Miss Ambivalent
Freddy’s Bar
South Slope, Brooklyn
Oct. 27, 2023
If you were to belly up to the bar at Freddie’s this past Friday, kicking off Hallo-Weekend surrounded by neighborhood drunks in DIY costume, I sincerely hope you had a good time. That said, it’d be false to say you’d made the most of your night.
Tucked around the corner from Freddie’s kitchen is the bar’s showroom, a small, stageless space that can house an audience hardly larger than 30 some-odd folks. The sound is rough, the environment cramped, the seating spare. But the music that night was something else.
A brief overview of the opening acts before we get to the main course:
First off, the absolute mayhem of the Trevor Dunn/Doyeon Kim duo: upright bass and gayageum (a traditional Korean plucked hard-adjacent instrument) facing off in a battle of instrumental will. I unabashedly love music that makes me fear for the instrument’s safety. Dunn attacks the bass with a ferocity that threatens to tear the thing to shreds, but he and Kim are impeccably attuned to each other. Through all the scratches and wailing arco, the wood-snapping pizzicato and cascading harpeggio, Kim and Dunn managed to build out two pieces of perfectly paced improv. If you can get your ears in past the harshness or, even better, accept it as an emergent quality of this sort of music’s genre-transcending ambitions, then you’ll recognize this as top-tier with regards to this style — always tangential, always moving, always pushing further and further its own sonic logic…
Sandwiched between the duo and the night’s headliner was a short, meditative improv set by Eric Biondo. Episodic and as humorous as it was monkishly humble, Biondo’s solo trumpet explorations, more murmur than howl, were a welcome oasis of muddy calm. Fleet fingers over the valves, but the sounds always, somehow, partially obscured — tin-foil over the bell, Harmon mute wobbling in and out of the mic’s range, skittering lines blown into a snare drum, or mutterings plumbing the unsoundable sub-registers of the horn. To categorize Biondo’s set as a pallet cleanser would be a great disservice to an incredible musician, but to discount its mood of repose would be an insult to Biondo’s respect for subtlety.
Then there was the headliner: Jeong Lim Yang’s, and I quote, “singer-songwriter project” Miss Ambivalent.
I’ve been a fan of Lim for a while now. She occasionally sat in the house band at a bar I used to work at in the East Village, and her trio’s take on Mary Lou Williams’ Zodiac Suite is unexaggeratedly cosmic. All to say, I know her approach, I’ve heard it many times in more jazz-forward settings.
Lim’s the kind of bass player who makes drummers jealous — a sense of time as firm as falling boulders, an arsenal of touch from feather to sledgehammer, and a mind for melody that seamlessly incorporates pop plainchant with avant angularity. She’s an incredible player, simply not to be fucked with.
The only other band I’ve heard sound anything like Miss Ambivalent is another contemporary group in Brooklyn, Stimmerman (hint, hint, wink, wink, please play a bill together so I can go). They too are a learned chaoticians, but with a stricter bent compositionally. Miss Ambivalent very often feels that they could care less how their song is “supposed to go.” But, that’s the only thing ambivalent about Miss Ambivalent — with the likes of Kevin Shea (drums) and Santiago Leibson (keys) backing Lim up there wasn’t a chance on God’s green earth that a single note would get played that wasn’t meant.
With all the howling, the Evil Dead ring-modulated vocoder harmony, drum hits like grenades, and napalm-breathed keyboard sweeps, Miss Ambivalent created a dense, ecstatic chaos that only they knew the way through. We were just along for the ride, soaring to dizzy heights and plummeting back down to shatter on the rolling rocks, dancing through the pummel, broken bones and all.
