The room was slowly filling. Middle-aged and casually dressed, smelling of outside alcohol, weekday operators of concrete niches and specialty markets, they were gathering inside the second, wood-panneled, floor of Ridgewood Presbyterian, a nondescript mid-sized church, rebranded in recent years as the Stone Circle Theatre to accommodate rehearsals by punk bands, off-off-broadway theater and occasional intimate performances by indie acts like Soccer Mommy and Cameron Winter. 

Tonight, that list had made its way to Cassandra Jenkins, a longtime supporting character in the city’s folk scene, since elevated to a more focal standing after she was set to accompany David Berman’s backing band on tour before, as she explained in some number of profiles since, the aborted experience led her to record her own collection of Berman-esque (catchy, ambient, tearfully sincere) folk tunes, populated by knowledgeable art references. The most popular of these was “Hard Drive,” a cheerful ditty she wrote about talking to a security guard while looking at a Mrinalini Mukherjee retrospective at the Met Breuer, a since-closed modern art annex of the Met. It is a gorgeous song, swelling, magnificent and full of big words, and I always thought that it was nice that somebody thought to capture the strange sinking feeling of those years, which existed like the Breuer did itself, like the president or the spirit at the time, temporary and full of hope. Some years had passed since then; a slightly more prominent indie label would release yet another Cassandra Jenkins album etcetra, etcetra. And yet. A homespun charm about the whole pursuit still abounded. At the merch table, Jenkins’ longtimers were selling branded t-shirts depicting enormous clocks and poking fun of the Park Slope Food Co-op (She’s not a member, Jenkins would insist on stage)

“My big in this year is definitely the Belly Chorus,” Jenkins said at point, after she had arrived in a svelte navy blue jacket, decorated with bright, glittering flowers, like a bouquet of velvet. Earlier, the crowd had chatted idly around the idea that Jenkins would be performing with a chorus of some kind, and this had turned out to be the Belly Chorus: a new group, led by the bearded composer Ron Shalom, and numbering, that night, at around 20 or 30, all wearing glowing, silver vests. They had opened the show by performing a series of group harmonies, most of which sounded largely secular, though some scanned spiritual in grasp.  “All material things seem on the verge of being dissolved,” the group harmonized at one point. At another, Shalom tapped a glass of water contemplatively before beginning a titanic yell. Jenkins herself joined the group for one song and later brought them up to perform one of her own, casting it with a bigness that felt calming. The spirit of all this was convivial, mutual aid group coded, part of a larger trend described by the New York Post as “low-commitment fun.” 

When Jenkins herself sings, the inflection of her voice carries a kind of rough and unhewn history. Sometimes, it seems with her voice that she winces, or fake winces, like through the words of “Only One,” a song she says is about falling in love in New York and where she likens herself to a “stick-figure sisyphus.” (Dylan-esque!) At one point, she covers a Nick Hakim song, easily finding her voice in Hakim’s koan-like songwriting. And it becomes her language too. When she sings with the chorus, you could see her, in certain moments, step backward out of the group, as if watching everyone else, perhaps amazed that they are there. When, at the end, she finally sings “Hard Drive,” she lifts up her cell phone to play the recording she made for the song of the security guard she talked to and asks us if we think it really is a Queens accent. Her group handles these songs with the kind of 90s slow rock anthemics they deserve, quietly led by the incredibly able Adam Brisbin, a guitarist from the Brooklyn scene and aided by Jenkins’ brother, the violinist Reid Jenkins, himself once employed in the local folk pop act the Morningsiders that, per their website, once “topped Spotify’s Viral 50 in 2015 and was featured in a Starbucks commercial featuring Oprah Winfrey.”

Just the other week, a music writer at the New Yorker, where Jenkins was once working as an editorial assistant while gigging in the aforementioned-folk-pop-scene, had observed that her music had become something “fixated on space, in both the cosmic and the immersive sense, testing the interplay between bioacoustics and sound design, and the ways heavenly bodies help put life on Earth into perspective.” Above us, in the loose wooden space of the church’s parapets, there were pinpoints of blue light, glittering like stars, hung on unseen wires.

The Stone Circle Theatre is located at 59-14 70th Avenue. Keep up with their programming here.

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Photos taken by Andrew Karpan.