Mike Doughty (photo Sabina Curti)
Mike Doughty
Club Helsinki Hudson
Saturday, March 8, 2014
Review by Seth Rogovoy
Photography by Sabina Curti
(HUDSON, N.Y.) – Best known as founder and leader of 1990s hip-hop/jazz-folk outfit Soul Coughing, Mike Doughty has been plugging along as a mostly solo singer-songwriter for the past 15 years or so. And he brings a lot of the same gifts he brought to Soul Coughing to his career as a solo artist – the commanding baritone voice with attitude; the dazzling wordplay, an amalgam of Beat poetry, rap, and spoken-word craft; and the simple but woefully underestimated appeal of attaching a catchy melody to an inerrant groove.
And in solo performances such as the one he gave at Club Helsinki Hudson on Saturday night – augmented by his capable sidekick, Andrew “Scrap” Livingston on cello – Doughty adds a hefty dose of vulnerability, deftly functional guitar work, and a sense of intimacy to the package, which kept the crowd of hardcore fans and the merely curious enraptured for his 90-plus minute show.
Mike Doughty (photo Sabina Curti)
The program was framed overall as one of his “Question Jar” shows, which meant that after every few songs, Scrap would read out loud questions, comments, or requests that had been handwritten and submitted by fans before the show. These ranged from the relatively straightforward (“What’s your favorite song?”) to the bizarre and incoherent (“Douche or shitstorm?”). Part of the entertainment was the manner in which Doughty chose to respond to the different comments and questions – he answered the former question by playing a gorgeous rendition of John Denver’s “Country Roads,” and the latter by parsing the various possible meanings of the question in search of an ultimate answer (perhaps you had to be there).
But there was plenty of music, and while weighted heavily toward his solo work of the past 15 years, Doughty threw in a few choice Soul Coughing tunes (several of which he re-recorded last year for an album meant to take them back and claim them for his own), including “Super Bon Bon.” His solo material displayed the same gifts of verbal dexterity that won him many fans early on, with phrases like “I’ll assess the essence of my mess,” words that perhaps had never before been put together in that order, but tripping off his tongue, seemed made for each other.