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Brian Slattery |
Nov 5, 2024 7:55 am
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Allen Lowe.
On Friday night, the latest show in Firehouse 12’s fall concert series featured a journey through the American music of the 20th century before the rise of hip hop, as imaginatively seen through the eyes of one of jazz’s most central figures, Louis Armstrong. In walking decades in the icon’s shoes, it was also a trip through the latest compositional ideas of musician and writer Allen Lowe.
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Jamil Ragland |
Nov 4, 2024 7:54 am
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Damien Escobar plays at the Little Black Dress Gala
Annual Little Black Dress Gala Infinity Hall Hartford Nov. 2, 2024
A friend told me that Damien Escobar, the world-renowned violinist, was performing at a gala called Little Black Dress to celebrate and benefit the Legacy Foundation of Hartford.
So I was prepared for some great violin playing, but I didn’t know I would also discover a great organization in my own back yard.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 30, 2024 8:44 am
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Effy Gray Photo
Gelsey Bell: “The piece is designed so that people start off feeling apocalyptic. Then they can go on a journey that leaves them in a different place."
Over a pulsing synthesizer, musician and composer Gelsey Bell ends the final song of her opera with the line “I’m struck by morning / the orange line of light / low and fast, revolving flight.” By then, however, to the listener the meaning of that first noun is ambiguous: does she mean “morning” or “mourning”? The line carries the weight of both meanings with ease.
It’s part of Bell’s experimental opera MƆɹNIŊ [Morning//Mourning], which “inhabits a world in which all humans have disappeared from Earth,” Bell writes. “An ensemble of five vocalist/multi-instrumentalists witness and guide the audience through the changes on Earth as forests grow back, new species evolve, and the human-made world erodes away. The piece is a fantastical and playful exploration into the dire political and ethical contradictions that structure current human relations with nature.”
U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy and Honda Smith with firefighters from Engine 15 who work with kids at The Shack ...
... as artist David Coardes stands before mural of Alder Smith painted by Imani Roberts.
In the midst of a spirited game of Bingo among a group of senior citizens at The Shack, there was an interruption. It was U.S. Senator Chris Murphy stopping by — to get an up-close look at what makes the West Hills community center work so well.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 28, 2024 8:57 am
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Awilda Sterling-Duprey in "...blindfolded" ...
... soundtracked live by Jesse Hameen II, Morris Trent, and Johnathan Moore, at NXTHVN.
In the large common area at NXTHVN on Henry Street, a temporary, two-segment wall was erected, mounted with black paper. Artist Awilda Sterling-Duprey moved in that small space, a blindfold over her eyes, large pastels in her hands — improvisational jazz helping guide her way, during the last weekend of New Haven Open Studios.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 25, 2024 8:53 am
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At the beginning of a night of music at Three Sheets on Elm Street on Thursday, Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen (DESK) volunteer Andrew Zumwalt-Hathaway lauded both New Haven’s musicians and DESK as two ingredients that make the Elm City great. He noted that volunteering for DESK has become “one of the most fulfilling parts of my life.”
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Karen Ponzio |
Oct 24, 2024 10:36 am
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Karen Ponzio Photos.
Goodnight Blue Moon
As the outside temperature last night stayed a bit warmer than your typical October, inside Best Video the atmosphere was super cool, and not just because the AC was on. Two bands — Portland, Ore.’s Blue Darling and New Haven’s own Goodnight Blue Moon — made Wednesday more celebratory than just the halfway point to the weekend with their sweet harmonies, lush melodies, and lyrical loveliness.
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 15, 2024 9:24 am
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Dan Greene, sometimes of the Mountain Movers, cast a dislocating spell on a rapt audience at the Institute Library Saturday night, with a tremolo guitar and his echo-drenched voice. He was singing a song about a usual habit, of meeting friends downtown and hanging out in parking lots. But one night, he sang, “was different because / I didn’t know where I was.” The eerie sense of unease tipped into the surreal. “We all turned into birds / and flew over the town / we turned back into wolves / when we touched the ground.” Had they been wolves all along?
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Brian Slattery |
Oct 9, 2024 8:42 am
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Anna Webber Photo
Christian Sands.
“Good Morning Heartache,” the opening track on Christian Sands’s latest album, Embracing Dawn, begins with a warm, gently unfolding gesture from the piano, an easing into consciousness. But then there’s an insistent ping from somewhere else. Something’s off, something’s wrong. A beat settles in, heavy and lethargic, with strings adding extra weight. It’s an exploration of a state of mind, in which maybe everything will be okay in time — but it’s not okay now.
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Karen Ponzio |
Oct 2, 2024 9:41 am
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Karen Ponzio Photo
The Psychedelic Furs: Still making music that's fun, sexy, and a bit dangerous.
October opened with a one-two punch as the dreamy double bill of the Psychedelic Furs and The Jesus and Mary Chain turned College Street Music Hall into a post-punk version of heaven.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 30, 2024 8:37 am
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Kelly Jensen Photo
Taylor Ho Bynum.
Cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum smiled from the stage at Firehouse 12 Friday night, explaining how good it was to be back there. “I cannot imagine my life without it,” he said, from his collaborations with Anthony Braxton to his numerous performances there with other groups. On Friday, however, he was there with UK-based pianist Alexander Hawkins, as part of the Crown Street bar- recording studio-performance space’s fall jazz series, running now into December.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 23, 2024 9:12 am
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Magdalena Abrego crouched over her pedalboard Sunday evening at Never Ending Books on State Street, and unleashed a lush, complex soundscape, a series of guitar-made tones layered over one another, now vibrating together.
As the sounds continued pulsing around her, she began to play simple chords, laying down a rhythm, a chord progression. On the downbeat, Mali Obomsawin and Willis Edmundson joined Abrego. The soundscape switched off in a second, and the band — Deerlady — sounded, suddenly, like a rock band. But the impression was left, and a point made, that the trio was drawing from a broad musical vocabulary. Which made sense; the last time Abrego, Obomsawin, and opener Allison Burik were in town, in May 2023, they were playing music that brought together elements of traditional Abenaki song and free jazz at Firehouse 12. Deerlady deployed a different sound, but still had the same searching sensibility.
Austin Scelzo hit the two bottom strings of his violin, struck a couple higher notes, launched a high-lonesome lament that seemed to stretch back eight decades to rural Appalachia.
Trouble in my soul I know it’s wrong But it’s feeling so good …
Did Bill Monroe originally sing this? Was it a gospel number repurposed for bluegrass barn dances? It sounded as though it leaped from an old vinyl 78, minus the scratches.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 19, 2024 9:36 am
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Jangly, catchy riffs. Yearning melodies. Rhythms designed for dancing. Three bands — Floater Verses, Toy Cities, and Los Shadows — deployed all three elements to great effect at Cafe Nine Wednesday night, adding up to one of the poppiest nights the club on State and Crown has booked in recent memory.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 16, 2024 10:09 am
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Gogol Bordello.
In an election cycle marked by acrimony and fractious divisiveness, the music at Toad’s on Friday — featuring international punk band Gogol Bordello, supported by label mates Puzzled Panther and Crazy and the Brains — amounted to a ragged, full-throated cry for action and greater community, with a sharp edge.
Steve Mednick performing Thursday in the WNHH FM studio.
Steve Mednick played a song from a new album as well as from his next album — while waiting to see how both the track, and country’s political future, play out.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 13, 2024 9:20 am
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At Lawrence Street Plaza Thursday night.
In the city’s latest experiment in closing a road to vehicle traffic to better boost community, Lawrence Street Plaza shone on Thursday night — with music, pizza, bean bags, picnic tables, and car-free safety.
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Lisa Reisman |
Sep 9, 2024 11:56 am
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Courtesy of Josh McCown
Time A Tell's Josh McCown in action with Moroccan-born American rapper French Montana at Oakdale Theatre.
Jayce Greene, 10, and his mother pushed through the door of Time A Tell, the clothing store and smoke shop at 1700 Dixwell Ave. He was looking for a Time A Tell hoodie.
“All the kids on my team are wearing them,” said Jayce, a student at Worthington-Hooker School and member of the Elm City Elite basketball team, as owner Joshua McCown brought out a selection of sizes and colors in the high-ceilinged, warmly-lit space. “They’re all over New Haven,” his mother added.
That’s an index of the quantum leap that McCown, 20, has taken in the two years since opening his shop with a mission to leverage his eye for fashion into being his own boss and realizing financial freedom.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 9, 2024 8:38 am
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Brian Slattery Photos
Leyla McCalla.
A flurry of rainstorms throughout the afternoon on Saturday didn’t keep the CT Folk Festival and Green Expo out of Edgerton Park — nor did it keep stalwart listeners away, to hear from some of the finest voices of two different generations of artists upholding traditions and carrying them ably through the present and into the future.
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Brian Slattery |
Sep 3, 2024 9:39 am
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“I tend to see skateboarding as almost a kind of dance, a conversation with the terrain around you,” says J. Joseph in the documentary Fly, a silent film about skateboarding in New Haven that has inspired a new local album.
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Marisa Torrieri |
Aug 30, 2024 9:39 am
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Marisa Torrieri photo
Jammin out at Cafe 9 on a Sunday afternoon.
Turkey Vulture — a metal/punk duo of Milford-based couple Jessie May (vocals, guitar) and Jim Clegg (drums) — typically spend Sunday afternoons entertaining their two toddler sons. So when May growled into the mic and ripped into a distorted-guitar riff at Cafe Nine on a recent Sunday afternoon in early August, it felt wholly cathartic.
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Brian Slattery |
Aug 29, 2024 9:41 am
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Rappers, producers, and drummers came together at Cafe Nine on the corner of State and Crown Wednesday night to celebrate the release of a new album, and give a sense of how the underground hip hop scene connects New Haven and New York.
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Karen Ponzio |
Aug 28, 2024 9:47 am
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Local rapper Ceschi, to be featured in State House compilation.
The State House may be closed — but its music lives on, in recordings made of a wealth of live performances that happened during the much-loved former venue’s five-year run.
