David Alan Broome: “Music For The Senses”
LowDown
March 9, 2024
I never thought I’d see an overflow crowd show up for an experimental music gig in Tulsa, but Tulsa has a way of upending my expectations. It’s part of what keeps me here, keeps me out there: you never know when some new eddy is going to surface in the current, however familiar you are with the stream.
As LowDown filled with people last Saturday night, I kept overhearing versions of the same comment: “I’m not really sure what this is going to be?” Preview materials for Tulsa-based pianist and musical adventurer David Alan Broome’s “Music For The Senses” (sometimes listed as “Music Of The Senses”) promised something about machine learning, something about American Sign Language, something about original compositions. Social media hinted that there might be a string quartet involved. Word got around that singer Annie Ellicott might be performing, too, and that it would be her birthday. All of this proved intriguing enough to pack the house with an unusual mix of music nerds, weird-art aficionados, Tulsans with hearing loss and tech people.
It was a four-act show—well, five, if you count the inadvertent performance art piece that ended the night, in which the candles on a birthday cake some friends brought in for Ellicott set off the fire alarm and all the buildings on the block got evacuated. The uncertainty around “what was generating what” in these pieces was one of the primary delights of the concert, which Broome described as “musical science theater.”