this week in music

POETRY IS THE MUSIC OF THE SOUL: ART CONTEMPLATES HISTORY IN TWO NEW DOCS

Nikita Khrushchev visits America and President Dwight D. Eisenhower in Soundtrack to a Coup d’État

SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP d’ÉTAT (Johan Grimonprez, 2024)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Friday, November 1
212-727-8110
filmforum.org
kinolorber.com

Two new documentaries opening November 1 in New York use music and poetry, respectively, to look at a pair of seminal moments in twentieth-century world history.

At Film Forum, visual artist Johan Grimonprez’s Soundtrack to a Coup d’État is a 150-minute jazz epic, an exhilarating barrage of words, images, and music that delves deep into the January 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of what would become the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In 1960, in a move that struck a blow against colonialism, sixteen African countries were admitted to the United Nations, and that year also saw the UN’s first peacekeeping operation on the continent. Amid espionage and international machinations, the cold war reaches new levels. Soviet chairman Nikita Khrushchev rhythmically bangs his shoe on a General Assembly table and US president Dwight D. Eisenhower befriends Belgian king Baudouin in an effort to secure uranium. The CIA gets involved in possibly nefarious operations in Africa, using unknowing jazz musicians as deflections.

Grimonprez (dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, Shadow World) and editor Rik Chaubet interweave quotes by Khrushchev, Eisenhower, Malcolm X, Sukarno, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Fidel Castro, activist Léonie Abo, Irish diplomat and writer Conor Cruise O’Brien, CIA director Allen Dulles, Secretary of State John F. Dulles, activist Andrée Blouin, mercenaries “Mad” Mike Hoare and Bruce Bartlett, Belgian premier Gaston Eyskens, UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld, writer In Koli Jean Bofane, CIA station chief Larry Devlin, DRC president Joseph Kasa-Vubu, Voice of America broadcaster Willis Conover, Belgian colonel Frédéric Vandewalle, and others with songs by such legends as Nina Simone (“Wild Is the Wind”), Louis Armstrong (“Black and Blue”), Miriam Makeba (“Mbube”), Thelonius Monk, John Coltrane (“In a Sentimental Mood”), Miles Davis (“Blue in Green”), Ornette Coleman (“January”), Dizzy Gillespie (“And Then She Stopped”), and Duke Ellington (“Take the ‘A’ Train”), along with archival footage, album covers, and boldly designed graphics.

The musical centerpieces are drummer Max Roach and vocalist Abbey Lincoln (“Tears for Johannesburg,” “Freedom Day,” “Triptych: Prayer/Protest/Peace”), who, at the UN Security Council in 1961, protested the murder of Lumumba, and Gillespie, who speaks with his trademark humor about the controversies. “This is what you might call a cool war,” Ellington tells Gillespie, who responds, “The weapon that we will use is the cool one,” holding up his horn. He also has fun teasing a television news journalist about the situation in Africa.

Powerful, poetic quotes are spoken or are blasted across the screen.

“One day independence will come to the Congo and the white will become black, and the black will become white.” — Congolese cleric Simon Kimbangu

“There is a limit to the usefulness of the past.” — Indian UN ambassador Krishna Menon

“The enemy is imperialism.” — Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah

“Any fool can start a war that even a wise man cannot end.” — Soviet chairman Nikita Khrushchev (over footage of a submarine rising through ice and Khrushchev petting his dog, looking like a Bond villain)

“Sure, I’d rather be a poet than a politician. . . . I’m suspicious of the written word; I prefer the spoken word. I trust it more in the world of politics.” — Belgian premier Paul-Henri Spaak

“If Africa is shaped like a revolver, then Congo is its trigger.” — French psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon

Soundtrack to a Coup d’État is like a multimedia jazz concert, every minute promising some kind of improvisatory surprise from many of the greatest singers and instrumentalists of the era. It’s a radical documentary with radical views; the scenes when Khrushchev and Castro come to America are unforgettable, and several of its positions on issues are controversial. But it moves and grooves to the rhythm of the beat in a way that will suck you into its world while making you reconsider much of what you know about the incidents it explores.

Grimonprez will be at Film Forum for Q&As following the 6:45 screening on November 1 and the 4:00 show on November 2.

After: Poetry Destroys Silence explores how poetry deals with such tragic events as the Holocaust

AFTER: POETRY DESTROYS SILENCE (Richard Kroehling, 2024)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, November 1
www.cinemavillage.com
www.after.film

In the 2016 documentary The Last Laugh, director Ferne Pearlstein spoke with survivors as well as such comics as Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Harry Shearer, David Steinberg, Susie Essman, and Rob Reiner in an attempt to find a connection between humor and the Holocaust “You can do jokes about Nazis,” Gilbert Gottfried says in the film, “but if you say ‘Holocaust,’ then it becomes bad taste.”

In After: Poetry Destroys Silence, writer, director, and editor Richard Kroehling looks at the relationship between poetry and the Holocaust, but, unsurprisingly, there is little humor to be found. It’s an intensely serious film that tries to tell its story in a form that mimics that of its subject. Just as Soundtrack to a Coup d’État unfurls like a jazz concert, After is told like an epic poem. But in this case, scenes of poignant purity and beauty are interrupted by self-congratulatory moments as experts feel the need not just to share poetry but to defend its existence as a necessary art form in interpreting history.

Following a projected quote from Theodor Adorno that reads, “To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric,” poet Alicia Ostriker explains, “After Auschwitz, poetry is barbaric. It’s easy for people to think that and many people do, but they’re thinking that is part of the contempt for poetry; that is also contempt for the human soul.”

“After certain kinds of genocide and suffering, how can the world go on at all?” poet and critic Edward Hirsch asks. “I think it’s the obligation of poetry to respond to certain kinds of horror. The Holocaust is a kind of test case for poetry because of course it defies language. It defeats language. And yet language has to respond. It’s our job as poets to remember what happened.”

The film works better when it concentrates on the poems themselves, which are often accompanied by archival footage from Auschwitz, shots of nature (especially fire and water), whispers, and music from a violin, piano, and typewriter. Citing memories from his time in the camps, ninety-one-year-old survivor Walter Fiden proclaims, “Everything can be overcome. Nothing is hopeless.”

Hungarian poet and actor Géza Röhrig (Son of Saul, To Dust) recalls visiting an empty Auschwitz in 1986, using a map his grandfather made, and seeing various artifacts left behind, from toothbrushes and children’s toys to Hebrew letters and drawings on walls. He notes, “I felt that if I could not become six million, I will step into the shoes of one.”

There are other contributions from survivor Paul Celan, Yehuda Amichai, Christine Poreba, Taylor Mali, Sabrina Orah Mark, film producer Janet R. Kirchheimer, and Pulitzer Prize nominee Cornelius Eady, who performs an anonymous poem from the Warsaw Ghetto with a jazz sensibility. In a ten-minute segment in the middle of the film, Oscar winner Melissa Leo (The Fighter, Frozen River) and Bo Corre (Mulberry St., Harrow Island) try to find meaning in a lost photograph from 1945. Tribute is paid to Raoul Wallenberg, Oskar Schindler, and André Trocmé. The late photographer Charles Carter recites haunting poetry while contemporary shots of his are mixed in with historical footage. The beautiful cinematography is by Lisa Rinzler, with evocative sound by Helge Bernhardt.

In Soundtrack to a Coup d’État, Max Roach declares, “We do use the music as a weapon against man’s inhumanity toward man.” The same can be said for the poetry in After.

After: Poetry Destroys Silence opens November 1 at Cinema Village, with Kroehling on hand for a Q&A following the 1:00 screening. On November 3 at 5:00, Kroehling, Kirchheimer, Eady, and Röhrig will participate in a panel discussion and reception at Town & Village Synagogue, moderated by Rabbi Irwin Kula, and there will be a panel discussion with the same group on November 6 at Cinema Village after the 7:00 show.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A RED HOOK INSTITUTION

Four actors share the history of Red Hook and Sunny’s Bar on board a historic barge in The Wind and the Rain (photo by Maria Baranova)

THE WIND AND THE RAIN: A STORY ABOUT SUNNY’S BAR
Lehigh Valley Railroad Barge No. 79
Sunny’s Bar
Conover Street pier, Red Hook
Wednesday – Sunday through October 27, $25 general admission – $45 VIP
engardearts.org
vineyardtheatre.org

At the beginning of writer Sarah Gancher and director Jared Mezzocchi’s wonderful site-specific play The Wind and the Rain: A story about Sunny’s Bar, actor Paco Tolson asks if anyone is new to Red Hook. The night I was there, only a few hands went up. “You made it! Welcome!” he says.

There was a time not long ago when nearly everyone in the audience would have raised their hands. Red Hook has changed, and the show provides an entertaining and innovative look at that metamorphosis through the slightly warped lens of Sunny’s Bar.

The multimedia production starts on board the historic 1914 Lehigh Valley No. 79 wooden railroad barge, which is docked on Conover St. in Red Hook and houses the Waterfront Museum, which is run by barge owner David Sharps. The audience sits in two rows on three sides of the staging area, where Tolson, Jennifer Regan, Pete Simpson, and Jen Tullock share the history of the neighborhood and, specifically, Sunny’s Bar, which is across the street. Simpson points out early on, “Some of what you see tonight is based on interviews. Some is based on research. Some is fictionalized. Some is totally made up.” He adds, “It’s a big story. It covers hundreds of years and thousands of people. And there’s just four of us, so we do need your help. We need you to be our voices of the past.”

The Wind and the Rain is an immersive, participatory show; members of the audience read text projected on a front screen and the walls, and some are asked to stand up and play a role for a minute or two. Although it’s made clear that no one will be forced to do anything they don’t want to do, the play works best when the audience is fully engaged. (Be sure to be ready when the shoe comes to you.)

Gancher takes us back through desolate periods with wild dogs roaming the grounds, police corruption and protection rackets, gambling and brothels, and Prohibition as well as when Red Hook was a busy port, an English ﬁshing village, a Dutch community, Lenape territory, and part of a massive glacier. “How do you write a story about time?” Regan asks. In this case, they focus on the last hundred years, featuring a wide range of intriguing characters centered around the impact Hurricane Sandy had on the bar and the relationship between Sunny (Simpson) and his partner, Tone Johansen (Tullock), pronounced “tuna.”

Sunny was raised in Red Hook, traveled to India to study with a guru, tried his hand at acting, then became an abstract painter before opening the bar in 1997. Tone was born on a remote Norwegian island, where her family had little and she was not exposed to the outside world. When they discuss their past, flashback scenes introduce us to Sunny’s grandparents Antonio and Angelina Balzano, who bought the bar in 1907, his parents Ralph and Josephine, his brother Frank, his cousin Gina Fazzabini, hipster bartender Francis, Barzano delivery boy Romeo and his brother Dominic, the hardworking Teresa, and others, splendidly portrayed by the four-person cast through quick changes as they shift four rolling tables around. (Marcelo Martínez Garcia’s set also includes family photos hung on the walls; the costumes are by Mika Eubanks, with stark lighting by Amith Chandrashaker, immersive sound by Jane Shaw, and superb video and projections by Paul Deziel.)

Battling family money squabbles, natural disasters, and Sunny’s health issues and wandering eye, Tone does everything she can to keep the bar running against improbable odds.

Sunny (Pete Simpson) and Tone (Jen Tullock) take stock of their lives in multimedia participatory site-specific play (photo by Maria Baranova)

Obie winners Gancher (The Place We Built, The Lucky Ones) and Mezzocchi (On the Beauty of Loss) previously collaborated on Russian Troll Farm: A Workplace Comedy, which was a streaming hit during the pandemic before being performed IRL at the Vineyard, which teamed up with Anne Hamburger’s site-specific specialists En Garde Arts on The Wind and the Rain. Gancher and Mezzocci make terrific use of the dark, intimate space, keeping the strong ensemble — which has an infectious improvisatory feel, like a jazz band — on the move and the audience involved, never getting bogged down in staid exposition.

Obie winner Simpson (Is This a Room, Infinite Life) does an uncanny job capturing the essence of Sunny, a magnetic figure who helped revivify Red Hook. Tullock (On the Head of a Pin, You Shall Inherit the Earth!) is powerful as the serious Tone, an unstoppable force who is on a mission. Regan (Born Yesterday, How I Learned to Drive) and Tolson (Vietgone, The Knight of the Burning Pestle) are excellent switching between multiple roles and addressing the audience directly, breaking the fourth wall regularly.

Throughout the show, an Americana roots band led by multi-instrumentalist Pete Lanctot plays such traditional tunes as “I Saw the Light” and “Where the Soul of Man Never Dies” with a rotating roster of musicians from Sunny’s; the night I attended, Lanctot was joined by Adam Winski on banjo, Sarah Klein on ukulele, and Alex Deane on fiddle.

The two-hour play (plus intermission) concludes with a group walk to Sunny’s Bar, accompanied by further narrative delivered over headphones and spectacular projections, resulting in a grand finale, with VIP ticket holders congregating at outside tables in the back to continue a memorable experience that can only happen in Red Hook.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

GRAFFITI MEETS DANCE IN BELLA ABZUG PARK

Imani Gaudin and Jakob Vitale will premiere site-specific work October 3 in Bella Abzug Park

jakob & imani
Bella Abzug Park, Hudson Yards
Enter between West Thirty-Fourth & Thirty-Fifth Sts. along Hudson Blvd. East
Thursday, October 3, free, noon-3:00 and 4:00-7:00
646-731-3200
baryshnikovarts.org

Baryshnikov Arts takes it outside with the world premiere of jakob & imani, a site-specific piece conceived by choreographer Imani Gaudin and visual artist Jakob Vitale for Bella Abzug Park at Hudson Yards. Commissioned with the Hudson Yards Hell’s Kitchen Alliance, the durational work explores the symbiotic relationship between graffiti and dance. It will be performed by Gaudin, Vitale, and Marcus Sarjeant, with a set by Gaudin, Vitale, and Louis James Woodworks and photography by Sinematic Studios; Gaudin and Vitale, both graduates of Purchase, also created the sound score and the costumes.

Gaudin, who was born and raised in New Orleans and is artistic director of the Brooklyn-based Gaudanse Inc., seeks “to create a collaborative space for all artists alike while exploring what it means to delve deep into how movement languages bring forth new ideas and translates into what we call dance.” The company has presented such previous pieces as nanibu, 二時二分（2:02), and mamihlapinatapai. The Bronx-born Vitale, who is based in New York and Los Angeles, states that “art can reach in any direction, but in its most basic form it can either steer an observer into fantastical distractions or it can build off of life and evoke a thought/reaction to the prevalence of the real. . . . It comes down to the viewer to determine the significance of the art and evoking its effectiveness towards making the world fair and peaceful.”

Admission to jakob & imani, which takes place October 3 from noon to seven with a one-hour break at three, is free. Baryshnikov Arts’ fall season continues with such other programs as Oliver Tompkins Ray’s Woolgathering, featuring Patti Smith, with choreography by John Heginbotham; PRISMA’s Origins, with ARKAI and SPIDERHORSE; and the Charles Overton Group in a salon-style concert.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

INDRA’S NET

Meredith Monk’s Indra’s Net at Park Ave. Armory is a multimedia marvel (photo by Stephanie Berger)

INDRA’S NET
Park Avenue Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
Through October 6, $45-$185
212-933-5812
www.armoryonpark.org

Meredith Monk, the grand doyenne of experimental music, theater, film, and dance, completes her trilogy exploring the interconnectedness of humanity and the natural environment and the universe with the gorgeous Indra’s Net, making its North American premiere at Park Ave. Armory through October 6. The eighty-one-year-old MacArthur Fellow and National Medal of Arts honoree began the three-part work with 2013’s On Behalf of Nature, followed by 2017’s Cellular Songs. Conceived for the armory’s massive Wade Thompson Drill Hall, The piece starts with a preamble; as the audience enters the space, they are greeted by “Rotation Shrine,” projections of Monk and members of her vocal ensemble in silhouette, their bodies floating across the screen. Meanwhile, four dancers to the right and four to the left pose in spotlights as droning music plays.

The audience is then seated in rafters around a large circle on the floor with eight small chairs lined horizontally in a row; at the east end of the hall is a moonlike flat screen hovering above the performance space, facing the audience, its curved upper limit mimicking the arched ceiling. The eight dancers (Tomas Cruz, Jodi Gilbert, Toussaint Jeanlouis, Anaïs Maviel, Luisa Muhr, Paul Pinto, Sarah Rossy, Chanan Ben Simon), known as the mirror chorus, take seats on cushions along the outer edge of the circle, then Monk and the vocal ensemble (Paul Chwe MinChul An, Theo Bleckmann, Gideon Crevoshay, Allison Easter, Ellen Fisher, Katie Geissinger, music supervisor Allison Sniffin) sit on the chairs. They move their arms and legs in synchronized motion to begin the piece as the sixteen-piece orchestra, eight on each side and dressed in shades of blue, perform the lovely score, led by Fifi Zhango on piano, Laura Sherman on harp, Ethan Cohn on double bass, Michael Raia on clarinet, and Karl Ronneburg and John Hollenbeck on percussion.

It’s no mere coincidence that the cast is made up of groups of eight, a number that, in various mathematical, religious, mystical, and numerological meanings, represents regeneration, prosperity, and the search for balance between the spiritual and material worlds.

Soon the vocal ensemble is wandering the stage, breaking off into duets and trios as if they are having conversations, although no actual words are spoken, instead creating their own language. Occasionally, a live overhead camera projects the movement on the screen, providing breathtaking visuals. At one point, the vocal ensemble, in all white, and the mirror chorus, in all black, interact as projections of tree branches evoking arteries appear on the floor and screen, interweaving humans with nature. The costumes and set are by Yoshio Yabara, with whispery, echoing immersive sound by Daniel Neumann, evocative, sometimes spooky lighting by Joe Levasseur, mesmerizing cinematography by Ben Stechschulte, and engaging projections by Jorge Morales Picó.

Meredith Monk completes eleven-year trilogy with dazzling Indra’s Net (photo by Stephanie Berger)

In the program, Monk explains that the title of the eighty-minute piece, Indra’s Net, comes from an “ancient Buddhist/Hindu legend [in which] an enlightened king, Indra, stretches an immense, boundless net across the universe with an infinitely faceted jewel at every intersection. Each jewel is unique yet reflects all the others, illuminating the principle of interdependence among all living things.”

Metaphorically, the net and jewels refer to the interdependence between the performers and the audience, celebrating each individual, but on the way out after the show it morphs into a poetic reality as the audience encounters “Offering Shrine,” a video of sixteen people, including many of the vocalists and dancers, opening their hands to reveal such objects as a baseball, keys, a toy car, Scrabble letters, and animal sculptures, representations of which are arranged on a long table below the screen. It’s a compelling way to pay tribute to the little things that, together, help shape an existence that encircles us all.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

ADAM DRESSNER: HELLO STRANGER

Mickey re-creates original pose at Adam Dressner opening in Grand Central Terminal (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

HELLO STRANGER
Grand Central Terminal, Vanderbilt Hall
89 East 42nd St. between Lexington and Vanderbilt
September 24-26, free, 9:00 am – 9:00 pm
www.adamdressner.com
grandcentralterminal.com

One can see a lot of fascinating faces and figures racing through Grand Central Terminal every day, but they seldom stop for close inspection, nor do commuters get to see a full-size portrait gallery of their fellow everyday New Yorkers. Yet that’s exactly what Adam Dressner’s new pop-up show, “Hello Stranger,” running September 24–26 on the east side of Vanderbilt Hall in GCT, provides.

After graduating from Yale Law School, New York City native Dressner briefly practiced as an attorney before turning to painting. He uses his studies of criminology, civil liberties, and facial recognition technology to create colorful, large-scale portraits of individuals he places in whimsical settings. For his latest show, he depicts people he met in Washington Square Park, relatives, and friends of friends; nearly all of them are not models and have never posed before.

Among the more than thirty works are paintings of his father, Robert, sitting cross-legged at a table, reading; the elegant Mr. Love, in hat and bowtie, dangling major bling; ABT dancer Georgia Duisenberg in the middle of a pose; Hannah, in fencing gear; a triptych of three people enjoying themselves in Averill Park in upstate New York; his favorite subject, his grandmother Sonia Segoda Dressner, who died in 2020 at the age of ninety-nine; and collaborations with artists De La Vega and Keion Kopper.

At the opening, I asked Dressner, who was dressed casually and wearing one of his many blue baseball caps, about how he chooses who to paint.

“Well, a lot of them were chance encounters,” he said. “That’s where I met [jeweler] Greg Yüna, who introduced me to many of the people who are in the paintings. It’s random chance. I have this umbrella that’s over here where I paint people from life; it’s self-selecting in the sense that people come over and ask to be painted, and if I think they’re a particularly interesting subject, I’ll ask them if they’d be interested. In some cases people ask me if I’d paint them; in many cases I ask them. I place people in imaginary environments where I think that they might want to be placed.”

He noted that Shar told him that she liked sharks, so he added a hammerhead hovering in the background. At the opening, Shar was sitting behind a table with another subject, Betty, handing out information about the show as well as postcards. Also on the table was a mixed-media cash register with the word Sales on top, although the postcards are free.

Jessie poses in front of one of two portraits of her in “Hello Stranger” show in Vanderbilt Hall (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Several subjects were at the event, posing in front of their paintings, including Mickey, who mimicked his exuberant pose; Wendy, sitting next to her small cart with a stuffed red monkey attached to it; and Jessie, who is in two paintings, one of her reading on the beach, the other standing in a blue dress in front of a pink window.

Jessie said that she found the experience of posing for Dressner in his East Village studio “unnerving,” adding, “I love his work so much that I wanted to see what he would do with me, even though I was a little afraid. It’s a strange thing to see yourself captured on canvas, then against this strange background.”

In the center of the space is a Steinway piano, where live performances will take place during the three-day run of the show. I took a peek at the playlist on the piano and noticed several Christmas songs, “Amazing Grace,” “Ave Maria,” and two Johann Strauss pieces.

Dressner is inspired by classic works he’s seen at the Met and MoMA while also exploring his personal feelings and memory. Talking about his portrait of Shar, Dressner admitted, “It’s a little bit of an absurd painting, but that’s what I do. I draw with paint; I will paint the person on a white canvas, then I’ll figure out some shapes that make sense to me, and then after that I will figure out a story.”

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

BUILDING BRIDGES: JOHN T. REDDICK AND THE BLACK HISTORY OF TIN PAN ALLEY

Curator and cultural historian John T. Reddick will give a talk on Tin Pan Alley on September 11 at the Society of Illustrators (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

ILLUSTRATING TIN PAN ALLEY: FROM RAGTIME TO JAZZ
Society of Illustrators
128 East Sixty-Third St. between Park & Lexington Aves.
Wednesday – Saturday through October 12, $10-$15
Tin Pan Alley Talk & Reception: Wednesday, September 11, $10-$15. 6:30
212-838-2560
societyillustrators.org

Longtime Harlem resident and Yale University School of Architecture graduate John T. Reddick is into bridge building — but in this case, the bridges aren’t physical structures but those that involve the lesser-known history of Tin Pan Alley. The birthplace of American popular music, Tin Pan Alley flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when dozens of music publishers and businesses lined the streets of what is now Chelsea, in the West Twenties.

Born and raised in the integrated Philadelphia neighborhood of Mount Airy, Reddick got involved in trying to save Tin Pan Alley when five buildings on West Twenty-Eighth St. were in danger of being demolished by their owner/developer. In 2019, the Landmarks Preservation Commission designated them historic landmarks.

A founding member of Harlem Pride and the director of community engagement projects for the Central Park Conservancy, Reddick has been an avid collector of sheet music art, focusing on songs composed and/or performed by Black and Jewish entertainers. What began as a curiosity and hobby has blossomed into a dazzling exhibition at the Society of Illustrators, “Illustrating Tin Pan Alley: From Ragtime to Jazz,” on view through October 12.

“I felt like these artists were groundbreakers. I see in them many parallels to hip hop, in that ragtime’s innovation for its time was as jarring as hip hop’s,” he said of the composers and performers of the era during a tour of the show. “My journey began after I went to a talk on the Lower East Side given by Jeffery Gurock, who lectured on the period when Harlem was Jewish. That was a revelation to me, that Harlem had once been the second largest Jewish community in New York City. From that point I went to the library, did research, and started buying items on eBay. It was just shocking; as I bought sheet music or got to see the names, I realized they all lived in Harlem during the same time period.”

Arranged chronologically, the exhibit focuses on sheet music and its accompanying art, which reveals the developing connections between American Black and white music, beginning with the cakewalk, a Black dance that originated in America but became a craze when introduced in Europe, advancing its popularity as a hit in the United States. Several photographs and illustrations depict the cakewalk being performed, including two works by French artist Georges-Bertin Scott, sheet music covers for the songs “Darktown Is Out To-Night” and “Cake Walk Neath the Dixie Moon,” and a drawing in which Uncle Sam relaxes while watching dancers’ cakewalk around a tree.

On a nearby wall is the sheet music for “All Coons Look Alike to Me,” a popular 1898 song composed by Ernest Hogan that sold more than a million copies. Hogan, a prominent Black composer and performer, appeared in shows with the leading African American performers of the day. However, the song’s sheet music art, which featured unflattering caricatures of Black men and women, became such a crippling definer of Hogan as an artist that it led to his demise.

Reddick noted, “All of a sudden, this ragtime music is popular, and you want to show and sell us more. What do you use to image that music?” Reddick grouped together the sheet music covers for “Who Dat Say Chicken in Dis Crowd” by Paul Laurence Dunbar and Will Marion [Cook], “Cotton: A Southern Breakdown” by Albert Von Tilzer, and “Watermelon Am Good Enough for Mine” by G. Barker Richardson and Von Tilzer. “I have three things in there: cotton, chicken, and watermelon. They’re in the lyrics; they’re in the titles,” Reddick said. “A lot of the signifying, I feel, is coming out of music publishers just trying to meet the commercial market where its mind is at. You don’t cartoon something unless its understanding is pervasive. For me it’s the beginning of bridge building to some identity that’s beyond that becomes an American music.”

Other excellent groupings juxtapose two different sheet music covers for Lew Pollack’s “Vamping Sal the Sheba of Georgia” and three for Shelton Brooks’s “Darktown Strutters’ Ball.”

Pointing out that a lot of sheet music was dedicated to songwriter and journalist Monroe Rosenfeld because the performers knew he could talk them up in the newspaper, Reddick zeroed in on the team of Bert Williams and George Walker.

“Rosenfeld has this bridge relationship, so you see a lot of people pandering to him, even Williams and Walker, who coined themselves ‘the two real coons.’ They claimed the tag and the stage to establish their own authenticity and artistry. I realized in many ways it’s just like hip hop. You could have been the greatest hip-hop singer in the world, but if you went to amateur night at the Apollo and started singing in a tuxedo, you would be booed. You wouldn’t even get your mouth open because there’s a certain kind of drag they expect you to be in to perform. Williams and Walker knew they were good, but they realized that more whites were blacking-up and playing Blacks onstage than actual Black performers. It was so much more sophisticated. They could show that there’s parody and all this irony in lot of stuff they did.”

Every element, even the way the show is hung, carries some kind of weight. Reddick explained that for most of the works, a black frame indicates the song was written by a Black composer, a white frame by a white composer.

Perhaps not accidentally, the cover sheet for Jean Schwartz’s 1908 “The Whitewash Man,” depicting a smiling Black man carrying a paint bucket and a broom, is placed over a water fountain, evoking the “Whites Only” signs of the Jim Crow era.

Among the other composers and performers Reddick discussed were James Reese Europe and Ford T. Dabney, Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, Irene and Vernon Castle, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Ethel Waters, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Miss Aida Overton Walker, drummer Buddy Gilmore, Fats Waller, Sophie Tucker, Josephine Baker, and W. C. Handy as well as the Clef Club, the Ziegfeld Follies, the Cotton Club, Connie’s Inn, and Al Hirschfeld and Sydney Leff, two Jewish artists who attended the Vocational High School for the Arts on 138th Street in Harlem.

“Think of the names of Motown groups,” Reddick said. “The Supremes, the Marvelettes, the Temptations. Nobody’s a gangster. They’re claiming we deserve to be on the other side. Now we have a credential. . . . When the Central Park jogger case happened [in 1989], the term ‘wilding,’ it was just a term for young people being in nature and the park, not being there in the park to victimize people. But that was the first time it crossed over as a term from the Black community to the broader public. . . . So, I always think, what if bling had crossed over, associated with a jewelry store robbery as opposed to the fashions of hip-hop artists. Again, the word already had that meaning in my culture. Bling and jewelry. You got bling on, but at a certain point it crossed over, right? Maybe a hip-hop person, whatever. What was the bridge that made it happen?”

Tin Pan Alley exhibition winds down narrow hallway (photo courtesy of Society of Illustrators)

One of the most striking works is E. Simms Campbell’s gorgeously detailed 1932 “Night-Club-Map of Harlem,” which locates such hot spots as Smalls Paradise, Club Hot-Cha (“where nothing happens before 2 a.m.”), “the nice new police station,” Gladys’ Clam House, the Lafayette Theatre, the Radium Club, and the Savoy Ballroom, with cartoon vignettes of people dancing the lindy hop and the snakehips, men purchasing “marijuana cigarettes,” Bill “Bojangles” Robinson tapping away, and Tillie’s offering “specialties in fried chicken — and it’s really good.”

Reddick, who will give a lecture at the Society of Illustrators on September 11 at 6:30, followed by a reception with pianist/preservationist Adrian Untermyer, then told a story about American composer and violinist Will Marion Cook, who had studied with and influenced Antonín Dvořák’s take on America’s “Negro Music.”

“He performed and got a review that said he was one of the nation’s best colored violinists. And he took his violin to the critic and broke it and said, ‘I’m the best violinist.’ He wanted to start writing for Black shows and other Black players. He wrote with [poet and novelist] Paul Laurence Dunbar. But his family was so embarrassed for writing that ‘n—er’ music that in his first productions, he didn’t use his last name. However, Cook-associated shows such as 1898’s Clorindy and 1903’s In Dahomey served to bring a more diverse African American identity to the stage. What does that mean politically? If people are liking you, then they are seeing you in another light. What’s that going to mean on the political landscape?”

He added, “Now they could be voters. Picking cotton, you weren’t a voter. They’re playing at Madison Square Garden, so they’re at this elevated level. They’re having a life that was unimaginable for most Blacks.”

Above “All Coons Look Alike to Me” is a quote by W. E. B. Du Bois from his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk: “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others . . . one ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two un-reconciled strivings.”

In “Illustrating Tin Pan Alley: From Ragtime to Jazz,” Reddick is reconciling those strivings and more, building bridges across race and class through a unique moment in New York City musical history.

[On September 19, the Society of Illustrators will host a happy hour from 5:00 to 9:00, with free admission, drink specials, and live music by Charlie Judkins, Miss Maybell, and Robert Lamont. Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

R.O.S.E.

Park Ave. Armory has been transformed into a rave club for R.O.S.E. (photo by Stephanie Berger)

R.O.S.E.
Park Ave. Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at Sixty-Seventh St.
September 5-12, $65
www.armoryonpark.org

Sharon Eyal’s exhilarating R.O.S.E., which opened September 5 for a too-brief seven-show run in Wade Thompson Drill Hall in Park Ave. Armory, ebbs and flows as a participatory dance experience that pulses with a series of slow fuses that explode about half a dozen times over the course of three hot hours.

An armory commission that debuted last year at New Century Hall in Manchester, R.O.S.E. starts off calmer than one might expect. The hall is divided into front and back sections by a floor-to-ceiling side-to-side black fabric wall. As the audience arrived in the first section of the hall, about a half hour before showtime, a DJ spun droning tunes in the space, mostly empty save for a few couches and benches; a projection of a large white rose glowed on the wall behind the DJ.

On opening night, one man moved slowly back and forth to the music as a handful of others relaxed, talked, and checked their phones. Little was going on; excitement was nonexistent. At 7:30, the crowd began entering the main space; staff wearing glow sticks placed a sticker over each person’s phone camera lens, as absolutely no photo or video is allowed inside.

The truncated area lacks the breathtaking awe of the hall’s usual vastness, with walls and curtains on all sides and lights and speakers hanging down, blocking the view of the impressive ceiling. There are four step-platforms, with bars in two corners, the tech crew in a third, and DJ Ben UFO in the fourth. (The set design is by Daphnée Lanternier, who is also credited with creative direction.)

Dancers weave in, through, and around the crowd in Sharon Eyal’s immersive R.O.S.E. (photo by Stephanie Berger)

It was not clear what to do at first as attendees considered where to stand. (I recommend hanging around wherever you see white tape on the floor.) The crowd consisted of people from all age groups (except children), in all types of dress and hairstyles, including small groups that appeared to come straight out of SNL’s old “Sprockets” skits; some swayed to the music, others chattered away, and a few scanned their phones. After about fifteen curious minutes, one gentleman stepped into a spotlight in the middle of the room and clapped his hands over his head several times; that was all it took to get more people to start dancing.

Shortly after eight o’clock, as the packed dance floor was heating up, nine performers (Darren Devaney, Guido Dutilh, Juan Gil, Alice Godfrey, Héloïse Jocqueviel, Johnny McMillan, Keren Lurie Pardes, and Nitzan Ressler) entered the space, making their way through the audience, which parted to let them pass. Wearing postapocalyptic beige costumes by Maria Grazia Chiuri of Christian Dior Couture (that occasionally included cowls and cinch sacks), metal jewelry and makeup by Noa Eyal Behar (that featured streaked black eyeliner, teardrops, and piercings), they moved through the crowd with insectlike precision, their arms and legs forming awkward angles.

Eyal cut her teeth as a member and choreographer of Batsheva Dance Company, and her exciting movement language contains elements of former Batsheva artistic director Ohad Naharin’s Gaga system. The work is codirected by Eyal’s longtime collaborator Gai Behar, whom Eyal met in a club in the late 1990s, and Caius Pawsom of the Young art collective.

While some audience members hung back on the platform risers, others followed the nine dancers around the room as the music thumped, haze wafted over everyone, and Alon Cohen’s propulsive lighting shifted between darkness and light. And then the dancers disappeared.

A team of twelve dancers in black join the fray at Park Ave. Armory (photo by Stephanie Berger)

This pattern happened five or six times during the evening. The dancers would sneak into the area, starting from different corners, and groove for between five and fifteen minutes, sometimes breaking off into stunning solos. If you decide to remain close to them, you have to stay vigilant, as they unpredictably turn, twist, and reach out; you might be touched — one woman stood her ground, so a dancer made contact with her, while another dancer gently put a hand on a man’s shoulder — and you might even be given a black rose.

For one exquisitely choreographed scene, the nine dancers faced off against twelve dancers in black lace (New York–based Julia Ciesielka, Blu Furutate, Antonia Gillette, Michaella Ho, Destinee Jimenez, Nick LaMaina, Natalie Wong, Nina Longid, Julian Sanchez, Luc Simpson, Kailei Sin, and Jeremy Villas) in an epic battle that evoked both West Side Story and The Warriors (as well as a smidgen of Beneath the Planet of the Apes).

It’s a long night, so if you need a break, you can wander back to the first section or even out into the armory’s various period rooms with chairs and couches, and you can get a breath of fresh air outside, but the time between dances gets shorter and shorter as the evening continues, and you don’t want to miss any of them. Part of the fun is anticipating where the dancers will next emerge from and when and where they will exit. Near the end, there are longer solos and, ultimately, a stirring finale where everyone comes together in a rousing celebration bursting with electricity.

The more you put into R.O.S.E., the more you will get out of it. Don’t take off the phone sticker and try to steal a picture or video, which I saw at least two people doing, and don’t obsessively scroll through your cell in between dances. Get into the groove. Bask in the freedom. Join the party and rave on!

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]