Club Helsinki comes of age with Phoebe Legere and Hamiet Bluiett
By Seth Rogovoy

(GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass., July 30, 2000) - This past weekend could well prove to have been a watershed at Club Helsinki. With enthusiastic and attentive crowds packing the downtown nightclub for Phoebe Legere and Hamiet Bluiett on Friday and Saturday nights, respectively, what one has long suspected was made clear: Berkshire County - or at least this hip, funky, South County town - has an audience hungry for hip, creative, sophisticated music.

In a bit of a left turn from its usual menu of funky party bands, Helsinki presented these two performers with impeccable downtown, avant-garde credentials. While the term tends to scare people away, with its associations of difficult, atonal music, in these two cases avant-garde did not mean inaccessible. It simply meant musicians not bound by genre or the dictates of the commercial marketplace.

What Legere and Bluiett shared in common was a very old-fashioned approach to their art, in which - fueled by their virtuosity of technique and bottomless well of ideas -- they let their free spirits wander, taking their audiences with them as they ventured forth into improvisational territory built atop a solid foundation of composition.

Legere’s show was a multi-dimensional rock cabaret built upon the persona of Phoebe Legere: part tramp, part vixen, at once a man-hating lesbian who craves the services of her “Sicilian Pizza Delivery Boy,” a white-trash mongrel ready for a fight at a moment’s notice who can turn around on a dime and transform a nightclub into a Native American sweat lodge. How to take a singer and performer who sprinkles references to Jean-Paul Sartre and Juliette Greco alongside ‘N Sync and Christine Aguilera, who pokes fun at the iconography of the rock guitar as “America’s phallic signifier” while wearing a pair of devil’s horns with flashing lights and playing a zydeco tune on accordion?

One way to take her is to take her at her word. “I am the personification of the creative feminine,” said Legere at one point, before launching into a radio-ready pop-rock ballad called “Midnight’s Got a Mind of Its Own,” whose subtly subversive message about heterosexuality cries out to be heard on the nation’s airwaves. “I love you like a lock loves its favorite key,” sang Legere in another tune, a jazz-inflected piano ballad a la Bruce Hornsby, which left listeners wanting to hear more of Legere’s lush piano playing. Later on, the provocatively outfitted Legere strapped on one of those phallic signifiers and, with her trio of male musicians, the Hot Hairy Hunks, laying down a fat blues groove, she went deep into the Delta, where she channeled Muddy Waters. From there, it was back to accordion and a transformation into Edith Piaf, before connecting the dots from France to French Louisiana and a version of “Jambalaya.”

Legere closed out the night with a risky but successful bit of group meditation, enlisting the audience in an Abenaki chant that brought the crowd together in a hush of spirituality. She spoke of her Native ancestry, and her identification with the healing tradition of the Indian song and dance man. She was a bit of that, too.

The next night, Club Helsinki took on the aspect of a serious Greenwich Village jazz club. Attentive listeners crammed into tables in front of the stage where they were practically on top of saxophonist Bluiett and his quartet.

Best known as a founding member of the World Saxophone Quartet and for his laws-of-physics-defying approach to the baritone saxophone, Bluiett did not disappoint. He engaged his audience with simple, basic riffs and patterns and occasional melodies, and then took off into Bluiett-land, where he painted abstract improvisations of texture and color. Thus, a swinging blues quickly turned into a workout wherein Bluiett blew a two-note ostinato for several measures, building the basic structure, and then connecting the notes with running arpeggios of squeaks, vibrations, and overtones. Using circular breathing techniques, his runs were continuous and occasionally flute-like, and he took the blues to the Middle East, where he repeated a four-note phrase in a Turkish mode, circled around the bandstand and eliciting commentary from each musician, before bringing it back to the blues.

Another tune began with guitarist Ed Cherry playing a lush ballad for several minutes, before Bluiett honked his way into the tune and sang through his instrument in a kind of baritone falsetto. Bluiett was able to extend the range of the walrus-like horn well into that of the soprano by using pitch-perfect squeals of his mouthpiece. Several tunes were actually long suites of tunes that made their way from ballads to funk to fusion to Sonny Rollins-like calypso. Bluiett’s musicians were adept, inventive soloists, with Cherry quoting passages ranging from Curtis Mayfield to Woody Woodpecker to Johnny Mathis, and bassist Jaribu Shahid and drummer Nasheet Waits both earning their moments in the spotlight. The soloists weren’t left to languish, either, but Bluiett often took their personal statements and danced with them or embellished upon them.

This was by no means easy listening or cocktail jazz , but the diehards in the audience were with Bluiett and his band every step of the way in a generous two-and-a-half hours of music, not including intermission.

[This review originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on Aug. 1, 2000. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 2000. All rights reserved.]

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