Song Slam at Ice House

A song slam is like a poetry slam with better voices and piano accompaniment. To this combination of features we ought to add the arching melody and carefully parsed rhythms that "art" songs often provide. But you're sitting in a bar. No one is dressed up. The composers and performers answer questions about their work before each number is performed, and hundreds of dollars in prize money are given out at the end to the contestants the audience liked best. That is to say, the friends they came to see.

Sound like fun? I thought so. I met a friend at the Ice House on Nicollet Avenue and Hilary arrived a little later from the opposite direction after an early dinner with a friend. The place was packed. It was almost too dark to read the program, which, in any case, was mostly devoted to ads for the Source Song organization and mini-bios of the performers. The bios didn't follow the order of the songs, anyway, and I found it easy to set it aside.

The important thing was the ballot inside, and I was determined to take notes on each song, or at least give each performance a numerical value, so as to be able to cast an educated vote at the end of the show. That didn't happen.

The performers were standing in the hallway leading off from the stage like bucking broncos at a rodeo, and everyone was having a good time. The master of ceremonies, Chris Koza, played the guitar and sang one of his own songs, and then the slam proper began.

I wish I could tell you more about the individual pieces but I had to turn in my ballot at the end of the show, and don't remember any names, though (checking the program later) the first singer, Rodolfo Nieto, had a vigorous baritone, and another of the early performers, David Walton, delivered his piece in a very sweet lyric tenor. I found Benjamin Emory Larson's song about Nicola Tesla a little heavy handed, and also Catherine Dalton's "You Have to Stand There," but found a lot to admire in Jake Endres's "The Fuge of Love," and not only because my friend Athena Kildegaard wrote the words to it.

A number of the compositions were chromatic and "conversational," a la Charles Ives, but several had formal stanzas and repeated melodies, a la Schubert and that crowd. The singers seemed relaxed and entirely uninhibited on stage. One woman wore a zany red hat with twelve fluffy prongs sticking out the top. In short, there was a touch of Dada to the proceedings. 

Throughout the set Hilary and I continued to pick at the ploughman's lunch we'd ordered, which looked a little like a portrait by Archimboldo. I was expecting a great big onion, some chutney, a pickle, and a crusty piece of bread, but the waitress brought us a thin slab of slate covered with mushrooms, sausages, smoked salmon, mango slices (all the Welsh farmers eat it), roasted cauliflower, several chunks of cheese, and some toast. There were also a few shredded globs of unidentified vegetable matter. Cucumber? Carrots? I have no idea.

The performance space at the Ice House is ideal for such events. You feel like you're at the Globe Theater or a bull fight. The audience was there to listen, but also to cheer. Everybody knew somebody; some people seemed to know everyone. And soaring over it all, the lyrical human voice, male or female, wrapping itself tenderly around a 16th century English ballad, a Portuguese love song by Camöes, or a poem by one of our great local talents.