3 April 2003
Cedar Cultural Center

AS WORLD MUSIC DIRECTOR of my college radio station, I got the oppotunity to listen to hundreds of new albums from around the world. Fortunately, none of these records made any impression on me whatsover. Looking back, the only new music of which I had any recollection was a great album by the Tin Hat Trio. While I had never heard of them, and knew nothing about them, I really connected with their music. And so, when I saw their name in the paper, I went to see them play a live show.


The trio are three young musicians who play the accordion, violin and guitar, sticking to instrumental music that is somehow both tightly coordinated and improvisatory. Its quite reminiscent of Grapelli & Reinhardt cafe jazz, but with post-modernist musical amalgamation thrown in for good measure. Anyway, they were good, and I was happy.


After a certain amount of good ol' concert-going experience had passed, I suddenly started feeling uncomfortable with my position as an audience member. Of course, the music was a kaleidoscope of virtuosity and style performed with delicacy and grace. But, more than that, it was their instrumentation that granted them their debonair harmonies. Because the three instruments all share some of the same acoustic territory, it allows them to take turns at melody and rhythm, which makes for dynamic music.


But, my queasyness remained. In retrospect, I think it was the smugness of spoken segueways that irriated me, and their general air of solemn self-absorbtion that cast a dim pall on my evening. If only you could have been there to hear the flippancy of the guitarist's name-dropping. For example, after one song he mentioned Summit Avenue, Long Island and Beverly Hills, all in the same sentence. I gathered from this, and from looking later at the liner notes, that all three musicians had gone to the best musical conservatories in the country, and had been trained on their instruments since the age of two or three. At that moment, I knew I was part of a long line of adoring parents, wowed by their precocity and unqualified genius. Bitterly, I found myself wanting to see these three prodigies struggle and squirm. I wanted to force them to discover what depths they would sink, if only they had anything at stake. "Necessity is the mother of invention," I repeated to myself, like a mantra. I wanted the Darwinian pressure-cooker of free market capitalism to go to work, allowing me to sit back and smell the sweat on their three, smug foreheads.


Nutritional Equivalent: an elegant French meal with your ex-wife