ELEVATOR SONGS

Scored for the eight voices of Roomful of Teeth plus Kahane on keyboards and guitar, the album draws additional color from two members of the vocal ensemble—Eliza Bagg on violin alongside Jodie Landau on vibraphone. Holed up at Flora Recording and Playback in Portland, Oregon, where Kahane lives, the group tracked the album in a whirlwind four days at the end of 2024 with the help of three-time Grammy-nominated engineer/producer Joseph Lorge (Feist, Japanese Breakfast, hand habits, Blake Mills/Pino Palladino), whose deft touch can be heard throughout.

Elevator Songs grew out of a longstanding circuit of mutual admiration. Kahane and Teeth had been moving in concentric creative circles for more than a decade before the ensemble’s founder, Brad Wells, and current artistic director, Cameron Beauchamp, approached Gabriel about writing a “Roomful of Teeth Songbook.” Where the group had come to prominence for its electrifying ensemble work, winning its first Grammy in 2014 for its self-titled debut (featuring Caroline Shaw’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Partita for 8 Voices), this new project would feature each of the singers individually. Kahane, meanwhile, has been lauded for his ability to richly embody a wide array of characters in works like Book of Travelers (“a stunning portrait of a singular moment in America,” Rolling Stone), released in 2018; and emergency shelter intake form, an orchestral oratorio confronting economic inequality through the lens of homelessness, which has been performed in a number of major cities on both sides of the Atlantic.    

The resulting album runs the emotional gamut from the ridiculous (“Valise,” “Hot Tub”) to the wrenching (“Not Even the Dead,” “Memory Burns”) and everything in between. It sounds like nothing so much as itself, and yet, for all of its freshness, it is, first and foremost, a rich and resonant collage of the timeless travails of the human condition.