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Karen Ponzio |
May 17, 2018 12:05 pm
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Shilpa Ray.
Right before beginning his song “Sweet Embrace” at Cafe Nine on Wednesday night, Hnry Flwr explained that the song was about “embracing our mistakes, because we live in chaos.” The area had been experiencing the aftermath of a chaotic storm that brought tornados, macrobursts and much destruction to many of the surrounding towns, but in New Haven that night two acts from New York, Hnry Flwr and Shilpa Ray, brought a respite and a sort of controlled chaos in the form of music to those who came in from the rain and chose another way to get back on their feet.
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Brian Slattery |
May 11, 2018 7:59 am
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Drummer Ches Smith started with a groove built from rim shots. Shahzad Ismaily’s bass rumbled beneath it. They made a beat that surged forward as Marc Ribot unleashed an arc of notes from his electric guitar, like a lasso capturing all the ears in the room. The packed house at Cafe Nine on Thursday night was full of New Haven’s musicians and others who understood that this wasn’t a night to chat in the back. They were here to see guitar icon Ribot — here with his trio Ceramic Dog — in a rare New Haven performance that let the band rip through folk, jazz, punk, Latin, funk, and hip hop, all brought together by a musical sensibility that came out fists swinging and was full of surprises.
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Karen Ponzio |
May 8, 2018 12:24 pm
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While tuning her guitar MorganEve Swain of The Huntress and Holder of Hands thanked opening act Sam Moss and his band, including bass player Michael Siegel, for letting her use his upright bass to play with second act Daphne Lee Martin.
“We love those harmonies,” she said with a smile. It was a night of great harmonies and good company this week at another “Manic Monday” show at Cafe Nine, where audience and bands found a balance of kindness and kinship.
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Karen Ponzio |
Apr 30, 2018 7:32 am
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Sketch tha Cataclysm.
The first song of the soon-to-be-released album The Maya Demos Remastered, by Sketch tha Cataclysm begins rather prophetically. “I woke in a mist amidst mountains of nameless CD-Rs and philosophical writings, the previous evening still in the corners of my eyes.” If you are following along with the accompanying lyric booklet, you will have already read the introduction, where he explains that this current project is based on almost exactly that premise.
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 23, 2018 8:37 am
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Sley.
Within seconds of taking the Cafe Nine stage Sunday night, Cynthia Sley of the Bush Tetras announced that her appearance in New Haven was overdue — by two decades.
“We have a story about New Haven,” she said. “We almost played here and didn’t get to. It was about 20 years ago.” For fans of the legendary post-punk band, which could trace its history back to 1979, it was worth the wait.
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Brian Slattery |
Apr 18, 2018 8:25 am
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Now in its fourth year, the Elm City Folk Festival has reached beyond the borders of the city and state to put together two nights of music and 12 acts at Cafe Nine on the corner of State and Crown.
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Christopher Peak |
Apr 11, 2018 12:11 pm
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Slate Ballard and Carlos Wells reveal plans Tuesday night.
The State House
The new venue, accessible by State Street.
Theatrical shows, world-music concerts, poetry slams, book signings and industry festivals could all soon take over a forgotten, century-old warehouse on the Ninth Square’s periphery.
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Karen Ponzio |
Mar 26, 2018 7:49 am
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Rick Allison and Frank Critelli with a photo of James Velvet.
“This is a song about friends, and this is what today is about,” said Richard Neal of the Birdmen right before performing another song by his friend and former bandmate, the late James Velvet, who was on the minds and in the hearts and voices of almost too many people to mention at Cafe Nine Sunday afternoon.
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Karen Ponzio |
Mar 19, 2018 7:47 am
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Karen Ponzio
Barrence Whitfield and the Savages
Daddy Long Legs raised his guitar in the air midway through his band’s opening set. “New Haven, Connecticut, clap your goddamn hands,” he shouted “Come on, we are all so happy to be back here with Barrence Whitfield and the Savages. They’re gonna rip it up. You know that’s right.”
He knew. I knew it. Everyone at Cafe Nine on Friday night knew it. In fact, the ripping up had already begun.
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Brian Slattery |
Mar 6, 2018 8:37 am
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Di Maria.
The organ on “Black Rock” starts off spacey, an ascending line that drifts off into the air. There’s an effects-driven squiggle of sound. The bass thumps its way in, and the drums follow suit. Soon they’re on their way, driving fast down some neon-lined musical highway. A trumpet comes in with the melody, but you almost wouldn’t know it’s a trumpet. Effects have changed the instrument into something else, something that hearkens back to the synthesizer experiments of the 1970s but feels like now, too.
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Karen Ponzio |
Feb 27, 2018 1:10 pm
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Karen Ponzio
Xylouris White
Drummer Jim White spoke into the mic for the first time right before his band’s third song, “The Feast,” to explain that it was written about a baptism celebration in the village of his band mate, George Xylouris, that he was invited to. Both spoke only briefly about the tradition, as the focus of this Monday evening at Cafe Nine was the celebration of a another type of blessing: music, its creation, and the sharing of it with others.
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Karen Ponzio |
Feb 19, 2018 7:13 am
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Karen Ponzio
Robyn Hitchcock.
Right before concluding her opening set, Lys Guillorn said to the audience, “How crazy is it to be seeing Robyn Hitchcock in middle of the afternoon?” Crazy, maybe, but also maybe not.
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Karen Ponzio |
Feb 14, 2018 1:32 pm
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Earthkry
About halfway through Earthkry’s set, vocalist and guitarist Aldayne Haughton posed a question to the audience at Cafe Nine: “Do you want us to stop or keep playing?” The thunderous confirmation he received nearly shook the walls of the intimate room on this Fat Tuesday — a night typically known for outlandish behavior, but here, in this bar, simply for celebrating music and life.
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Christopher Peak |
Feb 8, 2018 9:04 am
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Four vacant storefronts in the Ninth Square.
Newly organized Ninth Square merchants are floating ways to stabilize a neighborhood where they worry that recent gains are starting to slip away in the face of business closures and increased crime.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 6, 2018 8:35 am
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Courtesy the Buttondowns
The strut that starts “Strong Man,” the opening single from the New Haven-based Buttondowns’ new album Volume and Tone, is straight-up rock ‘n’ roll, of the kind you don’t hear much anymore but never really got tired of in the first place. It’s the kind that makes you feel good.
“I work 20-hour days, I never get a break / the taxman takes, everything I make / I’m working so hard for so darn long / don’t even know it when the weekend comes along,” Robert Obie sings. The music puts the lie to those hard-up lyrics. It sounds like the weekend’s already here.
“I’m a strong man,” Obie says. He repeats it again. “I’m a strong man / But you make me weak.”
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 5, 2018 9:05 am
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“Gravity,” off History of Panic — the new album from the New Haven-based Shellye Valauskas Experience — starts with a warm bass, a chiming guitar. “It feels a little like loss / and a lot like gravity,” Valauskas sings, her voice clear and confident, though the meaning in the lyrics conveys something more ambiguous. “Weighs you down, pulls you under / and it makes it hard to see / where you are.” Within a few bars, the music joins her, the tonal center shifting, then shifting again. It still has all the accessibility of a good pop song. But it speaks of years of musical experience.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 30, 2018 8:33 am
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Lea.
New Haven-based trio Lea was churning through one of its songs when singer and guitarist James Fonicello stopped playing. “I broke a string!” he said. He turned to the crowd at Cafe Nine. “When Straight to VHS” — the band that had just finished playing — “broke a string, I said to my drummer, ‘That is going to happen to us.’ And it did!”
Two broken strings from two different bands couldn’t stop the music at the latest installment of Manic Mondays, a weekly series that features three bands doing shorter sets than usual at the Crown Street club on Monday nights and only seems to have grown more popular over time.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 18, 2018 8:38 am
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Katie Jurkiewicz
Detail from Working Hard or Hardly Working
Say you’re in a conference call and you start doodling on the piece of paper in front of you. Say you cover the whole thing with doodles, and start doing that during every conference call.
Or say you’re a commuter at a bus stop and something — a soda can and a plastic bag arranged just so — catches your eye. You take a picture of it with your phone. Say you do this every day. Are you an artist?
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 15, 2018 8:20 am
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Julie Pereira
Floating Wall #1
At first glance it looks like the paper is still on fire. But it’s just how it was made. To make Floating Wall #1, artist Julie Pereira made layers upon layers of dyed paper, then burned them with incense. The resulting pattern on the paper looks like frozen smoke, like underwater photography, like clouds.
The piece is a fitting formal introduction to “Between Beauty and Decay” — now on view at Artspace on the corner of Crown and Orange until Feb. 24 — as Pereira’s piece seems to capture the exact moment in the exhibition’s title.
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Karen Ponzio |
Jan 9, 2018 8:40 am
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“Ten years, one practice, one wedding,” Tim Parrish announced to the crowd at Cafe Nine, summing up the most recent history of his band, The Irascibles, which arrived for a once in a lifetime show for a band with a once in a lifetime story behind them.
