For the Sake of a Reinvented Song

Maverick Vocal Group Roomful of Teeth Plays Santa Barbara, with Inventive Singer-Songwriter Gabriel Kahane in Tow

By Josef Woodard Tue Jan 30, 2024 | 10:26am

While they may be alphabetical neighbors in record bins (rare as those are now) and digital platforms, Roomful of Teeth and Roomful of Blues are radically different musical creatures. The blues Roomful is a rootsy, gutsy outfit dating back to 1967, in different forms. The toothful room, a dazzling and forward-leaning octet founded by Brad Wells in 2009, is all about creating new variations of the chamber choir theme, bringing innovative yet accessible sounds into the new chamber music scene.

Catch the famed new music group in its ideal form — live and in person — when they play at the Music Academy’s Hahn Hall on Saturday, February 3, one of several adventurous bookings in the current UCSB Arts & Lectures series. Adding to this date’s appeal, the showing also includes acclaimed singer-songwriter and “new art song” artist Gabriel Kahane in the mix.

Out of the mouths, throats, and inventive arrangements of the younger Roomful comes a unique sonic blend made up of parts from high, low, and medium cultural perspectives. Aspects of minimalism, post-modernist choral ideas, conceptualism, and even new forms of art pop — an area in which Kahane is an acknowledged power broker — the group has successfully appealed to contemporary music nerds and adventurous-minded general audience listeners alike.

In that way, Roomful of Teeth works in the long shadow of the now-50-year-old and ever-young Kronos Quartet, which will make its own appearance at Campbell Hall on April 27.

In a way, the group’s rise to a high profile within the specialized world of new music can be traced back to Caroline Shaw’s Partita for 8 Voices, which had its 805 premiere at the 2016 Ojai Music Festival and which hit the top of the classical charts on iTunes. The piece heeds the ancient baroque partita structure but sounds strictly 21st century. Alternately lyrical, primal, and intuitively adventurous, the a cappella work won fans and a Pulitzer Prize, while the group’s debut album won a Grammy for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance, effectively kick-starting the group’s onward and upward trajectory.

With its shifting personnel, and periodically with Shaw still in the mix, the group subsequently has collaborated with many groups and “classical” settings, and slowly built up a discography through last year’s intriguing acoustic-electronic Rough Magic. The album features another Shaw piece, the five-part work “The Isle.” Her music will have its place in the Hahn Hall program.

Shaw, who has spent time as a faculty member of the Music Academy in pre-COVID years and premiered her Lo (violin concerto) here in 2018, spoke to me about the origin of the by-now new music classic, Partita for 8 Voices.

“It began as just an experiment,” she said, “conjuring one sound — vocal fry — into another — a D major triad — but it kept growing and growing. I really threw myself into writing it, and of course I had the great inspiration of getting to sing with Roomful of Teeth. After writing the ‘Passacaglia’ and ‘Courante’ [movements of the piece], I knew I had to keep diving in.

“Every writing project is different, with different puzzles and challenges and joys, and I’m lucky to get to keep learning something new with each bit of music I write. When I stop learning, I’ll stop writing.”

Kahane has had his own encounters with Santa Barbara, performing at Campbell Hall and also in cahoots with the group yMusic at SOhO almost exactly a decade ago. The son of respected pianist and L.A. Chamber Orchestra conductor Jeffrey Kahane, Gabriel has established himself as one of the more intelligent singer-songwriters on the scene — or just to the left of that typically more roots-based genre — with bilateral membership in the classical orbit.

While he has written for orchestra and chamber ensembles, his singer-songwriter persona is a distinguishing mark, sometimes resembling Paul Simon, Sufjan Stevens, and Rufus Wainwright (the latter two of which he has collaborated with). Among Kahane’s finer albums are The Ambassador (2014), riffing around Los Angeles’ mythic and tragic Ambassador Hotel and other storied places around the city of his youth, and 2022’s Magnificent Bird, his first album since relocating from Brooklyn to Portland, Oregon, when the pandemic hit.

Fence-straddler or not, Kahane is not one to draw hard and fast lines between the “serious” and “pop” idioms woven into his music. As he told me, “I think listeners, whether they are interested in pop music or classical music, want stories to be told, and want those stories to be emotionally rich without being laden with treacle. The consumer, the music listener, is interested in whether something is going to move them emotionally, not whether a pop song is informed by 19th-century Germanic harmony or has a 12-tone ostinato.

“People who love music just want to know whether something is going to move them or not. Bob Dylan can break your heart, singing badly out of tune, a folk song with a relatively simple harmonic palate. And so can the Takács, playing one of the Bartók string quartets. There is so much ‘genre-blurring’ music out there now that we really need to move the conversation toward the question of ‘Does it sound good?’ and not continue this preoccupation with the materials from which it is built.

“If I were to be strictly technical, I would say that I have great respect for the classic forms of American popular song, and I do think consciously about finding ways to simultaneously honor those traditional forms while stretching them to the limit of what they can bear.”

In other words, Kahane very much belongs in the circle of friends in the Roomful of Teeth.

The Southern California premiere of Roomful of Teeth with Gabriel Kahane takes place on Saturday, February 3, at 7 p.m. at Hahn Hall, UCSB. For more information, see artsandlectures.ucsb.edu.