Jazzy folk bluesman Luke Winslow-King appears wise beyond his years on his third LP, The Coming Tide (Bloodshot, April 23, 2013). The thirty-year-old Michigan native mines treasures old and new on the eleven-track disc, which melds a variety of old-fashioned Tin Pan Alley–era music styles, referencing such forebears as Muddy Waters, Leon Redbone, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Tom Waits, Justin Townes Earle, Johnny Cash, and Woody Guthrie while injecting plenty of his own originality. “There’s no place to hide from the coming tide,” guitarist Winslow-King and washboard player Esther Rose sing on the opening song, “The Coming Tide,” but they provide an answer on the next tune, “Moving On (Towards Better Days),” on which they declare, “Together, baby, we can make a stand.” The swampy New Orleans influence can be heard all over the record; Winslow-King moved to New Orleans shortly after being stuck there in 2001 when his band’s GMC Suburban, packed with their equipment, was stolen while they were in the Big Easy. The new record is filled with sweet slide guitar courtesy of Winslow-King, a former busker who has been performing since he was fourteen, along with generous helpings of piano (Ben Polcer) and horns (Polcer on trumpet, Rick Trolsen on trombone, and Chris Johnson, Bruce Brackman, and Tom Saunders on saxophones); Cassidy Holden handles the bass, while Rich Levinson is behind the drum kit. Winslow-King also shows a sharp taste in covers, with splendid takes on Ida Cox’s “I’ve Got the Blues for Rampart Street,” Lead Belly’s murder ballad “Ella Speed,” and James Ray’s “I’ve Got My Mind Set on You,” the last one a radically different version of the song popularized by George Harrison in 1987. The Coming Tide is a pure pleasure from start to finish; if you can’t find something to like here, you just don’t like music or know how to have fun. Winslow-King, Rose (his significant other), and Holden will be celebrating the release of the album on April 27 at Rockwood Music Hall and on April 28 at Jalopy.
this week in music
VIDEO OF THE DAY: “RACECAR” BY TWIN TIGERS
Not to be confused with Twin Tigers Karate Academy, fellow Georgians who “set the standard of excellence in teaching karate with a Christian emphasis,” Athens-based four-piece Twin Tigers have been developing a following while opening for such bands as Minus the Bear, Deerhunter, Les Savy Fav, and Interpol. Founded in 2007 by singer-guitarist Matthew Rain and bassist Aimee Morris, who were working together at the Grit vegetarian restaurant in an Athens building owned by Michael Stipe, Twin Tigers, which also features Forrest Hall on guitar and Logan Hornbuckle on drums, is out on the road in support of their latest album, Death Wish (Old Flame, April 9, 2013). Written and recorded in an Athens studio loaned by Interpol, the album evokes Bloc Party, the Cure, Joy Division, and Interpol across eight big-sounding tracks, from the propulsive “Racecar” and “Sources” to the slow, mystical “Transition.” Death Wish culminates with the eight-plus-minute epic “Holiday,” which goes through a number of tempo changes before rising to a major climax. Twin Tigers — without any martial arts accompaniment — will be headlining at Glasslands on April 25 with the Teen Age and Honduras and at Pianos on April 26 with Cruiser, Nude Pop, and the Denzels.
VIDEO OF THE DAY: “WAKING WORLD” BY EL SPORTIVO AND THE BLOOZ
White Iris Records and Black Iris Music founder Daron Hollowell, the man behind El Sportivo & the Blooz, has followed up the band’s eponymous 2011 EP with the outstanding full-length Nights & Weekends (White Iris, February 2013). Produced by White Iris/Black Iris’s Lewis Pescacov (Best Coast, Fool’s Gold), the eleven-track disc delves into rockin’ country blues as Hollowell explores the pain of loneliness and heartbreak. “We live this life / but we always wanted more,” he sings on “Waking World,” an aching duet with Nikki Lane. “I wish I could change everything I say,” he adds in “Along the Way.” And in the closing ballad, the six-minute-plus “Blue,” he asks, “Dare I speak a word?” Loaded with musical references from Celtic folk to even a hint of Pink Floyd, Nights & Weekends features a crack band that really gets to show its stuff on the seven-minute epic “Underground.” El Sportivo & the Blooz will also get to show its stuff at Mercury Lounge on April 24 with Sons of Fathers and at Littlefield on April 25 with Lapland and Frank LoCrasto.
TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL: BIG BAD WOLVES
Cop (Lior Ashkenazi) must determine how far he will go to get the truth out of suspected child killer (Rotem Keinan) in brutal black comedy
BIG BAD WOLVES (Navot Papushado & Aharon Keshales, 2013)
Monday, April 22, AMC Loews Village 7, 4:00
Wednesday, April 24, Clearview Cinemas Chelsea, 10:00
www.tribecafilm.com
Israeli film critic Aharon Keshales and his former student Navot Papushado follow up their 2011 Israeli slasher flick, Rabies, with the gory, ultraviolent black-comedy thriller Big Bad Wolves. Award-winning actor Lior Ashkenazi stars as Miki, a cop who is sure that Bible teacher Dror (Rotem Keinan) is behind the grisly kidnap, rape, and murder of a young girl. Miki and his partner, Rami (Menashe Noy), and two thugs try to beat the truth out of Dror, against the direct orders of their commanding officer, Zvika (Dvir Benedek). When the illegal interrogation winds up on YouTube, Miki is relieved of duty — with Zvika’s blessing to continue to go after Dror. But when Gidi (Tzahi Grad), the father of the dead girl, joins the chase, things threaten to get out of control — and quickly become even crazier. Big Bad Wolves is a sly, smart take on such genre pictures as Oldboy, Se7en, and Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Inglourious Basterds, featuring generous amounts of brutal torture along with some very funny bits involving Jewish mothers. Writer-directors Keshales and Papushado keep the audience guessing right up to the very end as the main characters rarely do what is expected and hysterical comic scenes show up at rather inopportune moments. While playing with the standard elements of the revenge flick and the cop-on-the-edge tale, the dark, atmospheric Big Bad Wolves also explores the unbreakable bond between parents and children, lending more than a touch of gravitas to the wild, unpredictable proceedings, which are not for the faint of heart.
MOTOWN THE MUSICAL
Hitsville, U.S.A. comes to Broadway in new jukebox musical (photo by Joan Marcus)
Lunt-Fontanne Theatre
205 West 46th St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Through December 30, $49-$159
www.motownthemusical.com
Motown: The Musical opens with a battle of the bands between the Temptations and the Four Tops from the 1983 Motown 25 television special, setting the too-fast pace for this watered-down ride through the history of the legendary record label and its founder, Berry Gordy. With a book by Gordy based on his 1994 autobiography, To Be Loved: The Music, the Magic, the Memories of Motown, the jukebox musical features snippets from nearly sixty songs from the Detroit label’s stellar catalog, whipping past in sped-up fury, re-created by a talented cast of performers who, of course, “ain’t nothing like the real thing” (a tune that, by the way, is not in the show). Brandon Victor Dixon is solid as Gordy, a dreamer who goes from odd job to odd job until deciding to start his own music company. He puts together an amazing group of singers, from Marvin Gaye (Bryan Terrell Clark), Smokey Robinson (Charl Brown), Stevie Wonder (Raymond Luke Jr. and Ryan Shaw), and Mary Wells (N’Kenge) to the Marvelettes, Gladys Knight (Marva Hicks) and the Pips, and Martha Reeves (Saycon Sengbloh) and the Vandellas. But this by-the-numbers story of Hitsville, U.S.A., directed by Charles Randolph-Wright, focuses too much on the relationship between Gordy and Diana Ross (Valisia LeKae), feeling more like a public apology than a realistic depiction of their years together, both personally and professionally, particularly her solo debut in Las Vegas that involves forced audience interaction. Gordy also forces in set pieces related to the civil rights movement and such tragedies as the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King that are driven by clichés.
Raymond Luke Jr. nearly steals the show as young Michael Jackson (played alternately by Jibreel Mawry), channeling the superstar on such Jackson 5 classics as “ABC,” “I Want You Back,” and “I’ll Be There,” but that also is a major problem with the production, which works so hard to impress the audience with its re-creations, resulting in truncated versions that come off more like a talent show, albeit a pretty darn good one. There are also a few new songs written by Gordy and Michael Lovesmith that are standard Broadway musical fare. Motown: The Musical is like an old record spinning on an even older turntable, going a little too fast, filled with skips and scratches as the needle follows the grooves, but in the end, the songs are so good that you just might not even care about all those hiccups.
BLUES FOR SMOKE
Rodney McMillian, “Asterisks in Dockery,” mixed-media installation, 2012 (photo by Sheldan C. Collins)
Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Ave. at 75th St.
Wednesday – Sunday through April 28, $14-$18 (pay-what-you-wish Fridays, 6:00 – 9:00)
212-570-3600
www.whitney.org
In 1960, jazz pianist and composer Jaki Byard released his solo debut, Blues for Smoke, an improvisatory record that features on its cover a train puffing out dark clouds as it makes its way down the tracks. The album lends its name to an exciting multimedia exhibit at the Whitney that examines the impact of the blues on the arts. The show is highlighted by David Hammons’s extraordinary 1989 installation, “Chasing the Blue Train,” which greets visitors on the third floor. A blue train makes its way across tracks that take it through a tunnel covered in coal and a landscape with upturned piano tops as John Coltrane’s 1957 Blue Train album plays from a boom box, the work riffing on Coltrane’s name (coal, train) while celebrating the blues. Zoe Leonard’s “1961, 2002-Ongoing” consists of a row of suitcases of different shades of blue, evoking impermanence and creating a mystery about what might be inside; nearby, Martin Kipperberger’s “Martin, into the Corner, You Should Be Ashamed of Yourself” is a life-size replica of the artist standing in the corner, suffering from a case of the blues. Specially commissioned for the show, Kori Newkirk’s “Yall” consists of a shopping cart nearly completing a circle of blue on the floor, calling to mind exclusion, homelessness, and failed capitalism. Kira Lynn Harris lines a stairwell and entrance with silver Mylar in “Blues for Breuer,” paying tribute to the architect of the Whitney building, which will be taken over by the Met in 2015 when the Whitney moves downtown.
Works by Martin Wong, Martin Kipperberger, Zoe Leonard, and others form a blues aesthetic at the Whitney (photo by Sheldan C. Collins)
Curated by Bennett Simpson in consultation with Chrissie Iles, “Blues for Smoke” also features works by Romare Bearden, Carrie Mae Weems, Glenn Ligon, Liz Larner, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Rachel Harrison, Mark Morrisroe, Alma Thomas, Beauford Delaney, Kara Walker, William Eggleston, and Lorraine O’Grady, all contributing to the overall examination of the blues aesthetic. A media room includes viewing stations where people can watch classic performances, while Stan Douglas’s “Hors-champs” plays continuously in its own space on the first floor, offering a unique view of a live recording on the front and back of a screen hanging from the ceiling. In addition, the Whitney is hosting a series of live events that continue through the end of the exhibition, which closes April 28, including “Blues for Smoke: Matana Roberts, Keiji Haino, and Loren Connors” on April 20 at 8:00 (featuring a solo performance by Roberts and a duo guitar improvisation by Haino and Connors), “Through the Lens of the Blues Aesthetic: An Evening of Short Films Selected by Kevin Jerome Everson” on April 25 at 7:00, the live concert “Blues for Smoke: Annette Peacock” on April 26 at 7:00, and the three-day “Blues for Smoke: Thomas Bradshaw,” in which the playwright will be creating a new piece that will be shown April 26-28.
SONG OF THE DAY: “THE NEIGHBORHOOD” BY DARCY JAMES ARGUE’S SECRET SOCIETY
In November 2011, composer Darcy James Argue and visual artist Danijel Zezelj presented the multimedia Brooklyn Babylon at BAM’s Next Wave Festival, an audiovisual commission documenting the building of a futuristic Brooklyn, coming at a time when Brooklyn was indeed beginning to go through a major transformation, particularly around BAM’s home in Fort Greene. Argue, a Vancouver native who resides in the World’s Greatest Borough, has now recorded the show’s wide-ranging score with his band, the eighteen-piece Secret Society, resulting in the vastly entertaining Brooklyn Babylon (New Amsterdam, April 30). The fifty-three-minute suite slides effortlessly from jazz, Klezmer, and power pop to psychedelia, Balkan folk, and swing and back again as it moves chronologically through such songs as “The Neighborhood,” “The Tallest Tower in the World,” “Construction + Destruction,” “Missing Parts,” and “Coney Island”; it also includes such empowering interludes as “Infuse,” “Enthrall,” “Bewail,” and “Arise.” The outstanding band features such performers as Erica von Kleist on piccolo, flute, alto flute, soprano sax, alto sax, and electronics, John Ellis on clarinet, bass clarinet, and tenor sax, Ingrid Jensen on trumpet, fluegelhorn, and electronics, Ryan Keberle on trombone, and Gordon Webster on acoustic and electric piano and melodica, with Argue as ringleader. It all comes together like the soundtrack for an unseen film that the listener gets to create in their head. In conjunction with the album, the Brooklyn-based Zezelj, who hails from Croatia, is publishing the limited-edition graphic novel Babilon. On April 20 at 10:00, BAMcafé Live will be hosting the Brooklyn Babylon album release party, a concert without the visuals; admission is free, and advance copies of the new record, Argue’s follow-up to his debut, 2009’s Infernal Machines, will be available for purchase.