Wilco has already begun taking over the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. The three-day Solid Sound Festival, curated by Wilco, starts Friday.
A weekend of music and art, side by side in the Berkshires
If you haven’t made your weekend plans yet, you really should think about heading to the Berkshires for the Solid Sound Festival in North Adams, Mass.
Solid Sound is the band Wilco‘s takeover of the entire complex occupied by the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), a fantastic 19th Century factory complex with an ever-changing lineup of modern art.
Wilco
While the museum is no stranger to hosting music events and other performing arts, the Solid Sound Festival is likely the first event that turns over the entire place — in fact, a good chunk of downtown North Adams, to a single event. As the museum website notes:
Just want to visit the galleries? We recommend you come a different weekend.
We anticipate that more than 5000 people will attend the Wilco Solid Sound Festival August 14 + 15. While the galleries will be open to non-festival goers that weekend, visitors who are looking for a contemplative time in the galleries and easy parking should visit us on a different weekend or arrive as early in the day as possible.
Starting at 8 on Friday night, the complex will be filled with thousands of Wilco fans intent on seeing their favorite band’s only East Coast show of the summer. But this event is special, because Wilco has managed to line up a place where all its side projects and friends’ bands can play too.
If you can’t make it to the festival, or even if you’re there, be sure to check back for updates on Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? and our Twitter feed.
Romeo (Damon Daunno) and Juliet (Kelly Barrett) in the Williamstown Theatre Festival production of The Last Goodbye. (Photo by Sam Hough)
When The Last Goodbye blossomed on the stage of downtown Manhattan nightspot Joe’s Pub in April 2009, Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? knew director Michael Kimmel (who also conceived and adapted this show) and his collaborators were onto something good. The idea of pairing the lyrics and music of tragic pop star Jeff Buckley with Shakespeare’s story of tragic lovers, Romeo and Juliet, had an instant appeal.
And it took shape well onstage. My mind was blown by that early reading. It went through some changes, was re-presented in New York City this March, and now it’s taking a polished form at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts.
Many members of that original Joe’s Pub cast remain with the show. And that’s for good reason. They’re great.
Word of mouth
We haven’t yet seen this fully staged version, which opened on Saturday and runs through Aug. 20. But the word is very good. A friend of this blog who saw the Joe’s Pub version calls the Williamstown production “quite good,” with “much better integration of the bard’s language.”
Audience reaction was good:
Check out the first review
The first detailed review we’ve found, on the blog This Is Somewhere, is also quite positive.
For more about this show, and details on how you can see it, click through to the jump. Continue reading →
Lauren Pritchard, with drummer Simon Lea, at the Mercury Lounge in New York City on Aug. 5. (Photos copyright 2010, Steven P. Marsh)
Lauren Pritchard conquered Broadway as Lise in the fantastic original company of the Tony Award-winning rock musical Spring Awakening. On Thursday, the Tennessee native, who’s just 22 years old, returned to New York City to conquer the pop scene.
Lauren, who played keys and sang, got subtle backing from drummer Simon Lea and guitarist Paul Sayer. She blew the roof off the Mercury Lounge with her powerful voice. She sang a very short, showcase set —just eight songs — in a bluesey style with country touches. Her delivery was just the right balance of Broadway power and authentic saloon-singer sloppiness.
Crews were making the final preparations to Damrosh Park on Tuesday night for Wednesday's premiere of the 2010 edition of Lincoln Center Out Of Doors. (Copyright 2010, Steven P. Marsh)
The fabulous Lincoln Center Out of Doors festival starts Wednesday night with a bit of Civil Rights Movement street theater at 6:30 at Barclays Capital Grove (the sponsored name for the plaza between Lincoln Center Theater and Avery Fisher Hall and moves into full-bore music mode at 7:30 in Damrosch Park with Ethel Fair: The Songwriters.
Ethel is Ralph Farris (viola), Mary Rowell (violin), Dorothy Lawson (cello) and Cornelius Dufallo (violin).
Ethel is a string quartet like no other string quartet you’ve seen or heard. These four skilled players, who are quite active together and separately on the international contemporary music scene, have been working in collaborative mode over the past several years. Their latest project, which has its world premiere at the Lincoln Center Out of Doors festival, features the quartet yoked with songwriters who are quite well known on their own. Pop tunesmith Adam Schlesinger (a member of pop bands Fountains of Wayne and Ivy and composer of Broadway’s “Cry Baby”), assisted by Mike Viola (Candy Butchers), has created a work with Ethel. Other collaborators include folk-blues dynamo Dayna Kurtz, punk-New Wave pioneer Tom Verlaine (Television) and folky Argentine singer-songwriter Juana Molina.
Ethel always pushes boundaries with its work. This collaborative effort appears to reach for a broader, more mainstream appeal than some of the band’s more left-of-center efforts, such as its ongoing TruckStop project, which takes the band on the road to work with and celebrate indigenous cultures. But it’s certain to provide a richly entertaining evening.
No Snakes In This Grass is the title of the theater piece, written by James Magnuson and directed by Mical Whitaker, that kicks off the evening. It’s a comedy set in the Garden of Eden that deals issues of race and the Fall.
This is just the first night of a jam-packed schedule of fabulous free music and performance art that runs through Aug. 15. For the full Lincoln Center Out of Doors schedule, read the press release after the jump. Continue reading →
In a matter of days, Matthew Houck and his band Phosphorescent have had their lives turned upside down and now, suddenly, uprighted again!
The band publicist announced Tuesday morning that the Brooklyn-by-way-of-Athens, Ga., band’s rental van, stolen from a Greenpoint, Brooklyn, street last Thursday night, hast turned up, complete and unharmed.
Phosphorescent’s publicists at 7-10 Music just blasted this note from the band:
this is insane!
the police have recovered the van
and
all of our gear is in there
and appears to be un-damaged
speechless right now,
more soon, love phos
note from label/management: we will of course return everyone’s generous donations. thanks so much for your love and support!
If you missed the backstory to this amazing turnaround, click through to the jump. Continue reading →
Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? has been distracted this summer. There’s been a lot going on, musically speaking, around NYC and environs so far. As a result, we’ve neglected our friends at Midsummer Night Swing at Lincoln Center.
But on Monday night, the start of MNS’s final week for 2010 — hard to believe — Femi Kuti & The Positive Force are taking over Damrosch Park. And we can’t fail you this time. Even if you think you can’t dance, you should be at this show. It’s hard not to at least feel like you can dance when Femi Kuti takes the stage. His version of Afrobeat — he’s one of Fela Anikulapo Kuti’s two musical sons, the other being Seun Kuti who inherited his father’s band Egypt 80 — has an insistent beat and a joyous feel that can get anyone to dance. (Fela Kuti, you may recall, is the subject of the fantastic Broadway musical, Fela!, directed by Bill T. Jones.)
Composer Matt Marks and soprano Mellissa Hughes are Boy and Girl in the Incubator Arts Project presentation of The Little Death: Vol. 1 on Thursday, July 8. (Photos copyright 2010, Steven P. Marsh)
Something magical happened to Matt Marks‘ post-Christian nihilist pop opera The Little Death: Vol. 1, when it was preparing for its current staging at Incubator Arts Project at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery. What had been a great collection of smart, sometimes silly, pop songs in the guise of a gently confusing pop opera has evolved into a smartly staged, well focused piece of musical theater.
The stars of the show sell lemonade and cookies before the performance.
While Marks’ excellent music provided the building blocks, director Rafael Gallegos has built a solid foundation and has cemented the building block together to form an elegant theatrical environment for the Marks’ eerie love story.
A little less wholesome.
Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? was blown away (pun intended) by Thursday night’s premiere performance of the staged version. That’s quite a contrast to my reaction to the semi-staged version presented by Marks’ label, New Amsterdam Records, in March. Although I loved the sample- and hymn-heavy music, the overall feel of the piece left me a bit uneasy. It was hard to discern what Marks was trying to do. Was he making fun of Christianity or exploring the quirks and limitations of the faith context in which he was raised? Songs like “I Like Stuff,” are the types of catchy tunes that every producer wants in a musical — ones that the audience can easily hum on the way out of the theater. The lyrics are no less catchy, but that where things became a bit unsettling — when the singers compare liking hamsters and ice cream and rainbows to liking Jesus.
The piece uses recognizable samples and large chunks of Christian hymnody as the basis for some of its songs that loosely tell the story of a blossoming love affair between Boy (Marks) and Girl (soprano Mellissa Hughes), backed up by a four-member choir. Another thing that left me feeling uneasy in that early viewing was the fact that the story starts with Boy shooting Girl before time-traveling back to the start of their relationship. Marks describes Vol. 1 as “the first half of our story.”
True fans of The Feelies will remember Speed the Plough fondly, given that many Feelies played in Toni and John Baumgartner‘s band during its existence in the early 1990s. Like The Feelies, STP is back making music. Earlier this year, the band released its first album in 15 years, Swerve.
On the Fourth of July, before heading to Maxwell’s in Hoboken for the third and final Feelies show of the holiday weekend, the members of STP visited the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine in the Morningside Heights section of Manhattan. There, tucked away on the plaza surrounding sculptor Greg Wyatt’s Peace Fountain (1985), the band gathered around the public piano that was one of 60 installed around NYC as part of the Play Me, I’m Yours art project. The Fourth of July was the last day of the installation, and the members of STP thought it would be fun to take advantage of it as a group. (STP wasn’t the only band to think of this. The Bill Murray Experience did something quite similar, as Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone?reported previously.)
They did an acoustic rendering of “Kentucky Moon” that was captured on video by Katie Demeski. Enjoy!
With his rotary valve flugelhorn (no, it's not a trumpet!) slung jauntily over his shoulder, Beirut frontman Zach Condon is a devil-may-care showman. (Photos copyright 2010, Steven P. Marsh)
If you felt old at last night’s Beirut show at The Music Hall of Williamsburg, there was a reason. Elise, a fan in the crowd at my side pointed this out, saying that she felt like the oldest person in the room, even though she appeared barely older than the band’s 24-year-old frontman Zach Condon.
The boys of Beirut.
The explanation is simple: The first night of the two-night, sold-out stand at Beirut’s home venue was essentially designated youth night. Beirut’s record label, BaDaBing, arranged for Monday night’s show as an 18-and-older gig and a block of tickets was sold at the box office only for the bargain price of $9.99 to give young fans a chance to see what one critic has dubbed “the best indie rock band of the 19th century.”
BaDaBing head Ben Goldberg, explains:
Hey everyone, the first show on July 5th is an 18+ show, the second is 21+. We wanted to make sure all those of you without credit cards of your own or superspeed internet connections are able to potentially get tickets, hence why the $9.99 is only available at the box office and won’t carry any handling fees.
Looking forward to seeing all you pale skins’ post-Independence day sunburns!
–ba da ben
Last night’s show was simply amazing. Beirut played a solid 90-minute set, kicking things off with “Elephant Gun” and romping through a sing-along set of all the band’s best-loved songs. It seemed far too short, but satisfying all the same. (And selling out @MusicHallofWB for two nights in a row seems like quite an accomplishment for a band that hasn’t released a proper album since 2007 and probably won’t have the next one ready until Spring 2011!)
Zach exudes a charm and confidence that belies his age. He appears comfortable onstage and has the swagger of a latter-day Sinatra. He’s not so much electrifying as he is charming and seductive. His warm style and the band’s tightness won a lot of love from the audience.
If I had ever imagined that flugelhorn and trumpet would someday become this hip, I might have thought twice about giving up playing brass after high school. Zach and his bandmates are among a number of influential young musicians who have managed to make the rock world safe for old-school instruments — French horn, trumpet, flugelhorn, accordion, ukulele and trombone.
We didn’t shoot any video last night, but lots of other concertgoers had video cameras. Here’s one of “The Penalty” posted by a fan known on Twitter as @projectnrm. The sound quality doesn’t really do the performance justice, but no matter, the enthusiasm is there:
WOOM is always in motion. The band's scrappy, bare-knuckled sound is irresistible.
Openers WOOM, a silly but joyous husband-and-wife band, charmed the crowd with a nice set of DIY beats coupled with Sara Magenheimer‘s vocals and Eben Portnoy‘s scratchy guitar riffs.
In addition to their usual repertoire, they debuted their version of Elizabeth Cotten‘s folk tune “Freight Train” last night. Though it had some rough edges, it was an intelligent and entertaining deconstruction of a song that’s been covered by many artists over the years, including Joan Baez, the Grateful Dead and even Laura Veirs, with the highly recognizable chorus: “When I die, Lord, bury me deep/Way down on old Chestnut Street/So I can hear old No. 9/As she goes rolling by.”
WOOM’s first full-length album, Muu’s Way, is out today on BaDaBing. It’s available from Amazon.com and other music outlets.
Click through to the jump for more photos from last night’s show. Continue reading →
Since you landed on this post, you’ve probably already checked out the Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? post about The Feelies‘ Fourth of July weekend shows at Maxwell’s.
But if you’ve fallen behind on your Feelies news, here’s a collection of great items on the web about the shows, the band and the NEW ALBUM, for which the band has been writing new songs for a couple of years. Production is supposed to start any day. Read on for more.
Jim Testa‘s known The Feelies since Day One, so his voice in Jersey Beat is authoritative. Click here for his review and his insights about the new album.
Katie Demeski, daughter of Feelies drummer Stanely Demeski, blogs about a number of things, but mostly ruminates on her dad’s band. She posted some videos of her dad practicing here, gives her impressions of The Feelies demos here, talks about the in-the-works Feelies album here and weighs in on Feelies offshoot band Speed the Plough‘s new album here.
And The NJ Underground, a site aimed at younger music fans, did a good piece on The Feelies. Perhaps this accounted for the rather high percentage of young people in the audience at Maxwell’s last weekend.
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