they promise they won’t be d-bags
So a while back I posted about this new venue Le Poisson Rouge that is set to open soon and I said that it looks like it could be cool, depending on whether they got all velvet-rope-y, etc. Well, they sent me an email saying they were definitely NOT going to be like that, that they are planning on being the antithesis of that – which is definitely great. I got another email from them today about some of the acts they’re booking and though I’m not a full-on music guy, there’s some really great stuff like Damon & Naomi, Rickie Lee Jones, A Hawk and a Hacksaw, Matmos, Charlie Haden. More info after the jump … (and yes, I’m totally angling for an invite to the opening.)
Sunday 6.15.08
Damon & Naomi
Helena Espvall & Masaki Batoh
7pm doors
$14
18+ or accompanied by legal guardian
This is a seated, general admission event.
Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang’s music career started with modest goals but grew to incorporate one of the most influential bands of the 80s (Galaxie 500), a string of duo albums on Sub Pop records throughout the 90s, collaborations with some of the most adventurous rock musicians playing today (Ghost, Michio Kurihara, nmperign, Wayne Rogers), and most recently, the formation of their own record label (20/20/20) and subsequent release of their two latest Damon & Naomi albums, “The Earth Is Blue” and “Within These Walls”. In addition to their work as musicians, Damon & Naomi are the founders of Exact Change, a publishing house dedicated to avant-garde literature and artists’ writings. As individual artists, Damon writes (and teaches) poetry and music criticism, and Naomi is a visual artist (photography and painting) and graphic designer.
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Monday 6.16.08, Sunday 6.22.08, Sunday 6.29.08 AND Monday 6.29.08
Rickie Lee Jones
7pm doors
$55 VIP seating / $45 General Admission
limited $20 tickets with valid student ID at Box Office only
18+ or accompanied by legal guardian
‘The Sermon On Exposition Boulevard’, the new album by Rickie Lee Jones and her first for New West Records, is a beauty–soul-satisfying and sonically unique. What will certainly be most striking to some fans is that it rocks harder than any album the two-time Grammy Award winner has ever recorded. And yet, this music transcends all of its
historical touchstones, taking the elements and creating something that sounds totally new–full of grace, soul and adventurous sonic textures. What’s ultimately just as fascinating as the remarkable music, however, is that all 13 songs are inspired by the real words and ideas of one Jesus Christ. The recording began in a painter’s loft on an abandoned industrial street in mid-L.A in the summer of ’05. Lee Cantelon, who can best be described as a modern renaissance man,originally conceived the project as a lo-fi, low budget spoken word undertaking, and the initial plan was to recruit friends and associates–from punk icon Mike Watt to a homeless man he encountered every day–to do the talking. The project changed directions, though,when Rickie Lee showed up to record her part. Instead of reciting the text, she stunned everyone in the studio by improvising an entire song to a track she had never heard. “Nobody Knows My Name” is that first recording. So began the inspired musical and textural improvisations that would become ‘The Sermon On Exposition Boulevard’, an intuitive and beautiful collection.
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Tuesday 6.17.08
Simone Dinnerstein
Nina Nastasia
6:30pm doors
$25
18+ or accompanied by legal guardian
This is a seated, general admission event.
An acoustic bassist of extraordinary gifts, Charlie Haden’s talents have been in constant demand by fellow artists Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Archie Shepp, Keith Jarrett, Dewey Redman, Paul Motian, Jack DeJohnette, and Pat Metheny (with whom Haden shared a 1997 Grammy Award). Haden’s love of world music has also led him to collaborations with Brazilian guitarist Egberto Gismonti, Argentinean bandoneon master Dino Saluzzi, and Portuguese guitar giant Carlos Paredes. Haden has explored diverse streams of American popular music with both his acclaimed Quartet West, as well as on such recent collections as 2002’s inventive alliance with Michael Brecker. Haden was invited to establish the jazz studies program at California Institute of the Arts in 1982, and has earned countless honors from around the globe, including the Los Angeles Jazz Society prize, two Grammy Awards (and multiple nominations), myriad Down Beat Reader’s and Critic’s Poll prizes, a Guggenheim fellowship, four NEA grants for composition, France’s Grand Prix Du Disque (Charles Cros) Award, Japan’s SWING Journal Gold, Silver and Bronze awards, and the Montreal Jazz Festivals Miles Davis Award.
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Tuesday 6.17.08
NIna Nastasia & Jim White
Tren Brothers (feat. Mick Turner and Jim White of The Dirty Three)
10pm doors
$15
18+ or accompanied by legal guardian
This is a seated, general admission event.
Following last year’s critically acclaimed On Leaving, Nina Nastasia makes a rapid return with this stunning collaborative album with Jim White, the peerless drummer of beloved Australian instrumental trio Dirty Three. The pair played a handful of low-profile gigs together in Brooklyn and Chicago, and there was something so unusual and affecting about the way the songs came out that Jim flew back to New York, and the two spent a month with Nina’s long-time companion and musical organizer Kennan Gudjonsson developing and arranging the songs. The three brought the music to friend and engineer Steve Albini to record it at his celebrated Electrical Audio studio in Chicago. With Nina’s extraordinary voice able to swoop and turn on a dime, shifting from a langorous, breathy trail to beautifully emotive peals or a bloodied howl, Jim’s highly inventive playing (the word “drumming” seems inadequate or lazy) is simultaneously loose and lithe, intensely tight, testing and marking out the spaces around things; changing weight from a dissipated shimmer to explosive shrapnel bursts or weird machine-flurries – both functional and impressionistic. There’s something in the title, You Follow Me – perhaps a sort of anthology of aspects of following – that adumbrates the very relationship of two musicians performing at the height of their powers, somewhere between a duel and a dance, where the leading foot shifts from movement to movement.
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Wednesday 6.18.08
JVC Jazz Festival and (Le) Poisson Rouge present:
Charlie Haden Quartet West
TWO SHOWS: 7pm & 9:30pm doors
$45 adv / $55 door
18+ or accompanied by legal guardian
This is a seated, general admission event.
An acoustic bassist of extraordinary gifts, Charlie Haden’s talents have been in constant demand by fellow artists Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Archie Shepp, Keith Jarrett, Dewey Redman, Paul Motian, Jack DeJohnette, and Pat Metheny (with whom Haden shared a 1997 Grammy Award). Haden’s love of world music has also led him to collaborations with Brazilian guitarist Egberto Gismonti, Argentinean bandoneon master Dino Saluzzi, and Portuguese guitar giant Carlos Paredes. Haden has explored diverse streams of American popular music with both his acclaimed Quartet West, as well as on such recent collections as 2002’s inventive alliance with Michael Brecker. Haden was invited to establish the jazz studies program at California Institute of the Arts in 1982, and has earned countless honors from around the globe, including the Los Angeles Jazz Society prize, two Grammy Awards (and multiple nominations), myriad Down Beat Reader’s and Critic’s Poll prizes, a Guggenheim fellowship, four NEA grants for composition, France’s Grand Prix Du Disque (Charles Cros) Award, Japan’s SWING Journal Gold, Silver and Bronze awards, and the Montreal Jazz Festivals Miles Davis Award.
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w/ Special Guests
“Bill Frisell is the Clark Kent of the electric guitar. Soft-spoken and self-effacing in conversation, he apparently breathes in lungfuls of raw fire when he straps on his (guitar)…His music is not what is typically called jazz, though it turns on improvisation; it’s not rock’n roll; and it sure ain’t that tired dinosaur called fusion. In one of the biggest leaps of imagination since the Yardbirds and Jimi Hendrix, Frisell coaxes and slams his hovering split-toned ax into shapes of things to come…But besides being a guitar genius, he’s turned into a terrific songwriter. Like Monk, Frisell’s harmonic and melodic ideas form a succinct, seamless mesh with outer sonic and rhythmic ideas about his ax.” –Spin
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JVC Jazz Festival and (Le) Poisson Rouge present:
Carl Craig presents Tribe
feat. Marcus Belgrave, Phil Ranelin, Wendell Harrison
10pm doors
$25 adv / $35 door
18+ or accompanied by legal guardian
This is a standing, general admission event.
Carl Craig is one of the most important names in the second generation of Detroit techno producers and DJs. Carl approaches techno with inspiration from a wide range of musical genres, including jazz and soul. He has released many successful albums under a number of aliases, including BFC, Psyche, Paperclip People, 69, Designer Music and Innerzone Orchestra. As Innerzone Orchestra he released “Bug in The Bassbin” in 1992, a track that many regard as being a key influence in the then-evolving sound of drum and bass. Carl also created his own record label, “Planet E”, which has released records by well known techno and house artists like Kevin Saunderson, Alton Miller and Moodymann. Craig served as artistic director for the widely successful Detroit Electronic Music Festival in 2000 and 2001.
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Saturday 6.21.08
JVC Jazz Festival and (Le) Poisson Rouge present:
E.S.T.
Aethereal Bace
7pm doors
$30 adv / $40 door
18+ or accompanied by legal guardian
This is a seated, general admission event.
E.S.T.: A jazz trio, which sees itself as a pop band that plays jazz, which broke with the tradition of leader and sidemen in favor of equality within its members, which not only plays jazz-venues but also venues usually reserved for rock bands, which uses light effects and fog machines, which gets a whole audience to sing along with jazz-standards, is a trio that goes beyond the scope of the classic jazz trio. Their music can be found in the pop charts and their videos are playing on MTV Scandinavia. Their unique soundscape combines jazz with drum n’ bass, electronic elements, funk rhythms, pop and rock, as well as European Classical music.
AETHERIAL BACE: Eric McPherson is at the vanguard of his generation’s drummers. His command of multiple percussion instruments is matched by his originality, electricity, versatility and sensitivity. New York saxophonist Abraham Burton’s solos are powerful and creative. He began developing his skills at Hartford’s Hartt School of Music where he learned well from talented artists like Michael Carvin and Jackie McLean. Burton graduated with a B.A. in music and a new love for jazz greats such as Louis Armstrong and Lester Young. Nasheet Waits has an intuitive understanding of the complex rhythmic requirements of modern drumming. His interest was encouraged by his father, legendary percussionist Frederick Waits. Waits is also a member of Fred Herch’s trio, and Jason Moran’s Bandwagon.
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Saturday 6.21.08
JVC Jazz Festival and (Le) Poisson Rouge present:
Simone
KJ Denhart
10:30pm doors
$35 adv / $45 door
18+ or accompanied by legal guardian
This is a seated, general admission event.
A highly-praised live performer whose resume includes starring roles in such acclaimed Broadway musicals as Rent and Aida, Simone has developed an exciting and diverse repertoire of pop, soul, jazz, rock and funk, expressed in shows performed throughout the U.S. and in the UK, Ireland, Holland, Finland, Spain and France. With the 2008 release of her first full-length album, Simone On Simone (a big band tribute to her mother, Nina Simone, produced by famed jazz musician and arranger Bob Belden), music lovers worldwide discovered the vocal dynamism that live audiences have witnessed for over a decade. Blessed with a rich vocal range, an innate skill for lyrical interpretation and a soul-deep understanding of music as a means of healing, empowerment and celebration, Simone is very much her mother’s daughter, and she is also most assuredly a multi-talented artist in her own right.
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Monday 6.23.08
JVC Jazz Festival and (Le) Poisson Rouge present: “Salsa Meets Jazz”feat. Poncho Sanchez
(2 sets)7:30pm doors
Tuesday 6.24.08
JVC Jazz Festival and (Le) Poisson Rouge present: “Turntables, Samples and Jazz” feat.Mocean Worker
DJ Logic Project Logic
Marco Benevento Trio
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Thursday 6.26.08 AND
Friday 6.27.08JVC Jazz Festival and (Le) Poisson Rouge present:
Soulive w/ Joshua Redman
(playing 2 sets)
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7pm doors
$15
18+ or accompanied by legal guardian
This is a seated, general admission event.
With an astonishing musical sensibility and intellectual curiosity alongside her flawless technique, 20-year-old pianist Natasha Paremski has established herself as an artist of rare breadth and appeal. Natasha began her piano studies at the age of 4 with Nina Malikova at the Andreyev School of Music in Moscow. She studied at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music before moving to New York to study with Pavlina Dokovska at Mannes College of Music, from which she graduated in 2007. With a strong focus on new music, Natashas growing repertoire reflects an artistic maturity beyond her years. At the suggestion of John Corigliano, she began playing his Piano Concerto and is performing it with the Colorado Symphony in the 2007-08 season and at the American Symphony Orchestra League conference in June 2008. Her growing list of awards includes the Prix Montblanc 2007, the 2006 Gilmore Young Artist Award, top prize in the 2002 Bronislaw Kaper Awards sponsored by the Los Angeles Philharmonic; top prize in the Young Artists in Carnegie Hall 2000 International Piano Festival, and many others.
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Tuesday 7.01.08
Jonathan Kane’s FebruaryKathleen Supové
7pm doors
$15
18+ or accompanied by legal guardian
This is a seated, general admission event.
Jonathan Kane is a Downtown NYC legend–as co-founder of the no-wave behemoth, Swans, and the rhythmic thunder behind the massed-guitar armies of Rhys Chatham and the rock excursions of La Monte Young–and as one of the hardest-hitting drummers on the planet. On his critically acclaimed releases ‘February’, and ‘I Looked At The Sun’, Kane summons Swans’ concussive wallop, Chatham’s dense guitar strata, and the perpetual propulsion of 70s krautrockers Neu, then steers it all head-on into… the blues. Make no mistake about it: Kane is a bluesman, and beneath his music’s hip shaking high-decible bombast, he’s powering guitar-driven minimalism into the blues, and the blues into guitar-driven harmonic maximalism. Kane has also toured and recorded with a galaxy of modern music luminaries such as Elliott Sharp, Gary Lucas, John Zorn, Dave Soldier, The Kropotkins, Moe Tucker, Jean-Francois Pauvros, Jac Berrocal, Evan Parker and Transmission.
“Paradise between the back porch, the urban jungle and the heavens above. Rarely does the avant-garde rock this hard.” -Time Out New York
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Monday 7.14.08
A Hawk And A Hacksaw
7:30pm doors
$13 adv / $15 door
18+ or accompanied by legal guardian
Partial, first-come seating available.
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Friday 7.18.08 AND Saturday 7.19.08
Matmos
Leprechaun Catering
7pm doors
$15
18+ or accompanied by legal guardian
Partial, first-come seating available.
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Friday 7.18.08
Brazzaville
11pm doors
$15
18+ or accompanied by legal guardian
Partial, first-come seating available.