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Brian Slattery |
May 25, 2020 9:30 am
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Francesco Turrisi played his banjo like an oud, partaking of Middle Eastern tonality and phrasing. Rhiannon Giddens‘s voice, strong and sure, floated over the top of that, in a sound that felt American. There were no other sounds, and there didn’t need to be. In the space between their instruments, they bridged thousands of miles, and thousands of years.
“Ten thousand stories, ten thousand songs,” Giddens sang. “Ten thousand worries, ten thousand wrongs.” The lyrics spoke to hardship, but the voice sounded like hope.
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Brian Slattery |
May 22, 2020 9:42 am
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Kelly Sembos
Sembos.
“Born on a Leap Year,” the first track from The Backyard Committee‘s new album Surf Hotel Ghosts, starts with a sunny riff that has just enough salty grit and dissonance to keep things interesting. The band drops in, expanding the emotions, until the singer’s plaintive voice seals it up, making the track happy and sad at the same time.
“It’s not the real thing / What is it for? / The time is wasting,” the singer coos. “It was lost, it was found, it was shimmering with sound / And she watched / It was all too much to take.”
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Nora Grace-Flood |
May 21, 2020 11:45 am
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Nora Grace-Flood Photo
Eammon Ryan, second from left, with crew on opening day.
Eamonn Ryan was ready to start serving customers at The Playwright Irish Pub the moment the governor gave the green light — and five cooped-up Southern Connecticut State University students were ready to order.
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Brian Slattery |
May 21, 2020 9:36 am
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Jason Calogine was tired and prepared. Rehab Rajou was energized and excited. Isabella Fletcher-Violante was happy to be there. They and several other fellow Mauro-Sheridan Interdistrict Magnet students were on a Zoom chat with Michael Hinton, a teaching artist at Elm Shakespeare, recording a final few scenes for the school’s production of Cymbeline — which pivoted from theater to Zoom film project to keep the program going during the Covid-19 pandemic.
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Emily Hays & Maya McFadden |
May 20, 2020 7:01 pm
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Emily Hays Photo
Enjoying a lunchtime beer and waiting for steak tips to arrive, Al Casagrande (pictured) felt safe sitting outside Temple Grill on the first day of Connecticut’s “phase one” reopening — safer than he feels on his construction job.
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Karen Ponzio |
May 20, 2020 9:03 am
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Karen Ponzio Photos
Maxwell Omer at The State House rehearsing for the Cabaret last year.
Maxwell Omer is contemplative, calm, still, but not at rest. While many musicians are waiting for venues to open and trying to find a way to create through a pandemic-induced lack of gigs, the New Haven-based lead singer and guitarist for The Right Offs has chosen to remain present and put the work in where he can: with his songwriting.
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Brian Slattery |
May 19, 2020 9:59 am
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Who starred in My Fair Lady when it premiered at the Shubert Theatre in 1956? Whose ghost haunts the Palace Theatre on Broadway? What is the fastest song sung in Hamilton?
The questions may have been trivia, but the cause wasn’t trivial.
The trivia contest — as well as a series of musical performances, a sumptuous set of take-home snacks, and a quick cocktail lesson — were part of the Shubert’s “Next Stop: New Haven,” a fundraising event on Monday evening that drew together the theater, its patrons, and a few local restaurants for an evening of entertainment and a reminder of the importance of preserving downtown’s cultural scene through the Covid-19 pandemic.
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Brian Slattery |
May 18, 2020 9:55 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
Jungden.
Three concerts, 15 minutes each, in three different locations.
That was musician Jan Jungden’s assignment as the first performer in the International Festival of Arts & Ideas’s Arts on Call series, which allows patrons to support artists by booking them and having them deliver a short outdoor concert at their home.
Jungden made the rounds on Friday, from Orange to East Rock to downtown, leaving dozens of concertgoers swinging in her wake.
A half century after a Black Panther trial consumed New Haven and thrust it into the national discussion over racial and social justice, survivors of the episode as well as a new generation revisited that time to see what it means today.
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Karen Ponzio |
May 15, 2020 8:48 am
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Maxine Philavong Photo
Michael Moore and Gorman Bechard at Modern during last year’s festival
Last year at this time New Haven Documentary Film Festival, or NHDocs, was getting ready to fill screens for 10 days — from May 30 to June 9 — with over 100 films from all over the world, including New Haven. This year the festival’s organizers find themselves moving their seventh festival to the end of the summer, adapting and offering more viewing options as the world and their city deal with the ongoing effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and resulting restrictions.
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Brian Slattery |
May 14, 2020 10:12 am
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The cover for Evelyn Gray’s latest EP, Give Yrself What U Need, shows Gray in a location and disposition that seems almost jarring given our current situation on lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic. She’s outside, in a radiant desert, close to the photographer. The expression on her face conveys a sense of deep satisfaction.
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Brian Slattery |
May 13, 2020 10:01 am
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Joy Bush Photo
Rosenthal.
“We’re whole and broken at the same time,” said artist Judy Sirota Rosenthal, in delving into a concept that has fueled her art for decades.
She invoked the Japanese practice of kintsugi, whereby pottery is repaired by filling the breaks with gold, drawing attention to the break and making it part of the object’s history. She found resonance between that Asian practice and a lyric from Canadian songwriter Leonard Cohen, who drew from Jewish, Buddhist, and other belief systems in the lyrics to his songs: “There’s a crack, a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.” She described a life in which working on art, on oneself, and on the world around us were part of the same thing.
“Making for me has been the work of my soul,” she said.
