Anders Parker and Kendall Jane Meade could have called themselves Parker & Meade or chosen a completely different name, but their gorgeous debut album as a duo, Wild Chorus (Nine Mile, February 19), is credited to Anders & Kendall; using their first names is just part of the intoxicating intimacy they create on this gem of a record. Not to be confused with gospel soul singer Kendall Anders, Kendall (Sparklehorse, Helium, Juicy, current indie faves Mascott) and Anders (Varnaline, Gob Iron with Jay Farrar) have been friends and collaborators for nearly twenty years, but this new pairing finds them writing and singing songs that lift them to a whole new realm. “We’re burning through the night / Burning through the days / We’re just about as hot / As the sun’s rays,” Anders sings on the album’s first single, the infectious “We’re on Fire, Babe,” continuing, “You set my blood on fire / I’m always going off / The way we move together / How we never stop.” The album’s eleven songs, the first full-length disc recorded at former Sparklehorse drummer Scott Minor’s Wild Chorus studio in Knoxville, will set listeners’ ears on fire as Anders & Kendall move together beautifully, dropping little hints of the Beatles, Bruce Springsteen, Van Morrison, the Byrds, Lou Reed, Nirvana, and the Band while harmonizing to the heavens and engaging in vocal dialogues in songs that combine indie pop with flourishes of Americana, folk, rock, and country, from the gentle gait of “City of Greats” to the jaunty bounce of “Let’s Get Lost,” from the poetic elegance and longing of “Sleepwalking” to the driving ’60s beat of “Dreamers on the Ground.” On “Let’s Get Lost,” Anders sings, “Live as you want / Love as you want / You can really feel me / You can really see me / So run” while at the same time Kendall declares, “You know it when you know / You find it as you go / And we can walk for hours / And we just keep on talking / Don’t you know?” We suggest you run, not walk, to catch this magical duo as they hold their record release party on Sunday, February 24, at 7:00 at Rockwood Music Hall (Stage 2) with Benjamin Cartel before A&K heads out for SXSW. Listening to music, sometimes you just know it when you know it, and with Anders & Kendall, well, you just know it.
this week in music
TWI-NY TALK: JOHN PIZZARELLI AND JOE COSGRIFF
Friends, coauthors, and musical colleagues Joe Cosgriff and John Pizzarelli looking sharp at the Carlyle (photo by Doug Grad)
SANDY BENEFIT CONCERT
powerHouse Arena
37 Main St. at Water St., Brooklyn
Monday, February 25, $20, 7:00
718-666-3049
www.powerhousearena.com
www.johnpizzarelli.com
“What they don’t tell you when you sign up to become an author is how many times you will end up reading your own book,” jazz guitarist and vocalist John Pizzarelli writes in the finale to his first book, World on a String: A Musical Memoir (Wiley, October 2012, $26.95). “I can also tell you that I have been around the block so many times with this manuscript that I’m beginning to have issues with this vaguely familiar John Pizzarelli character who seems to get a lot of airtime in this book.” The son of legendary musician Bucky Pizzarelli, John, now fifty-two, has been recording original songs and covering standards for more than thirty years, playing with such greats as Skitch Henderson, Paul McCartney, Rosemary Clooney, James Taylor, and many others, including his wife, Jessica Molaskey, and his father. On his most recent record, Double Exposure (Telarc, May 2012), John reinterpreted a wide range of jazz, pop, rock, and folk classics by the likes of Neil Young, the Beatles, Elton John, Elvis Costello, Steely Dan, and the Allman Brothers.
For his memoir, Pizzarelli teamed up with longtime friend Joe Cosgriff, who wrote one of Pizzarelli’s most popular hits, “I Like Jersey Best.” (The book includes a riotous section on how John and Bucky went to the Jersey State Assembly when the tune was being considered for official state song.) John and Joe, a pair of Jersey-born Red Sox fans who are both proud members of the Yankee-hating BLOHARDS group, will be at powerHouse Arena in DUMBO on Monday night, February 25, in a benefit for the Brooklyn institution, which suffered significant damage from Hurricane Sandy. Pizzarelli will read from and sign copies of World on a String and will perform a rare solo set. Admission is a mere twenty bucks for what should be a unique and wonderful evening. Pizzarelli and Cosgriff recently discussed their collaboration, the Boston Red Sox, meatballs, and Sandy with twi-ny.
twi-ny: You’ve been friends for some thirty years; how did the writing process go?
Joe Cosgriff: It took us a little while to hit our stride. We started out face-to-face, which was a blast but didn’t produce finished pages. And John submitted about a third of the book in written form. But what worked best were the voice files and CDs he sent from the road. They were hilarious, and John’s prodigious output of these helped us catch up with the publisher’s deadlines.
John Pizzarelli: That’s it! Mostly we wrote about what subjects Joe thought we should explore. Then for a follow-up I would put more exact answers onto a CD.
twi-ny: Were there moments that you wanted to kill each other?
JP: Joe was really great about specific things he may have gotten wrong. If I said, “I think it happened this way,” he was more than happy to fix things. So there was no head banging, sorry to say.
JC: John and I have collaborated on projects previously, although nothing as ambitious as this one in terms of sheer volume. We had other bumps in the road — three editors and counting — but never any issues with one another. He is a natural storyteller, worked hard on the book, and he helped to make the experience about as enjoyable as it could be.
twi-ny: When will you be starting on the sequel?
JC: Sequel? We need to do a better job of letting people know about this book first.
JP: Agreed!
twi-ny: You’re both Jersey boys who love the Red Sox and live in New York City. That can’t be easy.
JC: It’s not an easy road and not one I’d recommend. Yankee Stadium, especially the previous one, was not hospitable. But our little club, the BLOHARDS, has a lot of fun at our two annual luncheons, and John and I have a good time preparing the material. “My Bobby Valentine” was one of last year’s best songs.
JP: My first recollection of baseball was the ’67 World Series [between Boston and St. Louis]. I loved the look of that Red Sox team, especially [Carl] Yastrzemski. Since there were no Red Sox uni’s then available in New Jersey, I was [Yankees second baseman] Horace Clarke for about a year, till about 1981-ish, when the Yanks fired Dick Howser.
twi-ny: John, you’ve put out dozens of albums and played thousands of shows. How has public and critical reaction to the book compared to what you’ve gotten throughout your career as a musician?
JP: The entire routine is like putting out a CD and waiting for the reviews, etc. The book has been largely well received, which has been a very pleasant surprise.
twi-ny: Joe, you worked for a printing company for several decades before recently retiring. What’s it like to have your name on the cover of a book for the first time, after having printed so many millions with others’ names on them?
JC: Good question! The best part of this “author thing” has been hearing from people who connected emotionally with the book. A couple of people at John’s shows had tears rolling down their faces talking about what we wrote about Zoot Sims and Dave McKenna. Those experiences have been powerful and unexpected.
twi-ny: How were John’s son Johnny’s meatballs at the annual Birdland after-party? I understand that they were not made at their usual location, Cosgriff’s kitchen.
JP: We did use Joe’s stove for an earlier meatball fest. I had to get out of there, though. I didn’t want to get used to that stove; it’s tremendous. When we do anything at Joe’s, wine tasting, meatballs, or book editing, he plays the best music — Zoot Sims, Anita O’Day, Oscar Peterson.
JC: Johnny is a meatball machine at this point. There were some time constraints this time with the Birdland gig, so they did the prep on the West Side. And the prep is half the fun. One common denominator about parties with Johnny’s meatballs — no leftovers!
twi-ny: John is playing a Sandy Benefit Concert at the powerHouse Arena in DUMBO on February 25. Were both of you affected by the hurricane, either directly or indirectly?
JP: I was lucky on the Upper West Side. Our cabin up north lost power for two weeks — lost some oxtail ragu that was in the freezer, but nothing else too bad. I am happy to help out any way I can to those affected much worse than I was.
JC: My apartment lost power for five days, but this was nothing compared with the devastation sustained by friends of ours in Brooklyn. And I am traveling this week in California with friends from the Jersey Shore whose home still needs significant repairs. When we heard about the damage to powerHouse, we told them we’d like to help, and that is how this event came about.
THE TONEBURST LAPTOP ENSEMBLE
Wesleyan’s Toneburst Laptop Ensemble will play electronic works by Paula Matthusen, Doug Van Nort, and Wil Smith in Brooklyn on Sunday night
The (OA) Can Factory
232 Third St. at Third Ave., ground floor
Sunday, February 17, free, 9:30
www.share.dj
The Toneburst Laptop Ensemble (TLE) makes its public debut Sunday night, playing at SHARE at the Old American Can Factory in Gowanus. Formed at Wesleyan under the directorship of composer Paula Matthusen, assistant professor of music at the Connecticut institution, TLE performs specially commissioned works in addition to pieces from the electronic music canon. Consisting of Ian Anderson, Ashlin Aronin, Tobias Butler, Dylan Bostick, Nathan Friedman, Jessie Marino, and Alex Lough, the new ensemble will perform three works in Brooklyn: Matthusen’s 2007 electroacoustic “lathyrus”; a selection from Albany-based experimental musician and sonic researcher Doug Van Nort’s “Genetic Orchestra” series; and Brooklyn-based composer and performer Wil Smith’s “Static Line,” which was written for Jody Redhage and the 2009 New Directions Cello Festival. The free TLE performance, which also includes live video samples and manipulation developed by Lough using an original patch he created in the Jitter programming environment, is part of SHARE’s mission to “blur the boundary between its participants and spectators, [engaging] all in a continually changing dialog on art and culture.”
VIDEO OF THE DAY: “KEN” BY EX COPS
In choosing a name for their debut full-length album, Brooklyn-based Ex Cops chose Terence McKenna’s 1993 tome True Hallucinations, which boasts the lofty subtitle Being an Account of the Author’s Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil’s Paradise. That book begins: “For thousands of years the visions imparted by hallucinogenic mushrooms have been sought and revered as a true religious mystery. Much of my thought over the past twenty or more years has been caught up in describing and contemplating this mystery.” Now, we are not claiming that Ex Cops, which was formed in 2011 by North Carolina’s Brian Harding and Denmark native Amalie Bruun, were on mushrooms or any other psychotropics that sent them into the devil’s domain when they were making the record; nor are we encouraging anyone to chomp on some ’shrooms before listening to the disc. But listen to True Hallucinations you should, no matter your state of mind, for it will transport you to another across its thirty minutes. The disc is the first official album released by Other Music, one of the city’s best record stores, whose first signing as a label was Ex Cops. The world of True Hallucinations is populated by the machine-gun rattle of “You Are a Lion, I Am a Lamb,” the beachy keen “Spring Break (Birthday Song),” the psychedelic “Jazz & Information,” the jangly “Billy Pressly,” the fuzzy “Nico Beast,” the very indie “Broken Chinese Chairz,” and the Asian/VU-influenced “The Millionaire.” On the video for “Ken,” the band pays tribute to the Replacements, whose classic videos for “Bastards of Young” and “Hold My Life” were each made in one continuous long shot of a speaker, a turntable, and a couch, the way music used to be heard, once upon a time. Harding and Bruun, joined by lead guitarist Kai Kennedy, bassist Leif Young Huckman, and drummer Sam Bair, will be headlining at Mercury Lounge on February 15 with Ski Lodge opening. Let the hallucinations begin.
VIDEO OF THE DAY: “DO THE STRAND” BY THE BRYAN FERRY ORCHESTRA
The most elegant man in the history of rock has now made his most elegant album yet in a career of elegant albums. In 1999, Bryan Ferry, who cofounded seminal British art rockers Roxy Music, released As Time Goes By, a collection of 1930s standards featuring Ferry on vocals, backed by an old-fashioned big band. Now sixty-seven, Ferry is releasing his latest record, The Jazz Age (BMG/Chrysalis), in the U.S. this week, thirteen songs selected from throughout his career, performed by the Bryan Ferry Orchestra. “After forty years of making records, both in and out of Roxy Music,” Ferry explains on his website, “I thought now might be an interesting moment to revisit some of these songs, and approach them as instrumentals in the style of that magical period — bringing a new and different life to these songs — a life without words.” For The Jazz Age, Ferry has chosen such Roxy favorites as “Do the Strand,” “Virginia Plain,” “Love Is the Drug,” and “Avalon” along with such solo hits as “Slave to Love,” “This Is Tomorrow,” and “The Only Face,” played in the style of the Roaring Twenties by longtime Ferry musical director Colin Good on piano, Robert Fowler on clarinet, Malcolm Earle-Smith on trombone, John Sutton on drums, Martin Wheatley on guitar, banjo, and ukulele, Alan Barnes on baritone sax and clarinet, Enrico Tomasso on trumpet, and Richard White on bass saxophone. The songs take on a new life indeed, bursting with fresh energy, together forming a soundtrack to a period film that doesn’t actually exist, except in the listener’s imagination. Some are more recognizable in relation to their original incarnations than others, but each one is a delight, playing off elements of their rock versions with genius and even a touch of mystery. “Slave to Love” is particularly effective, liable to cause you to start whirling around, humming along and dancing. Ferry will be touring the UK in the fall of 2013 with his rock band as well as the Jazz Age orchestra; there are no US dates announced, but you can meet the ever-elegant gentleman on Tuesday, February 12, when he’ll be at the Union Square Barnes & Noble at 7:00, signing copies of the new album. (He will not be performing.) The event space opens up at 5:00, and you must purchase the CD at B&N in order to join the line. In the meantime, you can check out the record, the best album of the year so far, for free on his website here.
CULTUREMART 2013
Bora Yoon collaborates with Adam Larsen and R. Luke DuBois in surreal WEIGHTS AND BALANCES (photo by James Chung)
HERE
145 Sixth Ave. at Dominick St.
Through February 10, $10 in advance, $15 within twenty-four hours of show
212-647-0202
www.here.org
The HERE Artist Residency Program, known as HARP, is now in the second week of its annual Culturemart festival, consisting of unique, experimental works, often in double features, from emerging presenters in such disciplines as dance, theater, music, visual arts, and puppetry as well as a melding of several of them. On February 4-5, Mei-Yin Ng’s Lost Property Unit explores loneliness and solitude in the digital age, referencing television and movies through dance, live and prerecorded music, and robot sculptures, while in Hai-Ting Chinn’s Science Fair the mezzo-soprano combines opera with science in a multimedia performance. On February 6-7, Robin Frohardt’s The Pigeoning uses music and puppets to look at the end of the world, while Joseph Silovsky’s Send for the Million Men is a solo piece that reexamines the Sacco and Vanzettti case with puppets and handmade projectors. Also on February 6-7, Bora Yoon’s Weights and Balances is a surreal opera featuring an interactive performance design by R. Luke DuBois. On February 8-9, Stein / Holum Projects’ The Wholehearted is a work in progress about a woman boxer looking back at her glory days. On February 9 at 2:00, there will be a free performance of David T. Little’s opera-theater piece Artaud in the Black Lodge, which links Antonin Artaud, William S. Burroughs, and David Lynch through a libretto by Anne Waldman. The festival, which also celebrates HERE’s twentieth anniversary, concludes February 9-10 with HERE artistic director Kristin Marting and David Morris’s Trade Practices, a live, interactive market in which audience members become participants in the event.
EP OF THE DAY: OH FEBRUARY BY Y LA BAMBA
“Say what you want to say / Say what you mean out loud,” Luz Elena Mendoza sings on the title track of the latest EP, Oh February (Tender Loving Empire, January 29), by her enchanting group, Y la Bamba. The tall, heavily tattooed Mendoza has been saying what she wants and means since her solo debut, 2008’s Alida St., after which she formed a full band named after her six-toed white cat. On such previous albums as 2010’s Lupon, produced by Decemberists guitarist Chris Funk, and 2011’s Court the Storm, produced by Los Lobos sax man Steve Berlin, the Portland, Oregon-based Y la Bamba created a unique blend of various genres that come together beautifully on Oh February, which reunites them with Funk. Mendoza’s ethereal voice has never been better as she leads the way through a half dozen English-language songs (previous albums included a mix of English and Spanish tunes), her vocals serving as another instrument, complemented by guitarists Sean Flinn and Paul Cameron, bassist Ben Meyercord, accordionist Eric Schrepel, drummer Mike Kitson, and percussionist-clarinetist Scott Magee. Mendoza, who suffered a debilitating case of amoebic dysentery ten years ago during a spiritual journey to India that led her to reevaluate her strict Catholic upbringing headed by her Mexican immigrant father, incorporates elements of traditional Mexican and Latino music, jazz, indie pop, depression-era Tin Pan Alley, and more into such beguiling songs as “A Poet’s Tune,” “Death on the Road,” and “River in Drought.” The EP culminates in the mesmerizing “Oh February Part 2 (Mad as We Are),” a duet with Cameron that encapsulates everything that Y la Bamba stands for: “We are changing . . . Got nowhere to go / Don’t look back,” Mendoza sings. The continually evolving Mendoza and Y la Bamba should have plenty of places to go, including Terminal 5 on February 1-2 opening for the Lumineers. The show is sold out, but you can check out their dazzling new EP above now for free.