Normally, a Yo La Tengo show in New York City around the holidays would be a cause for celebration.
The Hoboken, N.J., band—led by husband/wife tandem Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley, along with longtime bassist James McNew—has been throwing some version of the Eight Nights Of Hanukkah fête since its days staging it on its home turf. Beginning in 2001 at the late, long-lamented Maxwell’s, it became something of an indie-rock tradition, eventually moving across the river to New York’s Bowery Ballroom and continuing for more than two decades with breaks only due to the pandemic.
Over the years at these shows, a cavalcade of indie stars/friends of the band have appeared onstage with the trio. The Kinks’ Ray Davies, David Byrne, Death Cab For Cutie’s Ben Gibbard, the Magnetic Fields, Andrew Bird, Real Estate, Robyn Hitchcock, Graham Nash(!), Nick Lowe, Superchunk, the Clean, members of Sonic Youth and the Feelies and the late David Johansen are but a few of the boldface names who have mysteriously and spontaneously sat in with the group. Comedians such as Amy Poehler, Patton Oswalt, David Sedaris (who was particularly funny last year) and Bob Odenkirk have added opening-act levity, and even Kaplan’s mother Marilyn joined the group for one of its traditional closers on the final night.
The proceeds have benefited some of the band’s favorite charities; YLT has raised more than $1 million over the years for causes both local and national, with each show’s take going to a different organization. Being present at one of these evenings is a bit like spinning the underground wheel of fortune: No matter what never-before-played setlist is let loose on the night, you always leave feeling like everybody won.
But the first of 2025’s eight shows to be staged did not initially have the feel of a winner. Earlier in the day, a father/son gunman duo in Australia targeted and killed 15 (including a Holocaust survivor) and injured 27 in a mass-shooting attack on the Jewish community celebrating the start of the Hanukkah season at Bondi Beach outside Sydney. So it was anyone’s guess what kind of mood might pervade the evening’s show, held amidst a snowy cold snap that had temperatures in the teens by the time it all kicked off in the friendly confines of the Lower East Side’s cozy Bowery Ballroom.
Well, we needn’t have worried. The venerable Sun Ra Arkestra (which has played this event in various instantiations over the years), led by 101-year-old saxophonist Marshall Allen, took the stage early. Comedian Jon Glaser prerecorded his standup shtick and played it through the mic from his iPhone while pandemic-era masked and miming the routine. (That was a tactic I’d never seen deployed before, and for whatever reason, it worked as a sort of Lenny Bruce-in-reverse approach.) Then Ira, Georgia and James shuffled onstage to launch into the first of eight sold-out nights.
One of the most endearing elements of the YLT Hanukkah shows is the degree of prep the band clearly invests. No night is the same, the band’s original material is often subverted in favor of a variety of seemingly random cover songs, and guests often dictate the tone and musical flavor of each one-of-one performance. That, coupled with the band’s Velvets worship and tendency to default to downtown noise/scree no matter what style of song is being played, framed the start of the 2025 series. The somewhat-obscure Neil Young And The Chrome Hearts’ “Big Crime” (“We’ve got big crime in D.C. at the White House … Don’t need no fascist rules, don’t want no soldiers walking on our streets”) segued into a hilariously altered cover of Ace Frehley-by-way-of-Russ Ballard’s “New York Groove” (“Back with my New York jews” went the chorus, as fanboys/girls almost defiantly sang along) before a spate of YLT’s own songs (“Periodically Double Or Triple,” the sublime “Madeline” and hushed, country-flavored, Ira/Georgia duet “Can’t Forget”) punctuated the middle of the set.
Kaplan then signaled stage left, and the Sun Ra Arkestra sauntered back into the frame, crowding the Bowery’s tiny stage with a brass bouquet of trumpet, trombones and saxes, joining the band for a few of YLT songs (largely improvised tone poem “Don’t Have To Be So Sad,” “Let’s Be Still” and delicate miniature portrait “My Heart’s Reflection”) before launching into some of the Arkestra’s back catalog: “We Travel The Spaceways,” the seemingly preordained “Nuclear War,” a cover of Rex Garvin’s “Emulsified” and the lovely and spacious “Dreaming,” which witnessed trumpeter Cecil Brooks falling over mid-song, taking out an onstage monitor and microphone in the process, while his bandmates helped him back to his feet and the band itself missed nary a single beat throughout the mishap. “Just like we rehearsed it,” cracked Kaplan as the song’s final notes wafted into the late night air.
The encore is often where the action is at a YLT Hanukkah show and tonight was no exception. Richard Hell And The Voidoids’ speedy/noisy “The Kid With The Replaceable Head,” the chug-a-chug boogaloo of Blue Öyster Cult deep cut “This Ain’t The Summer Of Love” and the Ronettes’ classic “Be My Baby” (with Georgia on vocals) wrapped up the evening in appropriately shaggy fashion, with Yo La Tengo testifying in its typically low-key Hobokenese to the power of rock ’n’ roll to serve as both a joyous prayer for salvation and as a salve for all that ails us.
I can’t recommend strongly enough: Hit the band’s Subreddit, seek out a spare ticket and get yourself downtown to catch one of the other seven shows. As the band itself sings, Yo La Tengo’s little corner of the indie-rock world is always well worth a visit this time of year.
—Corey duBrowa
