For over twenty years, from their releases “Webaworld” to “Puttanesca,” the songwriting team of Weba Garretson and Ralph Gorodetsky has been steadily refining their craft. Since they sometimes perform as a duo, singing and playing songs, there might be an immediate tendency to lump them into the singer songwriter/folk music category, which wouldn’t be untrue, but wouldn’t be the whole truth. Some of the most interesting art in every medium has never fit into easily defined categories. While it is true that Garretson & Gorodetsky work with what could be called traditional, popular song structures, they often imbue the recognizable format of “song” with quirky, subversive elements borrowed from sources that people wouldn’t normally mix.
Garretson & Gorodetsky dance around the dictum that popular art can also be interesting and that aspects of Avant Garde (i.e. challenging art) can be popular. Imagine if Phil Ochs and John Cage went out for sonic cocktails together, or if Laura Nyro stayed up all night listening to Bartok and reading Thich Nhat Hanh.
“The group’s most basic configuration spotlighted the strengths on which they hang their fuller arrangements: imagination, tight vocal harmonies and contrapuntal interplay, with Garretson’s spare keyboards bouncing off Gorodetsky’s complex guitar lines. From duo to quintet, each G&G incarnation offers a vision worth seeing.” Greg Burk, of MetalJazz.
Garretson & Gorodetsky, “Tunnel of Time” (Catasonic). Just as in any time tunnel, you leap into the whoosh machine of singer Weba Garretson and guitarist Ralph Gorodetsky and never know where you’ll pop out. In Brazil pondering epistemology? In Mexico hoisting your ruffled dress? With the Everly Brothers a-sobbin’ your devotion? Click-clackin’ down the hillbilly railroad tracks? G&G’s most fully realized and most scrupulously recorded effort finds the L.A. duo and friends contemplating solitude and dealing out something for everyone, our faves including “Lesbian Lasagna” (lurching saxjazz about Echo Park gentrification), “Dusk” (dark flutejazz reminiscent of Mingus’ “Eclipse”) and the waltz “That’s the Way Love Is” by MetalJazz’s Greg Burk (Ralph’s violet-hearted arrangement choked us up).
The wildlife of Echo Park inspired these artists to sing
Written by Lisa Napoli Mar. 19, 2014 ENVIRONMENT
Ralph Gorodetsky and Weba Garretson
“Singer and performance artist Weba Garretson has lived in Echo Park for over 20 years, long before the yoga studios and cafes and condos began indelibly changing the landscape there. Along with an unusual feature for most LA domiciles–a basement–she was drawn to the tree-lined backyard and the wildlife at the house that became her home: the skunks, hawks, owls, birds, bees and cats that shared her backyard.”
“Put a couple of wide-open musicians together, you never know where it’s gonna go. Weba Garretson has been a performance artist, folkie, Brazilian-jazzy chanteuse, Kurt Weill interpreter, puppet, pirate, pawn, queen. Ralph Gorodetsky has done avant pop, jazzy punk, jumpy funk, soul yoga. Combine her operatic voice and her lyrics about small critters with his jagged jazz guitar, and it’s unprecedented.”
–Greg Burk
“Ultimately, however, the performance is intended to be about more than just one garden. Garreston describes “What Must the Hummingbird See?” as an ode to what her Echo Park neighborhood once was, and still is — “a place filled with big beautiful trees and places for animals to exist.”
Garretson & Gorodetsky – My Skin Craves Soil. This came out in 2015 but I just heard it this summer. This is a singer and a somewhat outside guitar player singing songs about creatures in the back yard. I love this record! You will too.
Meanwhile, those for whom one record of modern jazz/punk just isn’t enough would do well to check out the self-titled debut by Puttanesca, released late last year. Also featuring Baiza on guitar, as well as his former UCO bandmate Ralph Godoretsky on bass, drummer Wayne Griffin, and vocalist Weba Garretson, Puttanesca may not boast the same kamikaze thrills as The Master’s Voice, but what it lacks in off-the-cuff excitement it more than makes up for in tunefulness, with cool melodies that drift up and out of the speakers like cigarette smoke in a noir nightclub. As a frontwoman, Weba Garretson is a powerhouse, her intoxicatingly smooth vocals lending a touch of class to Baiza’s angular fretwork. Her apparently structuring influence as a songwriter, too, suits the guitarist well; if his more tedious improvisations with the Instructors occasionally serve as reminders of just why the electric guitar is a less expressive instrument for free jazz than, say, the tenor saxophone, here he’s at the top of his game, laying down grooves with an easy funkiness on “Shiny Red Box” and channeling his best Antennae Jimmy Semens on “Fruit Filled Pancake.”
But Puttanesca works best as a collaborative effort, and the best songs on this record are the ones where the whole is greater than the sum of its musical parts. Like “White Nylon,” where Godoretsky plucks out an almost subliminally funky bassline under Garretson’s and Baiza’s mutual racket. Or “Red Haired Woman,” the album’s majestic chill-out number, in which the band wisely resists the urge to go all out and lets Garretson’s voice stretch languorously over a bed of mellow guitar chords, brushed percussion, and even a closing flute solo to boot. Best of all, though (and not just because it allows me to make my third Beefheart reference in this single article), is the closing cover of “Lick My Decals Off, Baby,” which faithfully co-opts the Magic Band’s galloping arrangement while Garretson injects the lyrics with a sexuality Don Van Vliet could never muster.
Puttanesca is a Special Sauce
Outside Left Music
LamontPaul, – October, 2006
“Seems like Joe Baiza is turning into the busiest man in show business town. In one week, his 80s beat-punk band, Sacharrine Trust opened for (by special request of the very lovely) Tortoise at the Troubador; a few days later Joe Baiza’s Congress of… absolutely, pitilessly tore up Taix, the venue where he’s now also somehow involved in drawing great and diverse bands for the monthly Joe Baiza night.
I ran into him in the parking lot after the Taix show, and between nips from his flask of Old Grandad which is onsale at Gelson’s this week, he gave me a copy of the recently released, long lost record from Puttanesca, the band he’d joined/formed, (it’s a long story), more than a decade ago, with vocalist, Weba Garretson, bassist, Ralph Gorodetsky and drummer, Wayne Griffin.
The recently reformed Puttanesca have been putting in some quite enthralling performances in support of the record. That vocalist Weba is one of the more intensely charismatic performers I’ve witnessed helps not a little. Damn! She captivates a room by moving across it, even before she opens her, well, let’s face it, rather generous mouth.”
