Sharon Van Etten: It may be twisted love, but it’s definitely love

Posted on October 9, 2010 | Leave a comment

 

Sharon Van Etten and her band at The Rock Shop in Park Slope, Brooklyn, on Oct. 8, 2010. (Photos copyright 2010, Steven P. Marsh)

 

We liked Sharon Van Etten from the very first time we heard her, just her with her guitar, strumming her introspective songs. Her style and sound reminded us from the first of anti-folkie Diane Cluck (who has a date at Zebulon in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, at 9 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 13). And sure enough, on her MySpace page Sharon lists Diane as one of her influences.

 

Sharon Van Etten's harmonium powers the wall-of-sound that is "Love More," the signature song from her new album, Epic.

 

And now, with her new band and a second album under her belt, Sharon seems to really be coming into her own.

Her songs veer between powerful, emotionally draining near-howls to intimate prayers. Love is a regular theme.

Despite some initial technical problems, Sharon exuded charm and talent on Friday night, Oct. 8, at The Rock Shop in Park Slope, Brooklyn, one of the newest music venues in the area. (And home of what seems to me to be the first rock club I’ve encountered to chard $7 for a 10-ounce draft beer!)

Sharon spent much time on the material from her new album, Epic (BaDaBing Records). But she wasn’t afraid to hit the audience with something so new that it’s still untitled. Go here to listen to the new song. And she spent the end of her set alone onstage, with the band watching from the wings, as she recapped her earlier solo material.

She left the sold-out crowd thrilled and wanting more. And it made us, to borrow a phrase, love more.

If you can, go to The Mercury Lounge tonight (Saturday, Oct. 9) for more of Sharon. She’s continuing her CD-release celebration there at 10:30 on a bill with Kyp Malone of Rain Machine and TV on the Radio fame. The Mercury Lounge is at217 East Houston St New York, NY. Click here for a  map. $12.

 

Sharon Van Etten.

 

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Happy Birthday, John Lennon

Posted on October 9, 2010 | Leave a comment

It’s hard to believe that today is John Lennon’s 70th birthday.

We’ve come a long way since his tragic assassination 30 years ago, but we still have a long way to go.

Please enjoy Yoko Ono‘s touching video tribute to her husband.

Let’s all give peace a chance!

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Kronos Quartet’s rare NYC club appearance at (Le) Poisson Rouge

Posted on October 9, 2010 | Leave a comment

 

David Harrington of Kronos Quartet at New York nightclub (Le) Poisson Rouge on Oct. 8, 2010. (Photos copyright 2010, Steven P. Marsh)

 

Groundbreaking ensemble sells out two nights at Greenwich Village nightspot

Kronos Quartet can and does regularly fill huge auditoriums for its programs. But for its latest appearance in New York City, the ensemble picked Greenwich Village’s (Le) Poisson Rouge, arguably the most welcoming venue for New Music New York City.

 

Kronos Quartet's cellist, Jeffrey Zeigler.

 

Kronos’ two-night program included a slew of premieres and put the spotlight on many New York-based composers and collaborators, including the super-talented young composer Missy Mazzoli (founder of the hot electroacoustic chamber ensemble Victoire), Bang on a Can founder Michael Gordon, guitarist Bryce Dessner of the bands Clogs and The National (formed in Cincinnatti but now based in Brooklyn) and the Young Peoples Chorus of New York City.

The 37-year-old, San Francisco-based qua
rtet  — David Harrington and John Sherba on violins, Hank Dutt on viola and Jeffrey Zeigler on cello — played a spirited set to a packed house on Friday evening, Oct. 8. The second installment is tonight, Saturday, Oct. 9, when Kronos offers a completely different program.

 

 

At the Friday show, Kronos kicked off with Dessner’s Aheym (Homeward), which he wrote for Kronos. Mazzoli’s lovely, lyrical Harp and Altar, also composed for Kronos, followed.

The first world premiere of the evening was Aleksandra Vrebalov‘s spell no. 4, for a changing world.

But the most stunning performance moments of the evening came next, when Kronos introduced the Young Peoples Chorus, founded and conducted by Francisco Nuñez. The youngsters entered from the darkened sides of the room shrieking and howling the vocal parts of Terry Riley‘s Another Secret eQuation, which he wrote for Kronos and had its world premiere at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall in March.

 

Composer Michael Gordon cheers the Young Peoples Chorus of New York City, with John Sherba and David Harrington of Kronos Quartet.

 

After a brief intermission, the Young Peoples Chorus rejoined Kronos for the world premiere of Gordon’s Exalted, an intensely emotional composition.

Click through to the jump for more words and photos about Kronos and collaborators. Continue reading →

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Fela! visits Brooklyn

Posted on October 5, 2010 | Leave a comment

Sahr Ngaujah inhabits the character of Fela Ankiulapo Kuti, backed up by five Queens and a super-hot big band. (Photos copyright 2010, Steven P. Marsh)

Cast of Broadway Afrobeat musical thrills crowd in free concert at St. Ann’s Warehouse

Sahr Ngaujah

Sahr Ngaujah and the cast and band of the smash-hit Broadway musical Fela! didn’t let the rain dampen their spirits on Monday night, Oct. 4. And the appealing bunch didn’t even seem to be bothered that they were working on what would normally be their night off for the week, since Broadway theaters are dark on Mondays.

Fela! The Music of Fela Kuti, was a gift to Brooklyn and the city from St. Ann’s Warehouse, a cutting-edge performance organization in Dumbo. It was supposed to draw crowds to Brooklyn Bridge Park nearby, but the rains forced it inside the St. Ann’s space at 38 Water Street. The people at St. Ann’s handled the transition nicely, opening everything up quickly and accommodating a huge crowd with ease.

The show’s hot band and great Afrobeat dancers and backup singers — representing the many wives of Fela Anikulapo Kuti, the Nigerian creator of Afrobeat whose life story the musical tells in broad brushstrokes — locked in perfectly with  Ngaujah to deliver 90 minutes of music.

Click through to the jump for more photos.

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M Shanghai String Band playing in Nyack

Posted on October 4, 2010 | Leave a comment

M Shanghai String Band: old-timey joy. (Photos copyright 2010, Steven P. Marsh)

Acoustic country-folk collective kicks off GraceMusic’s 41st season of Great Music in a Great Space

The fantastic M Shanghai String Band brings its old-timey, joyous country folk sounds to Nyack, N.Y., to kick off the 41st season of GraceMusic on Sunday, Oct. 17.

Richard Morris steps up to the mic for a solo with M Shanghai String Band.

Visit the M Shanghai String Band MySpace page to hear samples of the band’s music.

Every member of this Brooklyn-based acoustic collective — which at times puts as many as 11 musicians onstage at once — is an accomplished musician in her or his own right. Many of them are involved in other bands, too. So when they mass their awesome talents together onstage as M Shanghai String Band, they put on a roof-raising, rollicking good show.

The band, which takes its name from the Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Chinese restaurant where it began in 2002, has an old-fashioned Grand Old Opry-style performance aesthetic. Players crowd around a single mic, stepping up to take turns on leads and solos. The music, likewise, is deeply rooted in the old-fashioned American musical traditions that spawned the Opry, their repertoire includes mostly original material that deals with issues both timeless and contemporary in often humorous ways.

The band is a fan favorite at Jalopy Theatre and School of Music in Red Hook, Brooklyn, a hotbed of traditional music.

Don’t miss this show. Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? is a huge fan of this band. (Full disclosure: We serve on the GraceMusic board and are friends with one of the players.) Make a day of it by visiting Nyack early in the day for brunch or lunch, and then settle in for a great session of foot-stomping music in a lovely space.

We guarantee you’ll have a good time  — including the great meet-the-artists reception afterward!

4 p.m., Sunday, Oct. 17. GraceMusic, Grace Episcopal Church, 130 First Avenue, Nyack, N.Y. (845) 358-1297. Tickets at the door only: $15 for adults, $10 for seniors, $5 for students.

Patty Hughes, Austin Hughes and Matt Schickele of M Shanghai String Band.

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Victoire: Finally, a full-length CD

Posted on October 3, 2010 | Leave a comment

Victoire at Joe's Pub. (Photos copyright 2010, Steven P. Marsh)

Composer Missy Mazzoli and her band, Victoire, celebrated the Sept. 28 release of their first full-length CD, Cathedral City, on the wonderfully adventurous New Amsterdam label with a show at at Joe’s Pub on Saturday, Oct. 2. The band’s performance made it pretty evident that much of the quintet’s new material isn’t new at all.

That’s not a bad thing. It’s just illustrative of how long it can really take to put together an album — something that Mazzoli, an obvious perfectionist, underscored at Joe’s.

Victoire, an rock-influenced electroacoustic quintet, was founded back in 2008 as an outlet for Mazzoli’s wilder compositions. We first heard the band not long after that, but Victoire really made an impression at the Bang on a Can Marathon in June 2009, on the heels of the March release by eMusic of the band’s A Door Into The Dark E. All four songs from that EP — but different versions — are included on the eight-track Cathedral City. So fully half the CD, including the dark, slightly hallucinatory i am coming for my things, is quite familiar by now. Continue reading →

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Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? recommends…

Posted on October 2, 2010 | Leave a comment

Shows we think you should check out during the week of Oct. 3-9

Composer Julia Wolfe (Photo by Peter Serling)

The Music of Julia Wolfe at (Le) POISSON ROUGE

Julia Wolfe is a composer of rare talent. The Bang on a Can cofounder is able to write in a classical idiom for string quartet as easily as in a rock mode for percussion ensemble.

On Oct. 3, she’ll be presenting a sampling of her work, including Stronghold for eight double basses, the string quartet Dig Deep, and LAD for bagpipes.  at (Le) Poisson Rouge. Julia will be in the house to discuss her work.

Performers include JACK Quartet, Robert Black and the Hartt Bass Band, and piper Matthew Welch.

6:30 p.m., Sunday, Oct. 3. (Le) Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker Street, Manhattan. (212) 505-FISH (3474) $15. Tickets available here.

Kronos Quartet (Photo by Jay Blakesberg)

Kronos Quartet at (Le) Poisson Rouge

Kronos Quartet, the pioneering modern string quartet, make two rare club appearances in New York City this week.

On Friday and Saturday, Oct. 8 and 9, Kronos is appearing at (Le) Poisson Rouge.

The program for Oct. 8 includes the New York premiere of Maria Schneider‘s String Quartet No. 1, a world premiere by Aleksandra Vrebalov, the premiere of Bang on a Can cofounder Michael Gordon‘s Exalted with the Young People’s Chorus of New York City and works by Bryce Dessner and Missy Mazzoli. On Oct. 9 Kronos is joined by special guest vocalist Judith Berkson for several pieces. Also featured are Clouded Yellow by Gordon as well as works by Clint Mansell, J.G. Thirlwell, and Dan Visconti.

7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 8. (Le) Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker Street, Manhattan. $25. Tickets available here.

Also 7 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 9. Tickets available here.

Ólöf Arnalds at The Bell House in Brooklyn on March 24, 2010. (Photo by Steven P. Marsh)

Ólöf Arnalds at Joe’s pub

Ólöf Arnalds seemed to be an uncertain, nervous performer when we saw her at The Bell House in March. But the Icelandic singer-songwriter writes lovely songs and makes delicately beautiful records.

We’re hoping she’ll be more confident when she stops in at Joe’s Pub,

9:30 p.m., Saturday, Oct. 9. Joe’s Pub, 425 Lafayette Street, Manhattan. $15. Click here or call (212) 967-7555 for tickets and more information.

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Buke and Gass: rock and roll inventions

Posted on October 2, 2010 | 1 comment

DIY noise-rock duo, plus Xylos and ArpLine open for Efterklang

Buke and Gass (Photos copyright 2010, Steven P. Marsh)

Buke and Gass.

The name is slightly mystifying. The Buke part not so much, just say it like the second syllable of rebuke. Easy enough.

But Gass? That’s a little difficult, But if you close attention to the cover of the duo’s self-produced, self-released and self-printed EP, +/-, you might notice the horizontal line over the a in Gass. That’s your first clue. It’s not gas, like the voiceover feature of my iPod would have it. It’s a long a.

The band name comes from the duo’s principal instruments — both of them jury-rigged, homemade, crazily honest.

Arone Dyer on buke.

Aron Sanchez on gass.

Arone Dyer plays the buke, a seriously modified baritone ukelele — b for baritone, uke for ukelele.

Then there’s Aron Sanchez on the gass. That’s g for guitar and ass for bass, as in bass guitar. Get it?

They also throw in some foot-driven percusson, with Aron on a juiced-up kick drum and Arone on bells and foot cymbals. Arone also does the majority of the singing, with a super flexible voice that can go from a purr to a shriek in a split second. Although there’s punk attitude and a touch of Riot Grrrl aesthetic in there, this is thoroughly modern music. Everything’s pretty wildly processed and synthesized, in the tradition of other DIY experimental duos like WOOM.

They sound like so much of what you’ve heard before, and yet like nothing at all you’ve heard.

They’re quite a pair. Arone (a bicycle mechanic) and Aron (who builds instruments for Blue Man Group) came onto the radar at Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? at this spring’s Bang on a Can Marathon. We missed their performance at the marathon, but heard such good buzz that we picked up a copy of the EP. And we have been playing it constantly since.

Buke and Gass keep their feet busy.

Their music is celebratory, strangely melodic, enormously cathartic and just plain fun. And now, thanks to Brassland, there’s a full-length album that just dropped, Riposte.

Buke and Gass opened for Danish indie-rockers Efterklang at Santos Party House in Manhattan’s Chinatown on Friday, Oct. 1.

(Click here for a fun, insightful Stereogum interview with Buke and Gass.)

With four bands on the bill, we figured this show could make for a very long night. Luckily, all the bands were quite good — although Buke and Gass was the band we came to hear. And they didn’t disappoint.

More about the other bands, plus more photos, after the jump. Continue reading →

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Best Coast: California noise rock rules

Posted on October 1, 2010 | Leave a comment

Best Coast at The Bowery Ballroom. (Photos copyright 2010, Steven P. Marsh)

We here at Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? had been looking forward to Best Coast‘s return to New York for months.

We missed the California stoner/noise-rock band’s free show at South Street Seaport because of scheduling conflicts — imagine that! — and so we jumped on tickets for the Wednesday, Sept. 29, show at the Bowery Ballroom as soon as they became available.

Bethany Cosentino: No longer California-girl blond

Bethany Cosentino, Bobb Bruno and Ali Koehler did not disappoint. (Okay, truth be told, Ali, the Vivian Girls drummer who became an official member of Best Coast didn’t exactly set the world on fire, but that’s a relatively minor quibble.)

Bethany, who said she’d been sick, still managed to sing her simple but charming lyrics well, and Bobb set the room on fire with his amazing playing. We have hopes that Ali will wake up and start really playing her kit, but in the meantime she did a decent job of keeping time. Or maybe she could just try to look like she’s not totally bored by the proceedings.

Is Ali Koehler bored or just projecting a chill image?

Comedian Eugene Mirman hanging out in the Bowery Ballroom bar.

Oh, and indie-rock comic Eugene Mirman was there for the show. He spent a lot of time in the downstairs bar, and pacing from there to the smoking area outside — we didn’t see whether he was smoking  — while checking his smartphone.

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Belle and Sebastian’s triumphant return to New York

Posted on October 1, 2010 | Leave a comment

Belle and Sebastian at The Williamsburg Waterfront: Undaunted by the threatening storm. (Photos copyright 2010, Steven P. Marsh)

UPDATE: The dancing fool in our video (scroll down)has identified himself via YouTube as “deandempseync” on YouTube. He tells Will You Miss Me: “Who’s the handsome devil on the left of the screen? ME! I’m the ‘tall one with the curly hair [who] got a bit carried away by the whole thing.’ Somehow rather proud… And [that] was a bottle of gin.”

The impending fury of Tropical Storm Nicole wasn’t enough to keep the fans away from showing up in droves at The Williamsburg Waterfront on Thursday, Sept. 30, to for Belle and Sebastian‘s first New York show in four years.

In fact, the threat of a storm brought B&S onstage a bit earlier than scheduled in hopes of beating the rain. That turned out to be a boon for the audience, as B&S played a longer set, going right up to the venue’s 10 p.m. curfew

Teenage Fanclub played a tight and tuneful opening set.

Amazingly, with the help of a tight and lively set by fellow Scots Teenage Fanclub, B&S managed to keep the bad weather at bay (Nicole behaved herself until early the next morning) and put on a show that was nothing short of spectacular.

Aside from some terrible sartorial choices — with Sarah Martin, Stuart, and Stevie Jackson all unwittingly donning very similar black-and-white horizontal stripe shirt, causing Stevie to keep his coat on all night, Stuart’s unfortunate man-scarf — it was quite a spectacle in every respect.

B&S played plenty from the forthcoming album, Belle and Sebastian Write About Love, but didn’t beat it to death. The band focused on keeping the fans happy with a wide range of songs from its huge catalogue. And that effort paid off well.

It was satisfying to see that B&S didn’t call on any celebrity friends to make guest appearances at the show. Given that New York’s Norah Jones duets with B&S on the new album’s “Little Lou, Ugly Jack, Prophet John,” it was plausible to think she might show up. But B&S kept things strictly in the family for this show.

Stuart even invited seven fans onstage to clap and dance along with a classic number, “The Boy with the Arab Strap.” Here’s a video of that amusing interlude. Pay particular attention to the tall guy with the curly hair:

Check out a great new interview with the band by Laura Barton for The Guardian. And click through to the jump for more Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? photos from the show.

Continue reading →

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