Music
Highly Selective Listings
Brooklyn Rail Highly Selective Music Events
A thoughtful, discerning, and carefully compiled list of the most notable, promising and unique musical events for the months of December and January in New York City.
In Conversation
MIKE LADD with Boice‑Terrel Allen
Hip-hop artist Mike Ladd has spent the past eleven years of his life calling Paris home. From James Baldwin to Langston Hughes, the lineage of African-American artists fleeing their American birthplace for Parisian equality is wide and illustrious—a notion that Ladd challenges on his 2005 album Negrophilia.
All Music Fans Everywhere
By Marshall YarbroughWhen the news broke in October that Condé Nast had bought Pitchfork, I was out of the country. If there were think pieces, I missed them.
The Ex at Monty Hall
By Dan JosephJust across the Hudson River in Jersey City, directly opposite the World Trade Center in what might best be described as a parallel universe, sits Monty Hall, the live music venue run by free-form radio station WFMU.
Outtakes
By Steve DalachinskyWe’ve had The Secret Garden. Grey Gardens. The Garden of Earthly Delights. The King of Marvin Gardens. Green Mansions, Home and Garden, and now: The Creeping Garden. So what exactly is slime mold? Well, it’s been decided that it’s not a fungus, but, rather than me giving away too much information, see the aforementioned The Creeping Garden, which played recently at the Film Forum.
Cécile McLorin Salvant: For One to Love
By Adolf AlzupharAcclaimed vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant was raised in Miami as the American-born daughter of a French school principal mother and a Haitian doctor father. Her newest release, For One To Love, is her finest yet. It is an album of twelve songs, five written by Cécile, and seven standards that she is interpreting. The entire band’s performance makes this album phenomenal. The group is made of Aaron Diehl on piano, Paul Sikivie on bass, and Lawrence Leathers on drums.
At Le Poisson Rouge, Three Voices Become One
By Alessandro CassinWalking down the stairs at Le Poisson Rouge on Sunday, November 15—a desolate fish tank hanging overhead—for the only New York appearance of Tre Voci, I can’t stifle my skepticism about the choice of venue. It is sadly paradoxical that a world-class chamber ensemble finds itself, in New York City, where chamber music has a huge following, performing in a basement club, with strobe lights flashing and food and drinks being consumed during the concert.
Diary of a Mad Composer
By George Grella“If only everybody in the world read The New Republic, the world would solve all its problems.” – Ian Buruma Those words—spoken to neo-liberal warmonger, and New Republic contributing editor Paul Berman, and for which I will eternally love Ian Buruma—I would paraphrase as: if only everybody in the world embraced political art …” The appeal of political declarations—whether they come from the endless herd of white men in blue suits yammering on TV or in the pages of political journals, or from an artist painting a slogan in the wilds of, well, there are no wilds left in New York City—is that of a consumer product: a simple, easy to swallow meme that provides instant satisfaction because it goes down agreeably.
Shostakovich Slips the Noose:
Quatuor Debussy and Circa
By Jeff Tompkins
I sat down for Opus, at BAM, with a certain amount of skepticism. A French string quartet, the Quatuor Debussy, playing three Shostakovich string quartets while a troupe of Australian acrobats gamboled around them onstage? And the musicians were going to be blindfolded for part of the performance? The word gimmicky wasn’t the furthest thing from my mind as I tried to warm to this scenario.
