Caffè Lena, Saratoga Springs, May 31, 2025
Many of the songs we choose to sing spring to our lips because they’ve been drilled into our brains by corporate profit-fueled repetition, clogging airwaves and streaming channels. But there are other songs, songs that speak to our dreams and disappointments, songs that offer reassurance. Those are songs we have to seek out, parting the waves of noise to get to these underheard jewels.
Those are the songs that Annie Rosen sings. She offers her selections in a carefree manner, but it’s clear that she’s living the material, drawing from it a power and joy that help shepherd each song into the hearts of her hearers. In one way, it’s the work of a mystic. In another—and this is probably what her Caffè Lena audience felt—it’s a rollicking good time.
Annie and the Hedonists is a family group, anchored by Annie and her husband, guitarist Jonny Rosen; many of the other performers have been working with them long enough that it wouldn’t surprise me to see them together at the Thanksgiving table. And there was a special guest vocalist at this particular show—daughter Hannah, who sang with her mother on “Here in California,” a Kate Wolf song, to the accompaniment of Dad’s guitar. “Love can make you happy / Love can rob you blind,” they sang, in persuasive harmony. Some drumming crept in, as Jerry Marotta added a subtle rhythm with his hands. Although Jonny typically plays guitar throughout a performance, he held back this evening because of recent shoulder replacement surgery. But who can turn down such an affecting family moment? He also added vocal harmony on the song’s dissuasive chorus: “And there’s no gold, I thought I’d warn you / And the hills turn brown in the summertime.”
The event was a CD release party, celebrating the group’s latest, unsurprisingly titled Live at Caffè Lena, collecting songs recorded there between 2020 and 2024. And the first half of the show gave us nearly all of the CD’s tracks in a nice flow of contrasting styles.
But at heart this is a blues band. I hope Annie hasn’t suffered as much as the doleful, often defiant lyrics suggest, but she certainly pours her heart into these songs. She insisted her way through Clara Smith’s 1924 “Prescription for the Blues,” vocalizing with an effective pair of reeds behind her, the beat driven by dramatic drum brushwork. Again in the classic realm, “Oh, Papa Blues” saluted Ma Rainey’s 1927 plaint in a medium-tempo blues groove, with saxophonist Cliff Lyons and clarinetist Peter Davis trading fours in the best jazz tradition by the end of it.
Although you might expect a song titled “Shout, Sister, Shout” to be a rollicking up-tempo number, Annie sang the Sister Rosetta Tharpe classic in a slower R&B style, again with the duo chorus of reeds supporting her.
I would have been delighted with only a succession of early-(last) century numbers, but this ensemble shrewdly mixes it up, lacing in more recent numbers in other styles. There’s the Country-adjacent “Blame It on Your Heart,” a 1993 song made famous by Patty Loveless and described as Annie’s favorite love song. And why not? It describes an ex-boyfriend as having a “lying, cheating, cold dead-beating, two-timing, double-dealing, mean mistreating loving heart,” which sounds fittingly comprehensive. A strong backbeat anchored the vocal, before we were treated to solos by Cliff on tenor sax and Don Young on guitar.
“The Refugee,” by Laurie Lewis, is also comparatively recent, and presented Annie starting her vocal over a spare accompaniment before the band kicked in with a medium-tempo honky-tonk feel for this heart-on-your-sleeve number. A nice contrast to the earlier “That’s All,” a ballad associated with Nat “King” Cole, but here getting a convincing Annie treatment.
Female singer-songwriters were well represented. Lucinda Williams’s “Big Red Sun Blues” opened the concert with a Latin beat, while Mary Gauthier’s “Mercy Now” veered us into the blues, especially with Cliff’s soprano sax solo. And I’m going to include “In My Girlish Days,” recorded by Memphis Minnie in 1941, even though it was written by her husband, who was known as Little Son Joe. After the excellent vocal and some nasty licks from Cliff, Don weighed in with a soulful blues solo on guitar.
We were served a Bob Dylan song during each half of the concert. “Masters of War” began over a keyboard drone with Peter at the keys, mallets on drums from Jerry, and a deliberate pace that helped build its intensity. Before going into “One More Cup of Coffee,” Jonny cautioned Don not to take it too slow. Setting up Don to come back with the classic musician’s joke: “You want it half-fast?”
Peter Davis took the vocal on Pete Sutherland’s “Geezerville,” exhorting the audience to join in the refrain. It’s a one-joke song that states the obvious about aging; were the lyrics leavened with more wit, it could have been truly funny.
Other band members also stepped into the spotlight. Guest bassist Dylan Perrillo, a mainstay with the Hot Club of Saratoga, took the vocal on the classic “Until the Real Thing Comes Along” to close the first half; Don switched from guitar to ukulele and took the vocal on “I Miss You So” (recorded in 1939 by the Cats and the Fiddle) over a backing chorus of Annie and Jonny and Peter. Cliff sang a lively “How Sweet It Is” before decorating the song with an extended sax solo.
And there was much, much more, running a gamut from Louis Jordan’s “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby?” to a soulful “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” which ended the night. Take away the songs already on their new CD and you’d still have enough material from this night for another one. They share an infectious pleasure in what they do—and they’re impressively good at it, too.
B.A. Nilsson is a freelance writer and actor who lives in rural New York. His interest in vintage jazz long predates his marriage to a Paul Whiteman relative, and greatly helped in winning her affections.
