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 →
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.)
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.
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!
It’s been a long time coming. First it was rained out in 2008. Finally, after a great deal of additional planning and with the blessing of the weatherman, Ronen Givony of Wordless Music and Bill Bragin, director of public programming at Lincoln Center, managed to stage the NYC version of Rhys Chatham‘s A Crimson Grail for 200 Electric Guitars (Outdoor Version) at Lincoln Center Out of Doors last season. (Loyal Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? readers will remember our coverage.)
Composer Rhys Chatham conducts his A Crimson Grail at Lincoln Center Out of Doors in 2009. (Copyright 2009, Steven P. Marsh)
On Sept. 14, a recording of that monumental performance is being released by Nonesuch. What a long, strange trip it’s been.
The magnificent, drone-based piece was mind-blowing in performance. Damrosch Park seemed ready to levitate from the amazing sonic pressure from the volunteer guitarists (plus 16 bassists and the sound of one hi-hat cymbal keeping the beat). I’ve heard the recording of the indoor Paris version of the piece, and while it’s amazing, it doesn’t quite do justice to the work. But I have high hopes that Nonesuch’s effort will top that.
Here’s the press release:
Nonesuch Records releases A Crimson Grail—Rhys Chatham’s work for large electric guitar orchestra—on September 14, 2010. Written in 2005 as a commission for the city of Paris, A Crimson Grail premiered at the basilica of Sacré-Coeur. It was created to work with the specific architecture of the basilica, making use of its natural 15-second reverberation time. The musicians surrounded the audience, creating an antiphonal effect with the sound moving around the space from area to area. Scored for as many as four hundred guitarists, an orchestra of approximately 125 musicians performed the premiere, to great acclaim.
The Dallas Observer said of a recording of that concert, “Beautifully intricate and harmonically dense, A Crimson Grail is nearly ambient in tone while pursuing a beauty that never seems beyond its scope.” When Lincoln Center Out of Doors and Wordless Music invited Chatham to mount A Crimson Grail in New York at the Lincoln Center Out of Doors Festival, the composition had to be completely reworked for the acoustics of an exterior, non-reverberant setting. The Nonesuch recording captures the subsequent 2009 performance, in Lincoln Center’s Damrosch Park, with 200 electric guitars, 16 electric basses, 5 conductors, and percussion.
Rhys Chatham is a composer, guitarist, and trumpet player from Manhattan, currently living in Paris. He was the founder of the music program at The Kitchen in downtown Manhattan in 1971 and was its music director between 1971–73 and 1977–80. While at The Kitchen he was responsible for programming more than 250 concerts of living composers including the NEW MUSIC / NEW YORK Festival, which was the prototype upon which the NEW MUSIC AMERICA Festival was later based. Chatham studied under, was influenced by, or has collaborated with Maryanne Amacher, Don Cherry, Tony Conrad, Jon Hassell, Charlemagne Palestine, Eliane Radigue, Terry Riley, Frederic Rzewski, Morton Subotnick, Serge Tcherepnin, and La Monte Young, among many others.
Click through to the jump for Givoney’s personal account of the journey from an idea in 2007 to a reality n 2009.
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.
Glenn Mercer and Bill Million of The Feelies at Maxwell's in Hoboken, N.J., on Saturday, July 3. (Photos copyright 2009, Steven P. Marsh)
As has been the habit of The Feelies since their comeback in 2008, they booked shows around a holiday — in this case the Fourth of July at the band’s musical home, Maxwell’s in Hoboken, N.J.
Glenn Mercer's singing: strong and clear
This year the band booked three shows starting Friday and ending tonight, on the holiday itself. If you love The Feelies and you haven’t seen them yet this year, now’s the time to book. Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? made it to last night’s gig, and we’re glad we did. The set was much the same as always — The Feelies have typically played the same set, with slight variations, at every show since the reunion. This is a band that likes predictability. But frontman Glenn Mercer‘s singing seemed stronger, clearer and more confident than ever, and the overall sound was crisp and clear —something that has not been a hallmark of many recent shows.
One thing worth noting, though. The band did do quite a few new songs — some of which have been in rotation for awhile, with a couple of other, even newer tunes, one of which remains untitled. It was a real treat to hear new material. It sounds strong and very much in keeping with what fans know and love The Feelies for without sounding like retreads.
Bass player Brenda Sauter played and looked great, and wasn't wearing the wrist brace she usually sports.
We’re hearing that it’s not clear when the band will play again, since no other gigs are booked so far this year. And a member of the band’s team says the quintet is going into the studio after tonight work on a new album.
Doors for tonight’s show are at 8 o’clock at Maxwell’s, 1039 Washington St., Hoboken, N.J. Showtime is 9 p.m. There’s no opening band, so get there by 9 or you’ll miss out. Tickets are $25, and still available here.
If you drive, allow extra time. It’s the Fourth of July, and there will be crowds of people out to watch fireworks. It’ll be hellish getting around, and parking will be extremely difficult, especially if you usually count on parking along Sinatra Drive, which is closed for the weekend. Take public transportation if possible.
Click to the jump for more photos from last night’s show.
Stew, of The Negro Problem and Passing Strange, has a lot on his plate these days, what with a new Shakespeare score being performed in Connecticut right now, a couple of musicals in the pipeline and some concert appearances. All of that is in the news section on the left side of Stew’s homepage.
Heidi Rodewald and Stew. (Copyright 2009, Steven P. Marsh)
For all the Stew completists who read Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone?, tomorrow is the most important upcoming date. Stew is one of the “special guests” at the FREE Dan Zanes Jam & Jubilee, The Battery 4th of July Concert and Family Festival, presented by River To River in Battery Park.
Gates open at 1 p.m., with festivities kicking off an hour later. You can spend the day in Battery Park, dancing to the rhythms of La Cumbiamba eNeYe and singing along to Dan’s brand of Broadway classics! In addition to Stew, guests include spoken word poet Caridad De La Luz (La Bruja) and Joan Osborn.
You can even participate in the fun, as musicians of all ages are invited to perform 76 Trombones in a spectacular 4th of July Parade! You can download the sheet music and get detailed information on the festival website.
It should be a blast!
Victor Williams is Othello in the Shakespeare on the Sound production, with songs and music by Stew and Heidi Rodewald.
Meanwhile, if you haven’t been to Connecticut to see Othello, directed by Joanna Settle with songs and music by Stew and his longtime partner Heidi Rodewald, there’s still time.
Shakespeare on the Sound‘s Othello is performed outdoors at 7:30 nightly (except Monday) through July 11 at Baldwin Park, 100 Arch St., in Greenwich, Conn. While Stew and Heidi don’t perform live, you’ll get the full impact of their work on the recorded backing tracks and live singing by the actors. Last year Stew scored A Midsummer Night’s Dream for SotS, and is was fantastic.
Seating is on the ground around the stage, so be sure to bring blankets or low chairs (nothing that would block the view of people seated behind you) for comfort. Or if you want to go first class, you can fork over a $50 donation for a reserved seat in on of SotS’s chairs.
And why not arrive early and turn it into dinner theater! It’s a great spot for a picnic before the show. There is a concession stand selling decent food and beverages, including wine and beer.
Admission is by donation. You could walk through the gate without paying a dime, but that just wouldn’t be right. Show your support for Stew and Heidi by dropping a donation at the gate. $20 per person is suggested, but more or less is just fine.
nically free, but donations are expected at the gae.
The park is right on the Long Island Sound and within walking distance of the Metro-North station. It’s a beautiful setting, easily accessible from NYC. Click here for transit info.
Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? 