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Brian Slattery |
Oct 25, 2021 8:02 am
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Roderick Topping photos
New Haven-based photographer Roderick Topping has been documenting the Elm City throughout the pandemic and before. That work is now being celebrated with a new exhibition at the New Haven Museum called “Strange Times” that, in the first week of its opening, garnered media attention from WTNH, the New Haven Register, and the Yale Daily News. What does it mean that Topping’s photos — which he’s been posting on social media as he takes them — have been collected, and now resonate so strongly?
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Karen Ponzio |
Oct 22, 2021 8:29 am
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Karen Ponzio Photos
daniprobably
Three bands entertained and engaged the crowd — and one another — at Cafe Nine Thursday night, where local acts Mightymoonchew and daniprobably came together with the Philadelphia-based Lizdelise to raise the energy level and get the weekend started a day early.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 22, 2021 8:22 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
Kath Bloom.
“It’s a perfect night for this,” said Best Video executive director Hank Hoffman, in introducing Thursday evening’s double bill of music from New Haven folk legend Kath Bloom, with Steve Hartlett opening. The weather on the patio in front of the film and cultural center on Whitney Avenue in Hamden was warm and crisp, the setting sun dappled with clouds, a bucolic setting for music that was all about acceptance.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 21, 2021 7:59 am
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Emily Herberich
Jacob’s Ladder.
The shape of a staircase crosses Jacob’s Ladder, but it offers only the suggestion of a structure. Which planes are the steps and which are the risers? The ghostly shapes using the staircase only confound the reading of the physical space, as they each follow the stairs according to their own rules, their own sense of gravity. Some appear to be using the opposite sides of the planks compared to other figures. The smoke rising from a candle is almost funny, as it moves up for neither the viewer nor the being holding the candle. What’s going on?
Sean Scanlon and Andrea Corazzini down Tweed-bound brew.
Sean Scanlon tried his first-ever cup of coffee Wednesday — after toasting a deal to bring an outpost of New Haven’s popular G Cafe to the growing airport he oversees.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 20, 2021 10:23 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
Minto.
At Artspace on Monday, as part of the Open Source Festival, artist Allison Minto was on hand to continue her deep dive into New Haven’s Black community, helping people preserve their own familial past while marking a moment of time in the present.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 19, 2021 8:22 am
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“Exquisitely crafted and exquisitely boring.” “Disgusting.” A source of motion sickness. And for one fan, revelatory.
Such were the reactions of the participants in the New Haven Free Public Library’s ongoing Animation Celebration series to four short works by the Quay Brothers — one of the most influential and also most divisive teams in animation history, whose works are perhaps uniquely suited to the run-up to Halloween.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 18, 2021 8:48 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
It was quieter than in years past, for the obvious Covid-19-related reasons. The hallways of Erector Square weren’t quite so jammed, the conversations were a little more subdued.
But still, Citywide Open Studios — part of Artspace’s rebranded Open Source Festival — happened this past weekend: Artists threw open the doors of their studios, and on Saturday and Sunday people moved from spot to spot in Erector Square’s warren-like maze of hallways, visiting old friends, making fresh acquaintances, and in many cases getting the first chance since the pandemic began to see the art both longtime and new tenants of the Peck Street complex had been making since before the pandemic began.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 18, 2021 8:36 am
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Douglas.
The band members stood at a 90-degree angle from the audience at Firehouse 12, facing stage right. Bassist Dezron Douglas held a clave, and played a simple, piercing rhythm that was a call to attention to the audience. Everyone fell silent. Douglas continued with the rhythm. Nazir Ebo picked it up on drums. Douglas then moved to his bass. George Burton sat at the piano. Lummie Spann took up his alto saxophone, and they began.
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Donald Brown |
Oct 18, 2021 8:34 am
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T. Charles Erickson Photos
Shannon Tyo.
On the bare stage of Long Wharf Theatre is one of those huge packing crates used for shipping props or sets. A man comes out of the shadows and pushes it further back, then opens its doors to reveal a theatrical space with a curtain and graceful designs on the wings. If you’re a regular theater-goer who hasn’t been in a theater since the Covid-19 lockdown began — and certainly not at Long Wharf Theatre’s stage at Sargent Drive, which has been closed since the spring of 2020 — that simple act of opening the crate to make theater on stage is striking, thrilling, magical.
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Karen Ponzio |
Oct 15, 2021 10:07 am
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Karen Ponzio Photos
Jake Blount Thursday evening at Cafe 9.
Fiddle music filled the “musician’s living room” Thursday night as two acts took to the Cafe Nine stage to offer an evening full of love, joy, and veneration.
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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.
