Gabriel Kahane and Roomful of Teeth Conjure a Multidimensional Marvel at 92NY
On a soft April afternoon, when Manhattan wore its early-spring light like a quiet confidence, something genuinely miraculous unfolded inside the David Geffen Stage at the Kaufmann Concert Hall. The 92nd Street Y — that venerable hive of high culture and civic imagination on Lexington Avenue — offered its audience a program that, to this listener, felt more like a carefully arranged passage between worlds than a concert. Gabriel Kahane, pilgrim-songwriter and miniaturist of the American psyche, shared the stage with Roomful of Teeth, the two-time Grammy-winning vocal band whose very existence constitutes a polite riot against what the human voice has been asked to do for the last four hundred years. Together, they offered a meditation on memory, mortality, and the quiet miracles that happen when one stranger sits down next to another.
The Songwriter as Pilgrim: Kahane Opens Alone
Kahane walked to the microphone the way a kind stranger might enter a train car — unhurried, attentive, immediately ready to listen. Guitar in hand, he began with “Little Love,” a tender ballad from his 2018 song cycle Book of Travelers, the diary-in-music of a nearly 9,000-mile railway journey undertaken the morning after the 2016 election. “Baedeker” followed, then a newer piece, “Limping Waltz,” which he offered, as he explained, like a candle held up to Minneapolis. These are small songs in the way a Chardin still life is small: deceptively modest, faintly domestic, and absolutely devastating if you stop for a moment to look. Later, seated at the piano, Kahane performed “October 1, 1939 / Port of Hamburg,” its lyrics drawn from his grandmother’s wartime diary as she fled Germany, and, still later, “To Be American.” The hall went very quiet.
Gabriel Kahane on Guitar. Photo by Scott Shrader
Prose as Melody, Melody as Conscience
One resists the obvious comparisons at first. Nevertheless, Kahane belongs squarely in a lineage — Paul Simon as confessor, John Lennon as ethicist, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Jackson Browne — that once soundtracked a nation’s self-examination. Like them, he writes prose as if it were melody, and melody as if it were conscience. Kahane is arguably one of the finest songwriters of the day, and the claim, asserted at this gathering, was simply indisputable. As a raconteur, Kahane is gentle at times, sentimental, but never glib. Rather, he is a reader of American life in the tradition that runs from Whitman to Elizabeth Bishop — a writer for whom concision is, to borrow a phrase, the aristocracy of feeling.
“The Isle”: Caroline Shaw’s Tempest in Eight Voices
After a brief, sweetly improvised “Happy Birthday” for Sally, perched on the balcony, the eight singers of Roomful of Teeth filed onto the stage, each moving toward a microphone — a small but consequential decision that allowed every gasp, whisper, click, and silvery high note to emerge with intimacy and perfect balance. They then offered Caroline Shaw’s “The Isle,” her spellbinding 2023 five-part setting inspired by Shakespeare’s The Tempest, commissioned for the ensemble and featured on their Grammy-winning 2023 album Rough Magic.
Gabriel Kahane portrait for Nonesuch Records, August 2025. Photo by Jason Quigley. Hisses, Buzzings, and Twanglings
Shaw — the youngest-ever Pulitzer laureate in music and a founding member of the ensemble — fashioned a twenty-minute voyage across the island’s acoustic weather: a prologue and epilogue framing three monologue-movements for Ariel, Caliban, and Prospero. Ariel breathes into being through murmurs, birdlike flickerings, and ascending lines; Caliban grumbles and mourns; Prospero gathers the storm and bids it farewell. Shaw’s vocal writing is, in effect, an argument — couched in hisses and buzzings and twanglings — that Shakespeare’s noises, sounds, and sweet airs were always, in fact, music waiting for us to learn how to sing them.
Pristine Western Choral Blend
Consequently, the performance flowed between hypnotic hush and rapturous wail. The ensemble — sopranos Mingjia Chen and Martha Cluver, altos Eliza Bagg and Virginia Kelsey, tenors Jodie Landau and Steven Bradshaw, baritone Thann Scoggin, and bass Cameron Beauchamp — displayed the technical discipline (Tuvan throat-singing, yodel, belt, sigh, glottal catch, expert management of chest and head voice and nasality for effect, and a pristine Western choral blend) that has become, since the group’s 2009 founding at MASS MoCA, a kind of lingua franca for the American a cappella avant-garde. Here was the human voice in fullest flower: eight instruments, a single lung, a room entirely spellbound.
Room Full of Teeth. Are we done yet? Courtesy roomfulofteeth.org
“Elevator Songs”: A Surreal Hotel of the Soul
After the intermission, the audience stepped into Kahane’s and Roomful of Teeth’s new collaborative suite, Elevator Songs, released this month on Nonesuch Records. The program notes promised a high-concept, multidimensional hotel with a time-traveling elevator and a quirky clientele — and the performance, delightfully, did not disappoint. A softly struck vibraphone stood in for the ding of an arriving floor; marimba, synth, bass drum, and violin (provided by the singers themselves) rounded out the toolkit. Each ensemble member took a turn at the center microphone, stepping from the collective into a soloist and graciously back again.
Fizzy Hooks Gave Way to Slippery Harmonic Turns
Kahane opened the suite with “You Won’t Be Traveling Today,” and from there the hotel’s residents emerged: a mother in “St. Vincent’s Hospital,” a hot-tub philosopher, a sophomore-slump songwriter, and a grieving lover whose “Memory Burns.” Kahane is among today’s most insightful wordsmiths, and the hall discovered why: fizzy hooks gave way to slippery harmonic turns, and counterpoint occasionally dipped into hymn before leaping into pop ecstasy.
If one were feeling genealogical, one might place Elevator Songs in the rare company of rock’s conceptual first-person narrators: The Who’s Tommy (1969), The Pretty Things’ S.F. Sorrow (1968), and the esoteric Nirvana (UK) curio The Story of Simon Simopath (1967). Those pop-prophets built castles in the listener’s head; Kahane and Roomful of Teeth, lovelier and stranger, have built a hotel — then handed us the key.
Voices as Instruments, Singers as Characters
Perhaps what one treasured most was the chance to hear each singer individually. Eliza Bagg’s porcelain soprano — which Pitchfork once compared to something not quite of this world — found a mirror in Martha Cluver’s warmer, more conversational light. Mingjia Chen lit certain phrases like a struck match. Jodie Landau traded marimba mallets for a mic stand with ease, revealing the seasoned theater-maker behind the percussionist. Virginia Kelsey and Steven Bradshaw lent dusk to the middle voices, while Thann Scoggin and Cameron Beauchamp — the latter the group’s co-artistic director — anchored the ensemble with grave, generous lower registers. Meanwhile, the point was unmistakable: these are not merely section players but soloists who have agreed, out of love and curiosity, to sing together.
Elevator Songs Album Cover. Courtesy roomfulofteeth.org
A Hall That Still Believes in Audiences
The 92nd Street Y, founded in 1874 and now in its second year under Tisch Music Executive Director Nicholas Russotto, continues to earn long-standing praise and, simply put, is one of the city’s best concert spaces. On this Sunday, with sunlight slanting through Lexington Avenue and the Tempest’s airy spirits still drifting through the rafters, the claim felt indisputable. One emerged onto the street a little gentler, a little more curious, and — let us be honest — somewhat in love
Gabriel Kahane and Roomful of Teeth Conjure a Multidimensional Marvel at 92NY
Concert Information & Upcoming Tour Dates
Concert: Roomful of Teeth with Gabriel Kahane — Elevator Songs
Venue: David Geffen Stage at the Kaufmann Concert Hall, The 92nd Street Y, New York
Address: 1395 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10128
Phone: 212-415-5500
Tickets & 2025/26 Tisch Music Season: 92NY Concerts
Roomful of Teeth — upcoming tour dates: roomfulofteeth.org/shows
Gabriel Kahane — tour schedule & recital performances: gabrielkahane.com
Album: Elevator Songs on Bandcamp · Rough Magic (Roomful of Teeth)
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