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Brian Slattery |
Jan 18, 2024 9:05 am
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A third of the way through the latest concert in the Kallos Chamber Music Series — held Wednesday evening at the New Haven Lawn Club — cellist Daniel Hamin Go had a little insider’s tip. “In order for this to be the best concert you’ve ever been to, this is what you have to do. During the intermission, which will begin in about 16 minutes, there is lots of wine!” The audience laughed. “And some good food. I highly recommend you either get drunk or you stuff yourself, because then we will sound amazing.” The audience laughed again. It was a fitting encapsulation of the tone of the evening, in which the music was serious but the mood informal and festive, making for a night of serious fun.
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Karen Ponzio |
Jan 17, 2024 9:00 am
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The Sacred Harp participants for the evening.
Do you like to sing? I do, but I haven’t done much formally or had any instruction in it. For 2024 one of my goals was to truly find my own voice without shame or judgment. Lucky for me, Volume Two at Never Ending Books has a gathering of the New Haven Sacred Harp every third Monday of the month, where new and inexperienced singers are always welcome.
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Karen Ponzio |
Jan 17, 2024 9:00 am
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Allen Lowe performing at Best Video.
Allen Lowe, a man of multiple talents — musician, songwriter, author, historian — likes to argue. Luckily for jazz fans, those arguments fuel his creative output.
His life is being captured in a documentary as he works on an array of new projects as well as a monthly jazz series at Best Video that is seeing its audience grow with every show. Lowe is no stranger to crowded rooms, as he has been playing to them locally and elsewhere for years. He currently seems to be in a sort of renaissance era — though if you ask him, he may argue that point as well.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 16, 2024 9:42 am
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Slam host Ngoma.
Memories of the Children’s Crusade. A vision of alien visitations in the future. Invocations of superheroes. Fist-raising calls for change. These were all part of the 28th annual Z Experience Poetry Slam on Monday, part of the Yale Peabody Museum’s celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.‘s legacy of social and environmental justice.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 15, 2024 8:54 am
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The Almighty Yellow Star.
Guitar strings plucked with grace and care, voices keening in the air, and one of the most attentive audiences seen anywhere in months made for an intense and intimate evening of music Saturday at Best Video Film and Cultural Center in Hamden.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 12, 2024 8:30 am
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Hank Paper
Another Brand New Day.
Hank Paper may have given his photograph the perfect title. Another Brand New Day is on one level just a normal street scene in Italy, but its vivid colors and warm light are almost supernaturally delicious. Paper finds the ecstasy in the everyday, and with it, a palpable sense of hope.
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Lisa Reisman |
Jan 11, 2024 10:29 am
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Executive producer Jeff Bell with actors Ethan Timothy and Ernest Richard.
Jeff Bell wanted animosity.
“I want to feel it,” he told actor Ernest Richard. “I want it coming out of your pores. I want you to be showing him ‘I can’t stand you. You’re just a social media punk out for likes and girls.’”
The scene was a clandestine meeting in a dank, dimly lit basement reached by a flight of rickety stairs from Madeline’s Empanaderia on Spring Street. Ernest Richard was District Attorney Calvin Tubbs. His object of scorn: Tim the Truthteller, the social media influencer played by Ethan Timothy.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 11, 2024 10:03 am
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Judy Atlas
Blue Flux.
Judy Atlas’s Blue Flux can evoke dozens of things if you let it: a cityscape in the rain, a snow field, the inside of an ice crystal, with just a little sun streaming through. But that’s not the game the painting asks you to play. It can also just be taken on its own terms, as color and texture, a composition that is satisfying because its elements are well balanced, without having to mean anything in particular. Or maybe put another way, it can evoke a few meanings at once, without ever needing to land on a single one; it’s the impression it leaves on the viewer that matters.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 10, 2024 8:59 am
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It’s a plush duck butt, hanging from the wall. Is it a piece of cartoon taxidermy? Is the bird crawling through a hole? Or is there something more oddly magical going on?
The only way this reporter knows for certain that the bird in question is, in fact, a duck, is because elsewhere in “Outdoors at Paul’s” — a show of art by Douglas Degges and Noe Jimenez running now through the week at iiiiotae in Cedar Hill — the duck’s head and torso are emerging from the wall, with the kind of blank stuffed-animal expression into which one can read just about any emotion.
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Karen Ponzio |
Jan 10, 2024 8:52 am
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Parker Posey as Meg Swan in Best in Show (and Beatrice, too).
Meg Swan is all sharp angles and biting retorts as she attempts to maneuver her dog into becoming a prizewinner in the film Best in Show, the first in Best Video’s January film series celebrating the work of actor Parker Posey, who plays Swan. Though definitively part of Christopher Guest’s stellar ensemble that finds the laughter in between — and, more often than not, within — the discomfort, Posey’s character stands out, as she has done in nearly every film role she has committed to since she first arrived on the movie scene in the 1990s.
Artist and customer Susan Clinard in Artist & Craftsman on Monday: "It’s one of those last-standing real art stores.”
“It is a disaster for our block. We LOVE this store. I am so angry.” “It’s my life’s blood.” “This is a huge bummer … I’m there weekly with buying materials for my work or for my class at CAW.” “I feel bad for us but also the wonderful staff who have always been so great.”
These were a few of the many outcries from New Haven artists and citizens as news spread yesterday that Artist & Craftsman Supply, at 821 – 825 Chapel St., had announced it would be closing in early March.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 8, 2024 9:12 am
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Zero Dollar.
Nicholas Serrambana on bass came on with a prowling, acrobatic line. Jeff Dragan on electronics countered with purrs and hisses, as though from a virtual snake. Nick Di Maria played his trumpet into a microphone to apply effects to the horn’s sound, from echoing reverb to electronically generated harmonies.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 5, 2024 9:04 am
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The New Haven-based bomba group Proyecto Cimarrón was already laying down traditional Puerto Rican rhythms in Keefe Community Center on Pine Street in Hamden, when families streamed into the room, ready to take part in the town’s first official celebration of Three Kings Day on Thursday evening.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 4, 2024 8:58 am
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The Kevin Saint James Band on Wednesday night.
It was 9:30 on Wednesday evening at the Owl Shop on College Street and already the Kevin Saint James Band had relaxed into an easy swing. Plumes of smoke rose in the air, from fans sitting close by, cigars lit. Lou Ianello took a ride on sax across the song’s changes. Steve Donovan followed suit on keys. Victor Ramirez on bass and Derrick Tappin on drums held down the rhythm for the others, until it was Ramirez’s turn. Each had time to express themselves. Each made sure to keep the vibe right. Singer Kevin Saint James then got up on stage, took a seat in the back, and lit a cigarette, like he had all the time in the world.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 3, 2024 8:57 am
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A squelching keyboard. A bleeping melody. Finger snaps holding down a backbeat. Then a voice raps, defiant, powerful. “Mask on / me and my bitches paint the city / Queer bitch gang, put ‘em up if you with it / Flags out the window, it’s the 203 / not a cis het bitch that be fucking with me,” Indigaux intones. They keep going, gender blending, but the devotion to place unwavering: “Bitch I’m from New Haven,” they rap. “Every winter is a bump.”
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Karen Ponzio |
Jan 2, 2024 9:09 am
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Clare Byrne and Amy Larimer of The Celestials.
The penultimate night of the year can be a tricky one, especially if it falls on a weekend. Do you go out and do something fun, or do you stay in and get cozy? On Saturday, Best Video offered the best of both worlds as two bands brought a down-home celebratory atmosphere to the Whitney Avenue performance space with friends, family, and fans gathered together to both hunker down and jazz it up as the year said its final goodbyes.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 21, 2023 4:00 pm
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Artists preparing for Citywide Open Studios in September.
Organizational chaos. Art spaces closing their doors. And new collectives of artists forming to take matters into their own hands.
For many in the New Haven arts scene, the year 2023 was a time of transformation — some of it painful, but much of it promising. The roots of that pain reached back into the past few years, into the pandemic shutdown, but beyond it as well. In artists healing, the chance has opened up to build something better, that lasts well into the future.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 21, 2023 8:55 am
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Mezzi.
Gary Mezzi, a.k.a. Buzz Gordo, beamed from behind a 12-string guitar on the stage of Cafe Nine Tuesday night. “This is a song about the demise of a dog track,” he said, to introduce the song “White City,” by Shane MacGowan. “And even if there were another song about the demise of a dog track, this would still be the best.”
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 19, 2023 9:45 am
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Harder with J Topog Rivulets 231.
After decades of printmaking, Barbara Harder revels in embracing the accidents. “I’m trying to make things the way I’m making them,” she said, but “sometimes I almost like tripping up,” because sometimes she likes the images she creates better. “You don’t have to beat yourself up more than you need to,” she continued. “It’s really nice to have the space as an artist to do that exploration, and wrestle with yourself, and the paper, and the ink.… It’s the hope that at times in the studio, I can have this spark… whether it’s done, or whether it’s perfect, or whatever it is, it just makes me happy. It’s something to keep after.”
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Asher Joseph |
Dec 18, 2023 2:58 pm
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Students sing loud and proud at Elm City Montessori's eighth annual Winter Sing.
Students, families, and teachers bundled together in the subfreezing temperature at Elm City Montessori School (ECMS) to lift their voices in song during the school’s eighth annual Winter Sing — which played out as candles flickered, under the silhouette of West Rock.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 18, 2023 8:55 am
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The show of artist Amira Brown’s work, up now at the Mitchell Branch Library in Westville through the end of the month, doesn’t have a title, nor do any of the individual pieces. That gesture alone seems to be part of the point, as is the elliptical, border-melting nature of the work itself. It’s a show to find your way into; one possible starting point is a piece that shows, in outline, a person in a classic pose of pondering, but the pondering itself is dissolving the person. The person contains other people. The person contains stars. But Brown’s sly humor is on full display as well. “Meh,” is one complete thought. “Shrug,” another. And then: “rodeo.” The rodeo of making art? Of showing it? Something bigger? Whatever the case, it isn’t Brown’s first.
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Karen Ponzio |
Dec 15, 2023 9:07 am
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Ceschi Ramos.
“It’s a good night for rap music,” said Pink Navel at the beginning of their set Thursday night at Space Ballroom. Anyone who was at the show would probably call that an understatement as four acts — Old Self, Pink Navel, Ceschi, and Open Mike Eagle — gave a master class in how to command an audience while also performing with friends and having a fantastic time themselves.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 15, 2023 8:47 am
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Composer Valerie Coleman.
An oboe and a bass, traveling the American landscape. A brass band inverting and celebrating the musical language of the street. Two pianists sweating side by side. On Wednesday afternoon, all this and more was part of the latest installment — and last of the year — in the Yale School of Music’s Lunchtime Chamber Music series, in which students at Yale’s conservatory give far-ranging programs of classical music past and present at Morse Hall, inside Sprague Hall at 470 College St.
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Adam Matlock |
Dec 14, 2023 8:56 am
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Setting up for a meeting of the Album Club at Never Ending Books on State Street, organizer and host Dean Andrade said that “I think this album will be kind of a revelation for our regulars.” On Monday night, the club assembled for the 16th time since starting in 2022 to discuss Alice Coltrane’s 1971 album Journey in Satchidananda — the first time, according to Andrade, the group had discussed a jazz album, or anything without lyrics.
