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Brian Slattery |
Oct 14, 2021 7:42 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
Host Chefren Gray, a.k.a. Chef the Chef, gave the growing audience at Cafe Nine a wide smile Wednesday night as he introduced New Haven Grand Prix Round 4 — not the bike race, sadly cancelled again this year, but Gray’s gladly ongoing showcase of New Haven’s hip hop and R&B talent, now taking place monthly.
“If this is your first time, welcome,” he said, as he promised the crowd the “most exuberant, incredible, persistent artists in the area.” With act after act of rappers and singers, he delivered on that promise.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 13, 2021 7:56 am
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John T. Hill Photos
The image — to many New Haveners, an iconic one — is so vivid it seems like you can almost hear it, a murmur of voices, maybe a cacophony. Maybe there’s a speaker’s ragged voice echoing across the Green through a bullhorn. The two men standing nearby seem like they’re having a conversation. Is it worry or sarcasm on that man’s face, or something else? The one message that seems clear is coming from the young man’s face, front and center in the picture. His mouth is closed, but his eyes convey so much — even more than the little sign he has pinned to his shirt, that reads “Human Rights Not Violence.”
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 12, 2021 8:33 am
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“Never Forget,” the first song from Ashon’s Every Knight Is Reign, starts with a recording of a storm, a nod to the play on words in the album’s title. A laid-back piano enters the picture, chiming chords from an electric piano, a bubbling bass, easy-swinging drums. “Soon as I started this, I knew I was a part of this,” raps Ashon T. Alston. He proceeds to tell a story of how he got into rap, the mixing of his ambitions and his strategy amid a childhood of friends, discovering music, trouble, police raids. “Tell me how can I forget?”
Sadé Heart of the Hawk at Monday’s ceremony on the Green.
Ricky Looking Crow and Norm Momowetu Clement smudging sage.
Dressed in orange to commemorate the victims and survivors of Indigenous boarding schools, Sadé Heart of the Hawk beat a turtle-decorated hand drum as she sang about a child — much like her mother — who was ripped from her family, home, and culture, and sent away to Shubenacadie.
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Nora Grace-Flood |
Oct 11, 2021 1:10 pm
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Nora Grace-Flood Photo
Pastor Jeremiah Jermaine Paul at his new pulpit.
After winning the second season of NBC’s The Voice and touring for a decade with Alicia Keys, Jeremiah Jermaine Paul realized his true life — singing about “building your church from the ground up” from his own pulpit at Sunday worship services.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 11, 2021 8:24 am
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A piece of artwork hanging in Bregamos Community Theater summed up the theme of the Festival de la Resistencia, which took place at the Blatchley Avenue arts and community space Saturday afternoon. It made a serious point: A fist smoked down from the sky to smite the people on a city street. The people were not crushed; they pushed back. And someone was there to document their struggle, and let the world see, even as the city burned around them. But the seriousness of the subject was delivered in a colorful, vivacious tone, full of life and action. It drew you in and made you want to be a part of it — and it was the work of multiple artists’ hands.
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Karen Ponzio |
Oct 11, 2021 8:14 am
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Karen Ponzio Photos
Concussion
Improvisational music comes off to many people as a few musicians getting together and simply playing their instruments, perhaps in a haphazard way — except it’s not that at all, and it’s not so simple. In fact, it involves a whole lot of experience, enthusiasm, commitment, and most of all, love. All of those aspects were on display Saturday night at Volume Two: A Never Ending Books Collective for a three-act bill that showcased some of the finest local improvisational musicians getting back to what they do best.
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Thomas Breen |
Oct 8, 2021 9:45 am
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Thomas Breen photos
Stephen Kobasa, Allie Perry at final stone laying at B’way Triangle.
Twenty years to the day after the United States first bombed the Taliban, New Haveners officially put an end to one home front of the Afghanistan War — by laying a final stone commemorating last month’s military and civilian deaths from “forever wars” in the Middle East.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 8, 2021 8:27 am
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The front gallery of Artspace, right on the corner of Orange and Crown, has been made into a living room of sorts. While the pieces are displayed on pedestals, as they might be in a museum, the warm tone of the walls beckons people in from the street. The carpet on the floor looks soft and inviting — even if it is made of shells. The pieces look old and worn, as if well-loved by users before being preserved. We can’t touch any of it, but we can be in the same space, with comfort and ease.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 7, 2021 8:24 am
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Jeremy Cooney of Brother Beauty gave the audience a sly smile from the stage. “Feeling good, feeling loose, and that’s a good way to feel,” he said at the beginning of his set. It set the tone for a two-band bill at Cafe Nine Wednesday night that matched a new New Haven band with a well-traveled touring act from Kentucky, with pleasing, relaxed, and spaced-out results.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 6, 2021 8:19 am
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“Old Habits,” the title track from the new album by Kat Wallace and David Sasso, starts with warm chords from an electric tenor guitar that then slides into a waltz, buoyed by drums and bass.
“Here we are now, back at square one,” Wallace sings. “All the rules we made becoming undone.” As tenor guitar, bass, and drums hold down the pulse, Sasso joins in on a piano that dips in and out, a boat on the waves. Wallace is singing about a romantic relationship on the rocks. But it’s also, in a very positive light, a statement about the direction the New Haven-based duo has taken on Old Habits.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 5, 2021 8:30 am
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Wangechi Mutu
Sentinel I.
Wangechi Mutu’s Sentinel I stands guard over its space in the Yale University Art Gallery’s exhibit “On the Basis of Art: 150 Years of Women at Yale,” on view now through Jan. 9. But it’s not a passive sculpture; in a way that no photograph can do justice to it, the piece appears to shift its shape as you get closer or farther away, and as you walk around the piece. The human figure morphs into something more like an animal, or maybe a plant, or maybe something more elemental, like fire or smoke. In a hall full of powerful pieces, it seems to protect and at the same time draw strength from the art around it.
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Karen Ponzio |
Oct 4, 2021 8:23 am
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Karen Ponzio Photos
Space Camp.
Friday marked the start of live shows at The State House after a year and a half of Covid closures and restrictions. The venue, which had been allowing a few closed-to-the-public events, such as livestreams and video shoots, reconvened with a three-band bill that reenergized the space as well as the music community, who gathered with masks on and space between them, but still as one with an intention to celebrate.
Estate of Winfred Rembert / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Looking for My Mother, 2019; reprinted in new book about the art and life of Newhallville’s Winfred Rembert.
The railroad tracks stretched ahead for miles and miles. Winfred Rembert walked them all day and half the night, searching.
It would take a full 60 years for him to reach his destination, to find what he was truly looking for. He found it right before he died. And laid it out for the rest of us to see.
