Category Archives: News

Sean Lennon and Charlotte Kemp Muhl get a Joe’s Pub homecoming

Posted on August 20, 2010 | Leave a comment

The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger (Sean Lennon and Charlotte Kemp Muhl) at Joe's Pub on Thursday, Aug. 19. (Photos copyright 2010, Steven P. Marsh)

Enthusiastic reception for sean and charlotte’s band and preview of charlotte’s other project: the duo Kemp and Eden

It was a lovely, silly, weird scene at Joe’s Pub early Friday morning when The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger, the band comprising  Sean Lennon and Charlotte Kemp Muhl, performed what Sean described as the last stop on their “international tour.” (Though it sounds like his idea of international mostly involves going out of state!)

Sean Lennon mugs during his Joe's Pub set.

Lovely because their low-key chamber pop was full of beautiful melodies, deceptively good playing and smart lyrics.

Charlotte Kemp Muhl of The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger.

Silly because of the duo’s deftly goofy banter and off-kilter titles.

And weird, or maybe just surreal, for a lot of reasons. For instance, Sean’s ex-girlfriend (and current business partner), Yuka Honda, formerly of Cibo Matto, was front and center in the audience. At her side was Nels Cline, the awesome Wilco guitarist and The Nels Cline Singers frontman, who also happens to be Yuka’s fiance. Sean invited Nels onstage to sit in on one Saber Tooth Tiger song, and nearly sat in Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone?’s lap while briefing Nels.

Click through to the jump for news of Yoko Ono and a look at Charlotte’s other band! Continue reading →

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Mavis Staples: Only the Lord knows, and he ain’t you

Posted on August 14, 2010 | Leave a comment

Mavis Staples draws a huge crowd on Saturday evening at the Solid Sound Festival at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Mass.

Her new album, produced by Jeff Tweedy, is out Sept. 14.

Click here to view a video about the new album.

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Mountain Man: What a difference a few months make

Posted on August 14, 2010 | Leave a comment

Mountain Man, a trad-ish female trio from Bennington, Vt., was really interesting @MercuryLoungeNY in the spring, but seemd not yet ready for prime time. On Saturday afternoon at Solid Sound Festival, Mountain Man was poised, strong and very much ready for the limelight. (Though they still have only one guitar among them, and they had to borrow it from somebody else!)

What a difference time can make. Nice going!

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Revival of Maxwell Anderson’s ‘High Tor’ play to be performed on the slopes of High Tor

Posted on August 12, 2010 | 3 comments

See A free reading of the play that helped save this rockland County peak from destruction

In just 10 days from today, on Saturday, Aug. 21 and Sunday, Aug. 22, we’ll get a chance to see a performance of High Tor, a play that really did change the world.

The West Branch Conservation Association, Rockland County’s Land Trust,  is producing two performances of Maxwell Anderson’s New York Drama Critics’ Circle Best Play Award winner for 1937 on the on mountain the play was written to save and from which it takes its name.

Write what you know

The old adage for writing is that you do your best when you “write what you know.” That’s what famed playwright Maxwell Anderson did in 1936.

Maxwell Anderson, left, accepts the 1936 New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1936, a year before he won it again, this time for "High Tor."

Anderson was a resident of South Mountain Road in New City, an area that had become artists colony over the years, attracting creative folks such as Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya, John Houseman, cartoonist Milton Caniff — along with Burgess Meredith and Alan Jay Lerner, who lived just over South Mountain in Pomona. Continue reading →

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Posted in Free, History, Music, News

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Ethel Fair Launches Lincoln Center Out Of Doors

Posted on July 28, 2010 | 3 comments

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 →

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Posted in Blues, Classical, Concerts, Contemporary, Contemporary Classical, Country, Dance, Folk, Free, History, Jazz, Music, News, Pop and Rock, Punk, Theater

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BREAKING NEWS: Phosphorescent’s stolen van recovered, complete with gear!

Posted on July 13, 2010 | Leave a comment

Matthew Houck of Phosphorescent.

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 →

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Fela! storms Lincoln Center’s Midsummer Night Swing — and Femi Kuti plays, too!

Posted on July 12, 2010 | 2 comments

Sahr Ngaujah, star of the Broadway musical Fela!, leads Midsummer Night Swing dance lessons on Monday night. (Photos copyright 2010, Steven P. Marsh)

Femi Kuti & The Positive Force may have been the headline act at tonight’s special Monday night edition of Midsummer Night Swing, but the cast members from Fela! on Broadway who taught the preshow dance lesson were just as big a draw — and equally exciting — for many in the audience.

Jill Vallery (in blue T-shirt, left), the dance captain from Fela!, worked hard to keep the crowd dancing.

Sahr Ngaujah, who created the title role of Fela Anikulapo Kuti off-Broadway, and shares the role on Broadway with Kevin Mambo, joined Fela! dance captain Jill Vallery and a host of dancers from the stage spectacle as they whipped the wannabe Afrobeat dancers into a frenzy. Many of the people in the audience, like yours truly, ably demonstrated that they had two left feet when it came to following the athletic and intricate steps involved. But that didn’t deter many from trying. But the real test came later, when the real dance party started. Click through for more photos. Continue reading →

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Posted in Dance, Music, News, World Music

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Femi Kuti kicks off the final week of Midsummer Night Swing at Lincoln Center Out of Doors

Posted on July 10, 2010 | Leave a comment

Femi Kuti

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.)

The fun starts at 6:30 p.m. with a dance lesson with Sahr Ngaujah, star Fela!, and the music starts at 7. Tickets are $17 and available at Damrosch Park, at West 62nd Street and Amsterdam Avenue, or online. And there are more shows throughout the week: Catherine Russell and Cat & The Hounds Swing Band on Wednesday, Loser’s Lounge Ladies Night on Thursday, La Exelencia on Friday and, wrapping up this year’s dance season, a kids’ dance party at 3 p.m. Saturday followed by the Harlem Renaissance Orchestra on Saturday evening.

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Music at the museum: Talujon Percussion Quartet performs at the Noguchi on Sunday

Posted on July 9, 2010 | Leave a comment

Talujon Percussion Quartet at the World Financial Center Winter Garden.

Bang on a Can/Cantaloupe Music and the Noguchi Museum are hosting Second Sundays, an awesome concert series on the second Sunday of each month through September. Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? missed the inaugural gig, a performance by French avant-pop composer and bassist Florent Ghys — catching him instead at the Bang on a Can Marathon later in the month.

The series continues this Sunday, July 11, with a set by the amazing Talujon Percussion Quartet. To get a good sense of this group, check out the sound samples posted here.

Master clarinetist Evan Ziporyn will take the garden stage in August, while one-bit electronics composer Tristan Perich closes the series in September.

Shows are at 3 p.m. on the second Sunday of the month in the garden of the Noguchi at 9-01 33rd Road (at Vernon Boulevard), Long Island City. It’s the former workshop of Japanese-American sculptor and visionary Isamu Noguchi that is now preserves his artistic legacy. The concert is included with museum admission, which is $10 for adults.

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Posted in Art, Concerts, Contemporary, Contemporary Classical, Music, News

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New Speed the Plough — live on the Fourth of July

Posted on July 7, 2010 | Leave a comment

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!

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