by | Mar 31, 2021 3:13 pm | Comments (2)
Emily Hays Photos
Robert Harris: I can’t make just a little collard greens.
It was 30 years ago when Robert Harris finally got his mother’s collard greens recipe exactly right.
Now he doesn’t even have to taste the cooked greens to know that they are ready for the customers of his Whalley Avenue restaurant, Mama Mary’s Soul Food.
by | Mar 31, 2021 10:15 am | Comments (2)
Thomas Breen Photo
Keeping it local: Nunez-Smith at Fair Haven vaccination campaign launch, juggling national and grassroots New Haven Covid work.
Nunez-Smith in conversation Tuesday evening with Kica Matos.
Public health and the arts working hand in hand in the quest for social justice.
by | Mar 30, 2021 9:45 am | Comments (1)
“Indigo Seven,” the opening and title track from Nick Di Maria’s latest album, starts with a flourish from a keyboard and drums that then heads off on a searching groove. A trumpet delivers a melody that takes its time unspooling over the rhythm. As the band settles in, the texture gets deeper and darker, and doesn’t return until nearly 10 minutes later, when the melody takes over again. It’s a long trip — fitting, since part of the New Haven-based musician’s mission is to explore possibilities, to make space. On Indigo Seven, with its overt nods to science fiction, that mission couldn’t be more apparent.
by | Mar 29, 2021 8:51 am | Comments (0)
Karen Ponzio Photos
Frank Critelli and The Birdmen share the distanced love.
“Boy, does it feel nice to be back in this room,” said Shellye Valauskas from the stage at Cafe Nine . She and Dean Falcone were one of four acts who made their way through three songs each in celebration of the Local Bands Show’s 34th anniversary — and the birthday of one of its founders, local music legend James Velvet, who died in 2015.
Continue reading ‘Local Bands Celebrate New Haven Music Icon’
by | Mar 26, 2021 1:28 pm | Comments (4)
New Haven’s Nu Haven Kapelye klezmer band marked a tradition that’s thousands of years old with a new tradition of its own.
by | Mar 26, 2021 9:32 am | Comments (0)
On Thursday night, a filmmaker and two professors screened a new documentary about Soul! — the pioneering PBS show focusing on Black culture that ran from 1968 to 1973 — and found, in its celebration of Black artists and message of revolutionary uplift, serious parallels with our current moment. The screening and discussion were sponsored by the Schwarzman Center and the Afro-American Cultural Center at Yale.
by | Mar 26, 2021 8:00 am | Comments (1)
Eliza Benitez Photo Logo by Gil Morrison
Album art.
“Tigerlily,” the opening track off the new album Deja Reve from New Haven’s own synth-pop rock angel Falconeer, catches you almost off guard. The synthesizer sizzles through the speakers, the rhythm repeating until you find yourself moving along, and when the beat drops you ask yourself, “where’s the party?” — until you realize that with this album the party can be anywhere you like. And that’s exactly what Falconeer (a.k.a. Gil Morrison) intended.
by | Mar 25, 2021 9:20 am | Comments (0)
Social media spats and California wildfires. The difficulties of freelance writing careers. But most of all food — growing it, foraging for it, cooking it, eating it.
On Wednesday night, these were some of the contents of the latest episode of Co Create, a conversation series hosted by Nadine Nelson, head of Global Local Gourmet, interdisciplinary artist, and creative in residence at the New Haven Free Public Library.
by | Mar 25, 2021 9:16 am | Comments (0)
by | Mar 24, 2021 3:06 pm | Comments (3)
Lisa Reisman Photos
Chef and manager Kenia Calderon at the grill.
Kenia Calderon slathered Italian bread with mayonnaise and layered on lettuce and tomatoes. She slung sliced ribeye steak, onions, and cheese onto a grill. She gently transferred the sizzling ingredients onto the sub.
Calderon then wrapped up one of New Haven’s best-kept secrets: B&M Deli’s grilled steak and cheese sub
Continue reading ‘Today’s Special: Kenia’s Steak & Cheese Sub’
by | Mar 24, 2021 9:24 am | Comments (0)
Mooncha (a.k.a. Thailend Delaine Parker) kicks off “Mojo Jojo” with a deliciously fuzzy chromatic surf line from their guitar. Chris Chew responds with pounding drums, while Marcus-Aurelius C. Benton fills in the bottom end of the frequency range with keys. “Just watch me!” Mooncha screams, and the band digs into a sound as grungy as it is danceable.
But mere minutes later, on “Upside Down,” the band is delivering sunny yet anxious pop.
And on the third song, “Harder,” they dive straight into live hip hop. It’s the latest delirious — and live — performance from the Sans Serif Sessions, a series begun by the New Haven-based recording studio in the fall that, on the cusp of venues in town returning to being able to have live shows, let New Haven have a taste of what they may be in for.
Continue reading ‘Video Series Shows New Haven Musicians Ready To Perform’
by | Mar 23, 2021 9:25 am | Comments (2)
Karen Ponzio Photo
Cafe Nine in fall 2020.
From rooftop jams to bartop guitar solos, from hip hop to punk rock to doo wop, Cafe Nine has a tangled history as a fixture of New Haven’s music scene. As the venue looks to reopen in the near future, Jason Bischoff-Wurstle, the New Haven Museum’s director of photo-archives, dives into its past in a recent installment of “Micro-Histories,” a now nearly year-long series about the corners of the Elm City that make it what it is.
by | Mar 22, 2021 9:04 am | Comments (6)
Kane with Momi.
Kimono: many people are familiar with it as an article of traditional Japanese clothing. But as artist Kathy Kane points out, it’s also “such a beautiful word.” The juxtaposition is apt. In conjuring up the practical and concrete with the aesthetic and the abstract, Kane has made a series of pieces that allow her to express her most recent ideas as a thoroughly abstract painter, while marrying it to a familiar form.
The resulting show, “Kimono,” runs now through March 28 at City Gallery on Upper State Street.
by | Mar 19, 2021 9:47 am | Comments (0)
A textured guitar and languid drum beat pulse out of the speakers together, but they sound like the radio 35 years ago, warm and a little tinny. The sound of being in the car, or someone’s kitchen, before cell phones and Bluetooth speakers. Then the sound opens up, and we’re in the present, looking back.
“Hello was the first thing you ever said to me,” Manny James sings, his voice between a whisper and a croon. “That’s when I had a revelation: what a great equation we could be.”
Continue reading ‘Manny James Takes People Back And Pays It Forward’
by | Mar 18, 2021 4:53 pm | Comments (0)
“Assassin!”
“The one who says it is it …”
by | Mar 18, 2021 11:59 am | Comments (5)
Thomas Breen photo
A sign outside Parking Lot A of the new Westville Music Bowl.
Langan Engineering
The updated traffic and parking plan for the 2021 season.
The operators of a new Westville outdoor-music venue plan to keep Yale Avenue open to through traffic this concert season, as they dramatically scaled back the site’s parking plan to correspond to a Covid-induced capacity cap.
Continue reading ‘Westville Music Bowl Drops Street Closure Plan’
by | Mar 18, 2021 9:53 am | Comments (0)
In April last year, Tank and the Bangas headlined at College Street Music Hall, supported by local favorites Phat A$tronaut, Jelani Sei, and Nikita. The next week, Ian Sweet anchored a show at Cafe Nine, with Jay Som, Audio Jane, and Daniprobably opening. The next month, Farewood, Violent Mae, Passing Strange, and Sarah Golley shared a bill at Best Video.
We know that none of these shows happened. But since September, local musician Dan Deutsch has constructed a kind of alternate reality in which they did.
Continue reading ‘Music Posters Imagine Shows That Could Have Been’
by | Mar 17, 2021 5:55 pm | Comments (2)
Courtney Luciana photo
Loretta and Louis Abate.
Regardless of lines going out of the door of New Haven’s renowned “Little Italy” restaurants, many owners didn’t think they were going to make it through the pandemic.
Continue reading ‘Wooster Square Rolls With Pandemic, Ready For Spring Rejuvenation’
by | Mar 17, 2021 10:04 am | Comments (4)
Julia Gill Photo
Cunningham and Keen.
Standing in her Erector Square studio on a recent afternoon, New Haven-based artist Jan Cunningham recalled a bodily reaction to a series of charcoal drawings she had made.
by | Mar 16, 2021 9:33 am | Comments (2)
Brian Slattery Photo
On Friday evening, Elena Augusewicz, Peter Cunningham, Jared Emerling, Jessica Larkin-Wells, Conor Perreault, and Charli Taylor — a.k.a. six of the Never Ending Books Collective — met in the storefront at 810 State St. They talked about how the beloved bookstore, music spot, and community space, which announced it was ending its decades-long run in December, may turn out not to be ending after all.
Continue reading ‘Collective Keeps Never Ending Books Alive’
by | Mar 15, 2021 12:46 pm | Comments (9)
A new chicken joint has opened in Newhallville, with a name that echoes New Haven’s history.
by | Mar 15, 2021 8:09 am | Comments (15)
Digital rendering of the Westville Music Bowl.
Here’s a harbinger of both warmer weather and a post-pandemic future: An outdoor-music venue is set to launch in Westville beginning with an April 30 show by the jam band Gov’t Mule.
Continue reading ‘Live Concerts Set At Westville Music Bowl’
by | Mar 15, 2021 8:07 am | Comments (0)
Deto 22 sips from a mug while the words “can use a cup of coffee” are heard. Then Sketch tha Cataclysm breaks out in dance and verse: “Even when the drama begins, yo, that problem ain’t a problem. That’s it. I wanna live.”
Continue reading ‘Musicians Celebrate Collaboration With “Red Eye”’
by | Mar 12, 2021 10:52 am | Comments (2)
Reinaldo Goeyenchea/ La Voz Hispana
“We can share the noon for both of us … it can be a big deal.”
by | Mar 12, 2021 10:50 am | Comments (0)
Deborah Ramsay
A Week in Times
Deborah Ramsey’s A Week in Times appears at first like an exercise in stillness. Pale colors, simple geometric shapes, an attention to texture. But the lines written in faint pencil across the bottom of each page tell a different story. “A new pier on Sunday in St. Petersburg, Fla. The state has one of the nation’s worst outbreaks,” reads one. “Many schools are unequipped to ventilate spaces properly,” reads another. A third pivots: “Portland, Ore. has had 50 consecutive days of protests.” A fourth: “Police officials say there were ‘isolated cases’ of inappropriate force. But 64 videos show seemingly unwarranted attacks.” Each line is followed by a date from last year — a line pulled from that day’s headlines.