THE GIG

Endless Sunsets

Delorean, Lemonade, Brahms

Mercury Lounge, March 29

Direction Nowhere

Forty years ago this month, Miles Davis opened for Neil Young at the Fillmore East. I wrote about their intersection a while back for an EMP Pop Conference, and now the piece has finally been released into the wild, thanks to the intrepid online magazine At Length. 

One animating idea in the piece is the power of unknowing. At one point in Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography, by Jimmy McDonough, Young offers probably the single best analysis of Crazy Horse:

Speaking Volumes

Angelique Kidjo

Town Hall, March 26

 

Critics’ Choice: New CDs

She & Him, “Volume Two”

Rumors, Recriminations

 Playlist, March 28

Caetano Veloso, Frank Kimbrough, the Bird and the Bee, the Living Sisters, Amir ElSaffar and Hafez Modirzadeh

Wistful Thinking

Ralph Towner and Paolo Fresu

Italian Academy at Columbia University, March 24

Threads and Treads

Jazz Listings

March 26 to April 1

Regina Carter and Reverse Thread

Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, March 23

Manhattan Bridges

Critics’ Choice: New CDs

Ken Peplowski, “Noir Blue”

  

Chris Dingman’s Waking Dreams

Jazz Gallery, March 18

Astereotypical

Pachora

Rose Live Music, March 17

Advanced Studies

 File under: self-promotion, duologue, pianism. This weekend I will be in Princeton, N.J. for a pair of concerts featuring Vijay Iyer and Craig Taborn. The two pianists, former section-mates in the superb new-music ensemble Roscoe Mitchell’s Note Factory, will perform back-to-back solo sets, followed by new works for duo piano. To quote from the program notes: “Both pianists share an enthusiasm for structural rigor and rhythmic precision, but also maintain a more gestural, interpretive and intuitive approach to improvisation.”

 The event(s) comes courtesy of the Institute for Advanced Study, a center for theoretical research with a distinguished history. (Einstein is among the more prominent former faculty.) Iyer and Taborn are appearing at the invitation of composer Derek Bermel, the Institute’s current Artist-in-Residence. My contribution will be a post-concert conversation on Friday and a pre-concert talk on Saturday.

Tickets are free, but way gone. (I’m told that the waiting list is substantial.) No word on whether this collaboration will yield a future spate of bookings, but as precedent has taught us, it could happen.

Likely Stories

Jazz Listings

March 19 to 25