Daniel Kitson (more by David Andrako)

As previously mentioned, like last year, UK comedian Daniel Kitson has a show at St. Ann's in Brooklyn this month (the first of many 2012 performances was last night). This year's 90 minute show is called It's Always Right Now, Until It's Later, and it runs through 1/29.

"This is a show about every single one of us, the past in our pockets, the future in our hearts and us, ourselves, very much stuck, trapped forever, in the tiny eternal moment between the two," Kitson said in a statement.

As you know, Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs has an opera coming to St. Ann's Warehouse in DUMBO. Kicking off in conjunction with VICE's "Creator's Project" (more details TBA), the show will actually run on eight nights from October 12-22...

An assault on the tragic joys of youth, fever dreams drenched in visual seduction, a cathartic spell spun through a cycle of nine songs.

Featuring Money Mark, Jack Lawrence, Patrick Keeler, Brian Chase, Nick Zinner, Jason Grisell, Gillian Rivers, Yuiko Kamakari, Justin Kantor and Lili Taylor

photos by Richard Termine, words by Andrew Frisicano

At Friday's performance, Nico Muhly warned early on that Tell the Way--a loosely tied together collection of 11 songs--would be a "casual sort of thing." He was right, for the most part; its compositions skirted around the unifying theme of travel in a range of styles: Sam Amidon's traditional folk songs; Bishi's eclectic, musical-theater-inspired chansons; the ever-busy Bryce Dessner's slow-building "Tour Eiffel," with dramatic vocal swoops that mimicked its subject; and Nico's unifying arrangements and short compositions. The voices of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus brought the works together in a brief 65-minute program, which moved quickly and offered small treats along the way (the three-night run at St. Ann's Warehouse finishes tonight, and a few tickets are still on sale).

More than any thematic thread, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus gave the evening consistency, as did ACME, who performed as a string quartet with a trombonist and a percussionist attached. The two groups had fun with the material, especially Muhly's pieces, which he composed with inspiration from historical texts (The Book of Common Prayer, and the travel writings of Sir John Mandeville) and commissioned texts (like the humorous, bite-sized "A Korean Girl," by writer Mary HK Choi, which inspired giggles at the appropriate moments).

Each composer brought what was basically their signature dish, with the wild card being Bishi, a British singer who I knew nothing about before the show, other than that she played the sitar. The sitar was the least of her contributions, the foremost of which was sheer stage presence. Her compositions--and her entrances, first in a coat of white fur (fake we hope) with hair done up like a Cinnabon, then in a black-and-white corset and skin-tight pants--added some danger and surprise to the program.

Bishi's singing was similarly attention-grabbing: a cabaret-style coo that blended with and added depth to the chorus (where someone like Sam Amidon sounded distinct and other). The theatricality of a musical pulsed through the songs, with Bishi as the preening lead. "Look the Other Way," her second number, progressed with a martial beat before delivering a string of awesomely WTF moments: a synthesized disco beat, then a man in white-tie formal-wear adding Vincent Price-esque narration, and finally a heavy metal breakdown with crushing drums and Bryce Dessner shredding away. Of course, it was also delivered with a wink. "That's probably the most metal guitar Bryce has played since high school," said Nico, of the best part of the evening.

A few more pictures from the show are below...

Continue reading "Nico Muhly's 'Tell the Way' in review & pics (Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Sam Amidon, ACME, Bishi & Bryce Dessner included) "

words by Rachel Kowal

On Friday and Saturday night, singer Sam Amidon has hosted a series of sold-out shows at The Kitchen, an arts space in Manhattan that boasts an impressive Board of Directors that includes the likes of Philip Glass, Nico Muhly and Bryce Dessner to name a few.

With its austere, DIY theatre vibe, the setting was a bit unconventional, but then again, so was the performance. Much more than simply an evening of folk songs, ballads, and hymns, Amidon projected random video clips and odd, hand-drawn cartoons onto the large screen lining the back wall.

There were two clusters of instruments and laptops on stage - one for Amidon and the other for one of his regular collaborators, Shahzad Ismaily. Due to Amidon's mesmerizing presence, it's easy to overlook Ismaily on percussion, but only because his contribution is effortlessly subtle and effective.

Amidon began his multimedia show with a series of video clips, including one of himself in a rowboat, narrating the tragic tale of "a young child of indiscriminate gender, wearing a green raincoat who ran away from home at the age of 10." With such a vivid and candid performer like Amidon, it's often hard to tell if it's all an act or if he's a bit crazy, but that's part of the appeal.

As was quickly evidenced by both his home videos and his live performance, Amidon can hardly contain his odd stories and asides. With Amidon, it's about the journey - however winding or disjointed it may be. And with a fair amount of sing-a-longs thrown in to keep the audience engaged, it's hard not to feel that we're all weary travelers on the same odyssey.

Of course, the bulk of Amidon's show comprised songs from his last two albums, but he also played a quick succession of short folk songs. And yes, besides the more conventional aspects of the performance, he displayed everything from 'liturgical dancing' and chaotic vocal exercises to a book review (Peter Biskind's "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'N' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood" - apparently terrible), a conversation between a piece of broccoli and a jar of maple syrup (naturally, about love and depression), and an R. Kelly cover ("Relief").

It may not have been the most coherent experience, but Sam Amidon's grab bag performances never cease to entertain and enliven.

--

Both Sam Amidon and Shahzad Ismaily also play in Thomas Bartlett's Doveman, so maybe they'll be there in March when Doveman goes on a very short tour with Nadia Sirota in March. That very short tour includes two shows in Minneapolis and that one taking place at Merkin Concert Hall on March 9th with Owen Pallett.

Nadia Sirota and Sam Amidon, along with The National's Bryce Dessner and Bishi, will also participate in Tell The Way at St. Ann's Warehouse on February 10th, 11th and 12th...

Tell The Way is a newly commissioned collaborative work created for the Brooklyn Youth Chorus (Dianne Berkun, Artistic Director) by the ubiquitous Nico Muhly. Loosely based on medieval and colonial English travel narratives, the work draws from American folk sources, prayers for the Royal Navy, early colonial diaries, Mandeville, Herodotus and Marco Polo. Nico Muhly's music is propulsive travel-music, but at the heart of Tell The Way are three meditative collaborations between Muhly and Bishi, Muhly and Bryce Dessner and Muhly and Sam Amidon. An ensemble of strings, percussion, piano, and flute augment the voices of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Bryce's guitar, Sam's banjo and fiddle, and Bishi's sitar.

All tour dates and Sam's Kitchen setlist, below...

Continue reading "Sam Amidon played the Kitchen (review & setlist), playing Nico Muhly's 'Tell The Way' @ St. Ann's Warehouse (dates)"

The Budos Band in Prospect Park (more by David Andrako)

The Budos Band celebrated the release of their new LP The Budos Band III at Southpaw last week (9/18), and now will wreck Bowery Ballroom on December 3rd. Tickets go on sale AmEx presale today at noon, and then general sale Friday at noon.

Its easy to tell that a heavy influence on the sound of The Budos Band is Nigerian legend and subject of a Broadway musical, Fela Kuti. In recent weeks, FELA! has taken both a big step forward and a huge step back; R&B legend Patti Labelle recenlty joined the cast of the acclaimed musical, but unfortunately the show will close during the first week in 2011. Boo.

If you haven't seen the show yet, you should. If you can't afford it, then take note: you can get a taste when members of the cast play a FREE show at Brooklyn Bridge Park's Pier 1 on October 4th. Patti won't be there, but FELA! star Sahr Ngaujah will be, alongside the FELA! house band (which includes members of Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra). The show kicks off at 6:30 P.M. More details can be found at the St. Ann's Warehouse site.

In related news, the non-profit Hip-Hop Theater Festival is celebrating its 10th anniversary with a gala at Urban Zen Center at the Stephan Weiss Studio (711 Greenwich Street NYC) on on 9/27:

From 7-8pm VIP guests will be able to enjoy a rooftop reception before general admission. Doors will officially open at 8:30pm, followed by performances from Pulitzer finalist Eisa Davis and Tony Award winning poet Lemon Anderson. A presentation honoring playwright and poet Ntozake Shange and graffiti pioneer artist Enrique PARTONE Torres will then ensue. Sahr Ngaujah of FELA! on Broadway will host the special evening with music provided by DJ Rich Medina.

The Budos Band recently performed live for KEXP in Seattle. Video below...

Continue reading "a free Fela! show, the Budos Band @ Bowery, Patti Labelle on Broadway (but not for much longer) "

DOWNLOAD: Velvet Underground - live from the New York Public Library (MP3)

Lou Reed, John Zorn, Sonic Youth and others will play a benefit concert for Tuli Kupferberg, the Beat poet and original member of the Fugs, at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn on Jan. 22. Mr. Kupferberg, 86, has had two strokes over the last year, which have left him blind -- although he still manages to regularly post video jokes to YouTube -- and the tickets for the concert, which is being produced by Hal Willner, will help pay his medical expenses. Among the others performers are the singer John Kruth; Ed Sanders, Mr. Kupferberg's fellow Fug; and Peter Stampfel of the Holy Modal Rounders (who also played on early Fugs albums). Tickets are $75 to $125 and are available at stannswarehouse.org or (718) 254.8779. [NY Times]

In December, Lou Reed took part in the NYPL talk with fellow VU members Maureen Tucker and Doug Yule. A recording of that night is posted above. Coming up, Reed's "Metal Machine Music" is going to be performed by Fireworks Ensemble at Columbia's Miller Theatre on Friday, February 5th. Tickets are still on sale.

Tuli was one of the Fugs who played a benefit show at the Bell House in April.

Some of the above mentioned Tuli videos are posted below...

Continue reading "Fugs' Tuli Kupferberg benefit show w/ Lou Reed, John Zorn, Sonic Youth, more ++ Velvet Underground 'reunion' audio"

photos by Chris La Putt

"During the final moments of her sold-out concert at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn on Friday night, Rosanne Cash stood beneath an image of her with her father, Johnny Cash. It was a photograph projected on a backdrop, and it faded soon enough to feel like a mirage. Given that Ms. Cash had just sung "Sweet Memories," a country ballad of haunted remembrance, that apparitional suggestion was on the mark...

...On Friday she worked without any outside help. ("Is Bruce here?" she quipped, looking around. "I think Bruce is playing a larger venue tonight," she added, alluding to Giants Stadium.) She was more than capable of carrying the material herself, backed by a precise and flexible band. Her husband, John Leventhal, who produced the album, doubled as lead guitarist and musical director... [NY Times]

Continue reading "Rosanne Cash @ St Ann's Warehouse, DUMBO - pics & setlist"

Rosanne & Johnny...

NY Times: On Tuesday [Oct 6], you're releasing your 14th album, "The List," a stirring leap into the past whose title refers to an actual list of 100 mostly country songs compiled by your father, Johnny Cash, in 1973 in an effort to expand your teenage taste in music beyond the Beatles.

Rosanne Cash: He realized that I lacked something essential about my own musical genealogy, and he made this list for me. He said, "This is a template for excellence." He would play the songs for me on his guitar, and I sought out the records in the years afterward.

Did you have a good relationship with him?

It's hard to be close to a drug addict when they're active. He was erratic and withdrawn. But when I was 17, he said, Come with me, and I left the day after I graduated high school, went on the road with him. It was wonderful. He was clean and sober by that time. That's when he wrote the list for me, on the bus.

As an acclaimed songwriter who is just releasing your first album composed entirely of other peoples' songs, do you think "The List" will bring new life to old classics and raise the country-music consciousness of a generation of kids?

Not just young people. I have a 50-year-old, culturally astute girlfriend who heard a recording of "Sea of Heartbreak" and said, Did you write that? I said, Hardly. Not even close. The definitive version was recorded by Don Gibson in 1961.

She discussed the album and played material from it on September 23rd at WNYC's Souncheck - that show is streaming online.

More info on the album (art, tracklist) and a schedule of Rosenne's live and TV performances (including Letterman & Today show) are below...

Continue reading "Rosanne Cash's new album & live show comes from 'The List' of country songs Johnny made (2 St Ann's Warehouse shows)"

by Andrew Frisicano

St. Ann's Warehouse is hosting its spring benefit, "A Gala Evening with Philip Glass + Ira Glass," on Tuesday, April 28th. The pair will engage in the "World Premiere Performance of Glass on Glass, a one-time-only evening with cousins, composer Philip Glass and master storyteller, Ira Glass, host of public radio's This American Life."

Tickets for the event, which run in $150, $350, and $1,000 packages, are on sale now.

Another upcoming benefit, for the Children's Health Fund, features a performance by Willie Nelson (with CHF co-founder Paul Simon) on Wednesday, May 27th at the Sheraton New York Hotel and Tower. Hillary Rodham Clinton and other notables will be in attendance as well.

To reserve a spot for that event, contribute between $1000 and $100,000 to the CHF (thx rajohn for the tip).

Willie recently played at the Lincoln Center with Wynton Marsalis in February, and has a US tour coming up. The closest stop to NYC on that is a show at New Brunswick, NJ's State Theatre on Saturday, April 18th. Tickets are on sale. All dates below..

Philip Glass tracks "Prophecies" and "Pruitt Igoe" from Koyaanisqatsi were recently featured in The Watchmen, and PBS is in the middle of screening GLASS: A Portrait of Philip Glass in Twelve Parts, a 12-part doc on the composer as part of its American Masters series.

The night after the St. Ann's benefit, Wednesday, April 29th, Glass' work will be performed by Michael Riesman, director of the Philip Glass Ensemble, at new downtown venue The Greene Space. The music will be integrated into a radio theatre performance of The Invisible Man.

On May 17th, "Signal performs Philip Glass' Symphony No. 3 and Suite from The Hours with pianist Michael Riesman, conducted by Brad Lubman at (Le) Poisson Rouge in New York City." (Tickets are on sale.)

Part of Glass' Koyaanisqatsi, Willie Nelson's best-of compilation infomercial video, and tour dates, below...

Continue reading "Philip & Ira Glass; Willie Nelson, Paul Simon play benefits & other upcoming shows "

photos by Bao Nguyen

"We wanted to make some statement from New York City -- the center of the universe," said Lou Reed in a hallway press conference for Speak Up!, an anti-war benefit held last night (March 18) at intimate Brooklyn theater St. Ann's Warehouse. While the 65-year-old NYC icon isn't in any shape to be chaining himself to a recruiting station, he certainly can gather a who's who of the lefty art-rocker geekerati: David Byrne, Moby, Blonde Redhead, Scissor Sisters, Damien Rice, Norah Jones and co-organizers Laurie Anderson and Antony, who helped conceive the event in Anderson's living room. It was a night where every song felt like a protest anthem -- even when the Scissor Sisters sang "I ain't got nothing but your seed on my face/You'll put them babies to waste." That could be about sending kids to war, right? [Rolling Stone]

Reed, Anderson, Antony and Moby opened the show with a broken version of "The Star Spangled Banner." Lou's feedback never quite nailed the notes and he mangled the words a little bit ("home of the free and the home of the brave"), but it all made perfect sense. On the fifth anniversary of a war that has been pushed off the headlines in favor of an election, our national anthem was given an appropriate luster of unease and trepidation. Norah Jones performed slinky versions of her "My Dear Country" and Randy Newman's "I Think It's Going To Rain Today." David Byrne, armed with a four-person choir, led an art-gospel sermon full of huge choruses. Damien Rice was on hand to add harmonies (and the shittiest tambourine playing since Tracy Partridge), but Byrne's mesmerizing presence kept his pair of originals spiraling heavenward. The perenially chilly Laurie Anderson pulled out the snarky electrofunk of her recent "Only An Expert," vivisecting corporations and Oprah and weapons of mass destruction and global warming in that arch, scientific, matter-of-fact Laurie Anderson way. [Rolling Stone]

Continue reading "Lou Reed, Antony, David Byrne & other photos from the Speak Up! benefit @ St Ann's in Brooklyn"

DOWNLOAD: Lou Reed - Caroline Says II (Berlin live) (MP3)

St Ann's Warehouse in DUMBO, Brooklyn, NY (aturkus)

Lou Reed recorded the album Berlin in 1973.
It was a commercial failure.
Over the next 33 years, he never performed the album live.

For five nights in December 2006 at St. Ann's Warehouse Brooklyn,
Lou Reed performed his masterwork about love's dark sisters;
jealousy, rage and loss.
-Julian Schnabel

Julian Schnabel has created "Berlin" the movie based on the Brooklyn shows. Sharon Jones, Antony and many others performed in those shows (aka they are in the movie too). More info, including a SXSW screening, below...

Continue reading "Lou Reed's Berlin - a film by Julian Schnabel (@ SXSW)"

Continue reading "SPEAK UP! benefit w/ Antony, Blonde Redhead, Lou Reed, David Byrne, Laurie Anderson, Moby, Scissor Sisters...."