nothin Singer-Songwriter Claims Cafe Nine | New Haven Independent

Singer-Songwriter Claims Cafe Nine

Natalie Tuttle figured out what to do at Cafe Nine: Make the club, as the slogan puts it, her living room.”

As a singer-songwriter, you can’t just be technical. You have to be personal, too,” Tuttle said after playing a set at the State Street club Tuesday night. It took me a while to figure that out, and then to figure out that it worked best when I was relaxed, like I was playing in my living room, and I just let the audience in.”

Cafe Nine indeed was her living room from the first note, as she glided through a set of originals that married beautifully simple musical ideas to a constantly inventive set of textures, all pulled out of one instrument.

Tuttle, who is 24, began playing guitar when she was 5. She first took lessons from Ed Aurelli, in a house in Waterbury on the edge of a cliff with six parrots.” Aurelli got her started in blues, classical, and improvisation. When she was a teenager she moved to Neighborhood Music School in New Haven, where teacher Joe Tinari added jazz and flamenco to the menu of styles she could pull from.

Meanwhile, she discovered the playing of Kaki King, Michael Hedges, and Andy McKee—all pioneers in a set of complex guitar techniques that defy easy genre categorization but involve pulling as many different sounds from the instrument as possible, often to create layers of texture that seem impossible for one player to pull off.

But she also lists Jackson Browne and Dave Matthews as big influences. People kind of hate him sometimes,” she said of Matthews, but I think he’s awesome.” His melodies let people in. The complexity of what he’s doing with the guitar — especially on his solo stuff — gives them a reason to stay. Meanwhile, Browne, who she saw live not long ago. was one of the most simple and relaxed players I’ve ever seen.”

Brian Slattery Photo

But all of that inspiration doesn’t weigh Tuttle down, in person or on stage. When I first started playing myself, I tried to imitate the people I loved,” Tuttle said. But eventually I started wanting to put my own juice into it, too, my own creativity.”

She played her first gig at the Space when she was 16. She has been playing — and growing as a musician — ever since, captivated by the possibilities of holding the simple and the intricate in balance, yet always with the goal of communicating straight to the audience, to play something really great and really clean that nobody else can do.”

On Tuesday that happened, despite a broken string halfway through the set. That would have derailed me when I was younger,” she said afterward. Now she could make it into a joke.

All the time you wonder if you should change the strings,” she said from the stage. Then it’s two days before the gig and you don’t want to change the strings.”

Oh, that’s the worst!” said someone from the audience. They understood completely. At the end of her set, the crowd shouted — insisted, really — on an encore. She obliged with a song that used technique and technology to add layer after layer, each line simple but surprising, and adding up to an emotional whole, a performer giving it her all.

There’s not a lot of second chances,” she said afterward. If people come to hear you and they don’t like it, they’re probably not coming back.”

If her set at Cafe Nine is any indication, everyone will be back for the next gig, and they’ll bring their friends. Because Natalie Tuttle knows she’s standing on a lot of shoulders. But she’s also doing something that no one else quite does.

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