Posts Tagged ‘music’
On Tour with the Magnetic Fields: Part II
April 3, 2012 | by Emma Straub
The People Behind the People
This tour is the biggest the Magnetic Fields have ever done, in terms of the number of people traveling. In addition to the five members of the band and one eighteen-month-old baby, there are five members of the crew: me and my husband (merch, blog, Twitter), Jason Thompson (tour manager), Mike Yesenosky (sound), and the very lovely Julia Knapp (nanny). That brings the grand total to eleven people, and with all the suitcases, instruments, and gear, we are a small society all our own. Someone is always holding the leftover snacks from the previous night’s greenroom, and someone is always holding assorted painkillers and stomach remedies. We are all getting very good at traversing airport terminals and hotel lobbies en masse, like a pack of nomads, or zombies, depending on the amount of sleep achieved the night before.
The Hotel Life
This tour is more grueling than the last few I’ve done with the Magnetic Fields, and we are rarely in one place longer than a day. This means less time for exploring the cities and more confused moments in the middle of the night when one wakes up and needs to pee. Stephin Merritt (vocals, harmonium, melodica, kazoo) told me a story about their last European tour, during which he was staying in a room so small that when he opened what he thought was the door to the bathroom in the middle of the night, he in fact had opened the door to the hallway and promptly locked himself out. In the last ten days, we’ve stayed in six different hotels, and so in addition to having no clue what day of the week it is, I also now have no clue where the bed is in relation to the door or what floor my room is on.
Of course, there are perks to staying in so many hotels. At heart, I am not a kleptomaniac, but when it comes to hotels, I can’t help myself.
A Week in Culture: Matthew Thurber, Cartoonist
February 9, 2012 | by Matthew Thurber
MONDAY
6:30 A.M. Woke up. Bought coffee at deli.
Read amNewYork on the subway to Queens. Page six: Khloe Kardashian and her giant basketball-player husband wear their pajamas to open Xmas presents.
8:30 A.M. At Queens College illustration class, one of my students turned in a drawing of anthropomorphic poop.
Branford Marsalis
December 8, 2011 | by Sam Stephenson
It’s sixty-two degrees and raining in downtown Durham, North Carolina, on a Tuesday in mid-October. At noon members of the Branford Marsalis Quartet gather at the former St. Joseph’s African Methodist Episcopal church, built in 1891, now converted into the Hayti Heritage Center, an arts-and-community nonprofit. Their goal is to record a new album over the next few days.
When Marsalis moved his family to Durham from New York a decade ago, the local press assumed he was replacing the retiring director of Duke’s jazz department, saxophonist Paul Jeffrey. But Marsalis, who'd grown up in Louisiana, simply wanted to return to the South and picked Raleigh-Durham because the area had an airport large enough to get him anywhere he needed to go. Later, he began teaching part-time in the noted jazz program at the historically black North Carolina Central University, which is a mile down the road from Hayti.
The original St. Joseph’s sanctuary remains intact: a wood-plank stage, hardwood pews, a balcony, chandeliers, and lots of stained glass. Marsalis began recording albums here in 2006 when he noticed that the room had a unique quality: there is no reverb at low decibel levels; it grows gradually with the sound.
Lizzi Bougatsos on Gang Gang Dance
November 8, 2011 | by Trinie Dalton
Lizzi Bougatsos. Photo by Brian De Ran.
Gang Gang Dance was founded in Brooklyn in 2001 by Lizzi Bougatsos, Brian Degraw, Tim DeWit, Josh Diamond, and Nathan Maddox. Informed by hip-hop, eighties pop and goth, and a wealth of international traditional musical styles, the band blends disparate sounds into a global amalgam. This collage approach has garnered attention from the art world; the band’s mixed-media work was included, for instance, in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, and Bougatsos’s installations and collages have been shown at James Fuentes gallery in New York. Last May, Gang Gang Dance released their sixth album, Eye Contact, a tribute to the many loved ones the band has lost—including Maddox, who died in 2002 when he was struck by lightning on a Chinatown rooftop—and a fusion of large, swaggering beats, polyrhythmic sampling, and Bougatsos’s raw, personal lyrics.
“Glass Jar,” on the new album, opens with a sample of a couple phrases that are clearly audible, and then goes through a movement that sounds like it’s contained in glass. The song feels as if it’s hermetically sealed.
It is its own ecosystem, a geo-dome. You can create your own world with your surroundings.
Does music produce common experiences with others?
Music is universal, and extending your music to somebody is about sharing it. But it is also about how they receive it and how a message travels back to you. The best way to receive information about your music is when people talk about it through experience. We have a spiritual adviser named Babylove who travels with the band. And Tony Cox has been documenting our performances for a long time now. When he photographs us, he calls the experience a sphere.
Join Us This Saturday on the NYC Lit Crawl!
September 8, 2011 | by Sadie Stein
Saturday, September 10, brings us the extravaganza that is the fourth annual NYC Lit Crawl. We’ll be there, with our dancing shoes on! Join us as we unveil our fall issue to the rock and country stylings of the Dog House Band—featuring Sven Birkerts, David Gates, Wyatt Mason, and James “Sin Killer” Wood, among others. The new mag will be hot off the presses: Lydia Davis on translation, Dennis Cooper and Nicholson Baker on writing dirty books, Terry Castle’s stash of anonymous kiddie photos, and more.
When: Saturday, September 10; the band plays from 8:15–9:45 P.M.; drinks till ??.
Where: Fontana’s Bar (21+)
105 Eldridge Street
New York, NY 10002
The Soloist: Jason Moran Live at A Gathering of Tribes
June 8, 2011 | by J. D. Mitchell
“It’s actually nice to play on this piano because it’s got the funk,” said the virtuoso jazz pianist Jason Moran. He was seated at an old Kurtzman upright piano and had just finished playing a lush, hard-swinging solo version of “The Sheik of Araby,” a tune he recently learned for his Fats Waller dance party at the Harlem Stage Gatehouse. His comment elicited nervous laughter from the crowd of fans who’d crammed themselves into the main room of a suffocatingly hot Lower East Side apartment late last month—some of us seated on fold-out chairs, others on the floor—to hear him play two unaccompanied sets. Moran, one of the most celebrated young jazz artists of the last ten years, seemed right at home in this intimate, makeshift performance space, aptly named A Gathering of Tribes. Although he has been justly praised for his sometimes cerebral approach to jazz, the no-frills atmosphere of the venue, which attracts players of every school and listeners of every stripe, accentuated the earthier side of his style.
A Gathering of Tribes is the home of author and educator Steve Cannon, a man the writer Paul Beatty, who dropped by for Moran’s second set, once referred to as “professor emeritus of the Lower East Side.” For the past twenty years Cannon has used his apartment to stage public readings, concerts, and art exhibitions. The venture reflects his devotion to the local community and his desire to preserve its vanishing bohemian character, which he came to know firsthand upon moving there from New Orleans in the 1960s. Cannon has made Tribes a particularly important site for contemporary jazz music. It boasts an impressive roster of past performers, including Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, Butch Morris, and Matthew Shipp.
