Rating:   5 Ratings     12345  

The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players Off & On Broadway Sarathan Records

      "We're an indie-vaudeville-conceptual-art-rock-slideshow band," says singer/songwriter Jason Trachtenberg. "We've got the market cornered. There's no band that can hold a candle to us. In that department." Funny, but also true. While watching the quirky, cute "Off & On Broadway" DVD by the Trachtenburg trio is this is something completely new and unique – basically it’s like taking a tasty trip through a magical candy land of sights and sounds never done before. It’s bizarre, it’s eccentric, and it’s nothing short of utterly entertaining.

      Husband Jason Trachtenburg had been a singer-songwriter out of Seattle Washington, trying to make ends meat with his arty, politically charged folk songs, but making a living by walking lots and lots of pooches and puppies – which he lovingly recounts. One day, his artist and designer wife Tina came across a box of old slides labeled “Mountain Trip to Old Japan, 1959” at an estate sale. This is quite possibly where it all began. With a quick burst of inspiration, she thought that Jason could set himself apart from the pack if he wrote songs about the people and places in the slides. He decided to give it a go, and enlisted their young daughter, Rachel, to play the drums. With Tina manning the slide projector, they entered a local talent contest, which they ended up winning for obvious reasons.

      After succeeding with their first try, they decided to hit yard sales, more estate sales, thrift stores, wherever they could find these lost treasures of what father Trachtenburg likes to call “Golden Age of Slide Photography”. More slide collections yielded more songs, and the family took their show on the road, eventually winding up in New York City, where they almost immediately found adoring fans.

      Through the journey of “Off & On Broadway” the Trachtenburg Family recounts its adventure of creation over the course of the disc. The DVD is sprinkled with gushing interviews of friends, fans, and fellow artists, all of which are enthusiastic about the Family’s infectious creativity and generosity (they’ve been know to even cook on stage for their audience). But of course the real meat of the DVD, where we get to see firsthand what all the commendable commotion is about, is found in the numerous live performances recorded in New York in 2005. Although you’re not witnessing one full length concert, the portions you see flat-out work and give the viewer a pretty good impression of what’s to be expected in live performances.

      The songs are relatively simple yet relentlessly endearing; the best of them are piano based, with an old-timey undercurrent that is refreshingly quaint. Others are dissonant garage rockers, or hearken back to Jason’s anti-folk roots. The slide accompaniments run the gamut from (yes) family vacations, to old driver’s Ed instructional presentations, to personal photo collections spanning decades, even to slides used for corporate board meetings. When paired up with the songs, the resultant package is a generally humorous and breezy lyrical and visual shower of non-sequiturs, political commentary, and subtle character studies of lives lived long ago and recast by the imagination. And when they are at their best, the songs and the slides dance around each other in a near perfect complementary symmetry, spinning around an axis of nostalgia and a longing for a more innocent time, building into something profoundly emotive, something more than the sum of its halves.

      There’s something about the watching the hazy, misty glow of these random photographs from long ago that is such a mystery. Their almost gauzy look, with their mysterious, unknown, non- permanent and fleeting past, that leaves the impression to the viewer. They almost seem to cut straight to the very core of memory, like you are seeing the past through a sort of private prism. There’s something in these antique images that digital photography could just never convey. It’s partly the obsolescence of the technology, partly the random people in them, and partly the awareness that we are looking at lives that we’ll never really know, and that these people are in fact most likely deceased, and they will never know they’ve been immortalized in such a fascinating way. It captures an eerie awareness of mortality, and it’s just completely awe-inspiring and almost overwhelming.

      Ok, maybe I’m analyzing the DVD a little too much, or being a little too deep, but it truly fascinates me. Though perhaps destined to remain legends largely only in their own inventive minds, and those of their small but devoted following, the Trachtenburg Family has carved a small but sublime niche out for themselves in a music scene that seems lacking, at the present time at least, to such originality. Though perhaps limited by the necessities of their chosen means of creativity - no matter how many estate-sale slide collections they happen upon, songs about mountain trips they write about, sadly eventually they may all begin to sound and look the same. Yet even though this may be true, they are radiant proof that, even at this late date, not everything has been done yet which is something to give praise about.

-Christine Beals 03/03/07