Will be updated during the week!
1. Scissormen
Date: Friday, January 13, 2012
Time: 8pm
Venue: The Shrine (2271 Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd, NY)
Ticket: donation
Genre: Blues
North Mississippi Hill Country Nights – 7pm-11am
Nashville-based blues band Scissormen are back in town! Since they list blues legends R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough alongside avant-rockers Sonic Youth as their prominent influences, it won’t surprise you to hear that they’ve fully harnessed the power of noise and the trance rhythms of the Mississippi Delta.
7-8pm The Scissormen, 8-9pm Pork Chop Willie Blues/Country and 9:30-11pm Kent Burnside Soul/Blues.
AFRAZZ
Date: Friday, January 13, 2012
Time: 7pm
Venue: Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe (236 East 3rd Street Between Ave B & C)
Ticket: $10
Genre: world/jazz percussion music
Multi/percussionist and producer, Ronnie Roc brings together an eclectic array of skilled musicianship to present the music of AFRAZZ. Bridging the musically rich tradition of West African & Afro-Caribbean rhythms to jazz standards and originals, AFRAZZ delivers traditional jazz melody and improvisation with the spice of polyrhythmic flavor.
Members: Ronnie Roc, Michael Wimberly, Hailejaa Euma, Anthony Robustelli, Richie Robles, Dave Mullen, Cheryl Thomas
3. David Krakauer and Matt Haimovitz in Akoka: The End of Time, featuring Socalled with Maria Bachmann and Geoffrey Burleson
Date: Saturday, January 14, 2012
Time: 9pm
Venue: Joe’s Pub (425 Lafayette St, NY)
Ticket: $20
Genre: modern music
In this reframing of Olivier Messaien’s masterpiece Quartet for the End of Time, clarinetist David Krakauer, praised internationally for his astounding ability to play in a myriad of music genres with “prodigious chops” (The New Yorker) and “soulfulness and electrifying showiness” (The New York Times), and musical pioneer cellist Matt Haimovitz, described as “one of his generation’s great classical cellists” (The Hamilton Spectator) and known for his “relaxed intensity and improvisatory flair”(Detroit Free Press), have created an evening of great emotional power.
Akoka: The End of Time is comprised of Krakauer’s own Akoka, Messiaen’s masterwork Quatuor pour la fin du Temps (Quartet for the End of Time), and Socalled’s Meanwhile.
Quartet for the End of Time was composed and premiered in a prisoner of war camp during World War II in the midst of tremendous upheaval. Henri Akoka was the Jewish clarinetist in the prison camp who performed the world premiere. This program has a musical focus on Akoka’s story, bringing out the human aspect of this composition as seen from the perspective of someone caught in terrifying events beyond his control.
Quartet for the End of Time will be performed in its entirety between the two new works – Krakauer’s being a raw structured improvisation that takes as its point of departure some of the musical gestures of the Messiaen – and the closing piece by Socalled made up of sequences and samples of the acoustic recording of the Messiaen combined with sound images that illustrate the violence and turbulence of the piece.
Akoka: The End of Time lifts Messiaen’s original work out of the polite context of a chamber music concert and places it in a dramatic setting that drives home its gravity and impact, while bringing it into the 21st century. As the forces of fundamentalism, intolerance and violence intensify in today’s world, this particular mounting of the great work seems all the more timely.
