Billy Novick and Guy Van Duser
The Amazing Things Arts Center
160 Hollis Street
Framingham, MA
May 23, 2009
You wonder how two guys, one with clarinet, the other with acoustic guitar, can make such a joyful racket. They’ve been playing together in one form or another, for over twenty-five years, about three times longer than most marriages last. Like a married pair, these two can finish each others sentences - on a music scale - and can crack each other up with a fresh take on a song they’ve played a hundred times.
That’s what it sounded like at the Amazing Things Arts Center in Framingham last week. Billy Novick is the genial chief of patter, announcing the pedigree of a song and anecdotes that connect with the tune in some offbeat way. He’s as at home improvising between songs as he is playing them. Intense as Novick is loose, Guy Van Duser is the occasional straight man for Novick’s set-ups. He lets his fingers to the talking, which holds up his side of the act eloquently.
Their music is steeped in swing-oriented jazz from the twenties to the forties and they can play the daylights out of it. From their first romp through “Wolverine Blues” by Jelly Roll Morton, the great transitional figure between jazz and swing, their musical mastery was on full display.
The grins and nods while they plug away solo or in tandem show they’re paying attention to each other. They seem in their own world yet connected by the special affinity musicians have in leapfrogging off each other’s ideas. They’re having a good time up there. We in the audience get in the act by cheering their solos and chuckling at their inventiveness.
“Let’s take it down a notch,” says Billy, as they launch into the evening’s second number, Fats Waller’s “Spring Cleaning.” Surprise, Billy sings!
This kind of music doesn’t demand a pitch-perfect voice, just one that can locate the heart of the song, Novick leans into the mike, stage lights reflecting off his shiny pate, and delivers with an impish grin.
The set rolls on with a slow sweet Gershwin tune then a 1928 cover of “Ready for the River,” in which Guy joins Billy on vocals and vigorous finger picking. A New Orleans spiritual from the 1920s features Billy covering the brass line and Guy filling in as the second line. In keeping with the jaunty New Orleans feel, they play a Scott Joplin rag. “We know two Joplin rags,” Billy says, "you might hear them both tonight.” (We did.)
Van Duser proceeded to make his fingers fly and his face lit up as he hit every single note as his right thumb, index finger and middle finger blurred over the strings and the fingers on his left hand danced up and down the frets on the neck of his guitar, hitting every note of the Joplin rag. Impressive.
In one of his rare conversations with the audience, Van Duser tells of being wowed as a young man by hearing Chet Atkins guitar playing on the radio. “I got his records and kept playing them again and again so I could make the same sounds,” he recollected. By now Van Duser has a style that has been influenced by the likes of players from Atkins to Django Reinhardt but is gloriously all his own.
“How much improvising is involved in your playing?” ptatlarge asks Novick during intermission.
“I’d say about 25% of our songs are set arrangements and the rest is improvised. We don’t have a huge repertoire so the improvising is what keeps it fresh,” says Billy. Their set tonight intimates they know an impressive range of music from the WWI to WWII and play it with the spirit of improvisation that was that era’s calling card.
These guys seem like an unlikely pair. Novick the extrovert tells stories, jokes around with ease, and is a natural bridge into the audience. The show gains from Billy’s effortless patter - “Mr. Footnote,” Guy cracks during one of Novick’s stories about a song’s background. Novick wants us to listen of course but he wants us to know what we’re listening to.
Van Duser seldom makes eye contact with the audience and is immersed in the music, almost remote. “My sister keeps telling me that I don’t look like I’m having fun and to smile once in a while,” he says during intermission to ptatlarge. “I need to focus on my hands and my head is totally into the music.”
During the second set, in one of his few talks to the audience, he told of playing for a dance with Billy. “I looked up in the middle of playing and saw over a hundred people dancing away and thought, ‘if I stop playing, the whole thing stops!' I ducked my eyes back to the strings and my hands and never looked up again.”
Tonight’s show covered music from Fats Waller, George Gershwin, Scott Joplin, Jelly Roll Morton, Bix Bierderbecke, and Benny Goodman. It hit the home stretch with a Novick and Van Duser original, "New Orleans Farewell", a drop dead gorgeous ballad in which Billy’s wistful clarinet is the diamond to Van Duser’s guitar setting, and is followed by the most improbable number of the night, Van Duser playing John Phillips Sousa’s "Star Spangled Banner" - in honor of Memorial Day.
The set ends with their cover of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust,” the most recorded song of all time (according to “Mr. Footnote”) in which Guy’s quietly inspired solo has the feel of a whole orchestra.
These two have appeared on Prairie Home Companion and been heard on NPR’s All Things Considered. And here they are in this quirkily wonderful performance space, a renovated 1890 Fire Station in Framingham, MA. Imagine a stage set up where Ladder 10 used to park and the audience sitting where Engine 3 used to berth. And the risers for the 180 chairs set up on a few hundred Polar Seltzer crates and you have a formula for an offbeat and intimate venue.
No matter where these two guys show up next, mark it in your calendar. They’re the best “Two Man Big Band” you’re ever going to hear.
Set List
"Wolverine Blues", Jelly Roll Morton
"Spring Cleaning", Fats Waller
"I Know That You Know", Benny Goodman
Gershwin song, slow sweet swing song
1928 "Ready for the River" (lyrics: Gus Kahn)
New Orleans spiritual from the 1920s
"Easy Winner", Scott Joplin rag
"I'm Coming Virginia", Bix Biederbecke
INTERMISSION
“Ain’t Misbehavin’", Fats Waller
a Sol Romberg fox trot
"The Jitterbug Waltz", (Fats Waller’s only waltz)
"Stompin’ At The Savoy", Benny Goodman,
"New Orleans Farewell", from the album Lovely Sunday Afternoon by Guy Van Duser And Billy Novick
Photos courtesy Amazing Things Arts Center
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