“We know you’re getting soggy out there,” Peter Siegel shouted from the stage, his lips curling upward as a few audience members laughed in response, raised their rainy umbrellas in salute and took one step closer to the musicians. A few knee-high Elm Citizens shook off droplets of water and called out shrilly for another song, weaving in between their parents and grandparents as they found dripping dance partners in the crowd. Others set up camp, laying out checkered picnic gear and slightly waterlogged watermelon under their umbrellas.
No one was going anywhere, they all seemed to say. They had come for some good dancing music, and they were going to stay for it.
Lucy Gellman Photos
This was the wet welcome in store Tuesday night for The Gaslight Tinkers, who performed for a small but dedicated crowd on the New Haven Green as part of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas.
Taking the main stage just as it started to rain around 6 p.m., the group — Siegel on mandolin, guitar, banjo, and vocals; Garrett Sawyer on electric bass guitar; Audrey Knuth on fiddle; Dave Noonan on drums and a guest artist accompanying on vocals — played for a little over an hour, drawing whoops, wet claps, and shoulder shakes for an eager audience.
The Gaslight Tinkers’ music is elaborate, sexy, and layered folk, played without a hint of fuss. Songs like “Quite Early Morning” and “Morrison’s/Birds Nest” drew out influences ranging from old Celtic jigs to folk to Afropop, picking up reggae, hip hop, and praise song along the way. Each piece was thoroughly danceable, so much so that the rainstorm didn’t stand a chance of stalling the event.
The crowd swung and shouted for more as they grooved in their ponchos. The distinct novelty in the music found its strength in long and varied pieces that allowed the group to jam with each other. Knuth’s fiddle married itself to Siegel’s banjo, the instruments entering a two-step as the piece progressed from jig-like to funky to electric. Noonan stirred the stage into a minor tornado with his precise and fiery drum work, Sawyer working himself into a dreadlock-tossing trance to catch up.
In return, there was some hard-core dancing in the audience …
… old friends making new ones, brought together by the music …
… and a lot of joy.
So much, in fact, that the band willed the sun out by the end of their set. As members launched into their last piece, a nearly ten-minute odyssey that transitioned from folksy to funky vocals with toe-tapping and hell-stomping beats, the sun peeked its gold crown out from behind a cluster of trees on the lower Green, almost smiling from its place behind the white steeple of the Center Church on the Green.
Then again, maybe that big ball of warmth felt threatened. Who needs the sun when you’ve already got a gaslight handy?
