In a loft-like space five floors above New York’s Soho neighborhood, one of the greatest songwriters of the past century was giving a private performance of several of his best-known songs.
Paul Simon has always moved resolutely ahead with his music, incorporating global styles ranging from South American music to reggae into his intricately crafted songs even decades before his pivotal 1986 album “Graceland” helped bring “world music” to the mainstream, and his work has continued to be innovative and explorative into the present.
But on Monday night, he went straight for the classics from Simon & Garfunkel and his early solo career, opening with the 1968 generational anthem “Mrs. Robinson” and moving into “Slip Sliding Away,” “Mother and Child Reunion,” “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” — which featured Yankee great Bernie Williams for an impromptu whistling solo — “Homeward Bound,” “The Boxer” and “Sounds of Silence,” accompanied by his longtime musical director Mark Stewart on guitar and cello. Simon’s voice is sturdy although weathered by age and hearing loss — more on that in a moment — but the songs, of course, will outlive all of the 150-ish people who’d gathered for the performance at the home of the Soho Sessions, an ongoing series of intimate, invite-only concerts to raise funds and awareness for multiple charities.
The concerts, taking place on a floor in a commercial building that once housed the hip-hop mecca Chung King Studios (where classics by Run-DMC, the Beastie Boys and Public Enemy were recorded), are organized by producers Greg Williamson and Nicole Rechter, who have produced several successful concert series, including Love Rocks NYC and the Talkhouse Jams. They estimate that they have helped raise more than $50 million for charity with their shows, which without fail attract star-studded audiences: luminaries on this night included Whoopi Goldberg, Jackson Browne, Jerry and Jessica Seinfeld, Amy Schumer, Kevin Bacon, Mariska Hartigay, Chris Meloni and others.
Photo: Danny Clinch
Simon was in a cheerful mood and joked frequently with the audience, saying that his whistling wasn’t up to snuff and asking if anyone in the audience could accompany him on “Julio” — to the surprise of all, Williams put his hand up. Simon made another Yankees-related reference when he recalled telling Phil Rizzuto that he was a vegetarian, and getting the great shortstop and announcer’s trademark exclamation, “Holy cow!,” in response.
But at the conclusion of the set, he spoke more seriously about the true reason for the gig: to benefit the Stanford Initiative to Cure Hearing Loss. Simon, now 82, spoke of how he’d lost nearly all of the hearing in his left ear (due to an affliction that may be genetic) and how devastating that is for a musician. He then ceded the stage to Dr. Konstantina Stankovic from the institute, who spoke of the advances that have been made in exploring the potential of stem-cell research in curing hearing loss, which lags far behind vision care and treatment.
The performance was the most recent of 14 Soho Sessions since 2017, which have featured intimate performances from Steve Earle, Gary Clarke Jr., Taj Mahal, Yola, Susan Tedeschi, Lucius, Brittany Spencer, Larkin Poe, Warren Haynes, Marcus King (who plays so frequently they call it a “residency”), Amos Lee, Lukas Nelson and others — and each one benefits a different charity. Past beneficiaries have included Everytown for Gun Safety; Music Will, the largest nonprofit music program in the U.S. public school system; the National Alliance on Mental Illness / Hawaii (after the devastating fire in Lahaina); and others.
Rechter says, “Every single one of those performers asks for nothing in return — they’re just showing up for charity and for the community we’re all building. The shows are for fundraising and building awareness for the causes, but they’re also for making introductions, so that the people with the charities can get connected to high-level people, which can pay dividends for them down the line. It almost makes me cry, it’s gotten so much bigger than us.”
Simon with Williamson (left) and Rechter (Photo: Danny Clinch)
Williamson says the initial inspiration for Soho Sessions was the late Band drummer-vocalist Levon Helm’s famous “Midnight Ramble” concerts, held in a converted barn in Woodstock in Upstate New York, where a wide variety of musicians would get together and play classics, covers and jam for hours. “I saw these incredible performances where everybody was in it for the right reasons, and I don’t mean charity,” he says. “There was no ego — everybody was there for the music, the community and the hang, and I connected to that in a big way.”
While Williamson, who works in real estate, and event-production vet Rechter also produce the annual Love Rocks charity concerts — which have featured Keith Richards, Dave Matthews, Robert Plant, Sheryl Crow, Jon Bon Jovi, Hozier, St. Vincent and many others over the years — with the Soho Sessions, “we wanted to do something ourselves, and we wanted to align with different causes: Love Rocks is amazing, but it’s exclusively for God’s Love We Deliver,” which has raised millions to feed people living with HIV/AIDS, cancer and other serious illnesses. “Plus, there are so many big [charity] galas, we wanted to do something different.”
Different is certainly an impression one gets when entering the Soho Sessions space: After passing through the street-level entrance, you wait (and wait) in a small lobby for the elevator, which slowly transports you to the fifth floor and a large, loft-like room that is, at first glance, not necessarily the kind of place one would expect to see a performance by a major artist. But the acoustics are fantastic — after all, it was formerly a recording studio — and there’s an intangible warmth about the space that contributes to the intimacy of the concerts: When this writer attended his first Soho Session several years ago, the first person he saw when the elevator door opened was the evening’s performer, Steve Earle, sitting in a rickety folding chair, writing in a notebook.
Williamson says, “I remember Gary Clarke Jr. walking in and being a little taken aback — like pretty much every performer,” he laughs. “But within one song, they’re like, ‘Why does this room feel so good?’ It’s just intimate enough where it feels great, but it doesn’t feel too small to the audience or to the artist.”
Rechter adds, “Each one of these Soho sessions is for a different cause, and we’re heading in a direction now where we want to be a place where artists come to amplify their own causes. So this works for [Simon] in that regard, and also because he can only play in small rooms due to his hearing condition.”
While the two continue to have day jobs, “this has really become what we spend most of our time on,” Williamson says. They’re considering ways to grow, whether with more concerts or broadcasts or becoming a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
“We see the power of this brand, and we see that artists not only want to be attached to great causes,” he says, “but they want to work with people who have a track record of doing right by artists and the causes too. I would like us to be a place where artists know that they can come and amplify their own causes. We’ve had people ask whether we want to take this on the road, but for us, the most important thing is that it stays intimate — that each performance is powerful, and that we’re we stay authentic to who we are.”
