Singer, poet, absurdist, operatic baritone ... US star eyes Oz tour

Brooklyn-based performer Joseph Keckler straddles the operatic and the theatrical, but never the mundane

Joseph Keckler. Picture: Alyssa Taylor-Wendt

There’s a cacophony in Joseph Keckler’s apartment in Brooklyn. Trains on an elevated train line screech towards Manhattan, ambulance and fire engine sirens wail. Yet there are harmonious tones too, coming from the Puckish performer, whose commanding voice cuts through the hubbub.

During a video chat ahead of the unconventional writer-musician’s Australian tour, Review tries to put a label on Keckler, who resists categorisation. So, how does he describe himself when he meets someone at a party?

“Well, I just say that I’m a singer and a writer, I try to keep it simple,’’ he says. “When I’m pressed, I say I use my voice and language in different combinations.” 

When he looks at descriptions of his work, he thinks it sounds like something he would dislike.

Watching his Tiny Desk performance on National Public Radio’s YouTube channel, the opening GPS Song is about a road trip with a lover.

It transitions from the couple’s baby talk, with piano accompaniment, to a monologue that follows the realisation the GPS is programmed to go to another romantic rendezvous after dropping Keckler to the airport. It feels like a scene from Charlie Kaufman’s surreal 2020 Netflix movie I’m Thinking of Ending Things, based on the novel by Canadian writer Iain Reid

Right when you think you get it, Keckler switches to opera. But this doesn’t properly describe what he does. The subtitles aren’t like what one sees during a performance of Turandot.

The Italian words suggest something more modern. Or are they German? Or gobbledygook? You can’t get your bearings, so you just follow his lead. Keckler comes clean. Yes, the song is in a nonsense vocabulary. “(It’s) about the breakdown of communication. So, I thought it appropriate to use an invented but primitive ­language.”

He likes questions that may or may not have an answer. He likes to make associations. He likes to be a spectator.

“If I’m engaged with the artist, then I do trust them. I am intrigued by ambiguity. I assume the same of my audience, and I’m able to create easy points of entry and lead people. Even if I’m leading them into the woods.”

Keckler, an intuitive and engaging performer, was first inspired by discovering David Bowie at a young age. He was interested in theatrical blues singers such as Aretha Franklin, Bessie Smith and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins.

The elvin-looking Keckler could be anywhere from 30 to 300 years old. His only comment on his age is that “it varies”.

Nevertheless he once was a child, raised in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He drew and made visual art. He was interested in voices, especially Mel Blanc, who voiced all the characters on the Looney Tunes cartoons, from Bugs Bunny to Elmer Fudd. 

As a teenager, he moved on to piano and singing. The latter took him to a voice teacher, Fay Smith, a friend of the family, to tame the aggressive impulses that would see him become hoarse in the course of three minutes.  Through studying voice, Keckler became interested in opera. He went to a school for visual arts, started as a painter, and ended up training as an opera singer studying under George Shirley, the first African-American leading tenor at the Metropolitan Opera.

When asked to explain his trajectory in music, Keckler turns to the American writer Flannery O’Connor. “Everything that rises must converge,” he says. 

He moved to New York, started performing in clubs and became immersed in a milieu that brings to mind the Gaslight Cafe in Greenwich Village, where some of the greats made their start. Bob Dylan’s 1962 album, Live at The Gaslight, was recorded there. It closed in 1971.

In New York he worked with Sheila Plummer. Keckler wrote experimental plays, performed in operas and in other people’s work. He stopped doing visual art. In New York he had a lot of low-paying jobs, such as selling audio guides at the Guggenheim and working for a blind gallerist.

His Goth song, which is in German, is semi-autobiographical. The music video shows Keckler as a lowly lackey in an office cubicle. A middle-manager micromanages him away from his power nap.

“The jobs gave me lots of material,” he says. “I had these pursuits, or modes of expression. My writing work and musical work, and then I decided to write about working for this man who sold pirated opera recordings. I thought this should really be an aria. And so that’s when I decided to fuse the narratives with that type of vocal production and that style of writing.”

That bait-and-switch he makes from monologue to modern opera is a central tension of his performance. The monologues have a younger person’s ironic sensibilities; the opera resonates with an older soul.

“I think people sometimes have that reaction to hearing people sing opera, there’s already the sense of abstraction in the language. There’s this liberty you have in that operatic mode to do something beautiful and big, really melodramatic, and emotional.” 

He can inhabit the two realms simultaneously. The dry, contemporary conversational mode, and another dimension that might be in a different country, a different time. It’s a high artifice form that requires key ingredients.

It’s not his only mode, he says. But when it works, it feels good. 

As for balancing the irony of the monologue and sincerity of opera, to Keckler, they’re not really opposed. He quotes the English artist and illustrator Sue Coe, “Technique is a testament to sincerity.”

“I’m both sarcastic and very, very sincere,” he says.

In his operatic songs, Keckler keeps the language spare, because he can add so much musically. His voice is mesmerising. That balances the tone.

His performances may be something you just have to see to begin to comprehend, and then try to explain it to a friend. When words fail, What Would Joseph Keckler Do?

Joseph Keckler’s Australian tour with Lydia Lunch runs at Byron Bay’s Byron Theatre March 9. Then Adelaide Town Hall on March 14, Melbourne Recital Hall on March 15-16, The Theatre Royal Castlemaine on March 17. He will be in Sydney performing at Phoenix Central Park on March 21 and The Great Club on March 22. His tour culminates at MONA Hobart on March 24.