Review: Yonatan Gat At Webster Hall

Words & Images by: Aaron “Neddy” Stein

Yonatan Gat :: 3.11.16 :: Webster Hall :: New York City

“What kind of music do you like?” Good Lord, do I hate that question, because, like, how do you answer that question? What kind of music do I like? I like the kind of music that causes drool to drip from my chin because I’ve been standing there with my mouth fully slack for minutes on end in awe of what I’m listening to. I like the kind of music that requires a deep-tissue massage to cure the soreness in my legs from dancing and my neck from banging my head and my shoulder from pumping my fist. I like the kind of music that takes me and a bunch of other individuals and turns us into a group, a community, a family. As I was reminded once again Friday night at The Studio at Webster Hall, that’s exactly the kind of music that Yonatan Gat plays.

Friday was my fourth time seeing Gat and his trio, which is important, because leaving the show completely blown away for the fourth time confirmed that this was no fluke, no gimmick. The three musicians – Gat on guitar, Gal Lazer on drums and Sergio Sayeg on bass – play from the middle of the floor. As they prepare, it feels like a wandering caravan of nomads setting up camp for the night. Or maybe a better metaphor is a traveling medicine show, a suitcase opens up and an impossible number of bottles and vials of colorful potions and elixirs pop out, each curing some ailment you didn’t know you had. The music has the same effect, it reaches deep into places you didn’t know needed it. The sound is a psychedelic brew of multi-ethnic punked-out jam-rock, heavy on the improvisation and bubbling with energy that, once released from the bottle, cannot be put back in.

Friday I was struck for the first time how each set piece was actually several songs weaved together: themes criss-crossing in the horizontal and vertical, stitched together with some serious no-net jamming. Then these themes continued to pop up through the rest of the set, circling back on each other in figure eights.

Playing from the center of the floor at Webster Hall, it was clear that it’s not just something they do, but in some ways it’s absolutely everything. The difference between a normal rock show and seeing this trio play is the difference between a line and a circle. There is no front row at a Yonatan Gat show, there are only concentric rings propagating from the center — electron orbitals around a nucleus percolating with quantum interactions. Friday the energy was even a little more surreal.

Typically they play with three floor lamps, each a different color — blue, red and green — one each for each musician, a small spotlight in an otherwise dark room, but Friday one was down so Lazer and Sayeg shared a single red bulb. I don’t know, but it somehow fused those two, a nuclear reaction that only heated things up even more. In addition, one of Lazer’s drums literally collapsed under the intensity of his playing, tossed aside like a piece of trash (and requiring a red light bulb change as well), so he went on for most of the set with just a bass drum, a snare and a cymbal. I’ve seen many a show collapse under these kinds of technical issues, but Lazer seemed to redirect any frustration into his playing, at times it felt like he was merely channeling impossible beats from out-of-body. Gat played off these rhythms, guiding the trio up, down and around these overlapping themes, swinging his guitar like a battle axe to accentuate a climactic riff or cocking an eyebrow to the other two to whiplash into a new direction.

And through all this, the audience was just trying to keep up, not sure if they should pick their jaws up off the ground or try not to step on them while trying to move their bodies to the frenetic rhythms. Once the crowd clicked with the music, the beauty of the encircling audience came through, looking through the band to the people watching directly opposite you.

You know that they know what you think you know about what’s going on in the room and the shared experience makes it all the more special. When the music finally stopped and the lights came on, everyone got their wits back about them and thought, “this, this is the kind of music I like.” I’m pretty sure you’d like it too.