VickiKristinaBarcelona travels the world.
A world that includes two shows at Temple Theater this Saturday at the Rochester International Jazz Festival. The trio’s mission? Spreading the gospel of Tom Waits.
For journalists in search of easy metaphors, Rachelle Garniez provides one. When VickiKristinaBarcelona is not on the road playing shows – and this is a very busy band – she lives in upstate New York.
“Obsessively digging up soil and plants,” she says. “It’s just one blade of grass at a time.”
One blade of grass at a time, just as VickiKristinaBarcelona nurtures one Waits song at a time. Growing each, encouraging their full cacophony of possibilities: songs of lovers, edgy characters, romantic melodies, broken rhythms, the beauty of guitar, the clatter of found percussion.
By some estimates – OK, mine – Waits has been one of the finest, and most daring, songwriters of the last four decades or so. VickiKristinaBarcelona believes so as well. The group first played here in 2018, at the jazz fest. It returned later for gigs at The Little Theatre and Geva Theatre.
The trio is charming. Each musician brings something different to the stage, both instrumentally and in personality. There is great panache as the band favoring outfits that feel like character actors in a Bogart film. Likening to that cinematic style, this is music noir.
The name of the group, VickiKristinaBarcelona, is drawn from the 2008 Woody Allen film “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” but only in the slimmest of ways — three women falling in love with the same man. In the case of VickiKristinaBarcelona, that man is Waits.
We’ll call it a New York City band. But that’s merely geography, not musicality.
Garniez grew up in the city’s East Village in the 1980s, declaring herself through performance art, “so there’s a bit of theater and do-it-yourself element.” Busking on the streets, creating music from “a slapping-it-together mode.” She’s drawn to Cajun and zydeco, playing accordion and concertina. “The accordion,” she says, “is a little key to every country in the world.”
Percussionist Amanda Homi is a native of New York City, but speaks of “influences from different parts the world.” She has wandered Greece, Italy, India, Columbia, Egypt, Spain and Turkey. She’s pieces of each, much like the mosaic tile projects she confesses to finding herself caught up in.
Guitarist Mamie Minch joined the group in February, after Terry Radigan moved on to pursue other interests. “Most of the vocabulary that I’m working with is blues stuff,” Minch says. Is Waits the blues? Certainly, if you take into account songs about broken hearts and car trouble. “I’m a big fan of Tom Waits, since I was a teenager.”
That must mean Minch is a big fan of car trouble and breakups. Trouble is a big part of her professional life, since Minch’s day gig is repairing musical instruments. “Shop class,” she says, “is essential for all girls.”
So what is the allure of Waits? The world is loaded with wonderful songwriters. All three women of VickiKristinaBarcelona hear a separate muse as well, having released albums of their own music.
They encounter this muse everywhere. Garniez recalls busking in New Orleans with another accordion player, in the early-morning, misty hours. And then … hearing a third accordion down the street. It was a long-haired guy playing Waits’s “Innocent When You Sleep.” (Perhaps Waits’s most-beautiful song, she says.)
That is a synchronicity, one born of atmosphere. The allure may be the early-morning mistiness that lingers over Waits music. Or, “a growly voice to express inner demons,” Garniez says.
She’s heard the comparisons of, “‘Oh, this is a female Tom Waits,’” she says. “I grew to resent Tom Waits.”
Then got over it.
“It’s nice to get under the persona,” she admits.
VickiKristinaBarcelona, Minch says, works from “a limited instrumental palette,” seeking to “ring every drop of musicality” from their instruments. Rhythms and styles change, but what carries VickiKristinaBarcelona is gorgeous three-part harmonies.
The women of VickiKristinaBarcelona confess they also like to go “a little to the darker side,” as Homi says. Perhaps it’s because they feel the music carries with it some responsibility. “There’s a bit of a joyful element to each song we bring in,” she adds. “Maybe that’s just ourselves trying to cheer ourselves up.”
They are not alone in the need to find refuge from this world. A recent European tour brought the group to Switzerland — a peaceful country just one overloaded train ride from Ukraine, a country consumed by the violence of war. Refugees were fleeing Ukraine and the Russian invasion of their country. At one of their shows, VickiKristinaBarcelona met a family whose father was Ukrainian soldier on leave. He posed for a photo with the band while wearing a washboard.
Then, he went back to war. There’s an echo of that sadness in “Soldier’s Things,” yet another interpretation of a Waits song on VickiKristinaBarcelona’s newest album, “Yesterday is Here.” The lyrics are an inventory of trifling items being sold off – cufflinks, hubcaps, a rusty jackknife – all once belonging to a soldier presumably killed in a war. “Everything’s a dollar in this box,” Waits sings.
And now, VickiKristinaBarcelona sings it as well.
“When you play a sad song,” Homi says, “that’s a way to preserve humanity.”
Jeff Spevak is the senior arts writer for WXXI and CITY Magazine.