Lucy Gellman Photo
Exiles from the sudden closing of Daggett Street Square studios in the Hill, which left a huge hole in New Haven’s artistic community, have moved into or are playing at shows in the Edgewood neighborhood, filling, note by note, a void that many still feel acutely.
As a result, an underground music scene is exploding in Edgewood, most recently at the Swamp Hut.
A product of organizer Danny Ravizza’s unflagging enthusiasm for independent expression and recent foray into public performance with Swamp Yankee, the venue came alive Friday night with an acoustic lineup of New Haven and New Haven-area artists that wrapped the room in particularly unadulterated sound.
“I want a diverse group of people coming in and playing. We have power over the resources we control, and if you have something like that, that’s got to be extended to the whole of the city. That is what I want to do with this thing,” Ravizza said. (Organizers didn’t want the house party’s location revealed in an article.)
Ravizza estimated that an average life span of a house venue is two years. He shared his hopes that this venue, and others in the neighborhood, will honor and nurture Daggett’s legacy in a big way.
At Friday’s event, Ravizza had five picks growing out of his fingertips. John Longyear was deep into a love song to the cello before he noticed an audience. Clenn Planetts was being born and reborn in Bridgeport in nineteen-ninety-nothing. Peradams wanted to take a field trip back into the annals of American folk. Sober Kevin was staring down the grim realities of unemployment while Alex Burnet was looking up for a progress report on heaven.
Swamp Yankee (Ravizza and Longyear; video above) kicked off the evening with a fingerpicking good set, channeling artists like Daniel Bachman as they married orchestral guitar and inventive cello.
Then came Sober Kevin (Kevin Gaffey of New Year’s Revolution), whose lyrics are frank and refreshing, and leave the listener caught between taking a long, hard drink and gasping for air in the face of adulthood.
Burnet (Laundry Day, The Proud Flesh), meanwhile, quieted things down, pulling a growing audience towards the small stage with chewy, aurally addictive songs like “Hey How’s Heaven” and “Seven Seas.” If the March release of Laundry Day’s eponymous album marked him as one of the city’s wittiest lyricists, this show spotlighted it anew, his humor and canniness glittering in an acoustic setting.
Very much feeling the swimming, swampy, warm buzz of support, Plannetts (Jon Stone) slowed down the set even more, readying the room for a grown-up sing along as he turned a lamp off, crouched low to the ground, and played against a backdrop of twinkling holiday lights. It worked, a swelling group of around 20 joining in as he crooned “have you ever seen a car on fire?/have you ever seen a car on fire?/felt the cinder and heat/smelled the burning tires/have you ever seen a car on fire?”
Elison Jackson’s Sam Perduta, accompanied for a few numbers by artist and musician Daniel Eugene, closed out the set on Stone’s cue, giving the audience a lesson in the traditions of Dave Van Ronk and Francis McPeake.
There is a profound and unparalleled intimacy to this kind of music making. In an interview with the Independent the morning after the concert, Ravizza explained that there are a lot of reasons to have started Swamp Hut — the acoustic nature of which is largely driven by the fact that he has neighbors — but that closeness is perhaps the biggest.
“House shows will allow you to go and have that intimacy. If you’re doing it acoustic, that stage is really only so big. You can only fit so many people on it. It takes a lot of the songs and ideas and I guess moves it down to something a little bit smaller. It allows people to be, I think, bare …which is really healthy. You can play an old song, and everyone knows the words to it. Or you can go and do something new, and be able to go and get a reaction, get a feel for it. The physical space you play in shapes what happens, how you interact, how art is created,” he said.
The last thing a 'house' venue needs to ensure its longevity is press.
Keeping it underground is what keeps it real. When word leaks like this, it almost always spells bad news.