wnyc.org / 93.9fm / am 820

“The creators of the cartoon South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, are planning to stage a Broadway musical based on the lives and (many) loves of typical members of the Church of the Latter Day Saints.”

I’ve been collecting world musicky Obama for two special iterations of the radio show I do at an undisclosed location - and I’ve discovered about thirty so far. As you can imagine the quality varies, but there are some good ones.

YouTube predictably has been a popular dissemination point. The videos often incorporate montage elements from the Obama campaign - visual and sometimes audio as well. Many of the non-English songs are subtitled because the musicians want the viewer to get the message! The song titles are direct and not always the most creative - a lot of Obamas for Change or just plain Obamas. Although Japan’s Anyone Brothers Band gets special credit for their J-English title Obama is Beautiful World. Given the cause, a lot of volunteer labor has been contributed by musicians and videographers, and many of the songs are offered for free mp3 download.

The very first song on my list was by the group Extra Golden. Extra Golden is a collaboration between musicians from the eastern US with an indie rock background and musicians from western Kenya who play benga, an uptempo guitar-centered popular dance style. Extra Golden’s Obama appreciation song preceded the campaign however. It’s actually a song of appreciation because Obama helped the band secure visas for its first US tour in 2006. As an early entrant it’s one of the few Obama songs on cd, on Extra Golden’s sophomore release Hera Ma Nono.

Read more »

Rosas. Photos by Jack Vartoogian

So, ok, I have, maybe, from time to time, been a little bit snarky about the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, which might better be known these days as the “Greatest Hits from the Avant-Old-Garde.” Or maybe the Icons Festival. Take the title of last night’s show, for example: “Steve Reich Evening.” Come on, people.

But. This show. Is. Amazing.

It celebrates the choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s relationship with Reich’s music. Lots (way too many) choreographers use Reich. It’s hard to take most of them seriously after you get a taste of the work De Keersmaeker has done. She is a masterful artist, and the response Reich elicits in her is breathtaking. The show runs through Saturday: get thee to the Icons Festival.

You’ve been reading here about the Droma Gypsy Festival, a festival of Balkan / East European / Roma (Gypsy) music that ends today, Friday at Drom (85 Ave. A, East Village).

The festival has brought in local, national and international bands. It’s feeding off a vibrant local scene that really came into its own at Mehanata, the notoriously rowdy Canal St. club that within the past decade evolved from a watering hole for local Bulgarians into a multicultural musical hotbed.

DJ Joro Boro, originally from Sofia, Bulgaria, was just another enthusiastic young Mehanata groupie. Then one night in an emergency he was drafted to DJ at the club - a gig which wound up lasting seven years. While at Mehanata he also co-produced a 2-cd collection of music from the burgeoning NY Balkan scene, Mehanata New York Gypsy Mania.

Joro Boro recalled the lively (understatement) scene at Mehanata’s original location on Canal Street.

Joro Boro laments that since the club moved to its new location on Ludlow St. on the Lower East Side two years ago it’s lost some of its individuality; it’s one hipster / youth bar among many on the block. And while plenty of great bands and artists still play there, the scene has spread out. In our conversation, we spoke about this change, also his thoughts on the very loaded term “gypsy.”

DJ Joro Boro will be spinning tonight at Drom, tonight being the final night of the Droma Gypsy Festival. Also on the bill: The boisterous Indian folk / Bollywood / wedding brass band Red Baraat Festival led by drummer Sunny Jain; and trumpeter (of Klezmatics fame) Frank London’s even bigger and more bombastic Klezmer Brass All-Stars. Joro Boro and London recently embarked on a collaborative project - there’s a chance they will do a little something together on Friday.

To help get you in the mood, here’s a downloadable Joro Boro mix:

Photo by Scott Irvine

If you want to celebrate the Jewish New Year with song and style head over to Le Poisson Rouge tonight to see the the Sway Machinery swing in the new year with their Hidden Melodies Revealed. The band is pulling out all the stops this year. Along with a guest appearance from Arcade Fire’s Sarah Neufeld, you can witness the debut of a stop-motion animation based on singer Jeremiah Lockwood’s “Scenes From a Life of Ben Zion Kapov-Kagan.” For a preview check out this post from Nextbook. For a taste of what to expect here is a clip from last year’s performance.

The Brooklyn Academy of Music held its second Takeover this weekend, filling the Opera House building with music, video art, DJs, movie marathons, games and lots of increasingly inebriated urbanites.

The fabulous Counter Critic, seen here multitasking, was my comrade for the night.

It was a packed house, but not as anarchic as the inaugural Takeover. This is probably inevitable; an institution is an institution, no matter how cheap the beer, and once something like Takeover becomes a fixture, rather than a strange one-off, it loses any sense of rebellion. And that’s fine. There were still plenty of, um, interesting moments.

Read more »

The Droma Gypsy Festival at Drom brings together local, national and international musicians playing musical styles of Eastern Europe and Roma (Gypsy)-influenced music. I recently met some of the NYC-based artists participating in the festival, including Sanda Weigl.

Sanda Weigl is a diminutive, soft-spoken but stunningly powerful singer originally from Bucharest, Romania. Her family moved to East Germany where she became a state-sanctioned rock star - until she and friends protested the invasion of Czechoslovakia, which got her banned from singing, thrown in jail and ultimately booted out of the country. But despite her rock and roll moment, Sanda told me her lifelong passion is for songs she learned from Roma who hung out near her house when she was a child in Bucharest.

While she sang the songs over the years, she never recorded them until coming to New York many years later. On the resulting cd Gypsy Killer, Sanda’s stirring vocals are propelled by a stellar ensemble of “downtown” luminaries led by pianist Anthony Coleman. Sanda told me why being in New York, so far from the Roma source, inspired her to finally make a cd of her beloved childhood songs.

Sanda Weigl at Joe’s Pub, August 25, 2008

You can hear Sanda at the Droma Gypsy Festival (85 Ave A in the East Village) this Sunday, September 28 with Dotschy Reinhardt. Check out their website to see a schedule of shows going on from now until October 3.

The Droma Gypsy Festival at Drom brings together local, national and international musicians playing musical styles of Eastern Europe and Roma (Gypsy)-influenced music. I recently met some of the NYC-based artists participating in the festival, including the Zlatne Uste Balkan Brass Band.

The Zlatne Uste Balkan Brass Band (ZU) is a group that’s passionate about East European music and dance. Most have day jobs and many came to the music through the large US network of East European-style folk dancers. Belle Birchfield and Michael Ginsburg of ZU told us that they originally started playing brass band music in a class at the Iroquois Springs Balkan Music & Dance Workshop, an annual gathering of enthusiasts in Rock Hill, New York. The idea stuck to have a permanent band modeled on the rambunctious brass bands of the Balkans and especially Serbia, the true hotbed for this music. They’ve done quite well at it - the band has been invited to the massive annual Guca brass band festival and competition in Serbia four times.

When ZU got started in 1983 the Serbian connection seemed innocuous, but a decade later when Yugoslavia broke up and war broke out, the association with Serbia became a thorny issue.

Belle and Michael told me about a particular ZU concert in Serbia after the war. In front of maybe 50,000 people, the band found themselves alone on stage for 3 minutes waiting for a television interview to end.

The Zlatne Uste Balkan Brass Band

You can hear ZU at the Droma Gypsy Festival (85 Ave A in the East Village) this Saturday, September 27 with Polka Madre and DJs Nohmada. Check out their website to see a schedule of shows going on from now until October 3.

Istanbul band Baba Zula opened the Droma Gypsy Festival with a rousing two hour show.

Download Video

Read more »

If you’re a fan of Arthur Russell, the brilliant, idiosyncratic New York musician and composer who succumbed to AIDS at the peak of his powers in 1992, then you probably already know that “Wild Combination” is opening this Friday at the IFC Center.

If you’re not, listen to this:
#

Ok, so now you’re a fan.

Russell left behind hundreds of hours of music this good, which the Audika record label has been reissuing for the past few years. The Russell cult has subsequently blossomed and now, thanks to the Brooklyn-based filmmaker and artist Matt Wolf, their hero gets properly canonized with this loving, evocative portrait.

Mixing archival footage with talking head testaments from avant-garde luminaries (Philip Glass) and the Russell inner circle (Tom Lee, his devoted lover, is an especially poignant presence), Wolf deftly tells the basic Russell narrative: From humble roots in Oskaloosa, Iowa to high bohemia in hippie San Francisco, to the avant-garde music, performance, and disco scenes of 1970’s New York.

At once brainy and soulful, melancholy and ethereal, rigorous and playful, experimental and pop, Russell’s music was never intended as a hep cat soundtrack. He wanted to make it big - albeit on his own intransigent terms - bridging downtown cool to universal pop. The height of his fame came in the 80’s with a string of odd disco tunes. Lola Love, vocalist on the delightfully weird “Go Bang,” remembers Russell as “the funkiest white boy I ever met.”

It’s wrenching to think that had he held on a few more years, Russell might have survived thanks to the antiretroviral drug therapy breakthrough in 1996. His life and death belong to the histories of music, downtown culture, and queer hagiography but his music belongs, if anything, to the future.

Some twenty movies are opening in New York this week, not to mention the New York Film Festival, but there’s only two must-sees: “Silent Light,” opening today at MoMA, and “Wild Combination” this Friday at the IFC.

Here’s an exclusive outtake from the movie, courtesy of Matt Wolf.

I was always obsessed with this clip of Arthur’s sneakers (two exact pairs I own myself). I never could find a place for this fairly esoteric and weird material in the film, so I decided to make an “anti-music video.” Here Arthur changes from his “street sneakers” into his “performance sneakers.” This is so emblematic of Arthur’s idiosyncratic and illogical, yet charming and endearing ways. - MW

Download Video