Brian Slattery photo
Ceschi (center) at Cafe9 Wednesday.
Hip hop and folk punk came together Wednesday night at Cafe Nine to offer stories of persistence, hope, and detective work as DJ Halo, Tommy V, MJ Bones, Indigaux, MC Homeless, and Ceschi performed for an enthusiastic audience in a show organized by Ceschi.
DJ Halo, currently based in Durham, N.C. but formerly of Connecticut (he had a regular show on WPKN), started the evening with a short set that warmed up the room, mixing hip hop beats with elements like Miami Sound Machine. “I haven’t played a set here in 10 years,” Halo said, but in the warm reception he got, it was clear he was as welcome as ever.
Tommy V next took the stage for a rap set that deployed a series of unusual samples from jazz and loungier music to other sounds off the beaten path in hip hop. It thoroughly matched the prevailing subject matter of Tommy V’s songs, as he donned a detective hat and waved a flashlight, then replaced the hat with a policeman’s cap, to tell a cops and robbers story shot through with drama and humor. He jumped off the stage to start what he called a “jazz mosh pit,” with audience members happily obliging. Another song called for yodeling, which V pulled off with aplomb.
In between songs, his self-deprecating humor kept winning the crowd over. “I kind of messed that one up,” he said of one song. “I wasn’t supposed to say that!” He was right that if he hadn’t said anything, no one would have been the wiser. He also joked that his songs didn’t have any big choruses, just confusion. They were also big fun.
“We’re going to get really vulnerable here,” the New Haven-based MJ Bones said before delivering a short, sweet set, accompanying themselves on ukulele. They opened themselves up, about their struggles with depression and anxiety and its effects on those they loved. “When I don’t have a body, will I be missed by anybody?” they sang. “What version of me are you seeing right now?” The audience responded by opening up in turn, learning the choruses on the spot and singing along.
They continued with a song about “a guy who thought his bones were haunted, and that’s not hyperbolic,” they said. They explained further that learning this fact made them want to get to know that guy — a decision they later retracted (“he said he doesn’t get angry, just impatient,” they sang, in understatement). Their last song went out to their brother, and was in some ways the most vulnerable song of the night, as it took the audience into a private conversation between siblings, as they wrestled with the mental illnesses and trauma that felt like “a generational curse, or something like that,” they sang, a “sacred family heirloom none of us asked for.” Bones’s delivery turned all this into catharsis and connection. Without imposing, they spoke to what ails and needs healing in many.
The New Haven-based Indigaux then took over the stage with a laptop full of glitchy, thumping rhythms and a boisterous, defiant, and joyful rapping style that grabbed attention from the first beat drop. “I’ve been on hiatus from all Connecticut stages,” they explained this was the first show they’d played in the state since the beginning of the year. Saying that it had been a “wild” year, they added they had no tolerance for “fake friends.”
“Boom!” said someone in the audience, in total agreement.
Frankly sexual and unapologetically proud, Indigaux easily brought the audience with them into their musical world, which slyly proved more challenging than it first appeared. Their rap style bounced from one fast, complex bar to another while the beats they made reveled in an unsettled disorientation below the hooky, danceable surface, revealing the complicated shadow behind the power stance.
MC Homeless — originally from Youngstown, Ohio, but now based in North Carolina — occupied the stage next, backed up by DJ Halo. Rather than beckoning the audience to him, Homeless leapt off the stage time and again to get close to the audience, interspersing driving raps with jokes that helped the ear find the considerable humor in the raps as well. One song, “Billy Madison,” was written about that titular Adam Sandler movie. Homeless mentioned that some had told him he looked like Sandler. “Do I have a treat for you in my set,” Homeless recalled saying.
Amid the humor were recollections of coming from a hardscrabble place; Youngstown is a classic Rust Belt city that, about 15 years ago, began clearing away half the city in a bid to build a smaller and improved future for itself. “Who’s from Ohio?” Homeless called out. No one clapped. “Me,” he responded, to laughter, but the following song described lives of desperation, of drugs and unemployment. It connected as deeply as the previous humor had.
“Doing that song, everybody’s from Ohio,” Homeless said.
The night ended with Ceschi, who had organized the show, performing his most recent album in its entirety. Bring Us the Head of Francisco False will be a two-volume album that Ceschi has announced will be his last record as a solo artist, and it felt like a fitting sendoff, full of big emotions and piercing observations, feeling in its totality like a dispatch from a community of precarious lives. “Wish I could give you your life back,” the final song concluded, but far more hopeful notes shone throughout, with one shout-along chorus comprised of the lyric “this is the beginning of a new era.” A few people in the audience already knew most of the words.
Ceschi ended his set with gratitude for Cafe Nine. “So many years coming here,” he said. “So happy you’re still making this happen.”
