this week in music

HONK NYC! INTERNATIONAL STREET BAND EXPLOSION

honk 2017

Multiple venues
October 10-15, free – $15
honknyc.com

The eleventh annual international street band extravaganza known as the HONK NYC Festival runs October 10-15, a yearly celebration of grassroots brass and percussion music, focusing on fun and revelry. The festivities kick off October 10 with a free party at the City Reliquary in Brooklyn, with the Nevermind Orchestra, the L Train Brass Band, and New Creations Brass Band. On October 11, it’s off to Staten Island for the free HONK! for Healing in Tompkinsville Park and the Everything Goes Book Cafe, with Damas de Ferro, Kenny Wollesen and Wollesonic Lab’s Sonic Massage, and New Creations Brass Band. On October 12, HONK! heads to Jersey with the Hungry March Band, Veveritse Brass Band, Pussy Grabs Back: the Band, Damas de Ferro, and New Creations Brass Band for a parade beginning at the Newark Pavilion, followed by a 7:00 gig at WFMU’s Montgomery Hall ($10). On Friday the Thirteenth, the festival moves uptown for HONK Harlem at the Shrine with Damas de Ferro and New Creations Brass Band ($10, 9:30). There will be several shows on October 14, starting with a HONK Pop Up at the NY Transit Museum at 1:30 with the L Train Brass Band and at Anita’s Way at 3:30, with the Brasstastic Blow Out! taking place at Rubulad from 8:30 pm to 3:30 am ($12 in advance, $15 at the door), with Raya Brass Band, Funkrust Brass Band, Nation Beat, Plezi Rara, de Ferro, DJ Ryan Midnight, DJ Baby K, projections by the Sperm Whale NYC, Norm Francouer’s Light Circus extraordinaire, and more. On Sunday, October 15, the HONK for More Gardens! Parade will march through the Lower East Side and the East Village from 1:00 to 5:00, followed by the closing party at DROM (5:00 – 10:00, $10) with William Parker and the Artists for a Free World Marching Band, Frank London, the Three Million Majority Marching Band, and Damas de Ferro.

NOH-NOW: LEFT-RIGHT-LEFT

Luca Veggetti’s Left-Right-Left will make its North American premiere at Japan Society October 13-14 as part of “NOH-NOW” series

Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Friday, October 13, and Saturday, October 14, $35, 7:30
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

In May 2014, Italian director and choreographer Luca Veggetti brought Project IX — Pléïades to Japan Society, a graceful collaboration with Japanese percussionist Kuniko Kato and Japanese dancer Megumi Nakamura that was the finale of the sixtieth anniversary season of the institution’s performing arts program. Veggetti and Nakamura are now back for the North American premiere of Left-Right-Left, part of Japan Society’s 110th anniversary and the series “NOH-NOW,” which blends the traditional Japanese musical drama with contemporary styles. The work, commissioned by Japan Society and Yokohama Noh Theater, is conceived, directed, and choreographed by Veggetti, with the esteemed author and scholar Dr. Donald Keene of the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture serving as project advisor and text translator. The three-part piece is inspired by the ancient play Okina, a sacred ritual about peace, prosperity, and safety. It will be performed by butoh dancer Akira Kasai, contemporary dancer Nakamura, and butoh-trained dancer Yukio Suzuki, with music director Genjiro Okura on noh small hand drum and Rokurobyoe Fujita on noh fue. Child noh actor Rinzo Nagayama will recites the new English translation of passages from Okina and another popular traditional noh play, Hagoromo, about a celestial feather robe. The lighting is by Clifton Taylor, with costumes by Mitsushi Yanaihara. “Noh has very precise patterns in the space that the performers follow,” Veggetti says in a promotional interview, explaining that his goal was “to use this archaic blueprint form and infuse it with different choreographic ideas, with that to find a language that is somehow organic.” Left-Right-Left, or “sa-yu-sa” in Japanese, will be at Japan Society on October 13, followed by a Meet-the-Artists Reception, and October 14, followed by an artist Q&A. In addition, Okura, Grand Master of the Okura School of kotsuzumi, will lead a noh music workshop on October 14 at 10:30 am ($45). “NOH-NOW” continues November 3-5 with the world premiere of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Rikyu-Enoura, December 7-9 with Leon Ingulsrud’s adaptation of Yukio Mishima’s Hanjo, and January 11-14 with Satoshi Miyagi’s Mugen Noh Othello.

IF THESE WALLS COULD TALK: CELEBRATING THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE BOTTOM LINE

if these walls could talk

Who: David Bromberg, Jimmy Vivino, Darlene Love, David Johansen, Sean Altman, Marshall Chapman, Clint de Ganon, the GrooveBarbers, Ula Hedwig, Garland Jeffreys, Christine Lavin, Curtis King, Terre Roche, Feifei Yang, Garry Dial, the Uptown Horns, Will Lee, Paul Shaffer, Gregg Bendian
What: Music and memories about the Bottom Line
Where: Schimmel Center at Pace University, 3 Spruce St. between Park Row and Gold St., 212-346-1715
When: Friday, October 13, and Saturday, October 14, $29-$55, 7:30
Why: From February 11, 1974, to January 22, 2004, the Bottom Line was one of the great music clubs in the country, a four-hundred-seat venue that featured acts from a multitude of genres, good food and drink, and large pillars that could block part of your view depending where you were sitting, but there was no place else like it. Among the myriad performers who played there from a multitude of genres were Lou Reed, Bruce Springsteen, Charles Mingus, Patti Smith, Donovan, Warren Zevon, Prince, Little Feat, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Meat Loaf, Janis Ian, Santana, Melissa Etheridge, Steve Earle, the Indigo Girls, the New York Dolls, Mose Allison, Joan Armatrading, the Uncle Floyd Show, Tom Waits, Captain Beefheart, Barry Manilow, Cheech & Chong, Television, Jimmy Buffett, Buddy Guy and Junior Wells, Nona Hendryx, Gil Scott-Heron, the Roches, the Cars, Miles Davis, the Hollies, Richard Thompson, Suzanne Vega, Steve Forbert, Dolly Parton, 10,000 Maniacs, Jorma Kaukonen, Carly Simon with James Taylor, Richard Belzer, and regulars Flo & Eddie from the Turtles and Buster Poindexter, the alter ego of David Johansen. Owners Allan Pepper and Stanley Snadowsky had a knack for finding new talent; in some ways, the Bottom Line was the folk version of CBGB, a key step on an artist’s rise to national, and international, success.

On October 13 and 14, tribute will be paid to the legendary club with the special program “If These Walls Could Talk: Celebrating the Life and Times of the Bottom Line,” two evenings of live music and personal stories about the venerable venue, which closed its doors over back-rent and lease issues with NYU. Hosted by Paul Shaffer and with Gregg Bendian serving as music director, the shows will feature Sean Altman, David Bromberg (Friday), Clint de Ganon, the GrooveBarbers, Nona Hendryx, Garland Jeffreys (Saturday), David Johansen, Christine Lavin (Saturday), Will Lee, Darlene Love with Ula Hedwig and Curtis King, Terre Roche with Feifei Yang and Garry Dial (Friday), the Uptown Horns, and Jimmy Vivino. It’s like the ultimate version of “In Their Own Words,” the Bottom Line’s long-running series of “a Bunch of Songwriters Sittin’ Around Singing,” which was started on May 24, 1990, by the great Vin Scelsa. The Bottom Line had a personality all its own, and it is dearly missed by those of us who frequented its hallowed halls on the corner of Mercer and West Fourth Sts., so this should bring back some grand memories, along with some great music.

CHAVELA

The extraordinary life and career of Chavela Vargas is documented in revelatory documentary

CHAVELA (Catherine Gund & Daresha Kyi, 2017)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
October 4-17
212-727-8110
filmforum.org
www.musicboxfilms.com

The extraordinary story of beloved Mexican ranchera singer Chavela Vargas is intricately documented in Catherine Gund and Daresha Kyi’s warm and intimate Chavela, opening at Film Forum today. Chavela’s life might seem an all-too-familiar archetype, the tale of a powerful female vocalist, a lesbian performer whose career was wrecked by the lethal combination of a heterosexual macho society, personal demons, and addiction, but Chavela avoids stereotypes and instead delivers a very human portrait. Born in Costa Rica in 1919, Chavela had an unhappy childhood and ran away to Mexico when she was fourteen to pursue a singing career and live a freer life, able to explore her sexual orientation as she grew older. “Her own parents saw her as a strange girl. They realized she was a boyish girl,” composer Marcela Rodríguez says. “Her movement, her hands, and her body language were manly.” Her longtime partner, human rights lawyer Alicia Pérez Duarte, adds, “Chavela created her persona in a very macho world.” Chavela dedicated her life to her music while keeping much of her personal life private — the film drops little more than tantalizing hints about her relationship with artist Frida Kahlo and an evening with Ava Gardner — and her commanding presence and powerful vocal style quickly made her a star in the 1940s and ’50s. “Hers wasn’t a sweet, crystal clear voice,” says cabaret owner Jesusa Rodríguez. “And she always sounded like she’d been torn apart, as if she’d been born with the wounds of life and death.” But at the height of her fame, those wounds started catching up to her as she began drinking heavily, resulting in a fifteen-year hiatus during which many people thought she was dead. The film centers around a never-before-seen 1991 interview Gund conducted with Chavela upon her return to singing, as she speaks more openly and honestly about her sexuality, her family, and her career. She’s a riveting figure, confident and determined, ready to face the world again. “We all have to live in the present. Don’t think about yesterday or tomorrow. Today,” she says.

Editor Carla Gutiérrez seamlessly weaves between archival film and photographs of Chavela performing onstage and in movies, complete with English translations of the heartfelt lyrics; interviews from 1991 and later, as she revels in being a star again; and new interviews with cabaret owners Jesusa Rodríguez and Liliana Felipe, singers Tania Libertad and Miguel Bosé, Federico García Lorca Foundation president Laura García Lorca, artist Martirio, composer and singer José Alfredo Jiménez Jr., whose father wrote many of the songs that made Chavela famous, and Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, who used her music in his movies and played a major role in her comeback, which took Chavela around the globe, including to her beloved Madrid and to Carnegie Hall. “In her voice, I’ve found one of my best collaborators. And a faithful reflection of myself,” he says in an old clip, a feeling that is shared by many who knew her. Producer-directors Gund (Born to Fly, A Touch of Greatness) and Kyi (Land Where My Fathers Died; Thugs, the Musical) clearly love their subject, and their love is contagious, welcoming viewers into the pure majesty that is Chavela Vargas. (The 6:15 show on October 7 will be followed by a Q&A with Gund and Kyi, moderated by LGBT activist Eliel Cruz; the 2:20 show on October 8 will be followed by a Q&A with Gund and Kyi; the 8:10 show on October 10 will be followed by a Q&A with Gund, moderated by NewFest’s Nick McCarthy; and the 8:10 show on October 17 will be followed by a Q&A with Carnegie Hall show producer Claudia Norman, moderated by Cinema Tropical executive director Carlos Gutiérrez. In addition, Stephanie Trudeau is bringing her one-woman docu-cabaret show Chavela: Think of Me back to the Pangea Restaurant & Supper Club on November 2, 19, and 16.)

BAM NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL: CROSSING

Matthew Aucoin’s Crossing makes its New York premiere at BAM this week (photo by Gretjen Helene Photography)

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
October 3-8, $35-$110
718-636-4100
www.bam.org/opera/2017/crossing

Five years ago, BAM presented “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” a three-day multimedia festival celebrating Walt Whitman’s 1856 poem of the same name from Leaves of Grass, in which the New York City native wrote, “Others will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shore to shore, / Others will watch the run of the flood-tide, / Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east, / Others will see the islands large and small; / Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high, / A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them, / Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood-tide, the falling-back to the sea of the ebb-tide.” The Brooklyn arts institution is now returning to Whitman with Crossing, Matthew Aucoin’s hundred-minute 2015 chamber opera, which takes off from Whitman’s 1861-63 Civil War diary and these lines from the poem: “What is it then between us? / What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?” The twenty-seven-year-old Aucoin wrote, composed, and conducts the work, which is directed by Tony winner Diane Paulus (Pippin, Eli’s Comin) and features the Boston-based chamber orchestra A Far Cry, with choreography by Jill Johnson, sets by Tom Pye, costumes by three-time Tony nominee David Zinn, lighting by two-time Tony winner Jennifer Tipton, and projection by Finn Ross. Baritone Rod Gilfry, who has previously appeared at BAM in David Lang’s the loser and Mark-Anthony Turnage and Richard Thomas’s Anna Nicole, plays Whitman, a Civil War nurse tending to wounded soldier John Wormley, portrayed by tenor Alexander Lewis. The work, which was produced and commissioned by the American Repertory Theater at Harvard University, runs October 3-8 as part of BAM’s 2017 Next Wave Festival. “Crossing emerges out of my sense that Whitman wrote his poetry out of need,” Aucoin writes, “that his poetry is not, or is not exclusively, a vigorous assertion of what he is, but rather the expression of a yearning to be what he is not, or to reconcile opposing aspects of his identity. The person/persona/personality ‘Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs’ is the living product of this need.”

THE RED LETTER PLAYS: IN THE BLOOD

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through October 15, $30 ($75 starting October 10)
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

In Fucking A, the first of the two Red Letter Plays that Suzan-Lori Parks wrote in the late 1990s inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the protagonist, Hester Smith, is an ostracized abortionist with an “A” branded near her heart, a single mother with a son in prison, both caught up in a cruel system. In the first Red Letter Play, the extraordinary In the Blood, which is currently running in tandem with Fucking A at the Signature Theatre, the main character is Hester, La Negrita (Saycon Sengbloh), a welfare mother with five young children from five different men. In her case, the “A” is the first letter of the alphabet; she is trying to learn to read and write, without much success. Hester and her kids — Jabber (Michael Braun), Bully (Jocelyn Bioh), Trouble (Frank Wood), Beauty (Ana Reeder), and Baby (Russell G. Jones), all wearing Montana Levi Blanco’s fanciful costumes — live in filth under a bridge, where trash is regularly pumped in. The town blames Hester herself for the predicament she’s in; at the beginning of the play, members of the community yell at her, “That’s why things are bad like they are / cause of girls like that . . . And now we got to pay for it. . . . She don’t got no skills / cept one,” adding, “She knows she’s a no count / Shiftless / Hopeless / Bad news / Burden to Society / Hussy / Slut / Pah!” But Hester adores her children, constantly referring to them as her “treasures,” her “joys.” She wants her life to be a fairy tale; she even tells her kids a bedtime story that serves as an uplifting metaphor about their situation. Hester is desperate to provide for her family, but she sometimes gets in her own way, looking for shortcuts because she doesn’t know any better. Each of the actors playing Hester’s children also doubles as an adult with ties to her: Amiga Gringa (Reeder) is a prostitute who is friends with Hester; the Doctor (Wood) offers her free medical tests and advice; Welfare Lady (Bioh) wants Hester to start helping herself and being more conscientious; Reverend D. (Jones), the father of one of Hester’s kids, keeps avoiding acknowledging their former relationship; and Chilli (Braun), the love of her life, is back in town and looking for her. (The names Reverend D. and Chilli are direct references to Puritan minister Arthur Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne’s husband, Roger Chillingworth, from Hawthorne’s 1850 novel, although the plot is completely different.)

In the Blood is beautifully written by Pulitzer Prize winner Parks (Topdog/Underdog, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World and superbly directed by Obie winner Sarah Benson (An Octoroon, Samara), never heavy-handed as they explore racism, misogyny, religious corruption, and inefficient government bureaucracy. Louis Thompson’s set has Hester trapped from the outset, a curved metal ramp serving as a Sisyphean non-exit, while bars put Hester in a zoolike cage. Tony nominee Sengbloh (Eclipsed, Hurt Village) gives a deeply heartfelt performance as Hester, La Negrita, a caring woman who just wants her family to be happy. “My lifes my own fault,” she recognizes. “But the world dont help.” Each of the adult characters delivers a soliloquy, called a “confession,” regarding their connection, primary sexual, to Hester, seeing her first and foremost as a sexual object, not as a person with very real problems. “Do not for a moment think I am one of those people haters who does not understand who does not experience — compassion,” the Doctor says. The Welfare Lady explains, “I walk the line / between us and them / between our kind and their kind. / the balance of the system depends on a well-drawn boundary line / and all parties respecting that boundary.” And the Reverend D. admits, “Suffering is an enormous turn-on.” In the Blood, which also features choreography by Annie-B Parson and movement by Elizabeth Streb, is a riveting, deeply intelligent and powerful parable that takes place in the “here” and “now,” marking it as a timeless work about institutionalized social ills that don’t look to be going away any time soon. (Parks will be playing with her band, guitarist Christian Konopka and percussionist Julian Rozzell, on October 7 at 4:15 and 6:30 at the Signature Café + Bar; admission is free and open to the public. There will also be a talkback with members of the cast and crew following the October 5 performance of In the Blood.)

BAM NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL: THE PRINCIPLES OF UNCERTAINTY

Maira Kalman looks on as her online graphic diary is brought to life at the BAM Fisher (photo by Rebecca Greenfield)

BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
September 27-30, $25
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

The audience at the BAM Fisher isn’t the only one smiling throughout The Principles of Uncertainty, the lovely multimedia collaboration between choreographer John Heginbotham and author-illustrator Maira Kalman; the musicians and dancers seem to be having just as much fun, if not more. Based on Kalman’s 2006-7 online graphic diary, the hour-long dance-theater piece is infectiously gleeful from start to finish. The sixty-eight-year-old Kalman is onstage the entire show, reciting text, calmly watching from the back, and, yes, dancing with Lindsey Jones, John Eirich, Courtney Lopes, Weaver Rhodes, Amber Star Merkens, and Macy Sullivan (several of whom are from Dance Heginbotham). The baroque and carnivalesque songs are played by music director Colin Jacobsen on violin and viola, Caitlyn Sullivan on cello, Nathan Koci on accordion, and Alex Sopp on flute and vocals. The lively staging puts Kalman in a large movable box, where she’s joined by assistant director Daniel Pettrow for some literary surprises and acerbic comedy; meanwhile, Todd Bryant projects (not enough of) Kalman’s words and drawings on a back wall, and a classical framed painting lies on the floor. (Kalman also designed the set and the costumes.) Heginbotham’s choreography includes repeated pairings: dancers’ foreheads rest against each other, and gentle fists press against knuckles and palms. The set is reconfigured — nearly everything is on wheels — while Nicole Pearce has a ball with different colored lights, and the band, members of the chamber ensemble the Knights, plays works by Bach, Villa-Lobos, Schubert, Beethoven, and Mexican ranchera king José Alfredo Jiménez. “John and I are trying to make something that feels like nothing,” Kalman writes in the program. “Well, not nothing, of course, but the kind of nothing that is full of the sad sweet funny uncertain life we lead.” As an added touch, each seat is covered by a two-sided cloth printed with words from the serious to the silly, the practical to the mundane. But there is nothing mundane about The Principles of Uncertainty, which indeed is a unique look at “the sad sweet funny uncertain life we lead.”