Nik Turner's Hawkwind w/ Nightbitch 10/30/13 BAR

A fitting musical event for the day before halloween. Local group, Nightbitch was more metal than prog. Frontman had a Vedder-esque delivery and they came armed with some capable songs. The evenings highlight was a revisit from the 70s prog behemoth Hawkwind. Founding member Nik Turner on sax and flute is now in his 70s. Guitar, bass, drums, and spacekeys with Turner played in front of a video screen that switched from vintage video to trippy blaxploitation footage. Hawkwind was prog-metal somewhere between Pink Floyd and Black Sabbath. Turner's current (much younger) bandmates certainly worshipped at the altar of original Hawkwind. The scantily-clad twentysomething female on keyboards spent much of the time suggestively gyrating, which was definitely part of this bands m.o. Performing much of the epic album Space Ritual to a near capacity crowd, Hawkwind hasn't skipped a beat (and even if they had, who would know?)

William Tyler 10/23/13 BAR

A few weeks ago a guitar hero, ex Captain Beefheart and Yale alum Gary Lucas was in town to play some songs from his recent chinese pop record. Unfortunately, the show was at the Yale Center for Asian Studies at 4pm on a Tuesday (aren't all college students watching re-runs of The Rockford Files at this time?), so I missed it natch. So I was excited to see that William Tyler (Silver Jews, Lambchop) was coming to Bar for a free show. Tyler, solo, had immense hands. It looked as if he had tarantulas on his wrists as he moved from fret to fret. The first tune was a vibrato drenched loopfest called "Cadillac Desert" inspired by a book on US water policy in the southwest. Another tune was about his girlfriends parents house 60 miles south of Dublin. This music was ambient, and washed over you to impart some landscape. It sounds like I'm describing new age. This music was more challenging than new age, darker, better.

The Claudia Quintet 10/4/13 Firehouse 12

Drummer Jon Hollenbeck leads this unusual fivesome. Accordion, bass, vibes, clarinet/sax, and drums/piano gave an old timey feel to this thoroughly modern jazz. Most of the set came from the recent release containing songs about September. In an effort to cope with the pang of 9/11, Hollenbeck constructs songs for cathartic healing. Expert playing from all members. On one tune Hollenbeck forced weird noises from mini cymbals inverted on toms and snare. Fantastic looped piece had cuts of an FDR speech interspersed (how much the political dialog hasn't changed since 1936). "The Limpidity of Silence" was a partial spoken word piece based on a poem. Outside the club, the artists LAMPfest (light artists making places) was in full swing with video installations and light sculptures art-ifying 9th square.