The Brooklyn Rail

So they’ve come to claim me 
To play with my patience 
To try and possess me
I have to say that I’m fatigued…
I’m alone on stage with / no exit…

Listening to “I’m alone on stage with / no exit” from “Maker Taker” off of Kaia Kater’s most recent release, Strange Medicine (Free Dirt Records, 2024), one wonders if French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre has returned. In his play No Exit, Sartre asks us to assume our individuality, and be mindful of our relationship with other people.

“Who’s / the maker?” Kater’s song “Maker Taker” asks. A flatfoot-dancing, banjo-playing, poet revivalist and bandleader of our time, Kater’s Strange Medicine blends the cinematic and a love for traditional music, drummer Brian Blade, Radiohead, and others into an album of freedom. Banjo music never went anywhere, but perhaps needs this freedom from expectation.

What Kater means by “no exit” is the reality of making oneself vulnerable to an audience, in putting one’s trust in the act of music making. Finding a way from maker to listener, once the music starts, with songs as vessels. As if confessional poetic song verse was strange medicine, love and diction combine like two snakes on the ten-song album.

In 2012, on the EP Old Soul, Kater revealed a vulnerable and spirited voice and postmodern banjo. Kater seemed to be quieting the other voices that surround us and are within us, the leviathans of commerce, faith, and politics, with “Maggie May”: “Maggie may / pick up the telephone … Maggie may / with the flowers in your hair … / Maggie may / with your ivory skin…”

The banjo, which she began playing at eleven, is a chameleon to Kater. The way it sounds, she notes, in bluegrass music is not the way it sounds in Irish or in old time music. The prevailing idea is that it’s loud, brash, in your face. She grew up embracing that, through the bluegrass.

The calmer, quieter sound of the instrument in old time music spoke to her. Particularly taking in unaccompanied ballads, and old time music, what stuck with Kater was repetition, which can be trance-like or even ornamental. Now leader of a quartet, Kater was first interested in encounters that broadened her own horizons. It’s how a five string fiddle player, Chris Bartos, who she met at festivals, produced her first two albums.

“Running from the rain / finding a way into your / big house,” were the first two lines of her self-released debut, Sorrow Bound. The album aimed to haunt modernity with tradition, with “Six white horses on your tail / running from paradise” in “Southern Girl,” or “Wouldn’t mind working in the / Sun” in “Sun to Sun.” “The man that you love / isn’t worth another day,” she sings on “Oh’ Darlin.’” An album of traditional songs, yes, but when is it happening? Now.

With experience, her confidence deepened, though the base of repetition and ornamentation remained. The light of complex songwriting shines through in the title track on Nine Pin (Kingswood Records, 2016).“Oh Lazarus / won’t you take me home,” Kater sings, positing with us that after our trials and tribulations we will live in peace.

Kater’s music would not be without the cities that inspire her. For example Montreal, in “In Montreal,” featuring Allison Russell, on Strange Medicine. It’s the people-watching in cities that she loves. Nor the art: Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s statue Apollo and Daphne inspired the song “Tigers.” Kater was affected by a photo of the sculpture, and meditated on women establishing themselves as people. Like a sculptor, musicians chisel at the world we live in, finding form out of excess. Is art not fated to run away from Apollonian life, and all of its rationalities? We listeners, are we not doing the same? Yes, we are, and should dance to it, making art out of ourselves.