Last Monday night, we actually motivated our fat lazy asses to get out of the house on a Monday night and drive down to Atlanta art center The Bakery for a show by Lonnie Holley and Mary Lattimore. And why wouldn't we? The Bakery is an ultra-cool DIY visual and performing arts gallery and teaching center, and Holley and Lattimore are the current creme de la creme of unclassifiable improvisational music.
We've seen Mary Lattimore perform before. Back in 2014, she played an improvised set with electric guitarist Thurston Moore, formerly of the band Sonic Youth, during the Hopscotch music festival in Raleigh, North Carolina, and in 2016, she opened for Julianna Barwick at the Mammal Gallery. We were impressed by her approach to the harp, which included electronic manipulation of the tone and pitch of her instrument, as well as use of a loop repeater to build layers of sound.
She brought much the same approach to her set Monday night at The Bakery, and no small part of the enjoyment of her music was the variety of approaches to music and song structure throughout her set - every song was markedly different from the others, not what you might have expected from a set of all-instrumental solo harp.
Lonney Holly's set started with a way-too-long (seriously, like well over 10 minutes) introduction by promoter Matt Arnett. Note to Matt: If you're in a roomful of people who came out on a Monday night in December to hear Holley play at an obscure venue in an odd part of town, chances are good that we all already know who he is and what he does, and you don't need to go over his life story, critical reception, and explanation of his art - we're obviously fans. Just shut up already and let him play already.
Seriously, we don't think we've yet seen Holley perform without Matt first feeding his own ego onstage with long, rambling introductions. He did it when we saw Holley as a headliner at Eddie's Attic) and as an opener for Animal Collective at Symphony Hall. And he did it a third time on Monday night.
After we finally got past that, the set by Lonnie Holley was probably the most unique of all the shows we've seen so far, both due to the intimate setting of The Bakery and the unusual backing of Holley's vocals and keyboards by guitarist Lee Bains II of the band Lee Bains III & The Glory Fire ("Real Alabama Rock & Roll") and, after the second or third song, by Mary Lattimore on harp.
Based on their stage banter, Holley has apparently known Bains for a long time, possibly since Bains' childhood. I believe this was Lattimore and Holley's first meeting, though. The entire set - songs, lyrics, melodies and all - was completely improvised, a stream-of-consciousness conglomeration by three very intuitive and sensitive artists. It was truly sublime.
Here's a small and very unrepresentative sample of the set that doesn't nearly do justice to the evening or the range of emotions and sounds produced. It's like providing a few leaves from a salad at a massive smorgasbord as a representation of the entire feast. But a little bit's better than nothing, we guess, so here you go.
Doesn't do justice, but it's not like we're going to record it and post in on YouTube and not include it here, amirite?
Lonnie Holley has a film debuting at Sundance next year called I Snuck Off the Slave Ship and an album out called Mith. We strongly recommend the latter and although we haven't yet seen the former, we're looking forward to it.
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