in Indiana Dolzani had seen.
Sometimes the extent of Dolzani’s travels felt like a whirlwind even to Dolzani. “I wrote that in Mobile, Alabama a couple days ago,” he said of a song, then stopped himself. “What am I talking about It was a couple years ago.”
He collected himself. “I was there before the line was drawn.” A few in the audience laughed. “That was a topical joke,” he said, and the audience laughed more.