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Sam Wilkes - Public Records Performance - Wilkes Records 003
It’s the first week of August 2022 in New York City. It is unbelievably hot. Bassist and composer Sam Wilkes learns through his bandmate, Will Graefe, that avant-garde stalwart Shahzad Ismaily wants to sit in during their upcoming performance at Brooklyn’s Public Records. Shahzad is a legend, but Wilkes is nonplussed at the request. This is Wilkes' first headline show in his birthplace of New York City, and the setlist is set. Anyway, he doesn't typically take impromptu guests. After mulling it over for a day, Wilkes delivers an ultimatum: If Shahzad is willing to play the soprano voice in the three-part harmony of the outro guitar solo from "The Boys Are Back in Town" on his synth during set-closer "Today," he can join in. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Shahzad enthusiastically obliges, and they set up a rehearsal date.
Flip on the last track of side B of Public Records Performance (out 10/17 on Wilkes Records) and you'll hear the lick emerge from Wilkes' own composition like a sudden storm. As with all Wilkes' work, this was as much preparation as intuition. Days before the performance, at the rehearsal between Wilkes and Graefe, a shirtless Shahzad showed up holding his Moog Rogue in one arm and a to-go stack of plain buckwheat pancakes in the other. Graefe finally introduced the two, and there the vibe was midwifed into the world. Onstage at Public Records, that chemistry was broadcast for the first time.
Public Records Performance is a dispatch from that sweltering evening on August 6th, 2022, where the sold-out crowd in the venue's plywood-panelled Sound Room inspired the kind of restless energy you can't rehearse for. At 27 minutes and 7 songs, the album is a concise but expansive document of a musician at the height of a prolific streak. At this point in the summer of 2022, Wilkes had already recorded both The Doober—his duo album with saxophonist and frequent collaborator Sam Gendel—and played bass on Louis Cole’s symphonic opus Nothing. Perhaps because of that, Public Records Performance doesn’t bear the burden of a grand unveiling. The band forms a tight and communicative unit of multi-instrumentalists: Wilkes on Fender bass and composition, Aidan Lombard on keys/guitar (Lombard also contributes writing to the song "Stay Awake"), Graefe on acoustic and electric guitar, and Craig Weinrib on drums and guitar.
On this record, Wilkes debuts a dynamic set of new originals and arrangements, presenting a window into his syncretic approach to an ever-expanding contemporary songbook. In contrast to a catalog that doesn’t always foreground its author's chops, Public Records Performance showcases Wilkes’ writing and virtuosic bass playing, both as a soloist and as a member of a dominant rhythm section. This is an athletically precise ensemble that remains loose enough to traverse into the unplanned, where each member's sense for arrangement can be deployed in real time through improvisation. Look no further than the spontaneously composed title track, or at 3:02 in "Stay Awake," where Graefe and Wilkes land on the exact same phrase in synchronicity, a highlight among the many brilliant solos Graefe takes on this album.
Thematically, the performance is peppered with winks and nods to the fact that this is something of a homecoming for the Los Angeles-based musician. Besides the obvious reference to Thin Lizzy in "Today," the elegiac "Return Home" renders Wilkes' Homeric return explicit. While "Just Married," the lone track where Wilkes sings, tells the story of a man watching a lost love get hitched, echoing Wilkes' own feelings of longing and acceptance over a former hometown flame who he thought might be at the show to hear it. (She wasn't.)
Back in the city where he was born, Public Records Performance finds Wilkes at his most natural: wry, heartfelt, and a bit enigmatic. In typical Wilkesian fashion, things happen once and only once: improvised, slightly off-kilter, and totally unrepeatable. - Yousef Hilmy and J. Mamana