The ere of uncertainty was palpable in the moments leading up to the opening note of Saturday evening’s performance by Ben Folds and his new musical alliance.
The ere of uncertainty was palpable in the moments leading up to the opening note of Saturday evening’s performance by Ben Folds and his new musical alliance.
yMusic, a Brooklyn-based chamber sextet composed of classically-trained musicians, has been making the rounds in both classical and popular music scenes since 2008. Their growing list of collaborations includes tracks with Dirty Projectors, Sufjan Stevens, and My Brightest Diamond, though their original work is more strictly classical, so it’s understandable if many Ben Folds fans had not seen their name before this tour and collaborative album were announced.
Ben Folds concert enthusiasts have come to expect a level of showmanship that few acts can rival. In his last appearance at the National, Folds propositioned the audience to hurl paper airplanes containing song requests towards the stage. Another concert in 2010 saw the artist conducting improvisational, video-projected ChatRoullette serenades with unsuspecting online strangers; the audience and his piano affixed in the webcam of his laptop. The question remained: what kind of experience would Folds unfurl tonight?
As the house lights dimmed, the members of yMusic assembled on stage and took their seats, which branched out from the backside of Fold’s piano like antennae. Folds’ bench and a drum set remained empty as the sextet plucked and popped their way into one of their original pieces, the self-fulfilling “Beautiful Mechanical.”
The piece was not the most accessible, as it contained a cacophony of syncopated rhythms layered one on top of the other without a distinguishable melody, and so the slow, inevitable drone of crowd chatter began in earnest. As the piece concluded, Folds and his drummer Sam Smith (not that Sam Smith) appeared from the darkness of backstage and set off on a string of new tracks that will appear on the forthcoming album with yMusic, entitled So There.
The new material offered the audience a blend of the light-hearted lyricism and bouncy pop melodies that they’ve come to expect from Folds over the past two decades, but this time with a small group of charismatic musicians who could match his virtuoso talent.
Whereas most Ben Folds and Ben Folds Five songs prominently feature the piano in the forefront of the mix, the new songs saw the pianist happily take on a less familiar role as more of a background percussionist while remaining the vocal centerpiece.
“Effington” was sprinkled in with the chunk of new material, but the crowd did not truly feel invested in the performance until the opening chords of “Fred Jones Pt. 2” rang out and the collective voice of the National reverberated throughout the hall.
Throughout the evening, Folds took time to introduce the individual members of yMusic, branding each with their own musical identifier by which the crowd would acknowledge them on his command.
For example, violinist Rob Moose was to be addressed with a Springsteen-esque “Moooooooose” while only ladies could collectively sigh “Gaaaabe” for Gabriel Cabezas as if they were middle-school tweens daydreaming about their celebrity flavor of the week. It was a unique facet of the performance that simultaneously bolstered crowd participation and familiarized the audience with the members of the band.
Folds would take several opportunities between songs to improvise musical call-and-response raps with the monikers of the yMusic members as the sole lyrics. Towards the end of the main set, Folds heeded a crowd member’s request to play “all You Can Eat” despite the fact that none of yMusic’s membership had ever heard the song. Folds called out key changes as the talent improvised and collectively found it’s footing.
Trumpeter C.J Camerieri was put on the spot as Folds shouted, “trumpet solo in D minor,” but carried the melodic torch with grace and poise.
A raucous rendition of “Stephen’s Last Night in Town” most effectively showcased the expansive effect that yMusic could have when handed the reigns to the classic Ben Folds sound.
A new song, entitled “Erase Me,” highlighted the potential of the collaboration to create new material and sounded like a scene in which Ben is discarded by a former lover while standing within the confines of a carnival funhouse.
The evening concluded with an encore stuffed full of sing-a-long favorites such as “Emaline,” “Annie Waits, and “You Don’t Know Me.” On “Army,” though both woodwind and brass were represented on stage, the crowd was happy to fill in with the requisite vocal accompaniment at Folds’ behest.
As the nearly sold-out crowd dispersed from the doors of The National, it was abundantly clear that while the crowd may not have collectively appreciated the finer points of atonal dissonance, they certainly went home with a broadened horizon of musical possibility. The artists would undoubtedly count such progress as a success.
