By Nadia Taha
Behind the rich red façade of the Perch Café in Park Slope lies a carefully designed scene. Candles adorn warm wood tables and chairs, creating a sultry ambience. It is evident that it is not just intended as a space where people can sit and enjoy their refreshments, but as a place to take in the sights and sounds. Those sounds, too, are carefully designed. The café provides a home to a variety of performances, musical and otherwise. The Perch Café plays host to Literary Tuesdays, a weekly reading series followed by open mic sessions. On Sundays it is home to Catharsis, an open mic assortment, featuring poets, musicians, comics, and others. But the centerpiece of the Perch Café’s auditory exhibits is its extensive jazz series. Four nights a week the café hosts a broad collection of musicians from around the globe, each boasting a unique interpretation of jazz. Their styles range from classic standards to world music and pop fusion, and the songs they play range from reworked children’s songs to adapted Motown hits. One of the ensembles ringing in the New Year at the Perch Café is Yoon Sun Choi and the E-String Band. Vocalist Yoon Sun Choi originally studied classical piano and composition until she was lured by the freer structure of jazz and the flexibility of the voice as an instrument. In 2005 she moved from Toronto, where she studied, to New York, to pursue the jazz scene. “I felt like I was searching for something new, musically and artistically,” she says. “I met all these incredible musicians… and I knew this is it. I can’t imagine not being here.” At the Perch Café on January 11, Choi’s vocals will be accompanied by a toy piano, a melodica, drums, a ukulele, and a guitar, none of which are the primary instrument for the musicians playing them. “It creates a really different sound aesthetic,” Choi explains. The group plays a very diverse selection of genres, including jazz standards, eighties pop songs, and tunes from the 1910s and -20s. As the band leader, Choi often plays pieces that the others in the group do not even recognize until she begins singing the lyrics. “It’s very genre-crossing but the main thing that holds it together is that it’s all improvised,” she says. “It’s very spontaneous, very improvised.” Choi believes the band’s ability to incorporate different types of music into a set is one of its strong suits. “The style is sort of irrelevant,” she says. “There’s something for everybody to see or hear.” Kicking off the Perch Café’s second year of musical performances is the Amy Cervini Quartet, a band whose repertoire extends from standards to pop songs. On January 4, lead vocalist Amy Cervini will be joined by a bassist, drummer, and pianist and accordion player. In addition to hits from the 1930s to the 1960s, they play jazz versions of contemporary hits from artists like Jack Johnson, Weezer, Green Day, Fiona Apple, and Cake. The quartet has played regularly at the Perch Café since its jazz series began. “Perch is our favorite place to play in Brooklyn,” says Cervini. “The vibe is always amazing.” The Seung-Hee Quartet will bring the influence of music from other cultures to the Perch Café on January 20. Korean-born vocalist Seung-Hee is another regular performer at the café. Her quartet plays a variety of modern and classic jazz, pop songs and Korean music. She varies her instrumental accompaniment as she experiments with different sounds. “I put my own lyrics to instrumental jazz pieces that I find interesting and sometimes I write songs without words, using my voice as a horn,” she explains. According to Seung-Hee, she has found a receptive audience to her blend of forms and languages at the Perch Café. “I find most New Yorkers are open to anything new”, she says. “And they seem to love my Korean songs in particular.” Melissa Stylianou, the curator of the jazz series and a regular performer at the Perch Café, says that kind of responsiveness from the audience is what musicians like about the venue. “The small space encourages interaction between musicians and the audience, and that warmth and contact is valuable in creating a loyal fan base for both the players and the club,” she says. According to Stylianou, bands are chosen to suit the intimate, cozy feeling at the café. “I do try to focus on smaller, more acoustic [bands] in terms of the size of the space and what seems to work for the audience at Perch,” she explains. As the leader of the Melissa Stylianou Trio, she will perform at the café on January 18. Her ensemble will play tracks from her recently released album, Sliding Down. Like the other musicians she books for the Perch Café, Stylianou plays an eclectic blend of jazz standards, original songs, and Brazilian- or Middle Eastern-inspired pieces. Performances run at 8:30 pm on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday and 9:30 pm on Saturday. Suggested donation is $5. The Perch Café is at 365 5th Avenue in Brooklyn; call 718-788-2830 or visit www.theperchcafe.com.
