The accordion isn’t usually considered a fearsome instrument. But there was a moment last Thursday when, turning quickly to face the audience at Berkeley’s Freight & Salvage with his squeezebox strapped to his chest, Sam Reider seemed suddenly to rear up, looming over the microphone with a fierce look in his eyes as he played a mighty chord to summon the mythical man of clay, the golem. This accordion conjures monsters.
Celebrating the release of The Golem and Other Tales, his new album with his band the Human Hands, the Oakland performer and composer saved his eight-part suite inspired by Isaac Bashevis Singer’s version of the Jewish folk tale for the second half of the concert. By that time, Reider’s formidable acoustic combo had already taken a wide-ranging romp through his singular repertoire, which seamlessly blends bluegrass, swing, hot-club jazz, American folk, and string-band idioms from Brazil, Ireland, and Sweden.
While the album features a seven-piece combo, for most of the Freight concert the Humans were five-handed, performing as a quintet featuring alto saxophonist Eddie Barbash, violinist Duncan Wickel, acoustic guitarist Roy Williams, and bassist Mark Schatz. Reider alternated between accordion and piano, moving to the latter instrument on tunes that beautifully evoked the folk-dance DNA in early-music fugues.
Thursday’s concert kicked off a West Coast tour for Reider and the Human Hands that continued with a performance on Sunday, Sept. 8 at Boulevard Music in Culver City.
Stringing together tunes in the manner of a choro or bluegrass combo, the band navigated quick shifts in mood and tempo, like from the melancholic “Mourning Dove” into a joyous, untitled slip jig, which spun into the awed “The Fire Road.” Blending their tones, Barbash and Reider created a wondrously lush and reedy sound, with Wickel often bowing counterlines or strumming rhythmic support. Strategic deployment of the snapping twang of Williams’s Django Reinhardt-inspired guitar lines greatly expanded the combo’s sonic palette.
Reider offered a brief synopsis of the plot of his suite The Golem, detailing how he assigned each instrument to a different character in the story. The summary was useful, but his musical writing is so vivid — wearing familiar tropes with bespoke panache — that one could follow the general narrative flow without a program.
Assigning the alto sax to the mysterious stranger carrying occult knowledge might seem a little on the nose for a work of chamber folk noir, but Barbash’s regal tone and vulnerable vibrato made for a multidimensional characterization. Reider played two roles, covering the scene-setting narration from the piano and taking up the accordion to portray the titular antihero.
The quintet’s virtuosity more than brought the music to life. Even at its most derivative — “The Rabbi Chases and Destroys His Creation” is an antic Gypsy jazz number that calls to mind Benoît Charest’s score for The Triplets of Belleville — Reider’s piece continuously finds interesting ways to recast old musical devices and ideas. Grappling with the unintended consequences of artificial intelligences never seems to go out of style.
