An offering of love

Honor: opening for the Dalai Lama at the KFC Yum! Center. Bummer: because His Holiness is running late, your 45-minute set gets cut down to 15 minutes. Also, as a Buddhist, the Dalai Lama only listens to spiritual music, shunning all the rest, including your jazz.

For some, this would be a problem, but most people aren’t Dick Sisto. The veteran vibraphonist and radio host also practices spiritual work. A protégé of Thomas Merton, Sisto has been a seeker for decades.

Sisto’s latest album, Engaging Compassion, a duo with pianist Kenny Werner, is comprised of six new songs — three written by each composer — worked up for the event that occurred on May 19. “The gig sometimes dictates the inspiration,” Sisto explains. “There was great inspiration, but at the same time, it was daunting, because I knew I didn’t want to play some straight-ahead jazz.” He checked out Tibetan music on YouTube, learning that there are some exiled Tibetan musicians here “looking more like punk rockers. But, still, very Tibetan. It was very interesting.”

The inspiration flowed, faster than normal, including the album’s opener, “Save Tibet,” which features Sisto playing a talking drum. He recruited Werner because the pianist has a similar interest in meditation, and both men share a love for Keith Jarrett and Bill Evans.

All proceeds from the album go directly to Tibetan nuns to help with housing and meditation space. Discs can be purchased at Heine Bros. Coffee and Rainbow Blossom locations.

Most of it was recorded in a donated studio at the Kentucky Center. Another downtown landmark, the Seelbach Hotel, was Sisto’s musical home for two decades until recently. But now the hotel has brought back Sisto for a limited run on Friday nights in their gorgeous Rathskeller, ending this week. The concerts are free, and Sisto notes that, sonically speaking, more people filling up the room makes the acoustics sound even better.

Photo by John Nation.

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c. 2013 LEO Weekly

Jessica Hernandez: A natural woman

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As Jessica Hernandez was readying her full-length debut album for a February 2014 release, she was in El Paso, Texas, finishing the album’s mixing process. Initial problems connecting with LEO’s reporter, she said, were due to the studio being located “on a pecan farm, in the middle of nowhere. It’s hard to use a cell phone out here.”

It’s an example of how far the Detroit native has come in her journey from local popularity to possible Next Big Thing. The first-generation American, whose band describes their sound as “big-indiefolkestraljazz&B,” is the child of parents who own a bakery, and the hardworking singer stood out in the scene in part due to the stage she built in the loft above the bakery, hosting shows by her band and many others.

Another standout feature for the 25-year-old is her voice, a big instrument equal parts soulful, jazzy and rockin’. At 5 feet, 5 inches tall, Hernandez might not look like her body can support such a voice. She’s not hearing what her audience hears, anyway.

“I hear my voice one way, and I’m used to the way it’s always sounded in my head,” she says. “Now, recording a lot, it’s weird to me (hearing it played back). I’m just, like, ‘I don’t sound like that!’” While working on her current record, Hernandez found herself consistently wanting to redo her vocals.

“My producer’s, like, ‘We love you, but you’re fucking crazy. It sounds great, you’re just being weird,’” she laughs. “I’ve had to learn to trust everyone else around me to tell me when it sounds good. It’s the same thing when people hear their voice on a voicemail: ‘That’s not me …’”

She found another solution to her dilemma recently in Pontiac, Mich. The band decided to release a single, with a new song on the “A” side and a Conway Twitty cover on the back, and went to an analog-only studio to record it. Hernandez says, “We went there and recorded live-to-tape, just one take through, and it was such a different experience. There’s just such a warmth to everything: The vocals and the drums and everything just sound so warm, so natural that you wind up not wanting to do anything to it.

“It’s weird,” she continues, “There’s so many imperfections when you’re doing something live and you don’t have the ability to go in and mess with things, but at the same time, it’s so forgiving. The flaws have so much character. Now I only want to record analog (laughs). I’m really dorky about it.”

She’s unable to hide her dorkiness, introducing the song “Young, Dumb & Drunk” on the band’s live EP Live at the Magic Bag by telling the audience, “We’re nervous, too, so don’t be embarrassed to dance or … somethin’ …”

Hernandez and the Deltas got their big break when a Capitol Records radio representative from Detroit passed the band’s CD around to employees at Capitol’s Blue Note division. “Somehow the president of Blue Note got a hold of it and ended up calling me on my cell phone one day,” she says. “We started talking about music, and all about life and everything, and talked for an hour, and then we worked out a plan to see me on my own stage, with our hometown crowd and all that. That ended up being really cool.”

Upon playing a triumphant show in front of all their friends and signing to Blue Note, the Deltas made their album — and then watched as everyone who believed in them lost their jobs after Universal took over the company. “It’s super-stressful over there,” says Hernandez. “I talked to the president of Blue Note about what that meant for me. He was pretty straightforward, saying, ‘I don’t know, because I don’t know who has a job here at this point.’”

Hernandez was lucky, getting the rights to her album back and stopping it from being buried in a vault. Now she’s working on starting her own label to release it. “I’m doing a self-release of the record I recorded with a major-label feel. It’s kind of a cool thing — we had this major label budget and attention to it, and now we’re releasing it as a self-release. It’s kind of a weird thing, but I’m excited for it. And nervous.”

Jessica Hernandez and the Deltas with Dr. Vitamin
Wednesday, Sept. 18
Zanzabar
2100 S. Preston St.
zanzabarlouisville.ticketfly.com
$5; 9 p.m.

c. 2013 LEO Weekly

Hip to be square: Revenge of The National

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Though none of the Berninger kids were musical while growing up in Cincinnati, their taste as listeners had a profound effect on their personalities. In the 1980s, older sister Rachel was a classic John Hughes character, falling for The Smiths, Violent Femmes and R.E.M. Brother Matt, two years her junior, enjoyed “a typical Midwestern suburban upbringing,” he says, aware of music as entertainment but otherwise disinterested until Rachel’s cassettes changed his life. Youngest brother Tom, born nine years after Matt, turned to heavy metal as his passion, perhaps as a way to define himself apart from his siblings.

This year saw the release of Matt’s band The National’s sixth album, Trouble Will Find Me, which sold almost 75,000 copies in its first week of release. A feature-length documentary about the band, “Mistaken For Strangers,” directed by Tom Berninger, has been playing at festivals, following the metalhead as he travels with his brother’s band.

Matt Berninger says he was attracted to “artsy” music as an awkward teen who felt out of place, in school and in his own body — “like every freshman in high school does …”

Berninger defines himself first now as a writer, and says he’s always been attracted to bands like those for their lyrics first, even above the catchy melodies. “The boldness and the courage, some of the weirdness — I particularly remember the Violent Femmes records, like, ‘I can’t believe he just said that! Wow, he had the guts to say something that’s creepy, that’s sexual, racially ambiguous …’ Morrissey, too, was representing, in a pop song, something silly or pathetic, which I loved,” he continues. “I instantly connected to people who made fun of themselves, and exposed their awkwardness. I think it’s the most direct and potent sort of form of art that I’ve connected to emotionally, as opposed to books or movies or anything.”

As he learned more about how music could speak to him, Berninger added artists like Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits and Nick Cave to his playlists, “and other writer/musician heroes, people who had the courage to be uncool and weird.”

Though today he is known for wearing smart suits on stage, the popular singer says he has always been “thin and gawky … I have a big nose and I would not be described as ‘classically handsome.’ I’m average-to-weird looking.”

He says about many rock musicians, like Keith Richards, The Who and the Ramones, “There’s a lot of dorks who, if they weren’t in rock ’n’ roll … it’s one of the ways dorks can be cool.”

In high school, he says, “I don’t think I was a pretentious douchebag,” but he began to think “more highly of myself … and I started to become more confident.”

Berninger didn’t know his future bandmates, all native Cincinnatians, as kids. He met bassist Scott Devendorf in the early ’90s when they were both attending University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning. Their first band, Nancy, was overly inspired by Pavement and Guided By Voices, though it inspired Berninger to take music-making more seriously.

After college, Berninger moved to New York, got a design job, and through Devendorf, hooked up with their future bandmates; Devendorf’s brother Bryan, the drummer, had been playing with twins Aaron Dessner (guitar, keyboards) and Bryce Dessner (guitar) in a different band. Berninger, who is now 42, was already in his late 20s before The National came together.

The members came from different scenes — Bryce Dessner, a serious composer, went to Yale; Aaron is more of a classic singer-songwriter; Bryan Devendorf is a jamband guy. The National’s first two records were the guys trying to figure out who they were together. It took two and a half records, Berninger says, with their Cherry Tree EP, before they nailed it.

It’s been a long, slow rise to the top for a band that saw their early peers — The Strokes, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Interpol — find their audiences more easily. In the early days, every mention meant a lot; Berninger still remembers a nice write-up in Buffalo. “We used to call in sick to our day jobs from Europe,” he laughs.

It’s been almost a decade since they didn’t have to work day jobs. Today, 14 years into The National, Matt Berninger says he feels cool.

The National with Frightened Rabbit
Friday, Sept. 13
Iroquois Amphitheater
1080 Amphitheater Road
iroquoisamphitheater.com
$36; 8 p.m.

c. 2013 LEO Weekly

Won more

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Guitarist Nathan Salsburg’s latest is titled Hard For To Win and Can’t Be Won, and it’s another striking collection of mostly instrumentals by the former LEO columnist. He plays a release show Tuesday, Sept. 17, at Greenhaus.

LEO: You’ve made two solos and a duo album in the past couple of years, in addition to working your job and producing box sets. What inspired this especially prolific period?

Nathan Salsburg: I hope the last few years’ worth of output isn’t a period, in that it’ll come to an end. I’d like to think that I just got myself into shape, and the productivity owes less to inspiration and more a practical and satisfying sense of vocation. There’s a Ned Rorem quote, paraphrasing Colette, that I keep close: “No one expects you to be happy — just get your work done.”

LEO: What’s the concept of this album?

NS: The album was largely written over this past winter, which I spent in Maine. Wintering in Maine is serious business — especially this one, which was the coldest one in decades — and some combination of the bitter cold, the dark, the proximity to water and the great local beer helped get the songs out. The record ended up being a means of making sense of that experience in that part of the world, and a meditation on what Donald Hall called “necessities of feeling” with regard to place and to home.

LEO: Can you explain the album’s title?

NS: In 1930, an Eastern Kentucky singer and banjo player named Hayes Shepherd — aka the Appalachia Vagabond — cut a version of an old lyric song that he called “Hard for to Love,” the first line of which is It’s hard for to love when you can’t be loved / it’s hard for to change your mind. It’s one of my favorite performances; the album title is a riff on it.

LEO: Ideal setting to hear your music?

NS: I think that’d be best addressed to someone who enjoys listening to my music, but my preference is un-amplified and outside.

Photo by Tim Furnish.

c. 2013 LEO Weekly

Drinking games

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Which came first, the music or the alcohol? For CatFight, the answer might be “both.” With their first EP coming out, the band plays a release show at Haymarket Whiskey Bar on Saturday. LEO spoke with guitarist Erica Sellers about drinking, music and drinking.

LEO: Have any of you gotten in a catfight with each other lately?

Erica Sellers: Umm … not lately. Only if we drink too much does that occasionally happen, but then we make up the next day. It’s all fun and games. We’ve all learned to avoid the bourbon.

LEO: Do you have any Gaga-esque plans for your show?

ES: We thought about getting some live cats on the stage while we played, and then we decided that would probably be a horrible idea. No, we’re just all going to be ourselves and have fun on stage, buy everybody shots …

LEO: If that goes in print, it’s going to cost you.

ES: I know, right? I feel like every time we go to Haymarket, any money we make we end up putting back into the bar.

LEO: So what’s the real priority here?

ES: The real priority’s obviously the playing — and, after our shows, we do like to drink. We focus on putting on a good show for everybody, which requires us to drink hardly any before the show, and then afterward, we like to chill with everyone who came out, have a good time and get to know everyone.

LEO: What’s your favorite song to play live?

ES: I really enjoy playing “Who Gives a F—” Oh, sorry.

LEO: You can say it.

ES: “Who Gives a Fuck” is one of my favorite songs to play. I like what it’s about, and everybody seems to really enjoy it. Their mouths drop when they realize there’s about 50 fucks in the song. That’s really fun.

c. 2013 LEO Weekly