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Brian Slattery |
Oct 10, 2022 8:32 am
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Brian Jawara Gray.
Halfway through Brian Jarawa Gray and the Healing Drum’s set at Best Video on Saturday night, the musicians had settled into a deep set of rhythms centered around three big beats. Drummer Michael Mills looked up and out into the audience. “Heartbeat! Heartbeat!” he began to chant. “Heartbeat!” The audience joined him as Mills set up a chair in front of him, facing the band, and put a drum next to it. He got someone from the audience to play it. Soon he had turned the semicircle of the band into a full ring, of moving hands, steady rhythms, and smiling faces.
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Karen Ponzio |
Oct 7, 2022 9:01 am
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Seth Adam
Seth Adam recalled the feelings that bubbled up inside of him after the release of his remastered EPEast Rock back in 2019: “I thought to myself … there’s a lot going on in the world, especially the U.S., and I was like, I have a lot to say, I have a real lot to say.” Three years later, the New Haven-based singer-songwriter is singing those words loud and clear on his latest full-length record, the energetic and emblematic Fits and Starts and Stops. Available on CD since September and released today digitally, the album features 10 songs that not only showcase Adam’s straightforward yet poetic lyrics, but also his hard-hitting and harmonious hooks. Thoughtful and thought-provoking, Adam asks his listeners to ponder what they hear.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 6, 2022 9:05 am
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The cover for Big Wheel.
“Ghost of Fun,” the lead song from Christopher Cavaliere’s new album Big Wheel, starts off on a lope so easy and free that it takes a closer listen to appreciate the clever construction of it. There’s a guitar that draws the ear, but all around it, a organ bubbles, percussion doesn’t do quite the obvious thing. The song takes its time, building slowly but irrepressibly, pushed along by lyrics that show humor and humanity (“He prefers his drama first thing in the morning”). By the end, that lope is headed into outer space, floating off on clouds of fluttering synthesizers. We’re not going back to the beginning. Where are we headed?
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 4, 2022 8:30 am
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Rawling.
In preparing for the latest production from Madame Thalia — the Prohibition-era vaudeville show that music and theater mastermind Zohra Rawling is bringing back to Cafe Nine on Oct. 9 — Rawling thought of the last time she got to stage it in the club on State and Crown, in 2019. She ended a particular segment on a complete cliffhanger. “Tune in next time,” she recalled intoning to the crowd, only to have a member of the audience interrupt, yelling back “you monster!”; the cliffhanger was apparently too much anticipation for them to take. “I’ve done my job,” Rawling recalled thinking. “That was the best compliment I’ve ever received on stage.”
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Lindsay Skedgell |
Oct 3, 2022 8:51 am
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Through the curtain-lined doorway of Never Ending Books on Saturday night, an older woman in a blue shirt left the performance room, plugging her ears with her fingers. This reporter passed by her, going in the opposite direction. The room inside was in darkness, the sounds of metal grinding and shaping layers of noise music, echoing from a monitor on a fold-out table. Behind the table, OPCOH moved his hand along what looked to be a black electric violin, while the monitor, with wiring colored red, yellow, and blue, jutted out from the near corner of the table. His performance felt like a conjuring, what with the backdrop of wind from Hurricane Ian’s remnants picking up speed behind him. As he neared the end of his set, it sounded as if raindrops were falling from different corners of the dark room, the sound of them moving off into the distance and then disappearing.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 30, 2022 9:13 am
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Duvall.
Amanda Duvall, of the New Haven-based dance studio Baila Con Gusto, danced a solo salsa on the stage of the New Haven Green Thursday afternoon with a heady mixture of strength and grace. As the music churned out its unstoppable rhythm, a sense of joy and play surged through her, a smile never leaving her face even as the moves became more athletic. Her enthusiasm, it turned out, was contagious. Five minutes later dozens of people, adults and high schoolers alike, would join her and Baila Con Gusto co-instructor Jason Ramos in a dance and history lesson that deepened understanding as it taught steps.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 29, 2022 1:44 pm
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At one point during the first hour of the evening, a concertgoer turned to this reporter and asked, half rhetorically, “are you here for Yo La Tengo or Japanese Breakfast?” “Both” was a valid answer, as the bill at College Street Music Hall Wednesday night, uniting indie rock veterans with a recent indie favorite, brought together multiple generations of New Haven music fans and showed how two groups can arrive in the same expansive musical territory by different routes.
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Karen Ponzio |
Sep 28, 2022 8:25 am
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Alexis Robbins.
Tap dance is an indelible form of American art, a practice we have all seen on screens little and big, but have you ever seen it done in a public park? And have you ever thought, “Hey, I wish I could do that?” Tap dancer and choreographer Alexis Robbins is here to tell you that you can see it and practice it, on a stage and in a park, right here in New Haven in the days and weeks to come.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 28, 2022 8:23 am
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The video for Ionne’s latest single “The Last Time” — off his new album Fracture — sends the viewer into a spiral from the start. When the camera finally stops spinning, it’s still moving, and there is Ionne himself, singing into the darkness on a beach, a crashed spaceship behind him. “All we ever feared / Was killing time / Several hundred years / Amount to castles that we’ll never own / And songs I write / But cannot sing myself / Our dreams of spaceships and their secret plans to take us somewhere else,” he sings. It’s a melody about loss, but the music isn’t about giving up. It’s about falling down and getting up again, of finding the strength to start something new.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 27, 2022 8:24 am
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Ninja Brian, a.k.a Brian Wecht, stood on the stage of Cafe Nine Monday night without uttering a single word, communicating with the audience only through a poorly constructed PowerPoint presentation, bodily gestures, and flashing eyes. “Hello,” the first card read, as if warming up the crowd. A few other typical pleasantries followed. Then: “I will kill you all after the show.” The full house assembled for the show dissolved in laughter.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 23, 2022 8:31 am
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The images up on the screen at Gather on State Street on Thursday night were from the Canadian mockumentary comedy series Trailer Park Boys, but they were altered, made psychedelic. The ambient music behind it felt sad and urgent. It was a quick reminder to the people filing into the space just how much a few images and the right music can alter the vibe of a room — fitting, as Gather was performing yet another transformation, from coffee shop to after-hours lounge.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 19, 2022 9:07 am
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Cara DeLucia of Qween Kong.
Artist and musician Bill Saunders, of New Cardiff Giants, was beaming from the stage of the State House Friday night, looking over the good-sized crowd who had assembled there. He marveled at the health of the New Haven music scene, the emergence of new bands, the persistence of older bands. “It seems like everyone’s coming out with their own form of self-expression,” he said. Then he introduced the first band by saying he got to announce something he’d wanted to be able to say for a long time: “The Queen is dead! God save Qween Kong!”
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Jake Dressler |
Sep 16, 2022 10:15 am
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Fivio Foreign and Coi Leray performing Thursday night at College Street Music Hall.
New York drill icon Fivio Foreign and TikTok sensation Coi Leray performed at College Street Music Hall Thursday night in front of hundreds of teens in a sponsored collaboration with New Haven’s Youth and Recreation Department. The event — titled as a “Back 2 School Concert” — sold out in less than two days.
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Karen Ponzio |
Sep 16, 2022 9:35 am
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Mo Niklz vending Mo Piklz.
New Haven hip hop scene stalwart DJ Mo Niklz is well known across the city, state, and country as a purveyor of hot beats, but in recent years he has become nearly as well known for his half sours, pickled pineapple, and yes, even beets. Seen most often on New Haven stages spinning tunes with accompanying video at dance parties and providing the sounds at live shows behind artists such as Ceschi Ramos and Sketch Tha Cataclysm, Niklz has added a new business venture to the mix: Mo Piklz. The pickled items began as merch being sold at live shows, have become a welcome addition to local farmer’s markets and other events, and are appearing next at the New Haven PRIDE celebration on the Green this Saturday, Sept. 17.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 15, 2022 9:44 am
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Iridessa Søul LaFlare performs for PRIDE.
Host Maddelynn Hatter broke in the crowd at Gotham Citi Cafe on Orange Street Wednesday night by establishing a few guidelines regarding drag shows.
“If you ever know any drag queens, you know the most important rule — other than to be able to paint your face — is to be kind,” she said. “All of the queens have passed the test. They are very kind. Which is good, because I am an awful person.”
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Lindsay Skedgell |
Sep 12, 2022 9:39 am
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At the edge of Edgerton Park on Saturday, peeking from beneath the reddened cliffside of East Rock, a small stage on a winding path lined with pines held the final song of Moonrise Cartel’s set. Next to them, a field opened up to a man in a brown wizard hat, a circle of pastel yoga mats where children embodied woodland animals through yogic poses, people juggling, and long ribbon silk fans that got carried and lifted by the day’s wind. As Moonrise Cartel finished their last song, the sound of a bell was heard from somewhere off in the field as the voices of Goodnight Moonshine rose up from over the hill. The CT Folk Festival and Green Expo was back, after a two-year hiatus.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 12, 2022 9:33 am
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Niyonu.
Niyonu Spann had her eyes closed, her hands reaching for the audience. The gesture mirrored the music swirling around her. In all of it was weight and longing, but also, strength and freedom. It was the heady sound of an experienced hand flying into uncharted territory, as on Friday night at the State House, Spann, a musician with a career spanning decades, was launching new music with a new ensemble, digging ever deeper and expanding on the musical and spiritual ideas that had fueled her for her entire life. Backed by a small choir of singers — Foluke Bennett, Paul Bryant Hudson, Ingrid Lakey, Cindy Mizell, and Diane Spann — as well as a band of John F. Adams on keys, Carl Carter on bass, Chris Wright on drums, and Eric Rey on conga, Spann created music of deep grooves, rich harmonies, and poetic lyrics that spoke to the spirit. Mizell regaled the audience with a scorching take on Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On?”
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Michael Barone |
Sep 9, 2022 2:43 pm
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Claudia Bell.
Claudia Bell, a mainstay of the original music scene in New Haven during the fertile late 1970s and 1980s as a music journalist and a bass player, died Aug. 14 at the age of 69 after a long bout with cancer. One of her pals and bandmates, Michael Barone, below offers reflections of her and what it meant to be in New Haven at the time.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 9, 2022 11:14 am
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Michalsen.
Appreciation of nature. Acknowledgment of change. Grief at what’s being lost. But also, hope for the possibility of adaptation. These are the themes of a new set of climate concerts being organized by Dignity Music, a nonprofit helmed by musician and educator Ravenna Michalsen. The first one — slated for Saturday, Sept. 17 at Bethesda Lutheran Church — is intended to stir heart and mind together to action.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 6, 2022 9:04 am
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“Here Again,” the first track from Saint James’s new EPUs and Your Friends, starts with a fuzzy chord dragged from the guitar’s strings, setting the mood right for the heavy drums and bass that fall in at the end of the measure. They’re accompanied by a slide guitar, a healthy heaping of twang, that feels right at home in the music but broadens the sound’s landscape. We’re not just in the Northeast anymore. We could be anywhere in America, or maybe passing through it. But Saint James isn’t exactly about windswept highways across the prairie. There’s menace there, too, embedded in the music and the lyrics: “Like a phony gun I am holding you up with a sense of revenge,” the singer states on the chorus, knowing helplessness and rage coiled together.
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Brian Slattery |
Aug 31, 2022 9:08 am
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After a two-year Covid hiatus, CT Folk returns this year with a changed Folk Festival and Green Expo. It’s still at Edgerton Park, and it still combines a music festival with a dedication to furthering environmental causes. But it’s now a two-day event — Sept. 10 and 11 — featuring its most diverse lineup yet, from solo singer-songwriters to R&B and jam bands to hip hop artists. If the shift seems abrupt, it shouldn’t; rather, it’s the fruition of an intention CT Folk stated years ago to expand its musical boundaries, exploring what folk music means and what it can be in 2022. For its organizers, the hope is that the festival can reach more and more people, in New Haven and beyond, and help turn the festival into a larger regional tentpole end-of-summer event.
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Lindsay Skedgell |
Aug 30, 2022 8:48 am
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Your Queer Plant Shop.
The outer edge of Pitkin Plaza on Sunday was lined with rare plants, bursts of pollinators, handmade leather goods, zines, and two birthday cakes of four different flavors. Nestled between vibrant murals, performers sang and folks from all around New Haven filled the brick park. One man next to a mural waved a cigar around in circles, dancing to the music Love n’ Co played. The band’s singer — Lovelind Richards — had various shades of blue painted across her eyes in thick bands. A leather worker from Beacon Craft Studio stitched a deep maroon leather piece with thick thread. It was East Rock House’s first birthday.
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Brian Slattery |
Aug 29, 2022 9:27 am
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The music poured onto Temple Street all the way from the plaza in the middle of the block, directing and enticing a steady stream of pedestrians and shoppers to the long rows of canopies set up for the Black Wall Street Festival, an afternoon-long event designed to showcase a wide range of Black entrepreneurs.
Thanks to the robust turnout, a live band, and a pervasive sense of cheer, the festival was true to its name, turning Temple Street Plaza into something like bazaar meets block party.
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Brian Slattery |
Aug 29, 2022 9:17 am
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Rev. Jeremiah Paul.
The Rev. Jeremiah Paul, pastor for Hamden Plains United Methodist Church, held his hand high as he spoke to the crowd assembled to hear him at Hamden’s Town Center Park on Friday evening. His audience were members of his congregation, but also from the greater New Haven community, a mix of languages, ages, cultures and creeds. Among them were artists selling their pieces and food truck vendors feeding the people.
“We had a little rain shower, which I consider a blessing from the heavens,” he said amiably. With the sun out, the show was ready to start.
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Brian Slattery |
Aug 24, 2022 8:06 am
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The Tines.
“Collarbone,” the lead single from the latest album by the New Haven-based band The Tines, starts with a simple, steady drumbeat, a pulsing bass, a single guitar chord. It’s a sound that’s taking its time, leaving plenty of space. Having established the atmosphere, the instruments get down to work. The guitar fleshes out its ideas. The bass answers with a melody of its own. A keyboard wriggles in from a corner of the musical space. The drums add their own accents. An echoing voice then takes its place within the music. “Chin clamping down on collarbone / talking on the phone / talking on the phone,” it sings. “With the one who leaves you prone / makes you feel so known / makes you feel so known.”
