Victor DeLorenzo is throwing himself a birthday party—sort of—and everyone is invited.
On Saturday, October 19, the veteran Milwaukee musician and Violent Femmes founding drummer will celebrate his 70th birthday with a show from his longtime instrumental group Nineteen Thirteen. The show, held at the Vivarium, will include an opening set from Mike Mangione. Tickets are available now.
“We’ve never been to the Vivarium, so we’re looking forward to playing there,” DeLorenzo says. “Maybe some people will be inspired because it’s a birthday show or whatever, but we figured we’d just throw that in.”
It’s a brisk autumn evening and DeLorenzo is relaxing in his tucked-away studio on Milwaukee’s east side. Joining him is his partner in Nineteen Thirteen crime, Janet Schiff. The two have been collaborating since 2010: DeLorenzo mainly on drums, Schiff mainly on her prized cello built in 1913, giving the group its name. Together, they’ve released a handful of idiosyncratic albums and EPs filled with sometimes dark and mournful, sometimes wonky and jazz-damaged chamber rock. (Cello And Drums Forever is both the title of a 2022 single and the band’s rallying cry.) In recent years, a third member, keyboardist Matt Meixner, has joined the Nineteen Thirteen fold. (Cello, Drums, And Keys Forever?)
“We sometimes joke around and say, ‘Okay, we’re going to play a Pink Floyd set tonight.’ That usually means Matt will come up with some exotic keyboard sounds and then maybe we’ll stretch out the arrangements,” DeLorenzo says. “It’s been nice to have another person in the group with us. He’s just brilliant, so we’re really thrilled to be working with him.”
Meixner’s addition comes at an incredibly busy—and sometimes perilous—time in the world of Nineteen Thirteen. On October 25, DeLorenzo’s other current band, Night Crickets, will release their sophomore album How It Ends (?). The long-distance group came together during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and released a debut record of effortlessly cool and laid-back jazz-rock called A Free Society in 2022. Night Crickets includes DeLorenzo, multi-instrumentalist Darwin Meiners, and Bauhaus and Love & Rockets bassist David J.
“Similar to the last one, we remotely recorded,” DeLorenzo says of the new record, which boasts a spoken-word contribution from his old Theatre X pal Willem Dafoe. “But this one turned out to be political in a way. I think what’s being said on the record is very important. Of course it’s our personal views, but there are a couple of things in particular that David wrote that are really intense.”
DeLorenzo is also in the midst of shooting a short film he wrote and will star in, Mary For The Block. The film is set in the city’s East Side neighborhood and will feature familiar locations like the Turning Page comic book shop.
“For one twelve-hour stretch, I sat at my computer with some scotch and I wrote this thing in one fell swoop,” DeLorenzo says. “And what I wrote, with the exception of maybe a line here or there, is exactly what we’re filming.”
Filming “Mary for the Block” with @VicDeLorenzo and company at The Turning Page on Milwaukee’s exceptional East Side. pic.twitter.com/EgMVvDXtBt
— Mark Fairbanks (@MarkFairbanks) October 11, 2024
Schiff has been busy, too. She currently plays in another Milwaukee band, Vox Starling, which notched a show at the Washington Park Wednesdays series this summer. During the pandemic, she also connected with Indian sitar virtuoso Ramprapanna Bhattacharya. Schiff plays cello on a single 30-minute piece of music that Bhattacharya will release in December. (Oh, and she’s been busy learning a two-stringed Asian cello called an erhu.)
“It’s called a raga. It’s a prayer, basically,” Schiff says of the Bhattacharya collaboration. “I’ve got more than eighty cello tracks on it. Ramprapanna is an Indian prodigy and he’s just fantastic.”
Along with prepping for the Vivarium show, the DeLorenzo-Schiff-Meixner trio have been creating music under a new, as-yet-unannounced music moniker. The mystery side project currently exists in recorded form only, though it may play live in the future.
“There’s a certain criterion with Nineteen Thirteen that we like to adhere to, and we’ve stretched it a little bit [with the side project] where we have some songs with lyrics and singing,” DeLorenzo says. “It’s not strictly just an instrumental group anymore. The three of us are free to do whatever we want. Janet sings a song that she wrote on banjo.”
And then there’s the perilous part of Nineteen Thirteen’s recent history. In 2023, DeLorenzo had a health scare that involved a trip to the emergency room and, eventually, surgery. He has a clean bill of health now, but his recovery was slow and it kept him away from his beloved drums. (During this time, Schiff’s Vox Starling bandmate Renee Luna Bebeau filled in for DeLorenzo at Nineteen Thirteen shows.)
“I didn’t play the drums for about four or five months, which was really bad. It made me crazy,” DeLorenzo says. “I’ve always had the drums set up, but for the longest time I had them just sitting here. When I was sick, even if I wasn’t playing, I could at least look at them and think about playing. Which is a rehearsal in and of itself, I suppose. But I’m glad I can play now and I don’t have to worry about it, health-wise.”
Which brings things back to the October 19 Vivarium show. While not explicitly a birthday show, it feels like a celebration–a celebration of coming out on the other side of a dicey year, and a celebration of veteran Milwaukee musicians who, somehow, have been busier than ever.
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