Brian Slattery Photo
Catalina Gonzalez was all smiles on the Cafe Nine stage. “You guys ready for something angry?” she said, still smiling. “Something sad?”
There was a whooo! from the audience.
“Sweet!” she said.
Then she really did give the club something angry and sad. But thanks to her voice, it was far more than that.
Accompanying herself on guitar, the New Havener by way of Chile pulled just enough notes and rhythm out of her instrument to let her voice take off. One second she was close to the mike, whispering out a raspy croon, the next she was leaning back for a full-throated holler, all held together by threads of tasty melisma. And her songs — long verses full of quick turns of phrase — took full advantage of what her pipes could do.
The small, laid-back crowd at Cafe Nine on Tuesday might have come in to socialize, but with every song Gonzalez sang, she won the people in the place over, one by one. By the time she’d made it through the part of her set she jokingly called “sexy town,” no one was talking. They were just listening, to what she was singing, and even more, how she was singing it.
She mentioned at the beginning of her set that her birthday was the next day. When she finished her set, the whole place spontaneously sang the standard song back to her.
It was just the right warm-up for Elle Sera. Where Gonzalez was at home with R&B and soul, Sera drew more from Americana and folk — to no lesser effect. Backed by the nimble rhythm section of Greg Oliveras on bass and Seth Adam on drums (Oliveras and Adam are both established singers and songwriters on the CT scene in their own right), Sera worked her way through a set of driving originals that ramped up the energy like a three-piece can without ever getting in the way of Sera’s voice. During the sound check, Sera asked for “way more” of her voice in the monitor. “Because of my big ego,” she joked.
But front and center was where her voice belonged. With each passing song, the band loosened, settled into something good, and Sera’s voice got stronger and stronger.
There are probably an infinite number of ways to make music. You can do it with strings, horns, drums, and electronics. You can do it with bottlecaps and slide whistles, feet stomping on wood floors, amplifiers the size of small buildings that can fill a stadium with sound. But there’s still nothing quite like someone just singing well, with honesty and skill, to an audience ready to hear it.
