SisterMonk Gypsy Funk Trio

You’ve seen the doo-wop groups, break-dancers and Mexican balladeers who wander through subway cars, and you’ve seen the violinists trying to finance their studies by serving "caviare to the general." On a recent night, the esplanade between the R train and the Broadway 1-2-3 at Times Square was occupied by a group called the SisterMonk trio. SisterMonk's female lead, K. Deane, plays a bongo, attached to her waist with a worn leather strap, wears ankle tambourines and sings with a virtuosity that is reminiscent of soul greats like Aretha Franklin. Her vocals are a mixture of jazz, swing, and the outlaw style of Rick James, with a little bit of Gloria Gaynor’s gospel disco style thrown in for good measure. Everything about Deane is magnified. Her bongo and tambourines are rudimentary, but it sounds like she’s Gene Krupa pounding away on a complete drum set with cymbals. The net effect of listening to Deane, who is accompanied by Trevor Hochman on bass and Jody Rubel on guitar, is to make you feel really cool and impregnable. Watching her, you get that old feeling from adolescence when music made you soar above everyone and made the petty concerns and responsibilities of living seem totally irrelevant, though her music doesn’t make you want to escape. It makes you want to stay right where you are, in this case the bustling Times Square subway station. She and her group offer the raw nourishment of hardtack. You want to merge with them, and you’d follow Deane on her odyssey if it weren’t for the rumble of your train pulling into the station. 

Take Me to Heaven

The great disco-era singer Sylvester has faded into the past, hopefully buried with his own “band of gold,” to quote the famous Freyda Payne song. Sylvester prefigured RuPaul, the transvestite singer who was popular in the early ‘90s, but he wasn’t ostentatious in the way of Rick James, who was the Caravaggio of disco performers, singing about a violent world and eventually ending up in prison himself. Sylvester’s music was filled with the urgency and cadences of the gospel world out of which he emerged. The lyrics reflected the sexual promiscuity of the permissive San Francisco club scene where he earned his stripes, but like much of soul music, with its big band sound, Sylvester’s crescendos simply turned the love of God to man. R&B, soul and disco of the kind that Sylvester sang are fundamentally romantic idioms, and this differentiates them from the first rap artists like the Sugar Hill Gang, who started to appear in the later years of Sylvester’s career, and who presented a gritty urban realism. “Do You Want to Funk?” was one of Sylvester’s most famous songs, and the answer, in an age when almost anything went, was usually yes. But one of the greatest numbers in his repertoire is “Take Me to Heaven,” a song that inhabits the crossroads between aspiration and sexuality. Heaven is hopefully where Sylvester landed after he died from AIDS in 1982.