Meet Schuyler Iona Press

Last week I made my annual trek to New York City for the Winter Jazz Fest and, for the first since the pandemic, the Jazz Congress conference. My report on the festival can be found here. Please check that out. But this post is dedicated to a show I caught when I went off the WJF grid for about an hour. 

Schuyler Iona Press came to my attention several months ago when I stumbled across her videos on Instagram. Here was a young woman staring directly into the camera while playing the piano (sometimes guitar or ukulele) and singing funny songs. Not funny as in "the title of the song is the punchline, which gets less funny each time" nor so-so jokes that are sung in a loud voice, which is supposed to be what makes them funny. Schuyler has a knack for snappy couplets, in a way that reminds me a bit of one of my favorite tunesmiths, Franklin Bruno.

New posts appear on her IG account almost daily. They're brief but they come across like completed projects rather than rough musical drafts. She sings about childhood crushes on unlikely actors, how she dealt with fear in the middle of a haunted house and what happened when she worked in a juice bar in Los Angeles. There's also the song about how her Thanksgivings during many of her teen years were spent traveling to an Irish dancing competition, which never achieved the results she hoped for. If her music and her crisp delivery paint a picture of someone who should be on a theater stage, it's not surprising. She's working on a musical about the bond between Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. 

When I found out Press was playing while I was in town, I didn't want to miss it. 

Last Friday, she played on a four-act bill in Brooklyn at a place called pinkFROG Cafe, during the first night of Winter Jazz Fest. Her show was not part of the festival but in New York, there's always something else going on top of the multitude of acts playing each night. Why not go rogue for a short while? The kid had me intrigued.

Catching her set meant hightailing out of the jazz first show of the evening, jumping on a subway and hoping to arrive on time. (Someone told me residents find such rushing around to be crazy. To me, it's par for the course, even if it stokes my anxieties in the process.) If Press started at 7:40, as promised, it could make it without missing too much of the festival. (Apologies to the other acts at pinkFROG, who I missed.) 

 

Onstage, Press evoked my memory of seeing singer/songwriter Danielle Howle for the first time. (It was in New York also, during a CMJ Music Marathon in the mid-'90s.) Howle, whose twang immediately betrays her South Carolina upbringing, is a far cry from native New Yorker Ms. Press, but they both have a welcoming stage presence, with the ability to develop immediate rapport with an audience through song introductions, as well as the songs themselves. Before singing "Ode to the Performative Male," a song inspired by an ex-boyfriend, Press told the story of how her mother pinpointed the song's character as soon as she heard it. It took her a few years to come clean because, as she quipped, no one wants to admit that their mom was right.

As good as she is with the light-hearted songs, Press (again like Howle) can also pen a serious one that can stop you in your tracks. "Welcome to the End" was a timely song that compared the world to a decrepit diner where, among other things "The jukebox won't stop playing 'American Pie.'" There were even better metaphors but I couldn't write fast enough and pay attention at the same time. In the wake of the events that went down a few days earlier, her words proved to be right on the money. Hopefully she'll release this one sometime soon. Two songs released four years ago can be heard on Bandcamp, with two more on Spotify (one of the latter, "Let's Have a Picnic," was part of her set last week).

Every night there's probably someone playing a show in Brooklyn that should be heard by a larger mass of people. If the right people hear Schuyler Iona Press, big things could happen.