Neil Shah - Pianist/Vocalist/Composer

The show last friday night at VoxPop was extrodinarily fun. From the moment I walked into the Flatbush coffee house, I was taken back to the shows I used to do in my teens in Northeast Pennsylvania. Fittingly, Mop Kid and the Bass Evans were already there, joined by the Hopple. Now that may not make much sense, but basically it means that my old friends were in house, and I knew it was going to be a pretty fun St. Patricks Day celebration.

A jazzy guitar duo played some standards while we warmed up and scoped the scene: A small coffee house with hundreds of books lining the wall, a dozen of laid-back people hanging around and chatting, and an authentic Irish man, straight from Dublin. He was understandably very proud, and very drunk. Left-winged paraphenalia was everywhere, including George Bush playing cards.

The guitar duo finished and the Modern Poet took the stage. Armed with 2 music machines, one old and one new, he began speaking monotone political tongue while recordings of other viewpoints raged on at the same time. He set up a self-contained debate with the absent owner of VoxPop, Sander Hicks. It was a scene you’d usually only witness on screen in an independent movie—but this was real life, and it was Charles Evans, potentially a future professional baseball player, but tonight the Modern Poet. Last Friday I think that he actually got his message home, a grand slam of modern poetry, to be perfectly cheesey.

Dave Little and I finally took the stage to pronounce some songs for a few friends and stranglers. Just under a dozen people remained, but it was enough to give the small establishment a receptive and inspiring energy. In the duo format we used the songs as a framework, and sometimes streched sections out, improvising a bit to create new arrangements on the fly.

We played 4 new songs, and I think these little pieces are really starting to get somewhere. I didn’t let my cold keep me from trying to sing out and sing the way I want. We played a couple tunes from The Last Leaves, but they sound so different than the album–it’s what I expected and hoped for, but I never would have thought things would change so much—and so much for the better. I finally feel like I’m writing, playing, and singing like me—like who I am. It feels so much more natural than any music has in so long—probably since I was in my early teens. It feels real again.

Thanks to everyone for a really great time.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 21st, 2006 at 11:24 am and is tagged music, events, politics, shows. Follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed and Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.