Gabriel Kahane Finds Inspiration in Strangers on a Train

Review: Gabriel Kahane Finds Inspiration in Strangers on a Train By Jon Pareles Dec. 1, 2017 The day after Donald Trump was elected, the songwriter Gabriel Kahane decided to go on a listening tour: crisscrossing America by train and talking to as many people as he could. Leaving his cellphone and the internet behind, he spent two weeks and nearly 9,000 miles on Amtrak, collecting conversations and stories for what would become “8980: Book of Travelers,” a song cycle and solo concert — Mr. Kahane accompanying himself on piano — that had its premiere on Thursday night at the BAM Harvey Theater, where it continues through Saturday. A video backdrop, designed by Jim Findlay, showed landscapes, urban and rural, seen from trains in motion. Mr. Kahane has built a career where classical music, musical theater and art-song pop meet, alongside occasional collaborators like Sufjan Stevens, Shara Worden (My Brightest Diamond) and Andrew Bird. He’s fond of narratives rooted in geography; his 2014 album (and a Brooklyn Academy of Music theatrical production), “The Ambassador,” based songs on Los Angeles locations, and he toured in 2013 with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra performing “Gabriel’s Guide to the 48 States,” based on WPA guidebooks. Mr. Kahane’s songs in “8980: Book of Travelers” are character studies of characters including himself. He has an ingratiating tenor that rises smoothly into falsetto, and for these songs he kept his piano parts subdued and transparent, with hints of Paul Simon, Randy Newman and Stephen Sondheim in their harmonies. The songs drift between stand-alone pop tunes and music-theater exposition. One asks, “Is difference only distance from the people I don’t know?” It’s a question the concert answers ambivalently and obliquely. Mr. Kahane’s songs sympathetically recount stories people told him about their lives, but also face grim historical memories. He ﬁnds comedy in a widow’s online dating stories and quiet grief in other passengers’ tales of loss. And he receives unexpected acceptance from members of an Amish-like traditionalist sect, the Old Order German Baptist Brethren, when he offers to sing with them since he can read the music in their hymnbooks. Hymns about “traveling on” to a “heavenly home” are threaded through the cycle: sometimes accompanied by harplike strumming inside the piano, sometimes reharmonized with more unstable, modernist chords. Near the end of the cycle, Mr. Kahane underlines his arty distance from what he’s observing, using electronic loops and a pitch-shifting vocal effect in “William Eggleston’s Sky,” named after the photographer, which itemizes strip-mall store signs and declares, “I am in love with America/I am betrayed by America.” And in a climactic, chilling song, Mr. Kahane sings about the travels of his German Jewish family: his grandmother, whose family escaped the Holocaust with faked documents, and relatives who did not. He also offers his conversation with Monica, an African-American woman returning to Tupelo for a funeral. It recounts a history of slavery and latter- generation success, yet her children still fear for her safety in rural Mississippi; the tolling refrain is, “They don’t need a hood or a cross or a tree.” She concludes, “I have limited sympathy for your desire to know the suffering of the working white man.” Mr. Kahane’s trip brings him new acquaintances and some sympathy for other people’s stories. But he knows a few shared hymns can’t repair history. Correction: Dec. 1, 2017 An earlier version of this article misstated one of Gabriel Kahane’s lyrics. It is “I have limited sympathy for your desire to know the suffering of the working white man,” not “working-class white man.” “8980: Book of Travelers” continues through Saturday at the BAM Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton Street, Brooklyn; 718-636-4100, bam.org. A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 2, 2017, Section C, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: Songs of Strangers on a Train.

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