On Amtrak, Gabriel Kahane Listens to America

This article originally appeared on this site.

Anyone who willingly undertakes long-distance train travel in the United States is something of a romantic. Anyone who goes on such a journey for two weeks while eschewing both a cell phone and an Internet connection is something of a nut—or an artist. Our Amtrak system is notoriously scuffed and inefficient, but it still gives an American wanderer a generous idea of the country’s variety, prosperity, and desolation. It also forces you to mix with people of widely divergent social and political backgrounds, in that cathedral of culinary captivity, the dining car. On the morning after the election of Donald J. Trump, the singer-songwriter and composer Gabriel Kahane embarked on such a journey, which provided the creative fuel for “Book of Travelers,” a solo song cycle that débuts this week at the BAM Harvey Theatre (Nov. 30-Dec. 2).

Accompanying himself on piano, Kahane, in his appealing, soft baritone, toggles between his own states of feeling and those of his interlocutors. While Kahane is not alone among singer-songwriters in having a sophisticated harmonic palette—Chris Thile and Rufus Wainwright are also members of that club—it is his strong classical-music background that allows him to add layering to his basically light and melancholy style. In one of the best of the personal songs, “Little Love,” he sweetly offers a vision of getting old with his lover on a stretch of sandy coastline, to the steady rhythms of a church processional. In “Model Trains (Shannon & Michael),” he tenderly relates the story of a train-loving husband and father who goes slowly mad after hitting his head, as the piano part gently wanders through gestures suggestive of Schubert, or Brahms.

But in another song, “Monica,” Kahane digs deep. His companion is an affluent African-American woman who is travelling to a funeral by train because her family doesn’t want her to drive alone on Southern roads. In “Empire Liquor Mart,” from his epic ensemble piece “The Ambassador” (2014), Kahane took on the persona of a black teen-ager who was shot dead in the mayhem in Los Angeles after the beating of Rodney King. But now the blend between composer and interlocutor is more complex. The richly chromatic music for the verses, in which Monica relates her story, is redolent of Chopin and Bach, but the devastating refrain—“ ’Cause they don’t need a hood or a cross or a tree”—is etched in clear, blues-tinged chords. In a newly woke world, such a sensitive approach may be a white artist’s clearest road to empathy. 

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