Denton, 10.24.2024

Had planned to go hear Jonathan Richman at Rubber Gloves with my buddy Dan, but Jonathan got Covid and the date was postponed until next March. (This was billed as Jonathan's "Spring 2024" tour; perhaps that will be his "Fall 2024" tour? Wishing him a full and speedy recovery.) We got late notice of a Tatsuya Nakatani appearance at Gloves the following night, but when my buddy Mike hit me up and asked "Do you want to go?" I couldn't refuse.

It was hardly an optimal performance situation for Tatsuya, the Japanese master percussionist who hangs his hat in Truth Or Consequences, New Mexico. There was a loud dance party outside, and his music -- which is meditative as well as visceral -- works off the contrast between sound, silence, and the space between (the Japanese concept of ma). 

Nakatani, who plays about 150 shows a year, had been on tour since August and drove eight hours from his last stop to Denton. He announced up front he wasn't sure he'd be able to play because of the environmental factors. But he dug deep and managed to pull off a transcendent performance in spite of the obstacles.

While bowed percussion instruments are ubiquitous in the creative music world, few players possess the mastery of the technique Nakatani has achieved since adopting it in the mid-'90s. The massive overtones he was able to coax from his gongs, using handmade Kobo bows of his own manufacture, were symphonic in their resonance. The strength and dexterity it took to play two gongs simultaneously were audible in the sounds they produced. 

Nakatani kept up a fast pulse on a small kick drum while playing the smaller gong, and attacked the larger gong with beaters and singing bowls. When he turned his attention to his snare drum and collection of inverted cymbals and pot lids, the ritual and ceremonial echoes in the sounds produced belied the physicality of his assault. We, the listeners, stood transfixed before the stage, the sounds of partygoers passing through enroute to the bar momentarily forgotten. 

Earlier, Monte Espina's start was delayed by some technical issues, but once those were resolved, Ernesto Monteil and Miguel Espinel delivered their trademark electroacoustic webs of hypnotic sound. Together, they take the extreme close-up sounds of percussion, small instruments, and prepared guitar and run them through electronic treatments that send them floating off like phantoms in the air.

For me, the surprise of the evening was Nathan Siegel, a current UNT Percussion and Pedagogy student who lives in Fort Worth and teaches at Tarleton State. Siegel specializes in marimba but, probably for exigencies of the situation, brought a smaller vibraphone to Gloves. He used a variety of approaches -- bowing, sticks (which he'd sometimes use to strike the bars sideways, producing dissonant clusters), and mallets -- and exploited all of the instrument's percussive and harmonically resonant qualities in his 30-minute improvisation. Hope to hear more of him in the future.

Next Wednesday, this month's edition of Molten Plains will feature percussionist Will Guthrie, an Australian expat living in France; Californian composer-saxophonist Rob Magill, who has a record out with Tatsuya; and a first-time trio of local lights Kristina Smith, Rachel Weaver, and Stephen Lucas (whose band Vaults of Zin was recently namechecked in a Stereogum piece on the zeuhl influence in metal). The evening before, Guthrie will be at The Wild Detectives in a duo with guitarist Gregg Prickett (whom I've seen more this year than in the previous decade) on a bill with another percussion-guitar duo, this one featuring Tidbits bandmates Gerard Bendiks and Kenny Withrow. And Gloves bartender Randall Minick just played a solo show at the Green Goddess Lounge, a cannabis dispensary in North Denton. Live creative sounds abound in North Texas lately. May it always be so.