Doveman & Friends (Featuring Anna Roberts-Gevalt, Alex Sopp, Steve Sallett, serpentwithfeet, Ella Hunt, Martha Wainwright, Jim White, Spencer Murphy, and more)
The Owl Music Parlor
497 Rogers Ave.
Brooklyn, NY
Nov. 20, 2025
Small venues come and go, no matter how great or special they are. It goes without saying that often the things that make venues the best are the same qualities that make them short-lived, like the people running them caring more about the art and the spirit of the thing than the bottom line. The Owl Music Parlor has been around for ten years now, an eternity in the live-music ecosystem of Brooklyn, and though it made many empty threats to close its doors over the last few years, it’s sadly shuttering for real next month, a reality that the music community it fosters has been bracing itself for and grieving in advance since the news became official in early 2025. Places like this are enough to make you seriously consider moving to Brooklyn if you’re a music lover, and so many of my favorite musicians and artists in the city have considered the venue a home away from home, an essential community hub and incubator of collaboration and new work.
When The Owl isn’t hosting world-renowned artists and performers – and first-rate sidemen and musicians known not for having their names on the marquees but for supporting the artists who do – I’ve found that they commonly host some of the best and brightest emerging talent in the city; intriguingly, when those same musicians come to Philly, they’re usually playing house shows or DIY spots like Abyssinia’s upstairs back room. Abyssinia serves as an interesting mirror image to The Owl: it’s like a reduction, as though you’d stripped away the proximity to Julliard. (If Bourdain rated venues instead of restaurants, I think he’d find both charming, but Abyssinia more improbably so.) The two spaces share a surprising amount in common, yet with totally different flavors. There isn’t exactly a pipeline here to speak of, just a shared affinity or propensity; when I describe a place like The Owl to someone, I think in terms of coziness and comfort, I think of a vision on the part of its proprietor to provide that for performer and audience alike. (Which makes sense: the guy running the place, Oren Bloedow, is a storied musician and artist in his own right. Check out his band Elysian Fields if you never have; fitting that he’d run such an elysian venue.) In so many venues, you feel like nothing more than a customer. When Bloedow walks through the room, trying to fix a feedback issue or be of assistance somehow, then runs back to serve you a drink at the bar, then runs up to play guitar with whoever’s on stage, you mostly feel like you’re at a great party with really, really talented people. Near as I can tell, Abyssinia is as close as Philly gets to this, or as close as we get to a venue that feels like playing in someone’s home or living room. It’s an ideal place to listen to and observe an amazing emerging artist who may not be broadly known yet but has no surfeit of the requisite talent to get there.
Way back in early 2010, I was on the tail end of undergrad, taking some winter time off after a particularly grueling and soul-deadening semester. In that little gap (unrelated obviously, but fortuitously for me), Thomas Bartlett, the producer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, began hosting a monthly salon-style series at Le Poisson Rouge in Manhattan, affectionately dubbed The Burgundy Stain Sessions. These shows were informal, improvised, intimate and exciting: anyone who attended got to witness a grab bag of Bartlett’s famous and not-so-famous friends dropping in to sing or play a song. I saw St. Vincent tackle Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” and perform a scat solo when she and Thomas lost their place; I saw Norah Jones sit in, then trip over a glass on the floor while making her way to the exit; I produced an orange Tortex guitar pick from my pocket when Glen Hansard asked from the stage, “Does anybody have a plectrum?” and got the rejoinder of an Irish-style “Tanks!” when I handed it to him. I didn’t live in New York back then but I made a point of driving down every month for those shows, which were all-the-more stunning for their off-the-cuff, let’s-give-it-a-go approach: incredible musicians doing incredible things they’d barely rehearsed, or hadn’t rehearsed at all.
So I made the pilgrimage not just to pay tribute to The Owl, in its last days, but to re-inhabit that time, to re-glimpse a portion of my own past, the closest thing to a Burgundy Stain Session that 2025 is likely to produce. Now that The Owl is on its way out, they’re pulling out all the stops, with some of their most special shows saved for their final months. Not long ago Bartlett revived his Doveman persona (really, just the name of the band he once sang and wrote songs in, long inactive both live and on record) for a show here; I’m told by my friend Claire, who attended though I couldn’t, that it was the first time in their entire relationship that his fiancée had heard him sing.
I walked in a little late, missing about fifteen minutes of an opening instrumental set by a trio led by Bartlett, on piano. I was gleefully surprised – though, again, expecting the unexpected – to see the legendary Jim White, drummer for The Dirty Three / Cat Power / Hard Quartet / countless others, behind the kit; they were joined by Spencer Murphy on upright bass, or, as he called it, “a fool’s instrument.” I loved watching all three, especially Bartlett; he plays inimitably, like the piano is his partner in a time-bending dance. He moved reactively and responsively on the bench, slamming fingers down and leaning back as though he’d cast an explosive spell, or pressing one ear to the fallboard, closing his eyes, feeling the instrument the way only someone who’s been playing since his legs were too short to reach the floor can. (Eventually, I’d find myself in a vacant seat right next to the piano, close enough to climb in, feeling the big black box move.)
Later, when she and Bloedow joined the trio for the night’s last two songs, Martha Wainwright heaped praise on Bartlett, saying he plays the way a singer sings, a phrase that gets at the same embodied quality of his playing: there’s so much personality, so much voice, in what he does that you feel like you’d easily recognize him just from his touch on the keys. The trio’s opening set concluded with a muted, slow, tender modal piece, crooked yet graceful, that I could have listened to forever, drifting dreamlike between rest and motion. The whole show was deeply informal – like we’d stumbled into the dress rehearsal and everyone on stage thought, “Well, they’re all here, might as hell do it for real” – and in remembering it I can’t help but jump back and forth in order. Each one-or-two-song segment – Ella Hunt’s showstopping “Six Hours” (an unreleased song, out in the spring), with Bartlett sitting on the floor, eyes close, entranced; Alex Sopp, the accomplished orchestral musician, singing her own songs live for the first time; serpentwithfeet’s yearning, moonmisty love song – would fully justify its own article. (Not to mention that I came back the next night, for another show, totally different and totally great, too.)
All night, there was the priceless splendor of witnessing such great musicians just barely making something work. They were actively listening to one another to pull it off by necessity; in some instances the group had never played the songs before. What I love about an informal thing like this is, yes, it’s almost not good. There's the potential for transcendence or for trainwrecks, though the latter implies the train is on the tracks, where it’s supposed to be... it’s more like the players are off-roading it and barely see where they’re at or where they’re going, but have the skill, experience and balance to get where they need to go, and the open-hearted vulnerability to go there to begin with. Both of those extremes are exactly what I'll miss about this place.
