“Here’s to the infinite possibility roadmap of life, where all the things we wish could be possible can be possible,” Salami Rose Joe Louis says to cheers. Her connection to music, as she tells the packed room at Blue Note Jazz Club, comes from a yearning for things to be alright, to just fall into place, for us to grow together as a society. While unassuming, her palatial, refined songs are a rallying cry for us to imagine a new dawn, one where we’ve overcome the dystopia we’re headed towards and have defeated overarching forces of malice.
And the music was lovely. Never one to make the same decision twice, Louis flip-flopped between punchy discordant sounds with a unifying backbeat, to fitful solos on a jazzy guitar. In just one hour, Louis took us riding through a wealth of lush soundscapes, amalgams of voicings— chopped and screwed, sometimes to obscurity— and punchy, unexpected novelties. And she did so masterfully with her accompanying band (Ambrose Akinmusire on trumpet, Simon Martinez on bass, and Luke Titus on drums), letting melodies thicken against rich percussion and bass and occasional wind. Frequently she took a backseat and allowed the musicians their respective moments, letting richly recorded tracks take on new textures in the live components. The four made a rewarding team, whether in the involvedly woven, canorous “Motorway” — a push and pull of light, frosty notes against a warm bass line, topped with a fluttery, twee voice that gave way to a soaring, winding soundscape— or in the brilliantly chaotic, constantly shifting “American Moss”, which showcased her and Flanafi’s production abilities to a maximum.
Before she was Salami Rose Joe Louis (a portmanteau of various childhood nicknames), Lindsay Olsen was a scientist, studying the ocean’s chemistry in oceanography labs and fiddling with DAWs and instruments during breaks. It’s fitting: now a multi-instrumentalist, producer, and signee to Flying Lotus’s label, her songs still embody those rich, unpredictable sonic qualities of the sea (re: “the giddy aquatic”), push-and-pull waveform melodies that bubble mutedly underground, then eventually popping unexpectedly and rising to the surface. Producing nearly exclusively on her Roland MV-8800 workstation, the tracks reflect an evangelic expertise in semi-analog production, as she translates her own hallmark sound into waves of technicolor blips, fluttery, twee vocals, and complex waveform melodies. Quiet yet thrilling, it was a show for the ages, a musically omnivorous display of proficiency you truly have to see live to understand.
