Feb
04
with Evie March
Tue February 4th, 2014
8:00PM
The Gallery
Minimum Age: 21+
Doors Open: 7:00PM
Show Time: 8:00PM
free!
Join Saul Conrad for his first show back home in the US after a January ’14 tour of Europe and Ireland. With singing partner Evie March, he’ll perform a collection of new songs that will appear later this year on his follow up to The Fancy LP. (Evie also joins him on this new record). The pair will also perform several of Evie’s tender songs. Look for these too on an EP, later this year.
“Conrad writes and sings at the intersection of Jonathan Richman and Daniel Johnston…Half the joy of “Poison Packets” is visiting Conrad’s strange hinterlands.” -The Boston Globe
“An album that evokes everything from Brian Wilson’s druggy, Smile-era pop orchestrations to Joan of Arc’s disjointed, dissonant indie-rock. Turn on, tune in, and drop out.” – American Songwriter
This is a general admission event in The Gallery at LPR.
Saul Conrad
In Saul Conrad’s family, music has been a central passion for three generations. In 1940, Saul’s great uncle Claude Frank, a 15-year-old Jew fleeing Germany, played for the Brazilian ambassador in Madrid –a performance that earned him and his mother exit visas. Two decades later, Frank settled with his wife Lilian Kallir on the Upper West Side, where the two established careers as professional pianists, practicing duets on nested pianos.
Two generations later, Saul’s father took the three-year-old Saul to the Longy School of Music, where he and several other curly-haired music lovers danced madly to Grieg waltzes and Tchaikovsky themes. Vera Klepikov taught Saul for the next seventeen years –taking him from “The Skater” and “Volga Boatman” to Beethoven sonatas. In 2006, at his high school’s spring concert, Saul performed Mozart’s double piano concerto with his great uncle Claude. Long, intense rehearsals with Claude exposed Saul to a level of rhythmic and interpretive rigor that he had not previously encountered.
Saul studied literature at Boston University. Sophomore year, in a class on the history of opera, Saul watched his passionate professor stand shaking and sweating, pirouetting her cane through the Tristan und Isolde Liebestod. Afterward, she exclaimed, “It makes you weak in the knees!” Her fervor made a deep impression on Saul, as did Wagner’s operas –with their trance-like, dissociative, dark, opiated, removed-from-this-world beauty.
During college Saul met a young novelist, Matthew Coppa, who could recite full episodes of Finnegans Wake by heart. Inspired, Saul became determined to use music to give emotional meaning to abstract language. Through his friendship with Coppa, Saul discovered a side of the mind in which the forgotten reappears; voices of the subconscious speak out and converse in evolving rhythmic patterns; and thoughts of mortality are temporarily relieved. Saul hopes devotion to art can turn pain, isolation and chaos into something new –into something tender that reveals hidden connections and mysterious space.
Saul Conrad on Mountain of Leopards
@SaulConradMusic on Twitter
Evie March
