Sam Amidon

Event information

When Sam Amidon flew to Los Angeles late in the winter of 2024 to collaborate with Sam Gendel, he had a deceptively complex plan for their session: that is, he had no real plan at all. Amidon and Gendel had long been two members of a mutual admiration society. When Amidon first saw Gendel play at his now-fabled residency at the Hollywood Italian restaurant Pace years earlier, he was wowed by Gendel’s open-ended enthusiasm and stylistic vim, plus charmed by his invitation to sit in on violin, though he didn’t know much about making ‘jazz’. Gendel, too, had been an ardent fan of Amidon’s voice and flexibility since seeing him on YouTube nearly two decades ago. Gendel even joined Amidon and the great Milford Graves for the 12-minute finale of 2017’s The Following Mountain. But what, exactly, were the New England folk musician now living in England and the pedal-hopping polyglot saxophonist going to do for the better part of a week in Gendel’s Venice home, in his ad hoc dining room studio? Neither exactly knew.

Amidon offered up two ideas. First, they could simply play, pursuing whatever ideas felt good as they jammed. Or, perhaps, they could tinker with a batch of interpretations Amidon had been building, a loose set of somewhat familiar tunes — Yoko Ono’s Ask the Elephant, Lou Reed’s Big Sky, the rapturous hymn Old Churchyard, the standard English shanty Golden Willow Tree. Gendel’s eyes and imagination lit up with the latter idea, or at the chance to help Amidon in his decades-long quest to recontextualise what it means to sing a folk song or make folk music. When Amidon left Los Angeles just days later, the bulk of Salt River – his Gendel-produced debut for River Lea Recordings / Rough Trade and a radical reintroduction to the possibilities of Sam Amidon’s music – was done.

AGE RESTRICTION: This is a 14+ show. Under 16s must be accompanied by an adult.