Kahane puts a new twist on art songs
The song as a musical genre enjoyed a more or less unbroken history from the lieder of Schubert and Schumann through the heyday of Tin Pan Alley and into the age of rock and beyond. To say as much is something of a truism — but to hear that truth embodied by a great artist, as it was in Gabriel Kahane’s splendid solo recital on Sunday, March 5, at the SFJazz Center, is to understand it afresh.
Appearing as part of San Francisco Performances’ Pivot series, this inventive and protean singer-songwriter-composer had a simple but intriguingly nuanced project in mind — to gather the 200-year history of the art song into a
two-hour sampler and illuminate some of the continuity that has sustained it.
Also, he sang and played the piano, which he does beautifully.
The connections that Kahane drew to the music of earlier eras surface in two ways. The more telling and evocative was the way echoes of the past bubble up in his own songs — Schubertian harmonic gestures, narrative structures that owe a debt to the big dramatic ballads of the 19th century and a deceptively plainspoken lyricism that harks back to Jerome Kern or Cole Porter.
But he also made the allusions explicit by performing “Dichterliebe,” Schumann’s groundbreaking song cycle of 1840, as though it were the work of an indie-pop balladeer who had somehow decided to work in German. The effect was unnerving, powerful and often revelatory.
Setting up and framing the Schumann was a large helping of Kahane’s own work, including “Craigslistlieder,” a comic song cycle whose texts come verbatim from online ads (whether or not he has the legal rights to these texts was the subject of a funny, and inconclusive, anecdote told from the stage).
The texts are selected with an eye to maximum weirdness. They begin with a classic missed connection — “You looked sexy, even though you were having a seizure” — and continue through a creepy yet pitiable romantic want ad, an oddball religious rant and some unsavory offers of goods for trade before exploding into a final operatic showpiece about a roommate-seeker whose personal compulsions have made it necessary for him to discount the shared rent considerably.
All of this is cast in music that is by turns heated, delicate, self-dramatizing or slapstick, and all of it — perhaps the final song especially — finds a way to be both amused by and sympathetic to the freakishness on display. There’s a world of musical tenderness just below the mockery.
That double vision, so essential to Kahane’s artistry, came through even more effectively in some of the other selections on the program. They included excerpts from his 2014 masterpiece “The Ambassador,” a suite of songs rooted in the emotional and physical geography of Los Angeles, which came to a head with an expansive and hauntingly fine tribute to a teenage girl murdered in the aftermath of the Rodney King riots.
Kahane brought translucent grace to a number of slow ballads, including the title track from his album “Where Are the Arms,” and the Jerome Kern/ Oscar Hammerstein classic “The Folks Who Live on the Hill.” And he previewed a new song, “Little Love,” which echoed jauntily in my brain for hours after the show.
And in the middle of all this, Kahane did something perfectly transgressive and wonderful by singing Schumann through a microphone, with all the deadpan irony and vulnerability that infuses his own material. That throaty, colloquial tone instantly gave Schumann’s songs a poetic sheen that can sometimes vanish in more formal setting.
It also, I think, blurred some of the work’s fierce brilliance. Many of the “Dichterliebe” songs, setting poems by Heine, are like little emotional cherry bombs that explode in their final moments; in Kahane’s muzzy, unruffled delivery, some of the sharper detonations seemed to register through a scrim of mumblecore impassivity.
But none of that quite dampened the flush of discovery, or dimmed the overall magic of the evening. In a world where the art song recital seems to be constantly on the verge of extinction, Kahane has found a way to make this music connect to new listeners.