Among the residents of Treme, David Simon’s HBO drama series about the inhabitants of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, you’ll find a character called Delmond. Delmond, a talented jazz trumpeter, is a deeply conflicted individual. In the person of his father, he is tied to the ruined city, its historic music and its obscure ritual cultures. And yet, he is drawn to the East coast, where the ensemble in which he plays is in considerable demand.
MC Taylor, a songwriter and a student of folklore, is not a declamatory man. His songs are compressed and poetic, with nary a syllable out of place. You will hear echoes of familiar things – a bit of Van Morrison’s mystical warmth, or John Martyn’s angst, and the language will be unfussy, and derived from the folk tradition.
It is about five minutes into “The Frame” before Terry Reid arrives onstage at the Jazz Café. As his scratch band lock into limpid funk that sounds like it could go on forever (and very nearly does), Reid comes grooving down the staircase, an odd but endearing mix of West Coast rock gentry and bumbling shires uncle.
“I’m tired,” Josh T. Pearson says. “It’s been a long life. I don’t even know what day of the week it is...” Someone in the crowd tells him the day and the date. “Friday the 13th?” he wryly muses, as if his life has been full of nothing but such days of potential reckoning in the ten long years since his band Lift To Experience released their fearsome album, The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads, and soon after blew apart. That record imagined humanity making its last stand in Texas during the apocalypse. Pearson’s eventual follow-up Last Of The Country Gentlemen considers a recent relationship in similar terms. There’s the rare sense tonight of every bitter, funny, helpless word mattering, because they’re being pulled up from a harrowing place and being relived on stage.
Various circumstances mean I have to miss Hiss Golden Messenger’s show at Club Uncut on Wednesday, so I went to see Michael Taylor’s first UK show at King’s Place, a rather refined venue beneath The Guardian offices, last Friday.
