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Boy without boundaries
Scene & Heard
Gabriel Birnbaum’s music mixes styles, personas
June 17, 2011|By James Reed, Globe Staff
Birnbaum, who performs and records under the name Boy Without God, says of his musical style, I tend to jump around.
Birnbaum, who performs and records under the… (james reed/globe staff)
BOY WITHOUT GOD
With Sleepy Very Sleepy and Tamsin Wilson
At: Cambridge Family YMCA Theatre, 820 Mass. Ave., Central Square, next Thursday, 7 p.m. Tickets: $10. 617-661-9622 , www.cambridgeymca.org
NEW YORK — Gabriel Birnbaum’s arms fly up into the shape of a “V’’ right as he calls out an enthusiastic, “Yes! Awesome!’’ That’s how he reacts when told that his new album is nearly impossible to classify. “V’’ is definitely for victory.
Birnbaum records under the name Boy Without God, a project he started when the Brookline native was still living in Boston and struggling to strike out on his own. But on “God Bless the Hunger,’’ the new album he’ll celebrate with a release show at the Cambridge Family YMCA next Thursday, Birnbaum finally realized he doesn’t have to minimize his talents.
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“I feel like a lot of everything I do has been determined by me feeling like I’m a saxophone player and not really a songwriter or a singer,’’ Birnbaum says earlier this week over pizza at a restaurant near his apartment in Brooklyn. “This is the first time I feel like I’m legitimately good enough to be this.’’
And by this, he’s referring to a quixotic mix of styles and personas. Just when you have an idea of what Boy Without God is about — it’s folk, it’s experimental jazz, it’s ’60s pop, it’s art rock — the landscape shifts to a whole new view.
“I tend to jump around,’’ says Birnbaum, who’s 25. “I was obsessed with jazz when I was younger because my brother was a jazz pianist and a bit of a prodigy. I was listening to jazz all the time and thought everything else was stupid. I refused to let people listen to rock music in the band room at high school. I would literally turn off Radiohead and put on jazz. I was such a jerk.’’
At 19, he decided he was going to be a downtown New York free-jazz musician, even befriending some of the scene’s characters who would soon become his mentors. When that dream faded, he turned his attention to Boston’s music scene. His eclectic tastes paid off, playing a variety of instruments with other musicians with Boston roots, from Eli “Paperboy’’ Reed to Drug Rug and the One AM Radio.
As a bandleader, Birnbaum first made his name around here in 2006, with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, whose “noisy, free-jazz rock’’ gave him a cult following that wasn’t exactly satisfying. “It was so inscrutable that I could have just kept doing that and kept writing the same songs over again,’’ Birnbaum says.
continued... 06/17/11
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