Photo credit: Kat Schleicher/Alverno Presents
At Alverno Presents’ recent Uncovered shows, Milwaukee musicians have reinterpreted the music of widely loved artists like Prince, Patti Smith and Quincy Jones. While modeled loosely after the structure of those cheerfully reverential programs, “How To Write a Popular Song” didn’t share nearly the same affection for its chosen subject: Charles K. Harris, the Milwaukee songwriter who wrote some of the biggest hits of the late 1800s and early 1900s, including the best-selling song of the Tin Pan Alley era, “After The Ball.” For all his success, Harris was a fundamentally cynical artist who believed songwriting could be distilled to a basic formula, which he outlined in the 1906 book that gave Saturday night’s program its title. He was, as program curator Christopher Porterfield put it in the first of many digs at him early in the evening, kind of a hustler. The man knew how to hawk sheet music, but many of the hundreds of songs he published are widely considered to be awful.
That vast songbook nonetheless left plenty to work with for Porterfield and the lineup of indie-rock, folk and country musicians he’d assembled for the night, which included Phox singer Monica Martin, Megafaun veteran Phil Cook and members of Porterfield’s band Field Report. Despite his title billing, Porterfield was generous about ceding the spotlight. He took the lead on only two numbers, and spent many songs seated on the side of the stage, grinning and clapping as he watched the players he’d assembled do their thing. His heavily abridged “After the Ball,” which stripped the ballad of its oppressive mawkishness and sped it into a good-humored heartland rocker, was an early highlight. It was given a run for its money later in the set by a barnstorming, Creedence Clearwater Revival-ified take of “Hello, Central, Give Me Heaven” led by Buffalo Gospel’s sterling-voiced Ryan Necci.
|
|
There’s a temptation in programs like this to romanticize the past and to gloss over some of its more uncomfortable realities, but this program took a warts-and-all approach. Drummer Shane Leonard highlighted the ugliness that ran rampant in Harris’ work by setting “There is No Flag Like The Red, White and Blue” to a montage of Harris’ racist and xenophobic lyrics. Difficult as it was to hear, that vitriol wasn’t unique to Harris. The early American songbook was often a very hateful place.
In the program’s second half, the musicians premiered new songs they wrote following the tips Harris outlined in his songwriting manual. Cook embraced Harris’ sentimentalism with “Without a Trace,” a sweet and sincere song about his grandmother’s dementia. Martin debuted a tune, “Conditional Love,” that could be a highlight of the next Phox album and thanked Harris for inspiring it, despite being a “racist, scary, pandering entrepreneur.” As solid as many of these new songs were, most of the joy from the night came from simply seeing these players share the stage, back each other up and make each other laugh. Like many of Alverno Presents’ most memorable recent shows, it was a reminder of the sparks that can fly when you give creative people a pretense to collaborate—even if that pretense is a historical curiosity who none of the assembled players hold in any particular esteem.
