this week in music

WHATEVER BLOG PARTY

Shark? will be part of a great lineup of local bands playing the latest Whatever Blog Party at Glasslands (photo by Amy Grimm)

Glasslands Gallery
289 Kent Ave.
Wednesday, September 29, $8, 8:00
www.whatever-amy.blogspot.com
www.glasslands.blogspot.com

Amy Grimm, who runs the Whatever Blog, is holding her latest monthly party on September 29 at Glasslands, featuring an ultrahip lineup of indie bands, all for only eight bucks. Grimm writes that the Señors of Marseille “have a really full, rich sound with beautiful harmonies that hark back to Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, with a twist of ’90s Brit pop (think Supergrass and Cornershop) and a hint of old school R.E.M thrown in for good measure.” Shark? had to cancel their scheduled appearance at the July Whatever Blog Party, but they’re now back, “a mega rad Brooklyn band [that] has a really cool, very ’60s garage pop sound mixed in with some early R.E.M. with a sense of humor,” in Grimm’s words. Another New York City band, Bottle Up and Go, “has a really cool, distinctive sound that is kinda like if you put the White Stripes, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Zeppelin, and Little Richard in a blender,” Grimm explains on her site. “Bottle Up and Go is really primal and raw live.” After catching the Sundelles at Public Assembly during the Northside Festival, Grimm wrote, “I was very impressed. Their sound was very old school three chord punk done right.” In addition, there will be DJ sets by Nick Kinsey and Wyndham Boylan-Garnett from Diamond Doves and Elvis Perkins in Dearland. (For more on Amy, you can check out our twi-ny talk with her here).

STANLEY CLARKE BAND FEATURING HIROMI

Hiromi and Stanley Clarke will team up again for a week at the Blue Note (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Blue Note
131 West Third St.
September 28 – October 3, $25-$45, 8:00 & 10:30
212-475-8592
www.bluenote.net
www.stanleyclarke.com
summerstage slideshow

Back in late June, the Stanley Clarke Band, joined by Japanese pianist wunderkind Hiromi, played an inspiring free show at SummerStage as part of the Carefusion Jazz Festival, with legendary promoter George Wein in attendance. Clarke was in great spirits, wandering across the stage from keyboardist Ruslan Sirota to drummer Ronald Bruner Jr. to Hiromi, part fan, part orchestra leader. Clarke moved from electric to stand-up bass effortlessly, playing the fusion that has made him one of the jazz world’s best for four decades. As on that beautiful night in Central Park (which was opened by the amazing McCoy Tyner), the quartet will be featuring songs from their latest album, simply titled THE STANLEY CLARKE BAND (Heads Up, June 2010), which includes such tracks as “Soldier,” “Fulani,” “Labyrinth,” and “How Is the Weather Up There?” The record also contains the superbly titled “Larry Has Traveled 11 Miles and Waited a Lifetime for the Return of Vishnu’s Report” and a horn-laden tribute to Sonny Rollins on the occasion of the saxophone colossus’s eightieth birthday. Clarke and his band will be at the Blue Note for twelve shows over six nights from September 28 through October 3, offering plenty of opportunities to catch this terrific group, sounding as good as ever.

TEENAGE FANCLUB

Teenage Fanclub gets a little too lost in the shadows on first record in five years

Monday, September 27, and Tuesday, September 28, Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey St., $25, 9:00
Thursday, September 30, Williamsburg Waterfront, $37.50, 5:30
www.myspace.com/theteenagefanclub

It’s been twenty years since Teenage Fanclub came on the scene with A CATHOLIC EDUCATION, then breaking through in the U.S. with 1992’s grungy BANDWAGONESQUE, which featured such hits as “Star Sign,” “The Concept,” and “What You Do to Me.” The Glasgow band is now back with its first studio album in five years, SHADOWS (Merge, June 2010), and over the course of twelve songs and forty-eight minutes, they show that they are not nearly as edgy as they once were. Guitarists Norman Blake and Raymond McGinley, bassist Gerard Love — who alternate songwriting duties and lead vocals — and drummer Francis MacDonald still wear their influences on their sleeves, evoking the Byrds, Neil Young, Big Star, and Jerry Garcia, but they need a wake-up call from these sleepy, treacly tunes. (Listeners will need a few wake-up calls as well.) In fact, they sing about waking up several times on the album, on the TV-theme-song-like “Baby Lee,” the tepid “Shock and Awe,” and the mundane “The Past.” “Give yourself a wake-up call,” McGinley sings on the latter, “let the past come back to rescue you.” Teenage Fanclub will have to let the past rescue them when they come to New York this week for two headlining shows at the Bowery Ballroom, September 27 with the Radar Brothers and September 28 with the Radar Brothers and the Clean, before opening for Belle & Sebastian on September 30 at the Williamsburg Waterfront.

ATLANTIC ANTIC

Annual Atlantic Antic street festival winds through the brownstones of Brooklyn

Atlantic Ave. from Hicks St. to Fourth Ave.
Sunday, September 26, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
Admission: free
www.atlanticave.org

The thirty-sixth annual Atlantic Antic will fill Atlantic Ave. with frantic festivalgoers eager for the latest in art, music, food, and other forms of culture. Some one million people will be wandering among the six hundred vendors, buying tchotchkes, getting a bite to eat (look out for lobster rolls from the Red Hook Lobster Pound and desserts from Whimsy and Spice), taking their kids on pony rides, and checking out dozens of bands across ten stages; we heartily recommend the Demolition String Band at Hank’s, Shark? at Roebling Inn / Future Sounds at 2:55, Les Sans Culottes at Last Exit at 4:00, and Dinosaur Feathers at Roebling Inn / Future Sounds at 5:00. There will also be storytelling, face painting, belly-dancing lessons, drum circles, balloon sculptures, and much more. In conjunction with the Atlantic Antic, the MTA will be hosting the seventeenth annual Transit Museum Bus Festival, held on Boerum Pl. between State St. and Atlantic Ave., with newly restored vehicles, the Patcher, the AutoCar, the MetroCard Bus, the Tunnel Wrecker, children’s workshops, and free admission to the New York Transit Museum.

NEW YORK CITY APPLE DAY

The New York apple will be celebrated at street fair on Orchard St. on Sunday



APPLES ON ORCHARD
Orchard St. between Broome & Grand Sts.
Sunday, September 26, free, 11:00 am – 5:00 pm
212-226-9010
www.lowereastsideny.com

Some three hundred and sixty-three years ago, Peter Stuyvesant planted an apple tree on Thirteenth & Third, and New York has been identified with the healthy fruit ever since. On Sunday, the Lower East Side Business Improvement District will be sponsoring the annual New York City Apple Day, held in the general location where French farmer James De Lancey Sr.’s apple orchard thrived back in the eighteenth century. The afternoon will include live performances by Grandma Fantasy, Tyrone Noonan Band, Cows Like Shrimp with Sefton Stallard, and Stella Winkelman of Bell Book and Scandal; the Mark Miller Gallery will be sponsoring an art activities table for kids; and such restaurants as Café Katja, Bunny Chow, and Georgia’s Eastside BBQ will be serving dishes featuring apples. Among the other participants are An Choi, the Henry Street Settlement, Biscuits by Lambchop, the New Museum, the LES Ecology Center, Red Jacket Orchards, the Tenement Museum, and Newtown Pippin.

DELUSION

Laurie Anderson is back at BAM with another multimedia examination of the personal and the political (photo by Leland Brewster)

Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St.
Through October 3, $20-$60
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

Examining the twenty years of her life she has spent sleeping, Laurie Anderson’s new show, DELUSION, running at BAM’s Harvey Theater through October 3, consists of approximately twenty short mystery plays that move smoothly between the personal and the poltical, an intimate multimedia work about dreams and the state of the nation. Commissioned for the 2010 Vancouver Cultural Olympiad, DELUSION features some of Anderson’s sharpest writing in years, performed in her unique talk-singing style either as herself or as deep-voiced alter ego Fenway Bergamot. Anderson glides between several microphones on a stage that includes video projections on a loveseat, shredded paper, a small scrim, and a large screen in back, depicting leaves flying in the wind, smoke drifting endlessly, a chalkboard filled with hard-to-decipher words and images, moonscapes, a child witnessing her mother’s death, and giant live shots of Anderson herself, playing her specially made violin. Joined by Colin Stetson on bass saxophone and Eyvind King on a more traditional violin, both men primarily seen in silhouette, Anderson, dressed in her trademark white shirt and thin black tie, tells jokes and stories about age, memory, Iceland, nineteenth-century Russian space theorist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, punctuation, and her own heritage. The centerpiece of the show is “Another Day in America,” from Anderson’s latest album, the just-released HOMELAND; “And so finally here we are, at the beginning of a whole new era, the start of a brand new world,” she sings as Bergamot. “And now what? How do we start? How do we begin again? . . . And so which way do we go?” Throughout the ninety-minute performance, Anderson, who has previously staged such pieces as THE END OF THE MOON, SONGS AND STORIES FROM MOBY DICK, EMPTY PLACES, and the seminal UNITED STATES: PARTS I-IV at BAM, is warmer and friendlier than ever, filled with charm and good humor, making strong eye contact with the audience as she delves into fascinating topics with a wink and a knowing smile.

NEW YORK GYPSY FESTIVAL

Drom and other venues
85 Ave. A
September 24 – October 3, free – $40
Festival Pass: $30
212-777-1156
www.nygypsyfest.com/2010

The sixth annual NY Gypsy Festival begins tonight with Selim Sesler and the NY Gypsy All-Stars at Drom. The ten-day celebration features performances by such individuals and groups as Mahala Rai Banda, the Veveritse Brass Band, Los Magnificos Impostores, Espiritu Gitano, Tecsoi, Stephane Wrembel, Zlatne Uste, Balval, and Yuri Yunakov, at Rumsey Playfield and Clipper City Tall Ship as well as at the home base, Drom. Past festivals have included such groups as Gogol Bordello, Beirut, Balkan Beat Box, Hazmat Modine, Slavic Soul Party! and Sway Machinery, so don’t be turned off if you don’t recognize any of the names in this year’s lineup just yet; next year everyone might know them, and tickets will be a lot harder to get.