Charmaine Lee Photo
If you like the guitar, complicated music, or poetry, Wendy Eisenberg wants you to come to her Friday gig at Firehouse 12 on Crown Street.
“I don’t really know how to say that, besides saying that I want them to come,” guitarist Eisenberg said in a phone interview last week. Moments later, she found a phrasing she liked: “My goal is to observe the instrument so closely, that with so much recent history, so much cultural history imprinted on it, that new perspectives of the instrument emerge.”
The prodigious musician, who works as a composer, improviser, and songwriter in a variety of projects, is certainly attuned to the range of the instrument’s possibilities. Its Shape Is Your Touch, her solo album from last year, is a sonic encyclopedia of the acoustic guitar, but phrased with the easy flow of a novel. The transparent, unaffected recording documents all the ways in which sound lives and dies emerging from the guitar. Intentionally muted notes and swarms of sound emerge amidst clarion melodic lines, and ring just as powerfully.
Contrast that with Eisenberg’s trio album The Machinic Unconscious, released on the Tzadik label last year, which shows a wider range of stylistic references from jazz, punk, and metal, and a deep awareness of the instrument’s role in those traditions. But her music is distinctly her own, no matter the context, and it is a nice thread across her work that at no point does she pander to the audience in order to be recognized as a part of that tradition. The acoustic album includes a few conscious gestures to the style, but otherwise avoids the droning resonance of, say, American Primitive guitar. Her trio freely navigates the various genres that orbit improvised music, with percussionist Ches Smith and bassist Trevor Dunn providing occasional stylistic anchors, but otherwise only observing and reacting to each other.
The music Eisenberg will present at Firehouse 12 on Friday is a new body of work for solo guitar and banjo, which she describes as being inspired by organization in poetic structure — in particular, a reading and lecture given by poet Ben Lerner at the University of Chicago in 2012.
“No matter the poetic impulse, all that we get is a mistranslation of what the original idea is,” Eisenberg said. “I’ve been using that as a composition device … that idea that everything will be a failure of the original intent is a way to free myself.”
For Eisenberg, this means compositions infused with and invigorated by improvisation, unconcerned with a mentality that treats every performance as target practice rather than artistic expression.
“Modern improvised music traditions … keep in mind the rule that nothing is really repeatable,” Eisenberg said. “I’m never going to play these pieces about reorganization and reorder exactly identically every time. If I did, that would have almost nothing to do with the original project of it.”
Eisenberg speaks about her work with an inspiring clarity — whether about her tenure in the improvising punk band Birthing Hips, or her solo songwriting (“It’s more Hugo Wolff than Mitski”). She uses a similar vocabulary across all of these projects and endeavors, and clearly sees the rope that ties them all together.
“I can’t perform free jazz if I’m not also in a rock band, and I can’t perform songs if I’m not also playing free jazz … it all has to be there because if it’s not all there, I feel unbalanced and can’t do anything,” she said.
But at the same time, Eisenberg resists trying to combine all of these separate musical areas into a single philosophical or artistic endeavor. “I know that my identity contains all of them, but a part of me really likes the delineation between these things, as a practice,” she said.
Eisenberg reflected on Birthing Hips, a band that came close to drawing in a lot of her areas of interest, and on her graduate recital from New England Conservatory, in which she presented a full range of her work in a single program.
“It didn’t work for me,” she said. “There wasn’t a grand mission statement, the only thing that spoke through all of [the pieces] was how I play the guitar. Which I think was the point of the recital, but to me isn’t the point of playing music.”
So that brings us to this Friday’s concert, wherein Eisenberg dedicates herself to communicating with the audience, via unperfectable music inspired by the fragmentation and failures of language. Her choice to use banjo in this material is deliberate, to place herself in a musical situation where she can think about the sound first and the instrument second.
“I think a lot about Anthony Braxton when I write for solo banjo,” she said, recalling her earlier comments about compositions that defy replication. (The Connecticut-based composer and multi-instrumentalist is known for unique performances that layer and sequence compositions from his entire oeuvre.) “For me, the banjo is a very linear instrument,” she continued. “I’m just trying to figure out how to deal with melodies on this instrument that resonates strangely. It’s a very granular experience.”
Although Eisenberg’s new music is not yet documented on record, it was not hard, based on the strength of her recent recordings and touring credits, for Firehouse 12 to commit to Eisenberg’s proposal.
“I showed them the music, and they seemed really passionate about it,” Eisenberg said. “They’re giving space … to something that can be hard to find an audience for.”
Whether at a punk basement show or an international jazz festival, it’s clear that her thoughtful musicality and intensity of focus can engage any listener.
Wendy Eisenberg performs this Friday, March 22, at Firehouse 12 in New Haven. Sets are at 8:30 p.m. and 10 p.m. Tickets for the 8:30 set are $20, $15 for students; tickets for the 10 p.m. set are $15, $10 for students. Visit Firehouse 12’s website for more information.
