More bang for your hardware buck

That lull between Christmas and New Year’s means different things to different people—from such formal holidays as Boxing Day and Kwanzaa to more nebulous pursuits, like shaking off two months of forced holiday cheer and all the angst that accompanies the specter of obese, bearded guys running around dressed up like giant apparitions of Amanita muscaria mushrooms.

For this scribe, however, the last week of the calendar year means one thing: Tru Valu.

In a Wednesday appearance at Old Ironsides, Tru Valu appeared as the featured performer at the club’ s open-mike night. The house was not packed, and the rabid fans that might show up for, say, one of Neil Hamburger’s knock-down, drag-out appearances were not to be found; perhaps there was a karaoke night with cheap drinks somewhere else in this fair city. Most of the people in the audience were waiting to play their 11-minute folk-music masterpieces, perhaps hoping that booking agents for the second stage of Woodstock 2002, or perhaps even the reincarnation of Moses Asch, might be lurking about.

So when Tru Valu, whittled by fate down to a solo act—no dancing guys in bear suits, no women pelting the audience with Toll House cookies—took the stage, the anticipation among those not on the stage was, sadly, focused more on the performance’s end than its beginning. Those involved in show business will tell you that it’s a difficult spot to be in, but veteran sawist Jason Verlinde acquitted himself quite admirably.

Verlinde, who now lives in Seattle but was in town for the holidays, is no Bob Armstrong, though. His method of playing the saw—drawing a bow, cello-like, over the smooth edge of the same tool you’d use to build a backyard doghouse—is more along the lines of how an impressionist painter might approach a canvas; he doesn’t so much illustrate a song’s melody in detail as he adroitly places a line here and there to suggest the existence of the melody. In fact, it might be difficult to ascertain what song was being played, if not for the karaoke soundtrack that accompanied him, which sounded like they were taped off old Euro easy-listening LPs—James Last, Paul Mauriat—procured at some offbeat garage sale. And the snap-crackle-pop on his backing tape gave the evening a decided Appalachian trip-hop feel.

He opened with “Hava Nagila.” It was the most otherworldly version I’d ever heard of that ethnic favorite, and perhaps the only thing that could have improved it was if I would have brought my dog to sing along. Surely Verlinde’ s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest sonics would have prompted some fine howls and barks from Sammy Hagar Jr., said pooch. After a humorous intro to the Don Ho song that was slated to follow, the old Matt Monro hit “Born Free” played instead. “Oh, well,” Verlinde shrugged. Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” and the theme from the surreal film Brazil followed.

It was an appropriate denouement to an evening of pure genius, as far as evenings of pure genius go.Scene & heard was reported by .