this week in music

RISK + REWARD: PERFORMANCE WITHOUT BOUNDARIES

John Kelly will welcome MAD visitors into open rehearsals of his updated version of FIND MY WAY HOME

Museum of Arts & Design
2 Columbus Circle at 58th St. & Broadway
Through December 8
212-299-7777
www.madmuseum.org

The Museum of Art & Design’s extremely promising inaugural Risk + Reward performance series kicked off last Saturday with Sarah Maxfield’s all-day site-specific “Knowing the Score: An Investigation of Improvisational Structures” and continues this week with John Kelly presenting a work-in-progress reexamination of his 1988 piece Find My Way Home, which was previously revised in 1998. On September 28 from 3:00 to 6:00 and September 29 from 7:00 to 9:00, museumgoers will be able to watch Kelly conduct open rehearsals for the multimedia dance-theater project, which moves the Greek myth of Orpheus, the god of music, to the Great Depression. On September 30 at 7:00, Kelly will stage a ticketed ($15-$18) concert version of the production. Last December, Kelly, whose many risks always lead to myriad rewards, revisited his wonderful Pass the Blutwurst, Bitte, at La MaMa, so we can’t wait to see what he does with Find My Way Home, which will be presented in full October 21-29 at New York Live Arts. Risk + Reward continues October 10 with the social-intervention-based performance “A New Discovery: Queer Immigration in Perspective”; on November 11-12 with Me, Michelle, a new duet about Cleopatra by choreographers Jack Ferver and Michelle Mola in conjunction with Performa 11; and concludes December 8 with “Benjamin Fredrickson, Artist,” a first-ever one-man show by the photographer dealing with his life and work.

CSS: “HITS ME LIKE A ROCK”

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.

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.