Bklyn Sounds 8/21/2024—8/27/2024
This Week's Shows include: ESG / Carl Craig / STEFA* + Mickey Perez + Combo Chimbita + Madame Vacile / Immanuel Wilkins / Joy Guidry / 'Celebrating Ronny Drayton' / Mike Servito / and much more
I remain in-and-out of town for the next couple of weeks, so the paywall stays down. The second rescheduled part of Dada Strain’s rained-out Ritmo, Improvisación, Electricidad show takes place this Thursday evening. If you’re anywhere near Sunset Park, consider stopping by. It’ll be a hoot! Scroll down for the details.
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This Week’s Shows:
The mighty drummer/producer/conceptualizer Kassa Overall brings his incredible band and live show — part improvised rhythm jam, part next-gen hip-hop party — into the heart of the city, the dusk amidst the skyscrapers, and the office-workers. Would love to be there to see if they dig on Kassa as much as Newport and Big Ears audiences seemed to. The mighty Miss Hap is on DJ duties. (Wed 8/21, 5p @ The Rink at Rockefeller Center, Midtown - FREE)
The Glade is a cute “natural” sloping-hill amphitheater on the south side of the Little Island river-park construction. It’s been hosting smaller performances of all types, and this week these are curated by the superstar-in-the-making jazz singer Cécile McLorin Salvant. The entire week is excellent (full listings at the link), but the opening two nights, with perennial Dada Strain faves Arooj Aftab (Wed) and June McDoom (Thurs), offer the most possibility. Great voices and songs, potentially pretty setting; if you can brave Little Island’s tourist crush, this will be nice. (Wed 8/21 & Thurs 8/22, 8:30 @ The Glade, Little Island, Hudson River Park - FREE)
Alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins is one of those young horn players with both a major deal (critically beloved albums on Blue Note) and a desire to constantly explore all the places he can go (many examples, not least of which is his role on the Meshell Ndegeocello's The Magic City). No better place than The Stone residency to express the breadth of his music’s potential. All these nights feature great collaborators and friends, and are giddy with possibility: Wednesday (21), Wilkins is in a string-heavy quintet with violinists Lauren Cauley and gabby fluke-mogul, Jessica Pavone (viola), plus Lester St Louis (cello); on Thursday (22) in a quartet with vocalist Nia Drummond, plus Cooper-Moore (piano) and Eric McPherson (drums); on Friday (23) in a powerful jazz trio with guitarist Keyanna Hutchinson and drummer Jeff Tain Watts; and on Saturday (24), treading celestial spaces with Laraaji and bassist Burniss Earl Travis. Highest Recommendation! (Wed 8/21 - Sat 8/24, 8:30p @ The Stone, New School, Manhattan - $20)
RAIN-OUT MAKE-UP 3: Mother Nature wasn’t kind to the Dada Strain-curated Ritmo, Improvisación, Electricidad show scheduled to take place as part of the free Thursdays Backyard Jam series on August 8th. Competing logistics meant we couldn’t rebook them all together, but it did make for a couple of great super-bills. The second is this week, when BeBop Poru/Public Service DJ Mickey Perez’s and the electronics-heavy singer-songwriter STEFA* join the great Afro-Colombian selector Madame Vacile and the mighty tropical futurists Combo Chimbita for a massive night of music. Highest Recommendation! (Thurs 8/22, 6p @ Industry City, Sunset Park - FREE)
This one’s a prescribed punt on a band I loved dearly around the turn-of-the-century, and had to literally rub my eyes + fact-check twice to make sure it was actually playing in NYC. Austin’s Knife in the Water has always been a slowcore mystery, primarily the project of singer-songwriter-multi-instrumentalist Aaron Blount, but always expanded into sweeping, steel-string laden fantasia. (If you like Low, Acetone, etc.) 1999’s Red River remains among my favorite indie records of the era; but 2017’s Reproduction, recorded after a long lay-off and with a whole new set of collaborators, is also beyond lovely and fully on-brand. Can’t believe they’re playing in NYC, and I can’t be there for it. Alongside local heroes: Jana Horn and Lefty Parker. (Thurs 8/22, 8p @ Cassette NYC, Ridgewood - $15)
A meeting of multiple generations of NYC rhythm magic: ESG is one of the city’s forever-unique monoliths, a family group (The Bronx’s Scroggins sisters, now performing with their children) who in the late-‘70s/early-‘80s created a dubby dance-punk-meets-proto-hip-hop sound that’s been sampled by too many producers and adapted by too many DIY bands. Last I checked (pre-lockdown), ESG still gets the crowd going like nobody’s business. Undoubtedly among the influenced is Midnight Magic, a New York live-disco mainstay over the past decade and a half, whose biggest hit is a bonafide local-gone-global standard. Highest Recommendation. (Fri 8/23, 7:30p @ Elsewhere, Bushwick - $30)
The mighty A.B.E.L.A. (Asociación de Bateristas ElektrónikXs de Latinoamerika) are making their Manhattan debut, and after their wonderful performance at Industry City last Thursday, I am doubling down on their bewitching electronic-drum-circle arc. Also on the bill are Bold Doses and Michael Rider. (Fri 8/23, 8p @ Francis Kite Club, East Village - $10)
As noted last week, London-based, eternal bass-futurist Hyperdub Records is celebrating a big anniversary this year, and the series of special events to mark its birthday now hit NYC. Paragon’s 20 Years of Hyperdub program will feature label founder and dubstep radical Kode9, Chicago footwork don DJ Spinn, plus Jersey girl and global-club doyenne, the mighty DJ Haram. Supporting sets in the basement come from Heavee, MHYSA b2b Chuki and Santa Muerte. (Fri 8/23, 9:30p @ Paragon, Broadway & Myrtle - $25)
Carl Craig isn’t counted among Detroit techno’s “originators,” having begun making music a few years later, but he is undoubtedly among the primary architects of the tradition’s various sounds, legends, and colors. Carl’s ambitions always pushed him towards the “art” side of things amidst the technologically funky, and I can guarantee that when C2 took on this gig at the Museum of Modern Art’s sculpture garden, he had a few pieces of music in mind. This ain’t gonna be a “Carl in Ibiza” set. Highest Recommendation. (Sat 8/24, 4p @ MoMA Sculpture Garden, Midtown - Free w/museum admission ($17-$30)
The follow-up to an upstate New York camp/residency by the same name, the Alternative Guitar Summit features a long, pretty amazing line-up of players associated with “jazz,” but who are obviously gathered here to make sure the instrument transcends dumb genre categorization. Or maybe even the event’s branding, which should be playing up the international “Summit” bit: Kurt Rosenwinkel, Nels Cline, Mike Stern and Rodney Jones are the “famous” Americans here, but there’s players great players here from Europe (Leni Stern, Wolfgang Muthspiel), the Middle East (Gilad Hekselman), Asian subcontinent (Anupam Shobhakar), South America (Camila Meza) and on. Big, jammie potential. (Sat 8/24, 7p @ Le Poisson Rouge, Bleecker Street - $35-$45)
A few years after he coasted onto RA’s “best DJs in the world” list with no marketing and just his way with destroying a club dancefloor, forever-Detroiter-in-Bklyn Mike Servito has taken more of a local approach to shit since lockdown. All Night Long at the neighborhood techno club??? Yes, please. Get there early and experience the whole rise-and-fall and rise-and-fall and peak-and-peak…(Sat 8/24, 10p @ Bossa Nova Civic Club, Bushwick - $10/$15 after midnight)
If Union Pool’s free, Sunday-afternoon Summer Thunder series is hosting the Sun Ra Arkestra, you know summer’s almost over. Over the past decade-plus, you could set the rotation of the Earth to this annual gig. In other words: while, yes the Arkestra does feel like it’s everywhere nowadays — especially with Maestro Marshall’s centennial celebration — this one is a relatively old-school and raucous affair. Get there early if you wanna get in. (Sun 8/25, 2p @ Union Pool, Williamsburg - FREE)
Bassoonist-composer-producer Joy Guidry’s sophomore album, Amen, is one of Dada Strain’s favorite LPs of the year, folding spirituals and blues, with ambient and progressive electronics, plus the many sounds that get grouped under “free jazz” nowadays. Joy has been playing improvised sets at various DIY series around Bklyn this summer, but this evening at Joe’s Pub — billed as a trio, with the album title prominent — feels like it may feature this recorded music. Regardless, buy this album, watch their space. Highest Recommendation. (Sun 8/25, 6p @ Joe’s Pub, the Village - $25+minimum)
King Klave & Friends is an interesting coming-together of three unique NYC musicians. Klave is Amaury Acosta, a Cuban-American drummer, producer and multi-media artist whose cut-and-paste productions and mixes sit at the intersection of numerous traditions and processes, a little bit techno electronics, a little bit hip-hop beats, a little bit Afro-Caribbean folklore. He’ll be joined by Maalem Hassan, the Moroccan founder of the great Bklyn-based Innov Gnawa, and by jazz pianist Paul Bloom. The mighty New York Knick provides the DJ tunes before and after. (Mon 8/26, 7p @ Sleepwalk, Bushwick - $17)
29 Speedway rolls into Union Pool to celebrate another twisted, digital hardcore-style release. Boosted is a collaboration between noise behemoths MURDERPACT, synthetic clash generator TRNGS, and software engineer Mark Fingerhut. The end result is a sound recording of three 140+ BPM “tracks”/slabs of breakbeat/drill chaos, but also an A/V .exe file that is likely to be the centerpiece of the evening’s “performance.” Also sets from Angry Black Men, Macula Dog and Cienfuegos. Not for the light-of-heart. (Tues 8/27, 8p @ Union Pool, Williamsburg - $20/$25)
Growing up in New York music in the 1980s, guitarist Ronny Drayton’s name could be spotted regularly in the Voice and the Times, a mark of quality for music at the intersection of hard rock, funk, electric jazz and soul. He played on, among other things, huge Roy Ayers and Material records, long before he became an original member of the Black Rock Coalition. Drayton transitioned in February 2020 at the age of 66. Tuesday’s Celebrating Ronny Drayton is a benefit concert whose proceeds will go to benefit the Drayton family. The line-up is that era’s who’s who — Living Colour, Nona Hendryx, The Family Stand, Sandra St. Victor, 24/7 Spyz, Bernard Fowler — and special guests are expected. (Tues 8/27, 8p @ Sony Hall, Midtown - $44-$90)