Brazilian sensation CSS has just released the video for their bouncy pop song “Hits Me Like a Rock,” from their latest release, La Liberación (Fontana, August 2011). You can catch Lovefoxxx, Adriano Cintra, Luiza Sá, Ana Rezende, and Carolina Parra at Webster Hall on October 22, on a bill with MEN and EMA.
this week in music
GLENN JONES
West Park Presbyterian Church
165 West 86th St.
Sunday, September 25, $15, 7:00
www.thrilljockey.com
Glenn Jones is a god of the guitar, so it’s only fitting that he’s holding his record release party for the extraordinary The Wanting (Thrill Jockey, September 13, 2011) in a place of God, the West Park Presbyterian Church on West 86th St. in a program tonight with Hauschka: A Prepared Piano Performance. On the gorgeous new disc, Jones, who came of age in the late ’60s and acknowledges that his “head was blown off by Jimi Hendrix’s second album,” leading to getting his first guitar at the age of fourteen, plays acoustic steel string, six-string, ten-string, and bottleneck guitars and a five-string open-back banjo on The Wanting, which features such dazzling sonic forays as “A Snapshot of Mom, Scotland, 1957,” “The Great Swamp Way Rout,” “Anchor Chain Blues,” and “Twenty-three Years in Happy Valley, or Love Among the Chickenshit,” each with its own unique tuning. Recorded in his apartment in Massachusetts, the album reveals the continuing influence of John Fahey on Jones, who in 1997, in the liner notes to Fahey’s The Epiphany of Glenn Jones, wrote, “I was introduced to the music of John Fahey in the early ’70s by my high school art teacher, who played me ‘The River Medley’ from the first of his two Reprise albums, Of Rivers and Religions. The first album I bought myself was Fahey’s fourth for his Takoma label, The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party. It was, for me, one of those life-changing albums, important as only the right album at the right time is to a curious kid with a growing interest in esoteric music.” Jones has also just edited John Fahey: Your Past Comes Back to Haunt You (The Fonotone Years 1958-1965), an eighty-eighty-page book with five CDs that comes out on October 11. The Wanting concludes with the seventeen-minute duet “The Orca Grande Cement Factory at Victorville,” with Chris Corsano on drums, a tour de force for Jones and his remarkable mastery of his instrument. The show tonight with Hauschka at the West Park Presbyterian Church should be, as one of Jones’s new songs says, “Of Its Own Kind.”
PARTY ON THE INTREPID
Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum
Pier 86, 12th Ave. & 46th St.
Thursday, September 29, free with RSVP, 7:00
www.intrepidmuseum.org
Pandora internet radio, the music service based on the Music Genome Project to serve each individual’s particular tastes, and State Fare are teaming up to sponsor a free concert on board the Intrepid on Thursday, September 29, a cool lineup featuring DJ Vice, the Hold Steady, and the Roots, playing on a stage on the aircraft carrier’s flight deck. Although admission is free, you must RSVP to get on the first come, first served guest list RSVP, which does not guarantee entrance, but you won’t be able to get in at all without it. There will also be vendors, food trucks, and more on hand for what should be a very hot show.
FAB! FESTIVAL
Dan Fishback will be at the Fab! Festival performing songs that did not make it into his upcoming Dixon Place show, THIRTYNOTHING
East Fourth St. between Bowery & Second Ave.
Saturday, September 24, free, 1:00 – 5:00
www.fabnyc.org
The FAB! Festival, sponsored by the nonprofit Fourth Arts Block, which supports arts and culture in the East Village, features a host of free live performances, site-specific installations, arts and crafts booths, film screenings, theater previews, yoga classes, writing workshops, and food vendors this afternoon from 1:00 to 5:00 on East Fourth St. between Bowery & Second Ave. Among the highlights are a double feature of Celia Rowlson-Hall’s Three of a Feather, a short film with choreography by Monica Bill Barnes, and Marc Kirsch’s TenduTV; WOW! Wow Cabaret with JZ Bich, Micia Mosely, and Kim Howard; dance presentations by Alpha Omega Theatrical Dance Theater, Classical Contemporary Ballet Theatre, Suzanne Beahrs and Dancers, Theater in Asylum (Frankenstein), Sobers & Godley (The Lesser of Two Sobers & Godley), Maia Ramnath and Constellation Moving Company, Li Chiao-Ping Dance, JT Lotus Dance Company Beyond, Rod Rodgers Dance Company, and others; cabaret and poetry from the Nuyorican Poets Café, Dixon Place, the New York Neo-Futurists, La MaMa E.T.C., and Judith Malina’s Living Theater, including a sneak peek at Dan Fischback’s thirtynothing; and much, much more.
DUMBO ARTS FESTIVAL
Sean Boggs’s “Blue Monster” is among the many multimedia projects at this year’s DUMBO Arts Festival
Multiple venues in DUMBO
September 23-25, free
www.dumboartsfestival.com
The fifteenth annual DUMBO Arts Festival begins today, kicking off a weekend of live performances, art exhibitions, site-specific projections and installations, and just about anything else you can think of inside and outside of the thriving neighborhood Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. Such locations as St. Ann’s Warehouse, Tobacco Warehouse, Smack Mellon, Superfine, and Brooklyn Bridge Park will host Tajna Tanovic, the Great Small Works Procession, the Jack Grace Band, a panel discussion on immersive surfaces, the White Wave Dance Company, the “Runaway Cape-Cart,” Janet Biggs’s “Wet Exit” multimedia presentation on the East River, “Kafkaesque Hammock,” the “Samsara” scroll, arm wrestling, a Mobile Tea Garden, “The Dumpster Project,” a series of virtual pavilions, Sean Boggs’s “Blue Monster,” the Fisher Ensemble’s Kocho, a steel cage Battle Royal, “Foop,” Carl Skelton and Luke DuBois’s interactive “Sweet Stream Love’s River,” readings by Sapphire and Samantha Thornhill, Bubby’s Pie Social, the newly moved and reopened Jane’s Carousel, and art projects just about everywhere you look, in stores, on street corners, in lobbies, and up in the sky.
WILCO / NICK LOWE
Rumsey Playfield, Central Park
Enter at 72nd St. & Fifth Ave.
Thursday, September 22, and Friday, September 23, $45, 6:00
www.bowerypresents.com
Jeff Tweedy and Wilco opened a two-show stand in Central Park last night with a twenty-five-song set that included eight tracks from their latest album, The Whole Love (dBpm/ANTI, September 27, 2011), kicking things off with the record’s double shot of “Art of Almost” and “I Might” and reaching deep into their extensive, impressive catalog all night long. The great Nick Lowe opens the shows, highlighting songs from his brand-new disc, The Old Magic (Yep Roc, September 13, 2011), a poignant, brutally honest collection of songs that celebrate the influential singer-songwriter’s maturity. It’s the kind of record Buddy Holly might have made if he had reached his early sixties. Lowe, now sixty-two, no longer rocks out to such memorable tunage as “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding,” “Cruel to Be Kind,” “I Knew the Bride (When She Used to Rock ‘n’ Roll),” and “Teacher, Teacher” and instead examines his life in such acoustic-based songs as “Stoplight Roses,” “Sensitive Man,” and “Til’ the Real Thing Comes Along.” Hopefully he won’t have to sing “Shame on the Rain” in the midst of a downpour at tonight’s show, which, surprisingly, still has tickets available.
CELEBRATE MEXICO NOW
Botellita de Jerez will rock out at SOB’s as part of annual celebration of Mexican art and culture
Multiple venues
September 21 – October 1
www.mexiconowfestival.org
The eighth annual Celebrate México Now festival celebrating Mexican culture begins tonight with the free panel discussion “México se escribe con J: A Celebration of Gay Culture in Mexico” at NYU’s King Juan Carlos 1 of Spain Center, with Nayar Rivera, Michael Schuessler, Alejandro Varderi, and Earl Dax talking about “The Famous 41” and other issues of sexual orientation in Mexico, and continues through October 1 with dance, music, theater, art, films, food, and parties. Anthology Film Archives will screen “Gen Mex: Recent Films from México,” the Queens Museum of Art will host the Trajinera Xochitl Project and the multimedia theatrical presentation “Hecho en Mexico: Estreno Nacional,” Mexican electronica band Sweet Electra will play the Church of All Nations, chef Daniel Ovadía will prepare special dishes for the panel demonstration “History and Traditions of Mexican Gastronomy” (yes, the audience will get to sample his food), Botellita de Jerez will rock out at SOB’s, the collective Rey Trueno will perform the multimedia Radio Soap Opera at the Bowery Poetry Club, and the folkloric Pasatono Orchestra will play a free show at the David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center and a ticketed show at Casa Mezcal.