AEM105 Boy Without God

His brother turned to jazz, his sis­ter to clas­si­cal music — Gabriel Birnbaum’s musi­cal des­tiny lay along a dif­fer­ent path. His solo project Boy With­out God deliv­ers guitar-led, moody rock com­po­si­tions with a Bon Iver soul, heavy on the fusion sauce. But the path from there to here was a long and wind­ing road. For­mally trained as a tenor sax­o­phon­ist, the jazz instinct died hard (if it died at all). In fact the Boston native has a few high­brow musi­cal adven­tures under his belt, includ­ing stints gig­ging around the bor­oughs of New York with the likes of avant-garde, future jazz impre­sar­ios Andrew D’Angelo and Jim Black. Birn­baum kept that spirit of exper­i­men­ta­tion going with the short-lived, but well-regarded Boston Jazz Com­posers Col­lec­tive, a tight-knit ensem­ble of play­ers and com­posers bent on secur­ing a place for jazz in the new century.

The first major sign that Birn­baum was inch­ing his way towards rock fame with his band Abra­ham Lin­coln Brigade, a meld­ing of jazz and noise rock. Noise rock has always held a strange fas­ci­na­tion and allure for jazz and clas­si­cal types alike, stuffed full of Apol­lon­ian rules and modal reg­u­la­tions by day, look­ing for a lit­tle anar­chic Dionysian release by night. And you don’t need to hold to the Glenn Branca-line that “jazz has stopped evolv­ing and become a dead art” to appre­ci­ate what the sonic fun­da­ments of rock n roll might have to offer in a jazz hybrid. Not so much that the musi­cal vocab­u­lary of rock has out­paced jazz in terms of rel­e­vance; rather that rock in the sec­ond half of the 20^th cen­tury assumed the man­tle that jazz had car­ried so bril­liantly in the first half: a total com­mit­ment to the live expe­ri­ence in all its spon­tane­ity and con­fu­sion. Jazz was born in the hurly burly of speakeasy clubs. Jazz was music to get high to. Jazz was a threat to the Estab­lish­ment. And white Amer­ica fought back, either by throw­ing Clorox-clean, teeny­bop­per pup­pets at the art form to coopt the music, or by ban­ning it alto­gether. Jazz was dangerous.

These days you only need about five min­utes in a jazz club these to see how dusty the entire expe­ri­ence has become, with middle-aged cou­ples tap­ping their fin­gers qui­etly at tables while work­ing their way through two-drink min­i­mums. Rock n roll at mid-century was an excit­ing way out– the next big thing– but has largely died the same death. Lis­ten to the radio and you’ll hear bands that sound like bands that sound like bands, an eter­nal recur­rence of suck. White Stripes is Lead­belly twenty-times removed. No won­der musi­cians turned to noise at the turn of the new mil­len­nium. If every pat­tern has been copped, the only path to gen­uine nov­elty lies off the music page in the ethe­real realm of overblown honks and sticky feed­back. Noise is the ulti­mate cover for new music, a secret lab­o­ra­tory nur­tur­ing pre­cious seedlings in a dead land­scape. The Abra­ham Lin­coln Brigade, described as “equal parts Albert Ayler and Deer­hoof”, was Birnbaum’s entrée into a post-genre musi­cal dimension.

The first for­mal gig of the Abra­ham Lin­coln Brigade was a Boston Jazz Com­posers Col­lec­tive show­case. There­after the band started play­ing their own gigs and tour­ing. A com­bi­na­tion of gui­tar feed­back, drum bash­ing and good-old-fashioned yelling at the audi­ence (“STOP FUCKING EVERYTHING UP!” was the repeated tagline, a real crowd pleaser) allowed Birn­baum to stretch his wings with­out dip­ping into the Byzan­tine modal morass of jazz com­po­si­tion. Good live rock and roll screech­ing cap­tures the live spon­tane­ity jazz used to have before it became hyper-academicized in the lat­ter half of the 20^th century.

His time in Boston has also included play­ing with local lumi­nar­ies Drug Rug as well as Eli Reed and the True Loves, show­cas­ing his sax­o­phone skills with both ensem­bles. Like good drum­mers, good brass spe­cial­ists are always at a pre­mium in a guitar-dominated music scene; so Birn­baum has never lacked for gigs, but has been increas­ingly con­cen­trat­ing on his per­sonal project Boy With­out God in recent years. Part of that renewed focus has come about due to his not-as-of-yet-patented “one minute a day” record­ing method. Birn­baum describes it best: “The minute-a-day thing is a cre­ative exer­cise I’ve done on and off since I came up with it in 2007. It helps me get over my inter­nal edi­tor, who is a nasty sono­fabitch. Basi­cally, every day I sit down to make one com­plete minute of recorded music (all the parts and all the mix­ing, so I don’t really have to touch it after­wards) and try to con­nect it to the pre­vi­ous day’s minute, cre­at­ing a long, wind­ing piece of music of indef­i­nite length that func­tions sort of like an abstract, musi­cal diary. I really like writ­ing this way because it grat­i­fies the impa­tient part of me and gives me some­thing tan­gi­ble at the end of every day.” Artists use all sorts of rit­u­als to get them in the mood, and the minute-a-day method has been Birnbaum’s own per­sonal recipe.

You can hear the fruits of that labor on Boy With­out God’s genre-smashing full-length release Your Body Is Your Soul as well as Walk­ing On Water Wasn’t Built in a Day, the EP from which both the A and B side of the Ampeater 7” have been pulled. In Walk­ing On Water… drums, gui­tars, ukulele, sax­o­phone, plus “found sounds” have been tied together into a neat lit­tle 4-track pack­age show­cas­ing Birnbaum’s affec­tion for clas­sic pop forms. Atten­tive lis­ten­ers will rec­og­nize the ba ba-bum chick drum line from the Greasers-era hit “Leader of the Pack” in our A-side “City Kids.” A raw slow burn of feed­back ush­ers the ear into a sweet, med­i­ta­tive num­ber that mixes equal parts Beach Boys and Justin Ver­non, sweet mem­o­ries of sum­mer love. When the horns kick in, the song warms up and strikes a vin­tage tone that you rarely hear these days, a lush spec­trum of orches­tral pop on an inti­mate scale. As “City Kids” segues directly into the B-side “Call a Yel­low Taxi,” you can even hear the crunch of an apple. Found sounds in the form of per­cus­sive fruit. Boy With­out God brings the sound (and the taste) of the unex­pected, but warmly wel­comed. Birn­baum seems to be savor­ing the famil­iar­ity of more well-behaved sound­scapes, in lieu of the nois­escapes or mad skronk of his past. Per­haps the audi­ence stopped fuck­ing every­thing up?

Look for spo­radic shows here and there, includ­ing a North­side Music Fest show­case, as Boy With­out God puts the fin­ish­ing touches on a new album, which Birn­baum describes as, “by FAR the thing I’ve done that I’m most proud of, and it’s the first BWG album where I really got to use all my composing/arranging chops in writ­ing out com­plex string and horn parts and then bring­ing in friends to play them, usu­ally bet­ter than I ever imag­ined they could be played. I can­not say enough how amaz­ing the per­for­mances are that other peo­ple (includ­ing Danny Mekon­nen and Will Graefe from the ALB) gave on this album. They all just killed it dead. Uh, in the good way.” Come watch Boy With­out God kill it (in a good way) this Sun­day at Bar Matchless.

Mike Gutier­rez

Side A — City Kids Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Side B — Call a Yel­low Taxi Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

[[[Down­load the 7-inch]]]