this week in music

FIRST SATURDAY: BEST OF THE BOROUGH

Carrie Mae Weems, “Untitled (Man Smoking / Malcolm X),” from the Kitchen Table series, gelatin silver photograph, 1990 (© Carrie Mae Weems / photo by Sarah DeSantis, Brooklyn Museum)

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, December 1, free, 5:00 – 11:00
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum celebrates the world’s preeminent borough again in its monthly free First Saturday program in December with the second part of “Best of the Borough.” There will be live music by Deva Mahal, Roze Royze of Set It Off, the Soul Summit Music Festival, and Jimi Tents; a curator tour of Egyptian art with senior curator Ed Bleiberg; Cave Canem pop-up poetry readings by Hafizah Geter, Cynthia Manick, and Nicholas Nichols; the artist talk “Something to Say” with Kameelah Janan Rasheed and Brooklyn Hi-Art! Machine; a screening of Brooklyn Film Festival “Best Brooklyn Project” winner Catch One Bedroom (Darien Sills-Evans, 2018), followed by a Q&A with members of the cast and crew; a tour of the museum’s history during the Black Power era with archivist Molly Seegers; a screening of Digging for Black Pride (Philip Burton Jr., 1971) sponsored by the Weeksville Heritage Center and followed by a discussion with Zenzele Cooper and Obden Mondesir; pop-up gallery talks with teen apprentices on “Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection”; a hands-on art workshop with figure drawing of live models inspired by Kehinde Wiley; and two Day With(out) Art screenings of Alternate Endings, Activist Risings, featuring short films from ACT UP NY, Positive Women’s Network, Sero Project, the SPOT, Tacoma Action Collective, and VOCAL NY, presented by Visual AIDS. In addition, the galleries will be open late so you can check out “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power,” “Kwang Young Chun: Aggregations,” “Syria, Then and Now: Stories from Refugees a Century Apart,” “Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection,” “Rob Wynne: FLOAT,” “Infinite Blue,” “A Woman’s Afterlife: Gender Transformation in Ancient Egypt,” and more.

BOB DYLAN AND HIS BAND

Beacon Theatre
Broadway at 74th St.
November 24 – December 1, $139 – $300
www.bobdylan.com
www.beacontheatre.com

In 1978, I saw my first Bob Dylan show, at Madison Square Garden. At one point my friend said to me, “What the hell is he doing? I just want to hear ‘Tangled up in Blue.’ ” I turned to him and said, “Um, that last song was ‘Tangled up in Blue.’ ” For more than forty years, the so-called Voice of a Generation has been fiddling with his vast catalog, reimagining classic songs and focusing on new material during his Never Ending Tour, which thunders into the Beacon for seven shows November 24 to December 1. He has previously played the venue twenty-one times, beginning in October 1989, including memorable performances with Patti Smith in December 1995. All these decades later, if you’re expecting the seventy-seven-year-old troubadour to change his stripes, well, that just isn’t going to happen. So it was with great anticipation that I entered the Beacon on November 26, and Dylan did not disappoint. Exclusively playing a baby grand piano — occasionally sitting, more often standing or just leaning against a high piano bench — along with some fine harmonica, Dylan did not alter his basic setlist one iota from any other show on this leg of the tour (although occasionally he switches an encore). Dylan was joined by Donnie Herron on pedal steel, lap steel, electric mandolin, banjo, and violin, Charlie Sexton on lead guitar, Tony Garnier on electric and stand-up bass, and George Receli on drums, each wearing silver sequined jackets, black boots, and black pants. (Rhythm guitarist Stu Kimball dropped out earlier this month.) Dylan was dressed in black-and-white boots, a black shirt with a bolo tie, and a loose cross between a kimono and a cowboy jacket ennobled with glinting swirls of blue and white embroidery. No hat perched atop his huge shock of curly (evenly brown) hair, and no pencil-thin mustache ornamented his occasional sardonic grins. The hundred-minute show was a mix of folk, pop, rock, blues, jazz, and even a little jumpin’ jive, a cacophony of sound centered around Dylan’s still-remarkable vocal phrasings.

For the last several years, one thing that hasn’t changed is Dylan’s opening song, the Oscar-winning “Things Have Changed,” written for Curtis Hanson’s 2000 film, Wonder Boys. “People are crazy and times are strange / I’m locked in tight, I’m out of range / I used to care, but things have changed,” Dylan sings, but don’t be fooled by his lack of patter with the audience (he did actually introduce the band during at least one of the shows); Dylan is fully engaged in the music as he proceeds through his carefully selected setlist. Five of the next six tunes dated no later than 1971, but in each case, the audience did not applaud with recognition until they caught familiar words in the chorus, since the arrangements were so displaced from the original versions, and even some of the lyrics were altered, making it hard to sing along; but that’s exactly what makes these Dylan concerts so exciting. (I use binoculars not only to see his facial expressions, which include a smiling grimace, but also to read his lips to figure out what he is warbling.)

Bob Dylan continues to reinvent himself at the Beacon

He also employs a sly sense of humor; he reimagines “Simple Twist of Fate,” only to let the missing melody line later appear in “Make You Feel My Love.” Be prepared for a host of songs from 2001’s Love and Theft, 2006’s Modern Times, and 2012’s Tempest but nothing from his American songbook or Christmas albums, and there’s not a dud in the bunch. On a sizzling “Scarlet Town,” Dylan headed to center stage and grabbed the microphone stand, adopting a few rock-star poses as he belted out the bluesy 2012 tune with a Middle Eastern lilt, declaring, “If love is a sin then beauty is a crime / All things are beautiful in their time / The black and the white, the yellow and the brown / It’s all right there for ya in Scarlet Town.” His regal reinvention of “When I Paint My Masterpiece” made it vital once more.

The only uncomfortable moment came during the first encore, an update of “All Along the Watchtower” in which he suddenly stopped the song and seemed to be angry, either at a technical issue or a person in the front snapping his picture — who just happened to be Ringo Starr, who posted the awful photo to social media; Dylan returned to the song but it never regained its steam. (Paul McCartney took in an earlier Beacon show.) The key to experiencing a Dylan concert is to just let Bob be Bob. There’s still no other musician who can so adroitly capture the heart and soul of life and love and the state of the nation in such unique ways. He doesn’t just sing but virtually spits and swallows words, a bittersweet outpouring that can rattle your core with a beautiful glory. Go to the Beacon with no expectations other than to be uniquely entertained, challenged, and confused, and keep those cell phones off and don’t try to sneak pictures or text friends. More than at most shows, you need to pay attention to every rapt minute, and if Dylan hasn’t earned that respect from you, then just stay home and binge Netflix.

SOUL OF A NATION: ART IN THE AGE OF BLACK POWER

Faith Ringgold, “United States of Attica,” offset lithograph on paper, © 2018 courtesy ACA Galleries, © 2018 Faith Ringgold

FIRST SATURDAYS
Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, November 3, free (some events require advance tickets), 5:00 – 11:00
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum explores art and Black Power in the November edition of its free First Saturday program. There will be live performances by Antoine Drye, Shelley Nicole’s blaKbüshe, and the Brooklyn Dance Festival; an Art & Dialogue discussion with curators Valerie Cassel Oliver and Catherine Morris; a hands-on workshop in which participants can create miniature paintings inspired by jazz and the work of Alma Thomas, William T. Williams, and others; a curator tour of “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power” with Ashley James; original poetry and music by Jaime Lee Lewis, Jennifer Falu, Joekenneth Museau, Asante Amin, Frank Malloy, and Terry Lovette in addition to excerpts from the 1968 collection Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing; pop-up poetry with Sean DesVignes, Joel Dias-Porter, and Omotara James of Cave Canem; an “Archives as Raw History” tour with archivist Molly Seegers; and the community talk “Black Art Futures Fund.” In addition, the galleries will be open late so you can check out “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power,” “Syria, Then and Now: Stories from Refugees a Century Apart,” “One: Do Ho Suh,” “Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection,” “Something to Say: Brooklyn Hi-Art! Machine, Deborah Kass, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Hank Willis Thomas,” “Cecilia Vicuña: Disappeared Quipu,” “Rob Wynne: FLOAT,” “Infinite Blue,” “A Woman’s Afterlife: Gender Transformation in Ancient Egypt,” and more.

ME & MR. JONES: MY INTIMATE RELATIONSHIP WITH DAVID BOWIE

Raquel Cion brings her deeply personal David Bowie tribute to Pangea on May 11 & 12 (photo by Jody Christopherson)

Raquel Cion continues her fall residency at Pangea in October and November (photo by Jody Christopherson)

Pangea NYC
178 Second Ave. between Eleventh & Twelfth Sts.
Friday, October 19, and Saturday, October 20, $20 in advance, $25 at the door, $20 food/beverage minimum, 9:30
Friday, November 16, and Saturday, November 17, $20 in advance, $25 at the door, $20 food/beverage minimum, 9:30
212-995-0900
www.meandmrjonesshow.com
www.pangeanyc.com

In a November 2015 twi-ny talk, Raquel Cion said, “Isn’t it great to be amidst a flurry of Bowie activity?” referring to Bowie’s sudden resurgence with an off-Broadway musical, new album, and various other new songs. “Oh, I have so much to say,” she added. Cion continues to have much to say as the show keeps evolving, especially following Bowie’s death in January 2016 at the age of sixty-nine; the massive success of the immensely popular “David Bowie is” exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, for which you need to get timed tickets in advance; and Cion’s own battle with breast cancer, which she bravely documented on social media.

In Me & Mr. Jones: My Intimate Relationship with David Bowie, librarian and chanteuse Cion reflects on her life through her worship of Bowie — who was born David Jones — singing Bowie songs and sharing deeply personal anecdotes that are both moving and funny. She is not a Bowie impersonator; she interprets Bowie’s extraordinary music with intelligence, verve, and love. She continues the fall residency of her glittery multimedia performance, which was nominated for a 2015 New York Cabaret Award for Best Musical Comedy or Alt Cabaret Show, at Pangea October 19-20 and November 16-17, joined by Jeremy Bass on guitar, Daniel Shuman on bass, Michael Ryan Morales on drums, and music director Karl Saint Lucy on piano. If you’ve seen it before, Cion is promising significant ch-ch-ch-changes for this iteration. The show is directed by Cynthia Cahill, and Cion’s glam outfits are by David Quinn. Tickets are $20 in advance and $25 at the door, with a $20 food and beverage minimum.

NIGHTFALL: A MOONLIT EXPLORATION

Nightfall: A Moonlit Exploration will be filled with surprises at Green-Wood Cemetery (photo by Robyn Von Swank)

Nightfall
Green-Wood Cemetery
25th St. at Fifth Ave., Brooklyn
Saturday, October 20, $75, 8:00
718-210-3080
www.green-wood.com

Friday’s site-specific performance of Nightfall: A Moonlit Exploration is sold out, but tickets are still available for Saturday’s show, taking place in historic Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. You’ll be guided through the Gothic Arches and up and down the endless paths, following thousands of flickering candles as you pass by a vast array of tombs, graves, and crypts that date back hundreds of years. As you go, you’ll encounter music, storytelling, film, and more by the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus, Rooftop Films, Morbid Anatomy, and others, curated by Unison Media, the company behind “Crypt Sessions” and “Angel’s Share.” Tickets are $75, for twenty-one and over only. If you’ve never been to the amazing Green-Wood Cemetery, this should be a great introduction to one of the city’s genuine treasures, especially around Halloween.

MARX FESTIVAL: ON YOUR MARX

Ivo Dimchev’s P Project offers audience members cash in exchange for a performance

NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts and other NYU locations
566 La Guardia Pl. between Third & Fourth Sts.
October 17-28, free with advance RSVP
212-992-8484
nyuskirball.org

This past May, Karl Marx would have turned two hundred years old. The NYU Skirball Center is celebrating his bicentennial with twelve days of special free programming honoring the man who wrote, “The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political, and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.” Audiences can also determine if they want to contribute to the performances based on supply and demand and their own consciousness; the events are all free with advance RSVP but donations are welcome. The “Karl Marx Festival: On Your Marx” begins October 17 at 7:30 with London-based Bulgarian performance artist Ivo Dimchev’s one-hour show, P Project, in which people from the audience will get paid by agreeing to do spur-of-the-moment things involving words that begin with the letter “P.” For example, Dimchev will present them with tasks that might involve such words as Piano, Pray, Pussy, Poetry, Poppers, etc. On October 18 at 6:00, NYU professors Erin Gray, Arun Kundnani, Michael Ralph, and Nikhil Singh will discuss “Racial Capitalism” at the Tamiment Library. On October 19 at 9:30, DJs AndrewAndrew will spin Marxist discs along with readings by special guests from Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto.

marx festival

On October 19 and 20 at 7:30, Brooklyn-based Uruguayan dancer and choreographer luciana achugar will present the world premiere of Brujx, which explores ideas of labor. On October 22 at 6:30, Slavoj Žižek will deliver the Skirball Talks lecture “The Fate of the Commons: A Trotskyite View.” On October 23 at 5:30, NYU professors Lisa Daily, Dean Saranillio, and Jerome Whitington will discuss “Futurity & Consumption” at the Department of Social & Cultural Analysis. On October 24 at 4:00, author Sarah Rose will talk about her 2017 book, No Right to Be Idle at the eighth floor commons at 239 Greene St. On October 25 at 5:30, luciana achugar, Julie Tolentino, and Amin Husain will join for the conversation “Labor, Aesthetics, Identity” at the Department of Performance Studies. On October 26 at 7:30, Malik Gaines, Miguel Gutierrez, Latasha N. Nevada Diggs, Ryan McNamara, Seung-Min Lee, and Alison Kizu-Blair will stage “Courtesy the Artists: Popular Revolt,” a live-sourced multimedia work directed by Alexandro Segade and Amy Ruhl. The festival concludes October 28 at 5:00 with Ethan Philbrick’s Choral Marx, a singing adaptation of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Manifesto for the Communist Party, performed by Benjamin Bath, Gelsey Bell, Sarah Chihaya, Hai-ting Chinn, Tomás Cruz, Amirtha Kidambi, Brian McQueen, Gizelxanath Rodriguez, and Ryan Tracy.

NYFF56 SPOTLIGHT ON DOCUMENTARY: CARMINE STREET GUITARS

Rick Kelly and Cindy Hulej are a mutual admiration society in Carmine Street Guitars

NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL: CARMINE STREET GUITARS (Ron Mann, 2018)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Saturday, October 6, Walter Reade Theater, 4:15
Monday, October 8, Francesca Beale Theater, 2:30
Festival runs through October 14
212-875-5610
www.filmlinc.org

In the second half of Ron Mann’s utterly delightful and unique documentary Carmine Street Guitars, a well-dressed, well-groomed young man enters the title store in Greenwich Village and identifies himself as Adam Shalom, a Realtor who is selling the building next door. Shalom tries to talk about square footage, but Carmine Street Guitars founder and owner Rick Kelly barely looks up as he continues cleaning a fret. It’s a critical, uncomfortable moment in an otherwise intimate and inviting film; throughout the rest of the eighty-minute documentary, the soft-spoken Kelly talks guitars and craftsmanship with a stream of very cool musicians and his punk-looking young apprentice, Cindy Hulej. But Shalom’s arrival harkens to one of the main reasons why Mann made the movie: to capture one of the last remaining old-time shops in a changing neighborhood, a former bohemian paradise that has been taken over by hipsters and corporate culture, by upscale stores and restaurants and luxury apartments. You’ll actually cheer that Kelly gives Shalom such short shrift, but you’ll also realize that Shalom and others might be knocking again at that door all too soon.

Rick Kelly welcomes “instigator” Jim Jarmusch to his Greenwich Village shop in Carmine Street Guitars

The rest of the film is an absolute treat. Mann follows five days in the life of Carmine Street Guitars; each day begins with a static shot of the store from across the street, emphasizing it as part of a community as people walk by or Kelly, who was born in Bay Shore, arrives with a piece of wood he’s scavenged. The camera then moves indoors to show Kelly and Hulej making guitars by hand, using old, outdated tools and wood primarily from local buildings that date back to the nineteenth century. Kelly doesn’t do computers and doesn’t own a cell phone; he leaves all that to Hulej, who posts pictures of new six-strings on Instagram. Meanwhile, Kelly’s ninetysomething mother, Dorothy, works in the back of the crazily cluttered store, taking care of the books with an ancient adding machine. Over the course of the week, they are visited by such musicians as Dallas and Travis Good of the Sadies (who composed the film’s soundtrack), “Captain” Kirk Douglas of the Roots, Eleanor Friedberger, Dave Hill of Valley Lodge, Jamie Hince of the Kills, Nels Cline of Wilco, Christine Bougie of Bahamas, Marc Ribot, and Charlie Sexton. Bill Frisell plays an impromptu surf-guitar instrumental version of the Beach Boys’ “Surfer Girl.” Stewart Hurwood, Lou Reed’s longtime guitar tech, talks about using Reed’s guitars for the ongoing “DRONES” live installation. “It’s like playing a piece of New York,” Lenny Kaye says about the guitars made from local wood while also referring to the shop as part of the “real village.”

Mann, the Canadian director of such previous nonfiction films as Grass, Know Your Mushrooms, and Comic Book Confidential, was inspired to make the movie at the suggestion of his friend Jarmusch, who in addition to directing such works as Stranger Than Paradise (which featured Balint), Down by Law, and 2016 NYFF selection Paterson is in the New York band Sqürl. Plus, it was Jarmusch who first got Kelly interested in crafting his guitars with wood from buildings, “the bones of old New York,” resulting in Telecaster-based six-strings infused with the history of Chumley’s, McSorley’s, the Chelsea Hotel, and other city landmarks. Carmine Street Guitars, which is far more than just mere guitar porn, is screening in the Spotlight on Documentary section of the New York Film Festival on October 6 and 8, with Mann participating in Q&As after each show, joined by special guests, including Kelly and Hulej on October 6. The film will be preceded by the world premiere of eighty-seven-year-old Manfred Kirchheimer’s thirty-nine-minute Dream of a City, a collage of 16mm black-and-white images of construction sites and street scenes taken between 1958 and 1960, set to music by Shostakovich and Debussy. Kirchheimer (Stations of the Elevated) will also be at both Q&As as well as the October 6 free NYFF Docs Talk with Alexis Bloom, James Longley, Mark Bozek, and Tom Surgal, moderated by Lesli Klainberg.