Category Archives: Concert And Event Reviews

Concert review: Ustad Mashkoor Ali Khan: The Voice

Date: July 22, 2012
Venue: house concert in the Upper West Side

Next show: August 1, at 8pm. Details here.

Review by Dawoud Kringle and photos by Marcus Simpson

Indian classical music is based essentially on vocal music. It is a widely held belief among the genre’s masters that without an understanding of vocal music, one cannot ever properly perform a raga. Arabic music, African, and some jazz (such as Dexter Gordon, who refused to play a song unless he knew the lyrics) all hold this to be true. So, when one is listening to a raga sung by a master, one is assured one is getting the real thing.

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Concert review and thoughts about Jazz: Michel Camilo keeps Jazzzzzzzzzz alivvvvvvvvve!!!

Venue: Highline Ballroom (NY)
Date: June 27, 2012.

Text by Sohrab Saadat Ladjevardi

Is jazz “really” dead? In 1975, when an angry, bitter and maybe exaggerating Miles Davis declared “Jazz is dead (it’s) the music of a museum,” I felt the same — especially when Fusion jazz and later Smooth jazz became very popular and very commercial, thus changing jazz into elevator and background music. Jazz became music that was “easy” to listen to and very accessible. Bored of that kind of music my interest went to American free jazz and to international jazz, such as European, Asian, African and Latin jazz.

As a jazz lover, I can say that this music has become stagnant, especially over the last twenty years. There’s no shortage of talented musicians out there, but jazz in America has gone decades without producing an artist capable of reinventing the genre the way Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, my mentor Ornette Coleman and many others did.

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Concert Review: Fishbone at CBGB FESTIVAL 2012

Date: July 9, 2012
Venue: Brooklyn Bowl (NY, Brooklyn)
Concert review by Jim Hoey

While the first ever CBGB Festival was raging all over town this week and bands were playing in the hot sun defying expectations, some of the older bands on these round-town bills were trying to bring back the magic of ’02, ’92, or ’82. This is the agenda of the CBGB Fest: present emerging and established artists in the spirit of early NYC punk and Hilly Kristal (CBGB’s owner).

When Fishbone took the stage this Sunday at Brooklyn Bowl for the final performance of the festival, they did just that, playing a raucous, hard hitting set that dwarfed the efforts of the opening act, Paranoid Social Club, and probably most of the other bands playing on bills across town at venues like Central Park Summer Stage and Times Square. Groups like Agnostic Front, Guided By Voices, the So So Glos, Superchunk, The Pains of Being Pure At Heart, and the Hold Steady all fanned out across the city and presented a battering array of sounds for curious fans to attempt to experience. Fishbone was the one act I was able to catch.

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Concert review: META a well-blended confection of jazz and African (both Subsaharan and Northern) musics and sensibilities

Date: June 27, 2012
Venue: Le Poisson Rouge
Review by Matt Cole

On Wednesday,  June 27; singer, songwriter, and percussionist META played before a sparse, but enthusiastic crowd at La Poisson Rouge, backed by Ari Hoenig on drums, Francois Moutin on bass, and Thomas Enhco on piano and violin. Meta’s music has been described as “world songs,” and tonight’s show would feature a well-blended confection of jazz and African (both Subsaharan and Northern) musics and sensibilities.

Meta opened the show playing a tambourine-like instrument (I wasn’t close enough to see exactly what) in an odd meter, and singing in a tenor voice. I heard bits of both sides of the Sahara in his vocals. Then the rest of the band came in, playing what basically sounded like good 1960s-modern jazz, but fitting quite nicely with Meta’s singing. Presently, Meta stepped back and ceded the sound scape to the instruments, each of whom had a chance to come to the fore before Meta came back in. Whether he was singing conventionally with the band, or more orthogonally, it all came together quite smoothly.

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Concert review: Terje Rypdal – bringing Nordic, impressionistic, spacey sound colours to Manhattan.

Date: June 27, 2012
Venue: Le Poisson Rouge (NY)
Review by Jeremy Siskind

From the moment that Terje Rypdal and his quartet stepped onto the stage of Le Poisson Rouge, all my sensory impressions grabbed me by the hand and hurried me to towards a faded word in the dusk light of a pitchy forest: dated. The hairstyles of the Norwegian band were combed with ‘80s cliché, the sound was jazz-rock that harkened to the age when musicians were enamored with “plugging in,” and the overall aesthetic was a tribute to the sort of virtuosity that has – in my vision – gone out of style with the rise of conservatory jazz programs.

Oddly, the band functioned in almost two completely separate units with solos by rock-based Rypdal and heavily-Miles-influenced Danish trumpeter Palle Mikkelborg pivoting around a very able rhythm section of organist Ståle Storløkken and Italian drummer Paolo Vinaccia.

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