this week in music

ZOOBOMBS

The Zoobombs will play it fast and wild at Bruar Falls and Studio at Webster Hall this weekend

Friday, March 4, Bruar Falls, 245 Grand St. between Driggs & Roebling, $8, 9:30
Saturday, March 5, Webster Hall, 125 East 11th St., $12, 8:00
www.myspace.com/zoobombs

Tokyo-based quartet Zoobombs were formed during a full moon in September 1994, and they’ve been playing it fast and wild ever since. Lead singer and guitarist Don Matsuo, bassist Moostop, keyboardist Matta, and drummer Pocky are set to release the compilation La Vie en Jupon on March 29, containing songs from such previous albums as 1999’s Let It Bomb and Bomb Freak Express, 2001’s Dirty Bomb, 2002’s Love Is Funky, and 2006’s Way In / Way Out. Proclaimed leaders of Japan’s Next Wave and a huge success in Canada, Zoobombs mix grungy blues and indie guitar jangling with hardcore punk flourishes and psychedelic garage rock. La Vie en Jupon is like a crash course in American music, evoking Dylan on “Way In / Way Out,” ZZ Top on “Builbone Blues,” the Mississippi Delta on the swampy “Don’s Dream” (a reworking of “Little Red Rooster”), downtown hipster cool on “Circle X,” and good ol’ funk on “Mo’ Funky” and “Jumbo.” Anarchy and chaos rule the day on the fab freak-out “Highway a Go Go” as well as on “Dolf” and “Get It Together.” And turn it up, because this shit has to be played LOUD. As good as the new, digital-only disc is, it’s as a live band that the Zoobombs have earned their reputation, and they’ll be getting it together at Bruar Falls in Brooklyn on Friday night with Victory & Good Hunting, Columboid, and Nymph and at the Studio at Webster Hall on Saturday with Deluka, the Front Bottoms, the Almighty Terribles, and J. Aims & the Milk Bottles. Expect things to get hairy even though the moon won’t be full.

FRED HERSCH: DUOS & TRIOS +2

Fred Hersch will be at the Jazz Standard this week with an impressive lineup of special guests (photo: Matthew Sussman)

Jazz Standard
116 East 27th St. between Lexington and Park Aves.
March 2-6, $25-$30
212-576-2232
www.jazzstandard.com
www.fredhersch.com

For more than thirty years, three-time Grammy-nominated pianist and composer Fred Hersch has been an innovative force on the jazz scene, whether playing solo, participating in unique collaborations, or reinterpreting Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Celebrating the release of his latest album, Alone at the Vanguard (Palmetto, March 1, 2011), in which he became the first solo pianist to perform for a week at the Village Vanguard (in 2006), Hersch will begin a five-night residency at the Jazz Standard tonight, playing in a changing series of duos and trios. On March 2, he’ll be joined by singer Kate McGarry, the vocalist on the Leaves of Grass project. On March 3, Hersch will team up with guitarist Julian Lage, who recently collaborated with the New Gary Burton Quartet. On March 4-5, tenor saxophonist Noah Preminger, trumpeter Ralph Alessi, bassist John Hebert, and drummer Billy Drummond will take the stage with Hersch, while saxophone legend Joshua Redman will close out Hersch’s Standard stand on March 6.

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.