this week in music

THE MACCABEATS: A HANUKKAH CELEBRATION

B. B. King Blues Club & Grill
237 West 42nd St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Sunday, December 25, $35-$50, 7:30
212-997-4144
www.bbkingblues.com
www.maccabeats.com

The Festival of Lights and Christmas overlap this year, so it only seems appropriate that the Maccabeats, the all-male a cappella group from Yeshiva University, will be performing a special Hanukkah concert on Christmas night. Since 2007, the Yeshiva bochers have been singing traditional songs and parodies that follow Torah u-Madda, a combination of secular and religious knowledge. This philosophy is central to their debut album, Voices from the Heights (Sameach Music, March 2010), which includes versions of such prayers as “Aleinu,” “Oseh Shalom,” and “Lecha Dodi” (set to Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”), the Israeli national anthem, “HaTikva,” and such English-language songs as “Go the Distance,” “Bad Day,” and a cover of Matisyahu’s “One Day.” But the college boys might be best known for their inventive reimagining of Justin Bieber’s (and Taio Cruz’s) “Dynamite,” transforming it into the Hanukkah sensation “Candlelight.” (Ever on the cutting edge, they’ve also turned OneRepublic’s “Good Life” into “Book of Good Life” and Pink’s “Raise Your Glass” into “Purim Song.”) Chanina Abramowitz, David Block, Michael Greenberg, Noey Jacobson, Josh Jay, Nachum Joel, Ari Lewis, Mordy Prus, Jeff Ritholtz, Buri Rosenberg, Meir Shapiro, and Yonatan Shefa will be at B. B. King’s in Times Square on December 25, bringing a little Hanukkah into your Christmas. As they sing on their new cover of Matisyahu’s “Miracle,” “New York City, wanna flex your muscle.”

THE MOUNTAIN GOATS: HAVE YOURSELF A MERRY LITTLE CHRISTMAS


John Danielle of the Mountain Goats wishes Jenn Wasner of Wye Oak (and her cats) a merry little Christmas in this live solo performance for A.V. Club in Chicago. The Mountain Goats will be in New York City this spring, participating in “The Music of the Rolling Stones: Hot Rocks 1964-1971” at Carnegie Hall on March 13 and the Ecstatic Music Festival with Anonymous 4 at Merkin Concert Hall on March 24. You can find Wye Oak’s A.V. Club cover of Brenda Lee’s “Christmas Will Be Just Another Day” here.

KLEZ FOR KIDZ FAMILY CONCERT

The Museum at Eldridge Street will host Klez for Kidz family concert on Christmas Day (photo by Rachel Rabhan)

Museum at Eldridge Street
12 Eldridge St. between Canal & Division Sts.
Sunday, December 25, adults $12, children under twelve $6, 1:00
Admission: free
212-219-0302
www.eldridgestreet.org

Continuing its 125th anniversary, the Museum at Eldridge Street will present a special Klez for Kidz family concert on Christmas Day featuring Klezmerfest! Led by clarinetist Greg Wall, the New York City-based band, part of the Simcha All-Stars, brings back the sounds of the old country, playing festive Eastern European and Yiddish dance music, including freylachs, bulgars, doynas, and chassidls. The afternoon will conclude with the audience participating in a musical shtetl wedding. As always when you’re at the historic Lower East Side institution, be sure to marvel at the recently restored building, which last year added a new stained-glass window by Kiki Smith and Deborah Gans. And there will also be hot chocolate, cider, and eggnog available all day long.

HANUKKAH AT THE MUSEUM OF JEWISH HERITAGE

Husband-and-wife-team Aaron Hartman and Alicia Jo Rabins, the leaders of Girls in Trouble, will give a special Hanukkah concert at the Museum of Jewish Heritage on December 21

Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust
36 Battery Pl.
646-437-4202
www.mjhnyc.org

The Museum of Jewish Heritage will be celebrating the Festival of Lights with two special presentations this week. On December 21 at 7:00 ($15), Brooklyn’s Girls in Trouble, led by singer-violinist Alicia Jo Rabins and her husband, bassist Aaron Hartman, will play dark tales of biblical women featured on their two JDub albums, their eponymous 2009 debut and this year’s Half You Half Me, which include such songs as “I Was a Desert,” “I Fell Off My Camel,” “We Are Androgynous,” “Bethesda,” and “Waltz for a Beheading.” (Sadly, JDub Records, which focused on music by Jewish artists, recently announced it is closing because of financial difficulties.) The concert is being held in conjunction with the museum’s current exhibit “Emma Lazarus: Poet of Exiles.” On Christmas Day, MJH will be hosting “I Lift My Lamp: A Statue-esque Hanukkah,” with arts and crafts for children ages three to ten, family-friendly tours, and a trio of film screenings, beginning at 11:00 with An American Tail (Don Bluth, 1986) and continuing at 1:00 with Alfred Hitchcock’s 1942 espionage thriller Sabaoteur and at 3:00 with Ghostbusters II (Ivan Reitman, 1989). In addition to the Emma Lazarus exhibition, also on view are “Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race,” “Voices of Liberty,” and “Let My People Go! The Soviet Jewry Movement, 1967-1989.”

AN EVENING IN MEMORY OF MICHAL THE GIRL

Friends, fans, and strangers will gather together and reach out to help at 12/19 benefit for Micahl the Girl

The Canal Room
285 West Broadway at Canal St.
Monday, December 19, donations accepted at the door, 8:00
212-941-8100
www.canalroom.com
www.thesnydertwins.com
www.michalthegirl.com

On November 25, 2011, forty-four-year-old Michal Lura Friedman died after giving birth to twins. She and her husband, Jay Snyder, had been trying to have children for seven years. “She wanted to be a mother more than anything else in the world,” Snyder told the Daily News shortly after his wife died following complications from a C-section. The tragic story of Friedman, Snyder, and twins Jackson and Reverie has captured the heart of the city. On December 19, friends, family, colleagues, fans, and others will come together to celebrate the life of Friedman, a Buddhist who recorded under the name Michal the Girl, and to raise much-needed funds for Snyder and the babies, at a benefit being held at the Canal Room. Among the performers will be Tiff Randol, Drew Blood, Cresta Kruger and Briana Winter of Kisser, Chris Goerke, Mike Beans Benigno, Todd Rengal, Mike Manza, Steve Dawson, Ben Toro, Shannon Conley, Dave Doobinin, Sarah Greenwood, and Joe McGinty. A local favorite, Michal the Girl released two albums, 2001’s Tongue Tied and 2005’s Strung Out, featuring such songs as “Blanket,” “Bittersweet,” “Transmission,” “Do Over,” and “Eyes Wide Open.” Sadly, Michal the Girl’s official website still lists what would have been her most recent performance, December 6 at Symphony Space.

NEW YORK CITY GAY MEN’S CHORUS: HOLIDAY HOUSE OF LOVE

The Town Hall
123 West 43rd St. between Sixth Ave. & Broadway
Sunday, December 18, $40-$75, 3:00 & 8:00
212-840-2824
www.the-townhall-nyc.org
www.nycgmc.org

The New York City Gay Men’s Chorus, consisting of more than two hundred gay men, will dish out plenty of seasonal spirit on Sunday at two “Holiday House of Love” concerts at the Town Hall. Celebrating peace, love, and unity, the chorus will present original songs and familiar classics, albeit with jazz and gospel twists. Special guests include Broadway star Lillias White, who won a Tony for The Life, and the first openly gay Anglican bishop, V. Gene Robinson. Chorus member Ryan Scobie has been actively promoting the shows, which take place at 3:00 and 8:00, on Facebook, promising, “You get to see me be a church lady, a lion, a sexy elf, and sing a solo. What more could you ask for?!” We couldn’t agree more.

MORE BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH

THOMAS JEFFERSON, MARIA COSWAY, AND THE MUSIC AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT
Abigail Adams Smith Auditorium
417 East 61st St. between First & York Sts.
Saturday, December 17, $50-$100, 8:00
www.mbhe.charityhappenings.org

It’s right there in the Bill of Rights at the very beginning. Adopted on December 15, 1791, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The separation of church and state has been a central issue in America for hundreds of years, and with good reason as fundamentalists from many religions continue to seek to take hold of the political discourse. Since 1947, the nonprofit Americans United for Separation of Church and State has sought to “preserve the constitutional principle of church-state separation as the only way to ensure religious freedom for all Americans.” On Saturday, December 17, the organization, headed by executive director Barry W. Lynn, will host a benefit at the Abigail Adams Smith Auditorium in Manhattan, raising funds and strongly defending the very basic need for the separation of church and state. Award-winning actors Melissa Errico, Matthew Modine, and Kathleen Chalfant will read from the letters of Thomas Jefferson and composer-artist Maria Cosway, who had a lifelong correspondence after meeting when Jefferson was the U.S. envoy in Paris. “Those, which depend on ourselves, are the only pleasures a wise man will count on, for nothing is ours which another may deprive us of,” Jefferson wrote to Cosway in his famous “Dialogue of the Head vs. the Heart” in 1786. “Hence the inestimable value of intellectual pleasures. Even in our power, always leading us to something new, never cloying, we ride serene & sublime above the concerns of this mortal world, contemplating truth & nature, matter & motion, the laws which bind up their existence, & that eternal being who made & bound them up by those laws. Let this be our employ.” The two also discussed art and music, some of which will be performed by members of the Clarion Society Orchestra and guest soloists Jessica Gould (soprano) and Karim Sulayman (tenor), including works by Sacchini, Hewitt, Corelli, Duphly, and Cosway. Directed by Erica Gould, the evening will take place in the elegant auditorium at the Mount Vernon Hotel Museum and Garden, a historic location built in 1799, during the time that Jefferson and Cosway were well in the midst of their very passionate epistolary relationship.