Tag Archives: Jane Scarpantoni

THE BELLS: A DAYLONG CELEBRATION OF LOU REED

The life and legacy of Lou Reed will be celebrated on July 30 with free all-day festival at Lincoln Center

LINCOLN CENTER OUT OF DOORS
Damrosch Park Bandshell, Josie Robertson Plaza, Hearst Plaza,
Alice Tully Hall lobby, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center Amphitheater
Saturday, July 30, free, 10:15 am – 12 midnight
www.lcoutofdoors.org
www.loureed.com

I think I took Lou Reed for granted. I’d see him regularly, either performing onstage, wandering through downtown art galleries, seeing shows at BAM, or grabbing a cab with his wife, Laurie Anderson. He was just one of those icons you thought would always be around, but it was not to be. On October 27, 2013, he succumbed to liver disease at the age of seventy-one. Less than three weeks later, on November 14, Lincoln Center hosted a low-key tribute to the Godfather of Punk at the Paul Milstein Pool & Terrace, three hours of his recorded music, with no speeches and no live performances. On July 30, Lincoln Center Out of Doors will be putting on a much bigger and broader festival in honor of Reed’s influential life and career with “The Bells: A Daylong Celebration of Lou Reed,” curated by Anderson and Hal Willner. The party gets under way at 10:15 on Josie Robertson Plaza with a tai chi lesson with Master Ren GuangYi; Reed recorded six original songs with Sarth Calhoun for the master’s Power and Serenity instructional DVD. From 11:00 to 4:00, the immersive sound installation “Lou Reed DRONES,” consisting of six guitars and amps emitting feedback, will continue in the Alice Tully Hall lobby. At 11:30 in the Damrosch Park Bandshell, the house band of Don Fleming, Sal Maida, Kenny Margolis, Lee Ranaldo, Steve Shelley, and Matt Sweeney will be joined by vocalists Joan as Police Woman, David Johansen, Lenny Kaye, Jesse Malin, Kembra Pfahler, Felice Rosser, Harper Simon, Jon Spencer, Bush Tetras, JG Thirlwell, and the Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls for some rock & roll. From 12 noon to 7:00, the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center Amphitheater will present Reed’s 2010 documentary, Red Shirley (12 noon & 3:00), about his one-hundred-year-old cousin; A Night with Lou Reed (1:30 & 5:30), a video document of his 1983 Bottom Line stand; and the American Masters program Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart (4:00). At 2:00 in Hearst Plaza, Master Ren GuangYi will give a tai chi chuan and weapons demonstration, along with an eagle claw weapons demonstration by Masters Emmanuel Sam and Paul Lee. At 3:00, “Pass Thru Fire: Lyrics of Lou Reed” features Elizabeth Ashley, Steve Buscemi, Anne Carson, Kim Cattrall, Willem Dafoe, A. M. Homes, Natasha Lyonne, Julian Schnabel, Fisher Stevens, and Anne Waldman reading Reed’s words. At 7:00, Anderson, Anohni, Emily Haines, Garland Jeffreys, David Johansen, Mark Kozelek, Bill Laswell, John Cameron Mitchell, Maxim Moston, Jenni Muldaur, Jane Scarpantoni, Victoria Williams, Jim White, John Zorn, and others will gather at the bandshell for live performances of “Lou Reed’s Love Songs,” showing off his gentler side. The celebration, named after his 1979 album The Bells, concludes with a 10:30 screening (with headphones) of Julian Schnabel’s film Lou Reed’s Berlin, a concert film of Reed’s performance of the 1973 album at St. Ann’s Warehouse in 2006. It should be quite a day and night; try not to take it for granted.

LOU REED’S BERLIN (Julian Schnabel, 2007)
Damrosch Park Bandshell
Saturday, July 30, free, 10:30
www.loureed.com/inmemoriam

In December 2006, Lou Reed resurrected his 1973 masterwork, Berlin, a deeply dark and personal song cycle that was a critical and commercial flop upon its initial release but has grown in stature over the years. (As Reed sings on the album’s closer, “Sad Song”: “Just goes to show how wrong you can be.”) The superbly staged adaptation, directed by Academy Award nominee Julian Schnabel (Basquiat, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), took place at Brooklyn’s intimate St. Ann’s Warehouse, featuring Rob Wasserman and longtime Reed sideman Fernando Saunders on bass, Tony “Thunder” Smith on drums, Rupert Christie on keyboards, and guitarist extraordinaire Steve Hunter, reunited with Lou for the first time in three decades. The band is joined onstage by backup singers Sharon Jones and Antony, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, and a seven-piece orchestra (including cello, viola, flute, trumpet, clarinet, and flugel). Amid dreamlike video montages shot by Schnabel’s daughter, Lola, depicting Emmanuelle Seigner as the main character in Berlin, as well as experimental imagery by Alejandro Garmendia, Reed tells the impossibly bleak story of Caroline, a young mother whose life crashes and burns in a dangerously divided and debauched Germany. “It was very nice / It was paradise,” Reed sings on the opening title track, but it’s all downhill from there. “It was very nice / It was paradise” might also now serve as a kind of epitaph for one of the most important poets of the last fifty years. Berlin is being shown at Damrosch Park Bandshell at 10:30 on July 30, with headphones available.

BIG STAR’S THIRD: AN ORCHESTRATED LIVE PERFORMANCE OF THE LEGENDARY ALBUM

Jody Stephens will lead a special SummerStage concert performance of Big Star’s THIRD on June 30 (photo by Daniel Coston)

Central Park SummerStage
Rumsey Playfield
Sunday, June 30, free, 7:00
www.cityparksfoundation.org
www.bigstarthird.com

In March 2010, Chris Stamey was getting ready to head to SXSW to ask the re-formed Big Star if he could put together an all-star band to play the group’s seminal 1970s record Third / Sister Lovers when he found out that Alex Chilton had suddenly passed away at the age of fifty-nine. With the help of Big Star cofounder Jody Stephens, the project eventually went on because, as Stamey explains on his blog, “regardless of who performed it, it should be heard out in the air, not confined to earbuds, cars, and living rooms. In the same way that Mozart and Beethoven, in their day, were heard.” On June 30, Stamey will lead a diverse group of friends in a performance of the full album, which includes such tracks as “Kizza Me,” “Holocaust,” “Kangaroo,” “You Can’t Have Me,” “Femme Fatale,” and “Take Care,” in Central Park, with vocalists Sharon Van Etten, Kurt Vile, Marshall Crenshaw, Pete Yorn, Reeve Carney, Jonathan Donahue, and Becky Stark joining instrumentalists Mike Mills, Mitch Easter, Ken Stringfellow, Richard Lloyd, Dale Baker, Charles Cleaver, Django Haskins, Brett Harris, Skylar Gudasz, Stephens, and a twenty-piece chamber orchestra featuring Jane Scarpantoni and the Uptown Horns. Big Star fans can get even more beginning on July 3, when Drew DeNicola’s documentary Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me opens at the IFC Center, with Stephens, DeNicola, and others participating in Q&As at select shows on July 4.

4KNOTS VIDEO OF THE DAY: “KV CRIMES” BY KURT VILE AND THE VIOLATORS

Lo-fi Philly CDR psychedelic indie rocker Kurt Vile and his band, the Violators, will be headlining this year’s 4Knots Music Festival at the South Street Seaport on June 29, highlighting songs from their latest record, Wakin on a Pretty Daze (Matador, April 2013). A former member of the War on Drugs, Vile has previously released such albums as 2008’s Constant Hitmaker, and 2009’s Childish Prodigy, building a loyal following and gaining a reputation for his wide range. Wakin on a Pretty Daze consists of eleven tracks totaling nearly seventy minutes, with one, “Goldtone,” cracking the ten-minute barrier. Vile and Violators Rob Laakso and Jesse Trbovich occasionally take off on hippie ramblings as Vile shares such thoughts as “I wanna live all the time / in my fantasy infinity / There I will never be abandoned / There I’ll have a handle against everything from ever happening to them.” 4Knots will take place on two stages from 1:00 to 8:00 and also includes performances by Marnie Stern, the Men, Parquet Courts, White Lung, Hunters, Reigning Sound, the Babies, Fat Tony, Heliotropes, and recent Violator Steve Gunn. Vile will also be at Rumsey Playfield on June 30 for the all-star SummerStage presentation of Big Star’s Third with Jody Stephens, Ken Stringfellow, Mike Mills, Sharon Van Etten, Marshall Crenshaw, Pete Yorn, Jonathan Donahue, Jane Scarpantoni, Reeve Carney, and a chamber orchestra, among other participants.

RICHARD BARONE: COOL BLUE HALO 25th ANNIVERSARY CONCERT

Richard Barone will re-create his classic COOL BLUE HALO album at City Winery on May 4

City Winery
155 Varick St.
Friday, May 4, $25-$45, 8:00
212-608-0555
www.citywinery.com
www.richardbarone.com

On May 31, 1987, Richard Barone gathered a group of his friends at the Bottom Line and recorded the instant downtown classic Cool Blue Halo. The Tampa-born Barone, a longtime Greenwich Village resident, will be re-creating that amazing performance on May 4 at City Winery when he and the same musicians, in addition to special guests, will celebrate the album’s twenty-fifth anniversary by playing it in full one night only. Barone will reunite with Jane Scarpantoni on cello, Nick Celeste on guitar, and Valerie Naranjo on percussion and keyboard, with such special guests as Fred Schneider, Tony Visconti, Garth Hudson, the Bongos’ Rob Norris on bass, Deni Bonet on violin, Richard Kerris on drums, and Candy John Carr on bongos. A mix of old and new songs and a few covers, Cool Blue Halo features eleven tracks filled with gorgeous melodies, beautiful harmonies, and lush arrangements. Barone kicks things off with the Bongos’ “The Bulrushes” and his own mesmerizing “I Belong to Me”: “I am a face in the window / passing through another day,” he sings, continuing, “I’ve heard the cool cool music of Mingus and Miles in the afternoon / in the afternoon / I’ve felt the cold blue halo / gotten by an angel in my room / in my room.” Barone delivers lovely renditions of the Beatles’ “Cry Baby Cry” and David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World” along with such other originals as the yearning “Flew a Falcon” and the lilting “Love Is a Wind That Screams” before concluding with the Bongos favorite “Numbers with Wings.” Barone is putting together a limited edition box set that will include a remastered version of the original album, a live DVD of the May 4 concert, and never-before-released bonus material that you can preorder here to help fund the project’s completion; various deluxe packages also come with tickets to the concert, handwritten lyrics, signed CDs, and other paraphernalia. Barone will be back at City Winery on May 8 for the fundraiser “Occupy This Album: a compilation of music by, for and inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement and the 99%,” for which Barone contributed “Hey, Can I Sleep on Your Futon?”