REVIEW: A Crypt Session With Time for Three
Above: Time for Three, photo by Kevin Condon.
January 14, 2020
By Brian Taylor
“They teach you to work with it,” bassist Ranaan Meyer muttered, as a passing siren competed with a contemplative improvisation midway through Time for Three’s Crypt Sessions performance in the subterranean Gothic arches of Harlem’s Church of the Intercession.
And work with it, they do. Genre-defying string trio Time for Three (Meyer, alongside violinists Nicolas Kendall and Charles Yang), erupts into the candlelit room with rockstar exuberance. Their camaraderie is electric. Their music, a fresh integration of voices and instruments, is kinetic and connective.
The trio’s vivacity reaches international audiences and fills stadiums. The group recently appeared in Vienna’s Musikverein, home of the Vienna Philharmonic, but nonetheless relished in the Crypt’s astonishing acoustics, “You can hear everything!”
Photo by Kevin Condon.
In a set spanning original songs and creative covers of familiar hits to pure instrumental magic, they wove a spell over the audience, joyfully pouring their hearts out. Their three instruments sound like a multi-track studio, in plush arrangements that ply a wide palette of colors: shimmering Ravel-like arpeggiations, crisp pizzicato, weeping fiddle slides, ethereal harmonics. Then, they sing.
Yang occasionally functions as lead vocalist, his earnest, unaffected bari-tenor emerging direct from the heart. Time for Three’s songs, which might be described as post-alternative-bluegrass-adjacent-art-folk, have simple lyrics, and structures that unfold with poetic mystery. Blossoming into warm three-part harmony, their voices blend as luxuriously as their instruments.
Photo by Kevin Condon.
From a haunting cover of Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek” to an uplifting rendition of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” the evening’s repertoire was a mixed tape of surprises, climaxing with “Chaconne in Winter", a clever mash-up of Bach’s Chaconne in D Minor and Bon Iver’s “Calgary.”
Time for Three’s arrangements are not stock and trade. The pieces develop and breathe, have form, and dynamics. And variety: sometimes the vocals provide legato and harmony, while fiddles and bass pluck and strum, providing rhythm and texture.
All three are first-rate virtuosos on their instruments, with charisma to match. They seem to have a message to convey, like evangelists, sweeping the listener in. This is a collaboration that could exist in no other time or place. Their openness is contagious. It is indeed, time for Three.
