Celebrating Undefinable Songwriting

“I’m so unfinished,” Arthur Russell sang in the 1982 song “A Little Lost,” and though it goes on to rhyme with “diminished” and take the form of a lover’s plea for a second chance, that line, alone, remains important.

Russell died in 1992, at 40. The poles of his work are his classical music — he was among the second generation of minimalist composers — and the fascinating disco records he made in the 1970s and early ’80s. But much of what lies in between is more personal and harder to define.

He was a songwriter with a sound that lay somewhere between droning art-song, FM radio pop and country music. He treated songs as permeable, flexible, unfinished entities, letting them drift together, ignoring standard rules about verses and choruses. He has become a hero partly for intellectual reasons, because he didn’t recognize obvious divisions between music for art and music for contemplation. But if he weren’t a great songwriter, no one would be paying attention.

The Kitchen, where he worked as music director in the mid-’70s, was the obvious place for “Let’s Go Swimming,” a revisiting of Russell’s work by past colleagues and present admirers. (The two nights of music, Friday and Saturday, were preceded on Thursday by the screening of a new biographical film about Russell, “Wild Combination.”)

Friday’s program began with Russell’s playful and revealing singer-songwriter music, performed in stripped-down form by some of his newer aesthetic descendants. Nat Baldwin, the double-bassist, performed the brilliant “A Little Lost.” Rebecca Gates, once of the Spinanes, played electric guitar and sang Russell’s “You and Me Both” and “Losing My Taste for the Night Life.” Joel Gibb of the Hidden Cameras played three songs on various instruments from one of Russell’s posthumous records, “Calling Out of Context,” material from a time when Russell was writing lyrics that sounded like letters to a friend. “You can make me feel bad if you want to,” Mr. Gibb sang, in an echo of Russell’s croon, over simple piano chords. “I don’t need those things you said I want.”