Jonathan Kane’s February – Live Reviews

Jon Crider – Guitar
David Bicknell – Guitar
Peg Simone - Guitar
Adam Wills – Bass
Jonathan Kane - Drums

 
“Blistering the stars...Jonathan Kane's February was a show to remember. Kane and his four guitar assault launched the blues into the stratosphere. This is glorious guitar music where everthing riffs, crashs and rolls in synch, the blues stretched to the infinity...it shouldn't work but by god it does. Many try it and many fail but Jonathan Kane and band deliver BIG time. The Dream Synidicate has got a new forger of harmonic maximalism”
Qu Junktions - Bristol, UK

 
“Jonathan Kane’s February were an obvious festival highlight. With Kane punishing the drums, four guitarists and Ernie Brooks on bass, they played the blues like I’d never seen before. Transforming minimalist, repetitive riffs into a full-on attack, every song scorched. Maybe the best thing I saw while in Texas”
Dusted at SxSW 2006


“The cap of the night was a great way to end the evening. Watching a rock concert in a church. Jonathan Kane's February was amazing. It was 4 guitarists, a bassist and drummer Jonathan Kane, playing the hardest blues/pop guitar music I've heard in a while. All of the band members were dressed in suits and played some fierce melodic guitar. Even the rock critics rocked out”
Chicago Public Radio at SXSW 2006
 

“New York drummer Jonathan Kane corrals four searing leftfield guitarists and a bassist for some clanging, relentless motorik chugs that make avant-garde capital out of roots music. In Austin, it seems even avant-gardists get the blues”
Uncut at SxSW
 
 
“John Lee Hooker meets La Monte Young in the droning, bluesy incantations of Jonathan Kane, a mainstay in the downtown avant-garde scene, interested in the crossroads of new-music iconoclasm and experimental rock. He has a drummers sense of steady dynamic development and an unapologetic love of noise. Virtuosic”
New York Times


“A triple bill of Tony Conrad, Rhys Chatham and Jonathan Kane is to the stark, hypnotic music known as American minimalism what a lineup consisting of Mother Maybelle Carter, June Carter and Rosanne Cash would have been to country music—a gathering of three generations of the idiom’s leading lights. Jonathan Kane, a member of the next generation of American minimalists and a veteran of Swans and LaMonte Young’s Forever Bad Blues Band, released a solo album on the Table of the Elements label called February. Taking in both a version of Chatham’s “Guitar Trio” and “Motherless Child,” it focused on that other American minimalist musical form, the blues. And so the circle goes unbroken”
Nashville Scene
 
 
“A thunderous rock admiral”
Spitz - London


Jonathan Kane's purifed blues is a powerful experience...
“One can say that blues is minimalism in itself. That the form is so simple and repetition is so essential, that blues is already reduced to it's own common denominator. And then one can listen to Jonathan Kane. He is a veteran of minimalism with impeccable pedigree. Now he has taken his experience and returned to his first musical love, the blues, in a purified uncompromising instrumental form which in principle contains only one simple riff and a driving rhythm. These are re-worked in lengths of 10  - 12 minutes at a time.  The effect is powerful. On stage in Goteborg, he had 4 guitars and a brutally upfront bass in front of himself, all of them gripped by the collosal groove. At the beginning, in unison, but soon one notices each doing slightly different things. More and more with the passage of time. Still there is always somebody who sticks to the main figure, which gives others that pardoxical freedom in the middle of static repetition. Not least of all is that obvious with Jonathan Kane himself, when at the the end of his songs he plays so freely and expansively that one couldn't explain if their life depended on it, how can that go together with music that starts with one small figure spinning over and over again.
But so it is with minimalism. First it seems like it's just repeating itself, then one realizes that it's changing all the time. At the end one finds themself   someplace completely different from where they started. And so it is with Jonathan Kane's February. There is a principle held within heavy electric blues. Primitive on the surface, deep and sophisticated on the inside”
Dagens Nyheters – Sweden


“Anyone who even casually listens to WFMU knows that we're incredibly fortunate to have such an amazing barrage of talent blowing through out halls on a regular basis. One such artist who recently graced Brian Turner's show with his presence is Jonathan Kane, whose powerhouse avant-drumming résumé includes collaborations with heavyweights such as the Swans, Rhys Chatham, La Monte Young, and Dave Soldier's Kropotkins. Kane, four guitarists and a bassist cut a wide path down the middle of the WFMU studio, Channeling a decade's worth of downtown sonic tradition and seamlessly marrying it to seemingly disparate rockabilly vibes. Some of Kane's latest work is poised to both envision and summate what can only be called Avant-Roadhouse. This was a set of total electric power. Want more proof? Check out Kane's new Table of the Elements label release, suitably entitled February”
WFMU

 
“Jonathan Kane’s February gives the blues a modern makeover”
Lexington Herald-Leader

 
“It’s difficult to describe in so many words a living legend the caliber of Jonathan Kane. He plays blues that’s at the same time classic and progressive. Classic because the themes he plays respect the roots of this music, but original because he plays blues like Neu! Or Stereolab might do it, with repetition and a hypnotic effect. Kane has a style of drumming that one would have to include among the heaviest of No-Wave. Attention – Event”
Sonic - Lyon

 
“One of the hardest hitting drummers on the planet, Jonathan Kane of Swans fame mines the root drone of the blues for maximum impact.”
Next @Wex – Columbus, Ohio


“Drummer Jonathan Kane explores the drone filled tribal roots of the blues.”
The Other paper – Columbus, Ohio


Openers Jonathan Kane's February, a sextet helmed by drummer and Swans cofounder Kane, featured a four-guitar front line in addition to bass and drums. The outfit's all-instrumental, kinetic 45-minute set was powered by sinewy precision, sculpted riffs, and the coiled stealth of a cobra: Pell Mell covering Junior Kimbrough, or Booker T. and the MG's without the organ.
Boston Globe


"Avant-rock heads know downtown NYC drummer Jonathan Kane for founding Swans with Michael Gira and for his collaborations with Rhys Chatham and La Monte Young. Those of us who were at either if Mission of Burma’s ICA gigs back in September know him at the guy who just about stole the show from the home-town-hero headlners with his band, Jonathan Kane’s February.  JKF – Kane, flanked by a small army of guitarists and a bassist – somehow make the blues sound like krautrock, repeating simple but thick-as-brick riffs until your head feels as if it were going to explode."
Boston Phoenix


Just got back from seeing Jonathan Kane’s February over at Tonic. Kane was a co-founder of Swans, and played with the likes of La Monte Young and Rhys Chatham. His band February — Kane on drums, with four guitarists and a bassist up front — is nothing short of stunning live. Musically, it’s rooted in the blues, but uses it as a starting point for a complex, layered sound that never loses its forward momentum. I’ve never seen anything like it live — though if you’ve ever been knocked on your arse by the likes of Oneida or Turing Machine, I daresay February will have a similar effect. (I realize that this may be an odd comparison, as Kane very well may have been an influence on the aforementioned two bands’ prodigiously talented drummers. On the other hand, why not? All three groups prove that you can make music intelligently that still hits you in your gut, that virtuosity and raw power are not mutually exclusive….so, yeah.)
The Scowl
 

February is an opus of five instrumental pieces, which deploys the musical possibilities that blues offers in a original way. Imagine Terry Riley copping a Muddy Waters riff and obstinately repeating, deconstructing and recomposing it as an explosive kaleidoscope of sound, with the support of a voluble bass and ardent drums. If you can imagine this, you won't be far from imagining what Jonathan Kane's music is like.
Fragil – France
 
 
"Motorik Desert Boogie King Jonathan Kane"
Other Music

 
He’s Full of Surprises. Somewhere between Sonic Youth and Steve Reich is the drummer Jonathan Kane. In the 1980s and ’90s he was a co-founder of the Swans, “a cornerstone of New York’s downtown no-wave art scene,” then moved on to even more experimental music with collaborators like the composer LaMonte Young. His latest instrumental album, “February,” is “unexpectedly, a collection of blues-inspired boogies.”
New York Times
 
 
JONATHAN KANE, a co-founder of Swans — a fiercely discordant outfit that became a cornerstone of New York’s downtown no-wave art scene — Jonathan Kane is a frequent collaborator of the experimental guitarist Rhys Chatham and the composer LaMonte Young. His most recent release, the instrumental “February” (Table of the Elements) is, unexpectedly, a collection of blues-inspired boogies.
New York Times


Jonathan Kane’s February, a quintet led by the downtown fixture Kane, on drums, and rounded out by three guitars and a bass. The group’s drone-heavy and occasionally explosive sound reflects the bandleader’s background with the noise pioneers Swans and the composers La Monte Young and Rhys Chatham. In 1981, following several years in a local blues band opening for such legends as Muddy Waters, Kane was asked to join the nascent band Swans by their founder, Michael Gira. Taking Howlin’ Wolf as an unlikely musical role model, the group pushed Wolf’s repetition, pared-down harmony, and sometimes slow tempos to unbelievable extremes. Kane’s latest group, which combines elements of early Swans with Chatham’s monumental guitar pieces, features long minimalist songs that build slowly over his precise and motoric drumming.
The New Yorker

 
Downtown New York city legend Jonathan Kane and his band February followed. These guys were stunning. Riffing traditional blues grooves that grew steadily into a beautiful explosion of sound. Vintage guitars and amps, and about the most amazing drummer I've seen since Buddy Rich. Hints of Velvet Underground too.
MajorWhoMedia
 

Apparently having decided the lines aren't long enough at Warm Up, P.S. 1 has beefed up the party's  lineup this weekend with four heroes from divergent hipster-beloved genres. In one corner, there's drummer and Swans co-founder Jonathan Kane playing with blues-drone act February. Kane's tag-team partner is fellow no-waver James Chance, who'll bring his reunited Contortions and their skronky, punked funk. 
New York magazine