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Kimberly Wipfler |
Feb 14, 2022 8:36 am
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Sven Gamsky onstage at CSMH.
Singer-songwriter Still Woozy (a.k.a. Sven Eric Gamsky) reminded the audience at College Street Music Hall Friday night just how nice it is to experience live music together at a concert. The collective dancing and singing of the packed crowd offered a sense of pre-pandemic nostalgia, if only for a moment.
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Karen Ponzio |
Feb 11, 2022 10:12 am
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Karen Ponzio Photo
He Was A God
“Are you sick and tired?” screamed Ben Curns of the band He Was A God, with his arms raised to the audience. They answered in a chorus that turned up the volume of an already thunderous and thoroughly entertaining atmosphere at Cafe Nine last night where three bands, each one distinctly different from the other but similar in approach, delivered a Thursday full of hot and heavy sounds.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 10, 2022 8:47 am
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Courtesy Octavia E. Butler Estate
Butler.
A new art exhibit, and a panel on migration facilitated by Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services (IRIS). The screening and discussion of the “first-ever ethnographic acid Western.” A Sun Ra tribute concert.
All these events and more, happening between now and the middle of May, are organized around a single novel by a science-fiction visionary that is the focus of this year’s One City: One Read, a campaign organized by the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, in partnership with Yale’s Schwarzman Center, the New Haven Free Public Library, Artspace, and Best Video.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 7, 2022 9:02 am
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“I Love You,” the opening track from Rudeyna’s new EPQueen Yapadoo, starts with beguiling simplicity; it’s a slow jam in the R&B vein, with a lazy groove, a lush organ, a floating guitar. Rudeyna’s voice, quavering but sure, enters and declares the simplest, most effective lyric in pop music: “I love you,” she sings. She sings it again, playing with it more. Shimmering keyboards, cooing background vocals, begin to destabilize things. Then a distorted electric guitar crashes in, and everything changes at once. The song reinvents itself from there, over and over.
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 4, 2022 9:13 am
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New Haven-based musician Tim Palmieri’s upcoming show with Lotus — at College Street Music Hall on Feb. 19 — is another step in his long career as a nationally touring guitarist, but also a chance to return an Elm City stage. “I’m 42 years old and I’ve been gigging since I was 13,” Palmieri said. “Band after band, gig after gig — and now I’ve been able to join Lotus.”
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Brian Slattery |
Feb 2, 2022 9:10 am
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Cafe Nine on State and Crown was the spot Tuesday night for three young New Haven-based acts who brought genuine affection to the stage — for one another, for the audience, and for the Elm City itself.
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Karen Ponzio |
Feb 1, 2022 8:43 am
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Fernanda Franco Photo
Fernanda Franco
Fernanda Franco brings every aspect of her artistic self to her new job as outreach director of New Haven Reads. “I walk into the office at Bristol Street, and I feel like Belle from Beauty and the Beast because you walk in and the walls are lined with books and it’s beautiful,” she said. She sang that last line, not unlike the character did in the movie.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 28, 2022 9:07 am
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Paul Aguilar of the Callisto Quartet looked over the growing audience assembled at Gather on Upper State Street Thursday night. “Cool thing,” he said. “Literally today is Mozart’s birthday” — his 265th. In honor of that, the quartet was going to perform his famous “Hunt” quartet, “one of the most well-loved pieces” in Mozart’s oeuvre, along with Brahms’s third string quartet, which could be understood as an homage to the Mozart piece.
What followed was a world-class performance, delivered for free to what became a full house at the new coffee shop and community space on Upper State Street.
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Karen Ponzio |
Jan 24, 2022 11:45 am
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Raizine Bruton Photo
Hank Hoffman
It is hard to imagine Hamden’s beloved Best Video without Hank Hoffman, its current executive director, who has been an integral part of that institution since 1994. But in June he will retire to a life beyond the walls of DVDs and the wildly unique series of shows and programs he helped bring to life at the corner of Whitney Avenue and Thornton Street.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 24, 2022 8:48 am
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José Oyola, a.k.a JOATA, smiled from the stage of Space Ballroom in Hamden as he looked out over the crowd. “It’s been a long journey,” he said, though there was a sense of things coming full circle, a chapter closing. He revealed how the song he had just performed, he had played nine years ago in the building just across the parking lot of the industrial park, when the Cellar on Treadwell was The Space. He turned to the audience again. “You can come closer,” he said. “I know it’s weird times.”
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 24, 2022 8:43 am
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Trey Moore had just finished his first song Sunday night at the State House. The applause had ended and there was a silence. “I don’t talk much,” Moore said, direct and self-deprecating. But it turned out that he and the two acts that preceded him — Danie V and Ammar — had a lot to say, perhaps all the more so because, for all three acts, it was their first time returning to a performing stage since the pandemic had started.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 13, 2022 9:07 am
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Michael Rogers Photo
“Amnesia,” the first song from the Sawtelles’ new album Promises and Codes, creates a mood from the first strike of the guitar, gritty and atmospheric. The drums come in to lay down a rhythm, but it still feels loose, as expansive as it began. Then the plaintive vocal comes in, unsettled, a little surreal: “I won’t go downtownm because it’s haunted / Memoir waits to greet on every block / Dodging the past is a task that’s daunting / Before she disappeared she unplugged all the clocks.”
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 10, 2022 8:00 pm
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Mourners Monday at first-ever Toad's funeral.
The line on York Street went halfway down the block on Monday afternoon as friends and family gathered to bid farewell to New Haven music legend Rohn Lawrence, whose visiting hours and funeral service were held at Toad’s Place, the stage on which he’d performed countless times.
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Karen Ponzio |
Jan 7, 2022 9:34 am
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Josh Esan Photo
Jessica Rose and Mark Lyon.
Mark Lyon (aka Marq The A$tronaut) loves to joke around as much as he loves to make music. Referring to his newest single with vocalist Jessica Rose, called “Bliss,” he initially said it was written about a cat.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 6, 2022 8:51 am
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Nu Haven Kapelye, sometimes billed as New England’s largest klezmer band, saw out the final days of 2021 with two concerts — one on Dec. 25 at Congregation Mishkan Israel and one on Dec. 31 as part of Yiddish New York’s globe-spanning, 24-hour Klezathon — that saw the ensemble carrying on longstanding traditions, expanding its reach, and exemplifying the tenacity of musicians and music to get through another pandemic year with spirits intact.
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 5, 2022 9:10 am
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“Bright Lights,” the first song from O.K. Company’s new album Stronglove, is built on a set of luscious, chiming piano chords that at first has only a hi-hat keeping the backbeat for accompaniment. But that’s more than enough to buoy the singer, who delivers lyrics that speak of a different time and our own. “All alone on a crowded afternoon,” she sings. “I miss you lately / because everybody needs somebody.”
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Brian Slattery |
Jan 4, 2022 9:46 am
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“The 99th Day,” the first song from Andy Daps’s new album Small Virtues, starts off with a driving beat and a fuzzed-out guitar. But Daps’s vocal is even-tempered, almost serene. “It happened on the 99th day / At the time it was surely a sign / Recurring ordeal / Battle scar, surreal,” he sings. As he hits the chorus, instead of an electric guitar, a sitar takes the lead, making way for a break involving tabla and flute. It’s the kind of musical left turn that you don’t see coming but brings all the more satisfaction for the surprise. It’s also a proper opener to an album that’s filled with similar musical moments — smart, unexpected, and totally accessible.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 23, 2021 9:34 am
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From folk punk to hip hop to shimmering pop and progressive bluegrass, New Haven’s musicians gave voice to our hopes and fears in a difficult year — and offered broader perspectives to help us see how we got here, and how we can get through it with heads and hearts engaged.
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Brian Slattery |
Dec 22, 2021 3:09 pm
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After the long dormancy imposed by the Covid-19 related shutdown of 2020, New Haven’s live music scene came back in 2021 — first with a little trepidation, then with gusto, as if making up for lost time.
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Karen Ponzio |
Dec 20, 2021 9:32 am
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Karen Ponzio Photos
Elm City Big Band
Sunday night, under the full moon and the first breaths of true winter weather, the Elm City Big Band made its State House debut with a holiday spectacular, an event filled with two sets of seasonal favorites, original music, covers, and all that jazz.
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Courtney Luciana |
Dec 16, 2021 3:26 pm
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Courtney Luciana Photos
Rapper Dustystaystrue back at Barnard Thursday after a national tour.
Five hundred students gathered in the courtyard of Barnard Environmental Science and Technology School roared with excitement Thursday morning as Dustystaytrue’s “Never Change” blared from the speakers — and the rising rapper himself arrived on scene.
