To the Ladies, Gentlemen and Others of the Krantz Official, Occasional Mailing List:
The time has come.
Typically, at the outset of any previous Krantz tour, you will have received a plaintive message from HQ. Whatever the guise, the content of that message is, unvaryingly, the same:
“Please show up.”
As we now send it again, know that we do not ask this of you lightly. We do not take your participation for granted in any way. We know what’s involved with getting to a show! It takes time. It takes energy. It takes money and in some cases, gasoline. Food, sometimes. Getting dressed. Standing up. Sitting down. Standing, again. Potentially being tired the next day. And perhaps most significantly: it requires subjecting oneself to another’s reality for a short period of time.
That can be a daunting prospect.
We also realize you may not know much about our music and what it offers. You might assume it’s just another one of those shows where people play their instruments really well, and missing that kind of show isn’t really a very big deal, is it?
No, honestly. These days? No. And we know that. So we wouldn’t even BOTHER touring if that were the case! We’d just continue packing the joint at 55 Bar in NYC every Thursday and call it a career.
“Art and Soul Music,” that’s our thing. We do happen to play our instruments pretty well, but only because we have to, to pull it off right – to get to the real stuff, the stuff underneath the day-to-day grinding accomplishments of familiarity and forgone conclusions; to get to the deep stuff, the rhythm-of-the-soul stuff, the states of particulate consciousness and re-estimation of identity, time and place – the stuff that actually matters: creation, unfolding in real-time right in front of you, raw, beautiful, funny, ugly, transcendant, organic, ALIVE!