Whiskey Howling

A Night with Bella's Bartok.

 

By Noah Zachary

An ambulance pulled up in front of the widely windowed entrance and flashed red and blue lights over the triumphant gypsies standing before the crowd.

“Now the ambulance is here, we can really fucking party!” vocalist Vashti Poor screamed and the band belted out their second to last song of the night, aptly titled “Party Song.”

With the whole house packed, the trombone player, Sean Klaiber, gallivanted through the crowd blasting hot air into random faces. The song came to a crescendo of epic howls, and yelps and horns, and yips and bass. The steady crashing of drums and guitar infected every person in the bar with power that could shake the cement walls of a basement while rustling the leaves on the top of a mountain.

Bella’s Bartok is a gypsy folk rock explosion forged in the brick alleyways of the Berkshire Mountains. I had taken on the task to write something about them, yet I had seen them just once before. I only knew Bella’s Bartok put on a rocking live show, the band was full of wildly colorful characters, and that I was probably getting myself in over my head with this bunch. I walked through the door expecting to find a melee of folk soldiers ready for war, but, to my embarrassment, was sorely mistaken. I opened the door with an “I’m Sorry We’re Closed” sign duct-taped to it, and stepped into a desolate apartment with no traces of the pre-gig rowdiness I expected. The living room was empty and the bedroom was full of instruments. I took my seat on the couch and waited for the whole band to burst through the door.

No army of folk rockers emerged for nearly twenty minutes.

Finally vocalist Asher Putnam and sax player Tony Barone barreled through the door and quickly gathered up amplifiers with no more than a nod in my direction, calling “be back in ten!” as they headed down the stairs.  Five minutes later the bald-headed bassist, Steve Torres, tramped through the door and confusedly greeted me.  

“I didn’t get my nap today,” he admitted as he packed up his upright bass before leaving me alone again.  

Hardly the folk rock army I had expected.

The band was 45 minutes late to the gig. As they sat watching the first band there were whispers of a “secret weapon” violinist overseas at music school and accordion player Doug Wright talked about his new accordion he recently acquired from an 89-year-old woman. His favorite thing about it? How “excellent Super Mario Bros. sounds.”

The time for waiting was soon over and Steve took off his shirt. Asher wrapped a beaded sarong around his waist. With the entire group in place they looked like an Alice in Wonderland bar mitzvah band on acid. Lead guitarist and vocalist James Bill slid his glass of beer up the frets of his guitar in an epic buildup and the room exploded with three crashes of the drums and consecutive horn blasts, before dropping to a jazzy ensemble and inviting everyone in the crowd to “come closer. Smell us!” The band wailed and howled the first song over a high-strung 1-2 Hungarian beat.

The harmony between the two powerhouse voices of Asher and Vashti Poor wrapped itself around the quick drums and bursts of horns, with the thump of the upright bass pulsing through the floor. The entire band can impressively stop on a dime and start again in perfect unison, with breakdowns of accordion to trumpet back and forth solos. Vashti’s face contorted in epic hums and howls as Asher made tongue-out-eye-bulging faces punctuating his yips and yaws, making his curled mustache seem attached to his eyebrows, all the while holding his guitar like a gun, pointing it towards the crowd. Doug boogied his accordion to the ground and wiggled his way back up, never missing a single beat.

“Sing along to the next song, if you know the words” erupted from the stage and the band proceeded to belt out a gnomish ballad in perfect Russian (and I could have sworn I heard the crowd singing along).

At the end of the song Asher picked the mic stand a foot off the ground.

“Warsaw!” he screamed (clearly a band favorite) and Bella’s Bartok jumped into a fast paced melee of guitar solos and flying eyebrows; with back and forth vocals that made the crowd shake their asses.

The effects of a long night of drinking finally took its toll and by 3 a.m. it was time to go home, before hearing what Asher wanted to tell me about “life and that sort of shit.” I’m sure you could find all that sort of information on the bands Myspace or facebook pages (that is if you’re willing to decipher highly intellectualized gypsy festival Ebonics in the form of haikus.) But I would also recommend going to any one of their constant live performances around the greater east coast area, most prominently in the Berkshires and around western Massachusetts. The band recently took second place in a local battle of the bands and is expected to record an EP soon.