Last night at Joe’s Pub, I had the pleasure of seeing writer/singer/piano genius Heather Greene, who my friend booked at the place to the delight of the huge-ass crowd. His pitch was everything that made me want to go to the show. He was like, “It’s a little Norah Jones and a little Fiona Apple!” No Norah Jones fan myself, he tried again: “It’s Fiona Apple crossed with a blow job!” That worked. She does a moody cover of The Cars’ “Just What I Needed” which will make you love her. Also, beer with a friend discount rules.
The other performer on the bill was an Amy Kohn, whose music veered more toward the genre of “vocal jazz, but, y’know, bad.” She was accompanied by a brilliantly talented band of random instruments. A trumpet here, an upright bass there, a back-up singer singing a minor third above Amy Kohn everywhere. She gestured wildly instead of playing the piano a lot and sang a song about her “response to September 11” that seemed like it was out of a Lower East Side poetry slam on September 12. But by far my favorite rhyming couplet of the night came in a song entitled something like “Ice Lady,” in which she plinkity-plinked the keys and crooned, “Sits on the buffet, slowly melts away” over and over and over again. A song about an ice sculpture. It sounded better with a sousaphone. Actually, no it didn’t.