Remembering Jay Bennett in benefit concert
Photo courtesy of Jonathan Pines
It’s possible to lay all sorts of emotional baggage atop Jay Bennett’s posthumous album, “Kicking at the Perfumed Air.”
As with much of the songwriter’s work, it has a haunted air of introspection that sometimes ventures beyond poignance into far queasier terrain (“Kicking at the Perfumed Air” is available HERE).Indeed, the album-closing “Beer,” in which the narrator drinks himself into a stupor and imagines his death, is tough to hear, given that Bennett died in May 2009 at his home in Urbana, Ill., of what the Champaign County coroner described as an accidental painkiller overdose.
But as anyone who knew Bennett would likely say, the sometimes brutally introspective artist was not necessarily a mirror image of the person he was in life: a driven multi-tasker with a constant craving to create.
Edward Burch, who will headline Saturday at Subterranean in a benefit concert for Bennett’s music-education fund, was one of the late singer’s closest friends and musical collaborators, and he was as devastated by his death as anyone. But he’s also happy to clear up a few things about the master musician’s final days.
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