by | Mar 20, 2024 9:27 am | Comments (0)
Brian Slattery Photos
Addie and Jacey of the Connecticut Democratic Socialists of America declared themselves “thrilled” to be on Cafe Nine’s stage Tuesday night. The DSA is involved in a number of political efforts, but this night it was focusing on raising funds for a cause: The REACH Fund, which, as its website states, “is a nonprofit organization that provides financial assistance for abortion care in Connecticut.”
by | Mar 19, 2024 10:18 am | Comments (4)
John McDonald Photo
Ball & Socket Arts front view.
When asked to name the cultural hubs of the Northeast, most people would not consider Cheshire, Connecticut a part of that list. A group of enthusiastic artists and supporters of the arts are hoping to change that over the next few years, as Ball & Socket Arts, a complex located on West Main Street right along the Farmington Canal Linear Path, continues its efforts to create a central location aimed at encouraging ongoing creativity and attracting New Haven County residents and beyond to its galleries, performance venue, art education center, and more.
Continue reading ‘Ball & Socket Arts Turns Factory Into Gallery’
by | Mar 18, 2024 9:50 am | Comments (1)
Kenneth Jimenez Photo
Lilith.
Ingrid Laubrock’s Lilith opened Firehouse 12’s spring season of shows at its concert space, recording studio, and bar on Crown Street with a fiery set of Laubrock’s compositions that paid homage to female energy and to the venue itself, which continues to be a hub for experimental music in New Haven, on the East Coast, and beyond.
by | Mar 12, 2024 10:13 am | Comments (1)
Jasmine Wright Photos
Roots of Deception lays it down at Connecticut Death Fest.
Hubert Smith took to the stage for the second time in two nights. The night before, he was playing drums for Necrocunt, something of a supergroup within Connecticut’s death metal scene. Now, he was laying down distorted guitar grooves for brutal death five-piece Roots of Deception. Photographers — myself included — wormed between audience members, who stood so close to the stage that their hair lashed its surface with each headbang. Behind us, the crowd was arranged in a circle of potential energy, the center of the Beeracks’ cavernous garage, waiting for the next mosh pit to break out.
by | Mar 11, 2024 10:25 am | Comments (1)
Leo Slattery Photo
A lone child in a Rubik’s Cube hoodie stood in the middle of the small black box space at Witch Bitch Thrift on Saturday night, trying and failing with a kendama, a Japanese wooden ball and stick toy. Around him, people trickled in in groups of two or three, ready to see folk-punk acts Apes of the State, Myles Bullen, and Lars and their Lilac Ukulele.
The band members socialized, waving to the people they recognized and smiling and introducing themselves to those they didn’t. Everyone was dressed for the occasion: a sea of Doc Martens, work boots, and old sneakers. Pants, mostly black, usually dotted in patches of the wearer’s favorite bands. The magnum opus, an Apes t‑shirt from a previous tour. April, lead singer of Apes of the State, seemed equal parts flattered and fascinated by the appearance of her decade-old merch. The most diehard of fans wore battle jackets, a punk tradition of sewing handmade patches of bands onto a denim coat. The battle jackets at this particular show almost all had Apes of the State on them. It was standing room only, save for a chair left in the corner that people piled coats under. The chair itself remained empty, as if for Elijah the prophet.
Continue reading ‘All-Ages Folk Punk Show Celebrates Community’
by | Mar 11, 2024 10:24 am | Comments (1)
Brian Slattery Photos
A Drop of the Pure.
State Street on Sunday afternoon was filled with signs of the end of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, whether it was the lines of people in green shirts outside Modern, the full marching bands gathered on street corners, the policemen guarding the barricades for closed streets, or the long rows of parked cars. The parade has changed a lot over the years and continues to, reflecting New Haven as it is, a diverse place in which successive waves of recent immigrants find a home. And in Cafe Nine, a steadily growing crowd came to hear A Drop of the Pure, a quartet purveying traditional Irish music and pulling at the long cultural thread that connects the present to the past.
by | Mar 11, 2024 10:23 am | Comments (0)
Karen Ponzio Photos
Love N' Co performing at Best Video as part of Spoken film.
On Saturday night Best Video presented an event that married two of its main enterprises: film and music. Local favorites Love N’ Co were there to premiere their movie Spoken: The Story of Unspoken and share a few tunes beforehand. The film, produced by Free Artist Productions, documents the making of their EP Unspoken, produced by Cliff Robbins-Sennewald, which they plan to release in May. The film documents their hopes, dreams, and desires as well as the struggles they went through both personally and professionally to get it just right, proving that the band accepts a challenge and rides it through with joy and grace.
by | Mar 7, 2024 9:18 am | Comments (0)
Brian Slattery Photos
Wow, Okay, Cool.
As a heavy rainstorm pounded the pavement outside on State and Crown, drummers pounded skins inside Cafe Nine, propelling a night of raucous guitar, muscular bass, and vocals that pushed the throats of their singers to the limit, as three bands filled the Ninth Square club with the sound of the latest iteration of a now-venerable music form: The rock band.
by | Mar 4, 2024 2:18 pm | Comments (0)
Maya McFadden Photos
Ellen Maust reads aloud to Mauro Sheridan second-grade class.
In a second-grade classroom at Mauro-Sheridan Interdistrict Magnet School students danced along to Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” after learning about the “Queen of Soul.”
Continue reading ‘"R-E-S-P-E-C-T" Kicks Off Women's, Music Month’
by | Mar 1, 2024 10:23 am | Comments (0)
Brian Slattery Photo
DJ P-Zo name-checks the crowd in the alder chambers.
New Haven hip hop pioneer DJ Terrible T had some pointed questions for his audience at the Hall of Records at 200 Orange St.
“What are we going to leave behind? What is hip hop going to mean to this little girl right here?” he asked, gesturing toward an audience member. “We can sit up here and talk about who we’ve been and who we DJed and how long we did it. But if we don’t leave a permanent, positive impression on our future — our children — what have we really accomplished?”
by | Mar 1, 2024 10:22 am | Comments (0)
Eight Feet Tall performing at my house.
Before performing, dancer Jackie O’Riley of Eight Feet Tall explained that the Irish dance the audience was about to witness had been thought extinct. Then “it was discovered there was one guy still teaching this dance” to neighbors and students in West Clare. “He was outside of the realm of competitive step dance, which meant that he had held onto his old repertoire,” O’Riley said. Modern folk dancers who visited him discovered he had a “vast repertoire” of dances “that hadn’t been seen in decades.” The audience, at a house concert I hosted in Hamden, was going to have to a chance to see.
by | Feb 29, 2024 9:03 am | Comments (1)
“Suite 21” starts with a pulsing, menacing bass line, joined by crackling, skittering drums. Then organ and guitar create atmosphere, a hazy smoke. The stage is set. And Keila Myles is ready.
“Told you not to fuck with me you see,” she croons. “Now your ass is stuck with me you see / But I’m a peacemaker luckily you see / Piece maker more like cutlery you see.”
That gutting tone is altogether fitting for the latest video release from Keila Myles and the Moose Knuckles, who made it in time for NRP’s latest Tiny Desk Concert contest. The song is reworked, the take on it is new, but it’s about a crime perpetrated against Myles over a decade ago, the long hurt it caused — and how Myles learned how to survive and gather strength from it.
by | Feb 26, 2024 11:46 am | Comments (0)
Watch Friday’s fashion show above.
Long polka dot skirts from the ’50s, black leather jackets from the ’60s, and bell bottoms from the ’70s all made a return to Hill Regional Career High School as it celebrated Black fashion throughout the years.
Continue reading ‘Career High Black History Assembly Cruises Decades Of Culture’
by | Feb 26, 2024 9:15 am | Comments (1)
James Paul Nadien sat behind the drums with an impish grin as violinist Sabrina Salamone tightened the hair on her bow. “F.I.M. 50!” he yelled. The crowd, a packed room at Never Ending Books on a Saturday, cheered. It was an appropriately direct introduction for the 50th installment of the F.I.M. concert series, which was started in April 2022 by guitarist Luke Rovinsky and bassist Caleb Duval and has quickly become a linchpin of the Elm City improvised music scene, joining the New Haven Improvisers Collective and the Instantiation series to solidify the next generation of players.
Continue reading ‘Improvised Music Series Celebrates 50th Show’
by | Feb 26, 2024 8:58 am | Comments (0)
Karen Ponzio Photos
Alvin Carter, Sr. speaks during Part One: The Drummer's Path portion of Diaspora Stories: Hartford at Best Video.
The Hartford-based Afro-funk fusion ensemble The Lost Tribe returned to Best Video on Saturday to screen the completed three-part series Diaspora Stories: Hartford a year and a half after sharing a preview of the project at the venue during a performance in 2022. This time, in addition to showing the completed version, the band would also be adding to the soundtrack during the film, as well as performing before, after, and in between.
The band described Diaspora Stories: Hartford as “highlighting the history and intergenerational nature of Hartford’s African and African Diasporic arts community.” It consists of three parts. Part One, The Drummer’s Path, features “Abu” Alvin Carter, Sr., Alvin Carter, Jr., Inara Ramin, Assad Jackson, and Jocelyn Pleasant. The second part, Is It Hip Hop?, features Jolet Creary and Studio 860. Part Three, La Source, features Damian Curtis with The Lost Tribe.
Continue reading ‘Lost Tribe Performs, Screens Diaspora Stories’
by | Feb 22, 2024 3:09 pm | Comments (36)
Nora Grace-Flood
91 Shelton Ave. to stay deteriorated on the outside ...
... and musically inspired on the inside.
City Plan commissioners killed a request to turn a dilapidated former factory serving as local artist studios into storage units — after deciding the development sounded like “dead space.”
by | Feb 13, 2024 8:58 am | Comments (0)
Karen Ponzio Photos
Qween Kong share the love.
While many were getting ready for the last big football game of the season this past Sunday, a local music series was getting restarted over on Elm Street, as Three Sheets welcomed back the first of its popular Unplugged shows in a long while. Presented by Booger Z. Jones in conjunction with series creator Sara Scranton, two bands — on this day, the New Haven-based Hell Fairy and Qween Kong — would present a selection of their songs in a more stripped-down fashion than usual, acoustic and accompanied by stories of how they were made and what inspired them.
Continue reading ‘Unplugged Series Recharges At Three Sheets’
by | Feb 9, 2024 9:07 am | Comments (0)
Brian Slattery Photo
Suzu Sakai on the Shubert set she designed.
A member of the stage crew was doing some last-minute cleanup of the set at the Shubert, in preparation for a rehearsal of Yale Opera’s The Rake’s Progress, the opera by Igor Stravinsky set to run at the venerable College Street theatre Feb. 17 and 18. At first glance, it may have looked like he was vacuuming a vast Persian rug. A second glance, however, might show the design on the floor for what it really is: the back of an enormous playing card. More than just an arresting visual pattern, the scintillating floor is part of a set design decision that, for the opera’s director, was the key to opening up Stravinsky’s work to better connect with audiences.
Continue reading ‘Yale Opera Plays Its Cards Right At Shubert’
by | Feb 8, 2024 9:16 am | Comments (1)
Brian Slattery Photo
Dallas Ugly Wednesday night at Cafe Nine.
Cafe Nine on Wednesday night was the scene for delicate ballads, bright harmonies, and gritty rhythms as three bands — Pyramid Rose, Dallas Ugly, and the Split Coils — played sets with passion and commitment to the cause of country, rock ‘n’ roll, and keeping live music rolling in the Elm City.
by | Feb 7, 2024 9:07 am | Comments (1)
Brian Slattery Photos
Rodgers.
Performers and audience members arrived at Cantean on Whitney Avenue in Hamden en masse Tuesday evening before the posted start time of 6 p.m., quickly filling the space and the open mic’s sign-up sheet. Each performer had enough time for two songs. Host Steve Rodgers announced that he had “two and a half rules.” First, the songs all had to be originals. Second, audience members had to keep quiet for the performances. And third (Rodgers was joking about the “half”), everyone should remember to support Cantean by buying food and beverages.
“Any more rules?” someone in the audience said.
“Play good music!” someone else said, to laughter.
by | Feb 1, 2024 4:31 pm | Comments (5)
Manic machers on the move: Intergenerational promo duo Keith Mahler & Mark Nussbaum.
Add Wall Street to a New Haven operation’s live-music empire.
by | Feb 1, 2024 9:00 am | Comments (0)
The Afro-Semitic Experience.
“Unity in the Community” begins with a classic hymn-like statement from Warren Byrd’s piano, carried aloft by a chorus of voices, bubbling bass and percussion, and horns passing a joyous melody from one bell to the next. “Why don’t we come together?” Byrd sings. “Why do we got to fight? / Let’s be like sis and brother / who finally got it right.”
by | Jan 30, 2024 9:09 am | Comments (2)
Brian Slattery Photo
New Haven Improvisers Collective.
It was 7:30 p.m. on Monday at Never Ending Books, and Bob Gorry of the New Haven Improvisers Collective had a few instructions for the musicians gathered in the room.
The collective always started with the same exercise, of playing long tones together, “whatever that means on your instrument,” Gorry said. “It’s very important for listening and for figuring out the room. It’s really important that you hear everybody.”
The idea was to play a tone as long as possible, then pause and play another, while listening to everyone else. “If you can’t hear someone,” Gorry said, “play quieter.”
by | Jan 30, 2024 9:00 am | Comments (8)
Karen Ponzio Photos
The Haints.
Are you the type of music fan who wishes there were more shows that started before 8 p.m., but wants the feel of a late Friday or Saturday night out? Are Sunday brunches too early for you, but you also don’t want to stay out too late? Three Sheets has something perfect for you the last Sunday of every month: a matinee that promises you an onslaught of punk music that is at just the right time for the late-to-rise-on-the-weekend, early-to-bed-for-work-on-Monday crowd.
by | Jan 29, 2024 8:55 am | Comments (0)
Mixed Company.
The band Mixed Company was doing its take on Abbey Lincoln’s “Throw It Away,” and the sound snapped into focus in the first chorus: “Throw it away / Throw it away / Give your love, live your life / Each and every day / And keep your hand wide open / Let the sun shine through / ‘Cause you can never lose a thing / If it belongs to you.”
Michael Carabello on keys, Conway Campbell, Jr. on bass, and Jonathan Barber on drums set up a strong and sultry rhythm. Taylor McCoy’s voice floated over the top.
Those in Jazzy’s Cabaret on Friday night stopped talking, paused over their meals, to listen. It was as if a signal had been sent across the room to pay attention to what was going to be a great night of songs.