INCHOATE THOUGHTS
March 20, 2011
Zoë Keating
I have long been an admirer of Zoë Keating’s layered
cello performances on CD, so when the opportunity arose to hear her live in
Boston, at Berklee’s Café 939, I had to take it. Ms.
Keating is unmistakable, even in a darkened room: gaunt and long-limbed, her
head surmounted by a Medusa’s tangle of auburn dreadlocks. I have to admit to a
slight frisson when she brushed past me in the intimate venue as her supporting
act, the Army of Broken Toys, was setting up.
Clad in a mélange of vaudeville and
circus vests, tule, and sequins, the Toys played
their invigorating brand of steam punk to a standing-room only crowd. Then the
human marionettes and cabaret zombies departed, clearing the small stage. Ms.
Keating’s discreet attendants swiftly reconfigured it with a platform, single
chair, and computer equipment. Yet she entrusted no one else with her
instrument. She brought her cello on stage herself, greeting us diffidently,
explaining that the Boston winter weather was playing havoc with its delicate
tuning.
Ms. Keating’s repartee was unusually
self-deprecating for a performer of her caliber. She noted that when she had
last played in Boston, the audience had numbered only five. Later, she
mentioned that in youth she had suffered from stage fright, perspiring so profusely
that she had once lost control of her sweat-slickened bow so that it flew from
her hand like a missile far into the audience. She told us that she had then
stopped performing, and had turned to computer programming. “With a computer, I
could be alone,” she added tellingly. Then she worked out how to combine her
computer with her cello, and the desire to do so live led her to perform once
more. Now, she continued, the nervousness has largely disappeared, so long as
she keeps performing. And perform she did.
Zoë Keating is an accomplished
cellist, delicately controlling her considerable range of tone, attack, and
vibrato with absolute assurance. She also has sixteen instant recording tracks
at her disposal, which she controls with pedals through a laptop. She plays
phrases and layers them successively, building complex figures, exploiting
every sonic characteristic of her instrument. Of the pieces she played, all but
the last were her own compositions. She explained that she develops them in
performance so as not to allow them to petrify by adhering strictly to the
versions recorded in her “cello cave” in the redwood forest north of San
Francisco. To play so self-assuredly while simultaneously layering tracks to
produce a one-woman cello orchestra is an astounding feat.
She gave us a succession of
mesmerizing works, some from early in her career, others from her recent album,
Into the Woods. Her music exhibits an
apparent simplicity that belies its complexity. Her sartorial style may be punk
cabaret (she sometimes plays with Amanda Palmer), but her musical inspiration
is classical, as she herself both acknowledged and demonstrated. She announced
that she doesn’t play encores as they make her feel silly, then ended with
nothing less than a layered rendition of the slow movement of Beethoven’s
Seventh Symphony. I have never heard anything like it. I was not the only one
in the packed audience who left as amazed as I was elated.