this week in music

EXTRAORDINARY ORDINARY PEOPLE

Sheila Kay Adams is featured in new documentary and will perform live at two screenings opening weekend at Cinema Village

EXTRAORDINARY ORDINARY PEOPLE (Alan Govenar, 2017)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, September 15
212-529-6799
www.firstrunfeatures.com
www.cinemavillage.com

With the future of such government agencies as the National Endowment for the Arts in jeopardy, documentarian and folklorist Alan Govenar celebrates the NEA’s National Heritage Fellowships in Extraordinary Ordinary People. Since 1982, the fellowships have honored “our nation’s master folk and traditional artists . . . recognizing the ways these individuals demonstrate and reflect our nation’s living cultural heritage and the efforts of these artists to share their knowledge with the next generation.” Govenar speaks with the program’s founder and first director, Bess Lomax Hawes, and former director Dan Sheehy, who explain the importance of nurturing a diverse group of artists who often live and work on the margins. New and archival footage feature more than two dozen figures, from such musicians and singers as Koko Taylor, Clifton Chenier, Wanda Jackson, Narciso Martinez, Sheila Kay Adams, “Flaco” Jiménez, John Lee Hooker, Chum Ngek, “Queen” Ida Guillory, Earl Scruggs, and B. B. King to such artisans as quilter Laverne Brackens, lace maker Sonia Domsch, and ceremonial regalia maker Clarissa Rizal. Govenar (The Beat Hotel, Stoney Knows How) previously documented the story of another of the film’s subjects, dancer and drummer Sidiki Conde, in You Don’t Need Feet to Dance. The film opens September 15 at Cinema Village; the 8:00 shows on Friday and Saturday night will be followed by a Q&A and mini-concert with Govenar, Adams, and Conde.

BILL MURRAY, JAN VOGLER & FRIENDS: NEW WORLDS

Photo by Jim Rakete (Jan Vogler) and Marco Grob (Bill Murray),

Jan Vogler (Photo by Jim Rakete) and Bill Murray (photo by Marco Grob) seek out new worlds in unique collaboration

Who: Bill Murray, Jan Vogler, Mira Wang, Vanessa Perez
What: Carnegie Hall concert
Where: Carnegie Hall, Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage, 881 Seventh Ave. at Fifty-Seventh St., 212-247-7800
When: Monday, October 16, $40-$250, 8:00
Why: Bill Murray has been singing his whole career, from goofing around as Nick the lounge singer on Saturday Night Live, where he would make up words to the Star Wars theme and annoy Linda Ronstadt, to delivering a rousing rendition of “Let’s Get Physical” on Late Night with David Letterman and a tender karaoke version of Roxy Music’s “More than This” in Lost in Translation. But just as he went from being a comedian to a more serious actor, he will be taking his vocal career to unseen heights on October 16 at Carnegie Hall for “Bill Murray, Jan Vogler & Friends: New Worlds,” an evening of classical music and American literature. Suburban Chicago native Murray and German cellist Jan Vogler, who met on an airplane in 2013, attended a poetry walk across the Brooklyn Bridge together in 2015, and then decided to team up on this project, will be joined by Chinese-born violinist Mira Wang (Vogler’s wife) and Venezuelan-born pianist Vanessa Perez on compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach, Astor Piazzola, Stephen Foster, George Gershwin, Henry Mancini, Van Morrison, Leonard Bernstein, and others; Murray will recite text by Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Sondheim, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and more alongside Vogler’s Stradivari cello. With its international quartet, the show will also focus on various connections between America and Europe. “I am bathing in this experience, really. I can’t get enough of it,” Murray said in a statement. The New Worlds studio album will be released by Decca Gold on September 9. For a sneak peek at what to expect, check out this promotional video.

JOSHUA LIGHT SHOW: FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY SHOWS

The Joshua Light Show celebrates half a century of psychedelic grooviness with a pair of shows at the Skirball Center

NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts
566 La Guardia Pl. between Third & Fourth Sts.
September 8-9, $40 (use code JLS1 for 50% discount), 7:30
212-992-8484
nyuskirball.org
www.joshualightshow.com

Formed in 1967 by Joshua White and others, the Joshua Light Show is celebrating fifty years of adding psychedelic visuals to live music with a pair of shows at the NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. On September 8, the onetime Fillmore resident artists will be working their image-making magic with punk-blues purveyors Boss Hog and the experimental, progressive Dave Harrington Group, while they will join John Colpitts’s Man Forever and electronic music composer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith on September 9. Over the years, JLS has stuck to its analog beginnings, using liquid and light, while incorporating digital elements. The current lineup features Alyson Denny, Curtis Godino, Nick Hallett, Seth Kirby, Ana Matronic, Brock Monroe, Gary Panter, Doug Pope, Nica Ross, Briged Smith, Bec Stupak, Jeff Cook, George Stadnik, and White. We caught them in 2012 at Skirball with John Zorn, Lou Reed, Bill Laswell, and Milford Graves and in 2011 at the Hayden Planetarium and were instantly sucked into their groovy world. Tickets are $40 for each show or $60 for both; use code JLS1 to get them for half price.

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG: AMONG FRIENDS

“Mud Muse” is one of many collaborations in MoMA exhibit “Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends” (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Through September 17
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

“Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends” is almost too much of a good thing, a massive MoMA retrospective of the interdisciplinary artist who died in 2008 at the age of eighty-two. The exhausting exhibition consists of more than 250 works, highlighting his collaborations while celebrating the vast nature of his practice. “Oh, I love collaborating, because art can be a really lonely business, if you’re really just working from your ego,” he says in an old interview on the audio guide. The show follows the Texas native from his Black Mountain College years through his time in Italy and North Africa, from his early combines and classical-influenced pieces to performances, silkscreens, objects, “Experiments in Art and Technology” (E.A.T.), and more. Many of his greatest hits are here, including “Bed,” “Monogram,” “Canyon,” “Gift for Apollo,” and his illustrations for Dante’s Inferno, alongside collaborations with Jasper Johns, John Cage, Jean Tinguely, Willem de Kooning, Susan Weil, Brice Marden, Sturtevant, Alex Hay, and more. Among the most unusual works is the bubbling “Mud Muse” created with Carl Adams, George Carr, Lewis Ellmore, Frank Lahaye, and Jim Wilkinson. And most entertaining is Rauschenberg’s involvement in the dance world, making sets for and even performing in pieces by Paul Taylor, Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown and Laurie Anderson, Harry Shunk and Janos Kender, and others, some filmed by Charles Atlas. The exhibition is supplemented with works by such Rauschenberg contemporaries as Aaron Siskind, Cy Twombly, Lucinda Childs, Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Robert Whitman. Meanwhile, the audio guide includes contributions from Yvonne Rainer, Calvin Tompkins, Weil, Marden, Brown, Virginia Dwan, Atlas, Julie Martin, and Rauschenberg’s son, Christopher. So how does one make sense of it all? MoMA is hosting a series of talks and performances to help sort everything out. The exhibition continues through September 17; the below “gallery experiences” are free with museum admission, with no advance RSVP required. (Only the September 12 “Dante Among Friends” performance requires paid ticketing.)

Peter Moore, “Performance view of Robert Rauschenberg’s Pelican (1963),” 1965 (© Barbara Moore/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York)

Wednesday, September 6, 11:30 & 3:30
“Dance among Friends: Robert Rauschenberg’s Collaborations with Trisha Brown, Merce Cunningham, and Paul Taylor,” featuring Changeling, Three Epitaphs, Tracer, You Can See Us, and excerpts from other works, Sculpture Garden

“Robert Rauschenberg’s Process,” with Lauren Kaplan

Wednesday, September 6, 11:30
Thursday, September 7, 1:30
Wednesday, September 13, 1:30
Thursday, September 14, 11:30 & 1:30
“No One Is an Island,” with Kerry Downey

Thursday, September 7, 1:30
“Rauschenberg Among Friends,” with Elisabeth Bardt-Pellerin

Saturday, September 9, 11:30
Sunday, September 17, 1:30
“100 Ways to Make a Picture,” with Petra Pankow

Sunday, September 10, 11:30
Monday, September 11, 11:30
“A Bit of This and That: Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines,” with Jane Royal

Tuesday, September 12
“Collaborators, Friends, Lovers,” with Tamara Kostianovsky, 11:30

“Dante among Friends,” with Robin Coste Lewis and Kevin Young responding in music and poetry to Rauschenberg’s Thirty-Four Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno, curated and hosted by Terrance McKnight, $5-$15, 7:00

OCTFEST

octfest

The Brooklyn Hangar
2 52nd St., Sunset Park
Saturday, September 9, $60 (two for $100), 1:00 – 9:00
www.octfest.co

You can celebrate Octoberfest a little early at the Brooklyn Hangar on September 9, when an excellent lineup of music joins an all-day beer tasting for OctFest. More than forty breweries are participating in the event, including Radeberger, Kona, Oskar Blues, Blue Point, 4 Hands, Rogue, Stony Creek, Braven, Citizen Cider, Shmaltz, ABK, Lord Hobo, and Alphabet City, offering unlimited craft beer. Considering the bands that are scheduled to play, the $60 ticket is one of the best deals in town — and a pair goes for $100. On the impressive bill are Guided by Voices, Charles Bradley & His Extraordinaires, Kilo Kish, Okkervil River, the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, and the Sadies. The event is sponsored by October magazine, which “aims to capture the spirit, ambition, and wort-soaked labor of the gambrinus pursuit — the making and drinking of the good life.”

DASHAINLAYA

dashainlaya

Who: Cobweb, Raju Lama and the Angels Band, Aditya Lama, Dewaj Thapa, Karanjit Singh, Rahul Rai, Tshering Dorje, Teddy, Kunga Chemi, Suraj, Jay Gurung, Akesha Bista, DJ Rokesh, DJ Reet, DJ Spin
What: DashainLaya concert in Queens
Where: Melrose Ballroom, 36-08 33rd St.,
When: Friday, September 8, 8:00, through Saturday, September 9, 4:00 am, $35-$50
Why: KTMEntertainment is hosting DashainLaya, an all-night festival of Nepalese and Tibetan music, on September 8-9 at the Melrose Ballroom in Queens. A portion of the proceeds from the show, headlined by Cobweb and Raju Lama (playing with the Angels Band) and emceed by Akesha Bista, Miss Nepal 2012, will go to families suffering from the devastating floods in southern Nepal. General admission tickets are $35, while $50 VIP seats come with a meet-and-greet with the artists. Anybody born in September gets in free. This summer, floods in Nepal, India, and Bangladesh have resulted in more than twelve hundred fatalities and affected twenty million people. Of course, if you can, you should also contribute to organizations helping the victims of Hurricane Harvey in Texas, including the Red Cross, the Humane Society, and many others.

CROSSING THE LINE — RYOJI IKEDA: SUPERCODEX [LIVE SET]

Supercodex [live set], 2013, © Ryoji Ikeda photo by Ryo Mitamura

Ryoji Ikeda’s Supercodex [live set] makes its New York premiere at the Met as part of Crossing the Line Festival (photo by Ryo Mitamura / © Ryoji Ikeda)

MetLiveArts
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
September 6-7, $45-$60 (including same-day museum admission), 7:00
212-570-3949
crossingthelinefestival.org
www.metmuseum.org

At FIAF’s 2014 Crossing the Line Festival, Japanese multimedia artist Ryoji Ikeda dazzled audiences at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with the sold-out U.S. premiere of superposition, an audiovisual marvel that explored technology, philosophy, probability, and the future of existence. He’s now back with the follow-up, supercodex [live set], which kicks off the 2017 festival, again at the Met. (Ikeda’s gallery show, “the transcendental,” was part of the 2010 festival, at FIAF.) The piece, which was conceived and composed by Ikeda and features computer graphics and programming by Tomonaga Tokuyama, is the culmination of Ikeda’s Raster-Norton trilogy of albums that began with Dataplex and continued with Test Pattern, as Ikeda investigates the limits of technological-human connection. Viewers will be enveloped in black-and-white digital imagery while experimental music blasts throughout the space. Ikeda, who lives and works in Japan and Paris and also blew people’s minds with the immersive, site-specific the transfinite at the Park Avenue Armory in 2011, mines the “data of sound” and the “sound of data” in his work, incorporating scientific and mathematical elements, and the New York premiere of supercodex [live set] should bring that to a whole new level. (Tickets include museum admission, so be sure to go early and check out such exhibits as “The Theater of Disappearance,” “Talking Pictures: Camera-Phone Conversations Between Artists,” “Sara Barman’s Closet,” and “Japanese Bamboo Art: The Abbey Collection.”)