this week in music

ELLIOTT SHARP AT 60

ISSUE Project Room
110 Livingston St. (entrance at 22 Boerum Pl.)
Friday, March 4, $50-$250, 7:00
718-330-0313
www.issueprojectroom.org
www.elliottsharp.com

Brooklyn’s ISSUE Project Room has gone through a lot of changes in the last year and a half, beginning with the tragic loss of ifs founder and artistic director, Suzanne Fiol, who passed away in October 2009 at the age of forty-nine after battling cancer. And now the nonprofit organization, which promotes itself as “a vital meeting place for the most disparate forms of creativity whose sole criteria embodies the integrity and spirit of artistic expression and exploration,” is moving from its third-floor space in the Old American Can Factory on Third St. into the McKim, Mead, and White building at 110 Livingston St., which was built in 1925 for the Elks Club and was later home to the New York City Board of Education. On March 4, IPR will be holding its first major event in their future home, a sixtieth birthday celebration for master avant-garde musician, composer, producer, and audiovisual artist Elliott Sharp, a benefit hosted by Jo Andres and Steve Buscemi. The evening begins with a 7:00 VIP reception and the premiere of the multimedia work “Trinity,” featuring music by Sharp, film by Andres, and text and narration by Buscemi, followed by a solo acoustic guitar performance by Sharp of “Velocity of Hue” and Sharp with author Jack Womack and poet Tracie Morris. At 8:00, Sharp will perform “The Boreal,” followed by the IPR commission “Occam’s Razor” performed by JACK Quartet and Sirius Quartet and an after-party from 9:00 to 11:30. The benefit committee, chaired by the husband-and-wife team of Andres and Buscemi along with honorary co-chair Marty Markowitz, features such illustrious writers and artists as Paul Auster, Tony Conrad, R. Luke DuBois, Nick Hallett, Jonathan Lethem, Robert Longo, Rick Moody, Kate Valk, and Anne Waldman. VIP tickets are $250 ($200 tax deductible), while concert-only tickets are $50.

TIBET HOUSE BENEFIT CONCERT XXI

The Flaming Lips will be part of another outstanding lineup of special guests at the annual Tibet House benefit at Carnegie Hall

Carnegie Hall
Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
881 Seventh Ave. at 57th St.
Thursday, March 3, $33-$95, 7:30
212-247-7800
www.tibethouse.org
www.carnegiehall.org

Founded at the request of the Dalai Lama, Tibet House US is “dedicated to preserving Tibet’s unique culture at a time when it is confronted with extinction on its own soil. By presenting Tibetan civilization and its profound wisdom, beauty, and special art of freedom to the people of the world, we hope to inspire others to join the effort to protect and save it.” Tibet House hosts many events year-round, and one of their biggest scheduled for Thursday night, when the twenty-first annual benefit concert will take place in Carnegie Hall. The show is always an eclectic gathering of kindred spirits giving unique performances in honor of Tibet and the Tibetan people, and this year’s lineup is another outstanding one, consisting of Philip Glass, Tenzin Choegyal, the Flaming Lips, Jesse Smith and Michael Campbell, Angelique Kidjo, Taj Mahal, James McCartney, the Roots, Patti Smith, and Michael Stipe. Good seats in the orchestra are still available, as are the cheap seats way in the back of the balcony. The Tibet House benefit concert is always an inspiring experience; if you’ve never been, now’s as good a time as any to “join the effort to protect and save” an unfairly oppressed nation and its people.

GREAT MUSIC REIMAGINED

The Turtle Island Quartet will give a different spin to the music of Jimi Hendrix at Symphony Space (photo © Jay Blakesberg)

Symphony Space, Leonard Nimoy Thalia
2537 Broadway at 95th St.
Wednesday, March 2, Turtle Island Quartet: The Hendrix Project, $15-$34, 7:30 & 9:30
Friday, March 11, Theo Bleckmann: The Music of Kate Bush, $15-$34, 7:30 & 9:30
212-864-5400
www.symphonyspace.org
www.turtleislandquartet.com
www.theobleckmann.com

Nominated for a 2011 Grammy, Turtle Island Quartet’s Have You Ever Been . . . ? (Telarc, August 2010) features the group’s jazz-classical versions of such Jimi Hendrix songs as “Voodoo Child (Slight Return),” “Hey Joe,” “Little Wing,” and “All Along the Watchtower” as well as tunes inspired by the 1960s guitar god, such as their own new composition, “Tree of Life.” Violinists David Balakrishnan and Mads Tolling, cellist Mark Summer, and violist Jeremy Kittel will be at Symphony Space on March 2 as part of the “Great Music Reimagined” series, highlighting tracks from the album. The series continues March 11 with “Hello Earth! The Music of Kate Bush,” as vocalist Theo Bleckmann takes on the eclectic songbook of the British muse, including “Running Up That Hill” and “All the Love.” He’ll be accompanied by percussionist John Hollenbeck, bassist Skuli Sverrisson, keyboardist Henry Hey, and multi-instrumentalist Caleb Burhans.

BUILT BY ANIMALS

The Suffolk
107 Suffolk St. between Delancey & Rivington Sts.
Saturday, February 26, $3, 11:00 pm
www.builtbyanimals.com

Don’t get confused about what Discover said about Built by Animals: “It is to the eternal credit and pride of humanity that scientists like Mike Hansell strive with insight and ingenuity to catalogue the wonders of the natural world and to convey their findings in such enthusiastic fashion to the rest of us blinkered anthropocentrics.” The science magazine was talking about the 2007 book Built by Animals: The Natural History of Animal Architecture. Brooklyn music trio Built by Animals, on the other hand, catalogue the wonders of the savage corporate world with insight and ingenuity for the rest of us blinkered anthropocentrics. Lead singer and bass player Nick Crane, guitarist Morgan von Ancken, and drummer Matt Graff have been compared to a wide array of indie darlings — Weezer, Guster, Modest Mouse, Built to Spill, Vampire Weekend, Radiohead, Phoenix, the Pixies, the Strokes, Bishop Allen, and Jeff Tweedy, and we’d throw in early Hold Steady as well — but their debut EP, Corporate Syndrome (Shmiz, June 2010), is not the derivative mélange those comparisons might imply for the CMJ vets. From the opening cough on “Return to the Power Kingdom” to the killer guitar riff on “Teenage Rampage,” from the ticking time bomb of “Spreadsheets” to the twisting melodies of “Ducks,” BBA documents the natural but depressing progression from high school to college to a corporate life of cubicles and Excel reports. “Listen to them today before you give up entirely,” they explain about themselves in their mission statement. You can listen today to the streaming EP on their website, but you can also hear and see them Saturday night at the Suffolk on the Lower East Side, where they’re holding the launch party for their brand-new music video, “Ellen Page.” (They’ve previously paid homage to the late singer-songwriter “Elliott Smith.”). I Love Monsters kicks things off at 11:00, followed by Quiet Loudly at midnight and the premiere of the video and a set by BBA at 1:00, with two-buck PBRs all night long.

WORKS & PROCESS: JOHN ZORN’S MUSIC INTERPRETED

NEW CHOREOGRAPHY BY DONALD BYRD AND PAM TANOWITZ
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Ave. at 89th St.
February 27-28, $30, 7:30
212-423-3587
www.guggenheim.org

One of the legends of the experimental music scene, John Zorn will be featured in the latest Works & Process event at the Guggenheim, the series in which artists go behind the scenes to reveal their creative process. For this two-night program, Donald Byrd, who has been choreographing work for thirty-five years for such companies as Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Dallas Black Dance Theater, the Pacific Northwest Ballet, and Philadanco, will present the world premiere of a piece set to Zorn’s “4,” performed by Byrd’s Seattle-based Spectrum Dance Theater and accompanied by Stephen Drury on piano. New York City-based Pam Tanowitz, who has been staging pieces that comment on the complexities of dance itself since 2000, will take on Zorn’s “Femina,” a project dedicated to women artists and composed for an all-female ensemble. Zorn, Byrd, and Tanowitz will be on hand to talk about the works during interspersed discussions moderated by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Charles Wuorinen. The February 27 performance is sold out, although stand-by tickets might become available the day of the show, but there are still a few seats left for February 28.

FOUNTAIN ART FAIR 2011

Allison Berkoy will be back on board the Frying Pan in the Lackawanna Caboose with more of her creepy but fun multimedia, lifelike installations (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Pier 66 Maritime, the Frying Pan
West 26th St. at the Hudson River
March 3-6, $10 (March 4 VIP preview $25)
www.fountainexhibit.com

The sixth annual Fountain Art Fair, dedicated to exhibiting avant-garde works from small, independent galleries, is back on board the Frying Pan, displaying cutting-edge painting, sculpture, and installation from the most radical artists to be found during Armory Week. Following the March 3 VIP and press preview, Fountain will open its doors to the public on Friday at 12 noon with works from such galleries as What It Is, Christina Ray, Microscope, LambertArts, Cheap & Plastique, Temporary States, and, as always, the anarchist Murder Lounge down below (don’t say you weren’t warned), in addition to artists projects by Greg Haberny, Evo Love, Mark Demos, Mami Kotak, and Danni Rash & GILF! There will also be a large-scale street art installation that brings together Chris Stain, Faro, Gaia, Shark Toof, Clown Soldier, Love Me, Ellis G, Alessandro Echevarria, Lee Trice, Imminent Disaster, and Dickchicken!, and Boston’s experimental Mobius Collective will be holding four days of curated roaming and site-specific performance art pieces, called “Infiltrate!,” from Marilyn Arsem and Burns Maxey’s “Captain Burns and First Mate Arsem Discover a New Land” and Sandy and Jeff Huckleberry’s “Entrapment” to Anna Wexler and Catherine Tutter’s “Vessel for Haiti III,” Joanne Rice’s “Without,” and Alisia Lord Louise Waller’s “What Are You, Some Kind of Monster?”

Jason Douglas Griffin’s “We Have an Understanding” can be found at the Leo Kesting booth at Fountain (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Other special events include an opening-night reception with live performances by Gordon Voidwell, Tecla, and Generic and a Saturday-night Lomography Picture Party with Ninjasonik and NSR, all free with the standard admission price. This year, the show has a decidedly 1980s retro East Village feel; among the highlights are Jason Douglas Griffin’s painted door, “We Have an Understanding,” at Leo Kesting (the spray-painted lightbulb is part of the work but not the heater), Chris Smith’s “Rumblers Road Signs & Rusted Cars” at G-spot’s subtexture booth, JMR’s colorful live mural at Mighty Tanaka, Demos’s lighted, scratched, and pounded glass canvases, Victor Cox’s enticing small works in the enticing Murder Lounge, Carl Gunhouse’s photos of American real estate developments at Camel Art Space, and R. Nicholas Kuszyk’s delightful robot paintings and Morning Breath’s cool collages at McCaig-Welles. One of our Fountain favorites, Allison Berkoy, is back in the Lackawanna railroad car with “Another Night in the Caboose of Magical Light” (she was previously in the caboose in 2009, with Nuala Clarke there last year), a brand-new collection of captivating light and mirror projections that give life to inanimate objects, from dolls and rice to a bowl of soup, all featuring her face. Be sure to explore every nook and cranny of the 133-foot-long lightship, which was in operation from 1930 to 1965 and spent three years underwater before being rediscovered by salvagers. Fountain is the art fair for people who hate art fairs, where anything can happen — and probably will.

RAW SHOWCASE

Dawn Toledo Walsh will feed RAW artists to a hungry city on February 24 at 3Ten lounge on Bowery

RAW:natural born artists
3Ten lounge
310 Bowery
Thursday, February 24, $10, 8:00
www.rawartists.org
www.3tenlounge.com

Based in Southern California, independent nonprofit DIY organization RAW:natural born artists was founded in March 2009 by Heidi Luerra “to provide up-and-coming artists of all creative realms with the tools, resources, and exposure needed to inspire and cultivate creativity so that they might be seen, heard, and loved.” The grassroots collective travels across the country holding showcases, workshops, seminars, and other special events with handpicked local artists in the fields of film, fashion, music, art, photography, performing arts, hair and makeup, and design accessories. On February 24, Raw comes to the 3Ten lounge on Bowery for a multidisciplinary evening featuring film, live music and dance, a fashion show, and more, with such artists as JT Lotus Dance Company, Jessica Noe, Sarah Valeri, Ness Ros-Zeppelin, Aljosa Daumerie, Crayongirl, Brian DePinto, Lyle Thomas, Jon Epstein, Fabylosa, and others. Cocktail attire is suggested. “The city is hungry,” notes RAW New York City location director Dawn Toledo Walsh. “I intend to give it all it can eat.”