Midi and the Modern Dance:

(Published in the Fairfield County Weekly 5/31/07)
Everyone in the crowd at Toquet Hall in Westport is in high school and nobody on stage can legally drive yet. The band looks young, acts young and talks too much. Lead singer Omeed Goodarzi nervously rambles about his favorite foods, his undying love for every person in the crowd, and he admits the glasses he’s wearing are not his own.

Lead guitarist Sam Abelow tightens his strings, keyboardist Mikey McGovern tightens his tie, Jack Aldrich tightens his snare, and bassist Akbar Mirza just stands there.

Toquet Hall, a small, old concert space near the Westport Public Library, employs both Goodarzi and McGovern as board members, and they help book and promote bands that fill the place. Tonight it’s mostly full with about 50 people inside. The sign outside says it’s a “teen coffee house,” but there’s no coffee to be found in the place. What you do find is a bunch of energetic young people fiending for original music they can dance to. They’ve brought their own coffee.

“OK, let’s do this,” Abelow says. Goodarzi slowly calms down, closes his eyes and grabs hold of the microphone. He instantly ages five or six years as the first line escapes his mouth. “If I could dance, side by side with you, a glance / Maybe a wave or two / Could you? Could I? Could we?” It’s not always his lyrics that pull you in, but the command he has over his vocal chords.



The band kicks in. An impressively intricate drum beat, a mature, jazzy keyboard and guitar tone, a delicate and mellow bass line and a soothing harmony come from the young rockers on stage. The song “Mother May I” builds into a sophisticated waltz, and the crowd sways at the band’s feet. In the same song, intricate turns into loud, jazzy turns into distorted, delicate turns into commanding and soothing turns into eerie. But it’s all carried out nicely by Goodarzi’s controlled and passionate voice. The crowd isn’t swaying anymore. They’re going nuts. Arms are flailing, teenaged girls are singing along and screaming their names. Everyone is front is dancing, and the band is loving it.

Meet Midi and the Modern Dance. They are the self-proclaimed best band in Westport. They’ve only been a band since January, but after their May 18 Toquet Hall performance, they were picked up by Boston record label Hotel Valkenburg with intentions to record, promote and book shows.

Move over, John Mayer…

Well, OK, maybe not, but wouldn’t it be great to tell him to?

Midi’s tight live show and their surprisingly professional-sounding EP make the band full of promise. They’ve been in and out of bands with each other, and Aldrich is currently a singer and guitarist in another band, but, according to Abelow, “This is the combination we think works the best.”

These sophomores at Staples High School are sophomores in the true sense of the word: They’re realistic enough to know that they haven’t been playing for too long, but they’re youthfully disillusioned enough to believe they’ll never stop making music together. “Basically,” says Goodarzi, “I never want to compromise music for anything else. And I always want to have these four guys helping me out.”

McGovern says the band benefits from not sounding like many other bands in Westport. “I feel like we kind of have a different, like, feel to things,” he says. “We don’t really have as much punk influence. We have more stuff in 3/4. We try to do instrumentation and we try to incorporate those kinds of sounds.”



Ambience, intense lyrics, beautiful singing voices and basically anything that’s mature, intelligent rock is what they seem drawn to. They mainly listen to popular indie bands like Arcade Fire, Bright Eyes, the Decemberists, Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, Neutral Milk Hotel, Stars and Sound Ambulance, but they also enjoy more notable bands like U2 and Radiohead.

Midi’s inexperience is offset by their easily noticeable mature sound—despite the fact that Midi’s members barely took any lessons. Mirza says, “I did take a couple lessons, but they never helped me.” And all of lead singer Omeed Goodarzi’s bandmates agree that he’s been a naturally gifted singer since the age of 12.

Goodarzi, who is also the main songwriter, is a charming, young Iranian-American. His voice is the first thing you notice when you press play. He might not know how good his voice is, or even how it got so good, but he’s not imitating anyone, “because you don’t want to sound too much like anyone else.”

With zero vocal training, he attributes his skills to his mom’s cooking. “My mom,” he says, “she sings classical Iranian music, which is really strenuous on the voice. She is always singing and cooking. Her two main hobbies.”

The Goodarzis left Iran during the Iranian Revolution in the late ’70s and early ’80s and have been supportive parents since the beginning. “I can’t remember Omeed showing excitement or connection to anything but music,” his father says. “These guys have a vision.”

The band’s vision has most recently been packaged in the form of a five-song EP. It was recorded and produced by Sam Abelow in his parents’ basement, using the equipment his father bought him. Oh, and Mr. Abelow just so happens to be one of two architects on the small team responsible for creating Sterling Sound Studio in New York City, which has been the site for dozens of influential recordings, from alternative rock to world music, jazz and even classical.

Midi and the Modern Dance’s EP doesn’t sound like a 15-year-old produced it in a basement. As a matter of fact, it doesn’t sound like 15-year-olds are playing guitar, bass or keyboard. It definitely doesn’t sound like a 16-year-old is singing on it, and it doesn’t sound like a 16-year-old is drumming. Maybe it’s the equipment and maybe it’s the money, but it doesn’t really matter. Sound is sound, and the thing sounds clear, mature, and the songs are varied enough to showcase their budding and wide-ranging indie-rock talents.

The song “Clear Black Snow,” for example, starts with a slow, teasing build-up complete with some Arcade Fire-esque lyrical stylings, with an emotional Iranian touch. It’s somber, but not boring and it’s peaceful, but not lame. It’s a short song with a quick but well-deserved climax, and it ends with a great do-wop vocal segment.

“All I Know” displays the band’s playfulness and rock know-how (even more so in concert). It’s only an EP, but this would be the single if they were in a position to choose such a thing. Could the guitar tone be reminiscent of the Strokes? No. That would be way too awesome. But it might be the case. And once again, the most striking part of the song is Goodarzi.

“Grey Light,” opens with sounds of the ocean, or perhaps rain, soft drum beats, a thick jazzy guitar and an echoey Goodarzi. If John Mayer’s voice has an overly-breathy, trying-to-be-sexy thing that gets old quick, well, Goodarzi does it better. Get ready to waltz to this one.

The band may have found the perfect vehicle for their vision at the The Hotel Valkenburg label. The innovative Boston-based company will not ask Midi and the Modern Dance to sign anything, or to share their creative rights. They just want good musicians to meet good musicians, and that’s what’s happening in August, when Midi heads to Boston to record a split EP with Dear Ulysses, one of their biggest influences. The guys couldn’t be more excited to be a part of what Aldrich calls a “utopian indie commune.” That commune now consists of three Boston bands: Dear Ulysses, the Peasantry and Murals. They’re all friends and they all record, practice and hang out together in a studio they all help run.

According to its founder, Jordan Kelly, who also started Dear Ulysses, “Hotel Valkenburg is somewhere between an indie record label, recording studio, management firm, merchandise manufacturer-designer and booking agent. It’s like a safe haven where artists can come create, record an album, make some money.” So, if you were a new band with no friends outside of Connecticut, that basically sounds too good to be true.

Well, lucky for Midi and the Modern Dance, Hotel Valkenburg says they’re the ones that are too good to be true. “They are extremely talented,” says Kelly in a late-night email. “I mean, I can remember my high school band, we were just awful. I don’t even think we played a show. Furthermore, Midi was just the sound I was looking for, and as it stands Midi will remain my main focus.”

With this chance of a lifetime, or at least a teenage lifetime, the guys are feeling pretty carefree. “I don’t have any stress,” admitted guitarist and EP producer Abelow. “My dad paid for all my equipment,” he says. “And I didn’t work for it, at all.”

And that’s not a bad thing, it’s just a rich kid thing. When all you have is time, money and zero worries, it can be endlessly easy to waste the time and the money doing nothing but being 16, and maybe doing some drugs. But the young members of Midi and Modern Dance are not doing nothing. And they aren’t doing drugs, either. “We’re all basically straight-edge,” says McGovern.

Time will tell if they’re doing something significant, but it’s no stretch to say that the combination of their stage presence, vocals and strong songwriting has the power to carry their music out of Westport and out of New England.

“We live in a rich town with a lot of really rich people,” says Goodarzi in an alley outside Toquet Hall. “They are able to put us in situations that maybe we deserve, maybe we don’t.” He looked up and behind him and the others as if to suggest Toquet Hall is one of those places.


You can probably find Midi and the Modern Dance practicing in the Abelow household basement or on stage at Toquet Hall, making the kind of noise that maybe, just maybe, will bring them somewhere of rock-significance. You can see it when Abelow looks like he wants nothing more than to get lost on stage in a jumping fit of guitar spasms. Or when Goodarzi runs through a crowd of less than 50 banging on a tom drum, not knowing he’s whacking people in the head with a broken drum stick. Tell the drummer who strapped a tambourine to his foot at an acoustic gig at Barnes and Noble that the music he’s making isn’t fantastic and original. They won’t even listen to you. There’s always a teenager ready to ignore you if you claim rock is dead. And if enough young people don’t listen, then the claim is not true. In Midi and the Modern Dance, you can find five such teenagers.