Recommended Agenda Soundboard

Brooklyn Rider

It’s no longer unusual for a classical group to have a name that doesn’t include a word like “quartet” or “ensemble,” or for it to focus on new compositions or on music that draws on pop, jazz, electronica, and the like. All of which means New York string quartet Brooklyn Rider isn’t an oddity these days—but it’s one of the best of this new generation. Violinists Johnny Gandelsman and Colin Jacobsen, violist Nicholas Cords, and cellist Eric Jacobsen (Colin’s brother) formed the quartet in 2006, while playing together in Yo-Yo Ma’s expansive Silk Road Project. In Ma’s group they adapt music from all over Asia, and in Brooklyn Rider they’ve done likewise—for the excellent 2008 album Silent City (World Village), they collaborated with Iranian kamancheh virtuoso Kayhan Kalhor. That’s not to say Brooklyn Rider restricts itself to Asian music: last year they released a double CD collecting the complete string quartets of Philip Glass, plus an album called Seven Steps (In a Circle) that collides a dramatic rendering of Beethoven’s meticulous String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp Minor (with heavy use of glissando and less vibrato than is traditional) with the dense 2008 work Together Into This Unknowable Night by New York composer Christopher Tignor (who leads the rock-flavored new-music group Slow Six). The real oddity on the album, though, is the title track, a response to the Beethoven quartet composed collectively by all four members of Brooklyn Rider, who write in the liner notes that they were “guided by a spirit of free play rather than the heavy hand of the auteur’s pen.” It’s just 12 minutes long, in contrast with the 40-minute Beethoven quartet, but its scratchy textures, extended techniques, and rapid-fire movement make up for in impact what’s missing in duration and exposition. For tonight’s concert the group will play Seven Steps, but the centerpiece of the program isn’t the Beethoven but rather another classical warhorse, Felix Mendelssohn’s String Quartet No. 1 in E-flat. Also included are John Zorn’s The Alchemist, Colin Jacobsen’s “Three Persian Miniatures,” and works by Christina Courtin, Dana Lyn, and Vijay Iyer, all from a series of commissions called the Brooklyn Rider Almanac, for which the group asks composers to use any artist from the past 50 years as an inspiration. —Peter Margasak $35, $5 students

Recommended Soundboard Member Picks

Circuit des Yeux, Rabid Rabbit, These Wonderful Evils, Nad Navillus

When Robert Fripp broke up King Crimson in 1974 (for neither the first nor the last time), he explained that he didn’t want to work in an unwieldy, dinosaur-dimensioned formation but rather operate as a “small, mobile, independent, and intelligent unit.” Fripp may not have foreseen what four decades would do to the price of gas (and thus the feasibility of touring in a group with a big pile of gear), but he looks like a soothsayer when you consider the current wave of performers who take the stage with just one instrument and some electronic augmentation. These Wonderful Evils is Zak Boerger, an artist from Bloomington, Illinois, who like Chris Forsyth and Steve Gunn plays solo guitar music informed by eclectic influences and a rock ’n’ roll mind-set. The inexorable flow and slow-burn drone of the long pieces on his most recent LP, Little Church (Sparrows & Wires/Horror Bag), make them sound like what would’ve happened if Pete Cosey had traded licks with Davey Graham over a beat laid down by one of Brian Eno’s drum machines; on a live recording from last month that’s available on his Bandcamp page, a loop pedal provides an undulating foundation for Boerger’s lyrical fingerpicking and thoughtful, fuzz-coated extrapolations. This concert is part of a series of benefits (here and in Barcelona, Madrid, and New York City) to help musicians and artists Dan and Letha Rodman Melchior pay for Letha’s cancer treatment. —Bill Meyer Circuit des Yeux headlines; Rabid Rabbit, These Wonderful Evils, and Nad Navillus open. $10 donation requested

Recommended Early Warnings (Music) Soundboard

Erin McKeown, Jenn Grant

Erin McKeown shows off the malleability of the songs on the new Manifestra (TVP) by including a bonus disc that acknowledges her coffeehouse roots with ten acoustic-guitar versions of the polished full-band tracks on the album proper. McKeown has always seemed to me like a pop polymath trapped in the body of a protest singer, but here she approaches politics with a heavy-handedness she’s previously kept in check. “The Politician” helpfully points out that corruption is bad, and “The Jailer” notes that current border policies are fucked-up. “Baghdad to the Bayou,” which channels the swamp-rock grooves of CCR and ties the war in Iraq to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, was cowritten via text message with Rachel Maddow. I’m down with what McKeown is saying, but I’d personally prefer to find such opining on the op-ed page. Thankfully her delivery—with the exception of the horrible rapping on the title track—redeems these lapses in judgment. Like the proverbial spoonful of sugar, her effortless singing and charming melodies help even bitterest lyric medicine go down. McKeown is joined here by Marc Dalio on drums and Matt Douglas on horns. —Peter Margasak Jenn Grant opens. $12

Recommended Soundboard

Ultraista, Prefuse 73

Between them British producer Nigel Godrich and American drummer Joey Waronker have been intimately involved with some of the most popular and influential music of the past couple decades: Godrich has worked with Radiohead, Pavement, and the Flaming Lips, among others, while Waronker has played with Beck, Nelly Furtado, R.E.M., and a zillion more. But they’re finally calling their own shots in Ultraista, a trio rounded out by unremarkable British singer Laura Bettinson. Unfortunately, though their self-titled debut for Temporary Residence shows off many of their trademarks—densely percolating polyrhythms, overlapping synths playing terse licks and colorful washes, and metronomic bass lines, here by Gus Seyffert—too much of it feels unfinished. Bettinson tries to caress the modest melodies, but she lacks the charisma and range to bring the songs’ skeletal blueprints to life. And because Godrich and Waronker are both members of Thom Yorke’s Atoms for Peace—who release their first album on Tuesday and will likely follow that with loads of touring—I’m thinking it’s unlikely we’ll ever hear Ultraista evolve their approach to the point that they’re writing real songs. —Peter Margasak Prefuse 73 opens. $18

Recommended Early Warnings (Music) Soundboard

Sera Cahoone, Ryan Jeffrey

Sera Cahoone named her recent third solo album, Deer Creek Canyon (Sub Pop), after a park near where she grew up in Colorado; in the mid-90s she moved to Seattle, where she still lives, and played drums in Carissa’s Wierd, Band of Horses, and other groups. Almost every song on Deer Creek Canyon expresses a longing for home, familiarity, and companionship, whether she’s literally yearning for a place (on the title track) or struggling with the pull of romantic nostalgia (on “Rumpshaker” she sings, “But now that I’m here I don’t know why I came at all”). As with her previous records, Cahoone’s sometimes wispy, sometimes twangy folk-rock flirts dangerously with ethereal fluff a la Sarah McLachlan, but she saves her songs with the directness of her writing and the leanness of the arrangements. —Peter Margasak Ryan Jeffrey opens. $10

Recommended Early Warnings (Music) Soundboard

Casket Lottery, Maps for Travelers, Sweet Cobra, Jar'd Loose

If you’re a forlorn thirtysomething susceptible to nostalgia and still partial to early-aughts emocore—the kind that’s heavy on thick, twangy bass and doleful, out-of-key vocals with syllables drawn out like thiiiiiiiiisss!—the past five years have been pretty kind. Midwestern staples such as Small Brown Bike, Braid, and the Get Up Kids have re-formed and released new material, and just last year Kansas City’s Casket Lottery (who broke up in 2006) did the same, reintroducing their relatively proggy brand of emo with last fall’s Real Fear (No Sleep)—piano and second guitar now included. Having evolved into their present shape from that of a metalcore pillar a la Coalesce (who also exist again), Casket Lottery have a knack for playing potent, intricate guitar licks and getting as tough as the raspy vocal harmonies of Nathan Ellis and Stacy Hilt allow. Their 2000 release Moving Mountains stands toe-to-toe with anything from that era, and despite 2013’s expanded lineup and the visible gray hair on the heads of the band’s front men, the mature and thoughtful Real Fear can match the spirit of the best material in Casket Lottery’s catalog—aches and pains and all. —Kevin Warwick Maps for Travelers, Sweet Cobra, and Jar’d Loose open. $10

Recommended Early Warnings (Music)

Chicago Afrobeat Project, Nick & the Ovorols

Chicago Afrobeat Project—arguably the midwest’s best practitioners of the funky style pioneered more than four decades ago by Nigerian national hero Fela Kuti—adapt Afrobeat to a wide range of music on their new album, Nyash Up! (CAbP Music), including songs by local free-jazz combo the Vandermark 5, Brazilian pop thrush Ceu, and Led Zeppelin. In nearly every case the material has been so heavily remade that the only trace of the original is the occasional lyric or indelible lick—the bass line in Fugazi’s “Waiting Room,” for instance, or the vocals of guest singer Ugochi on Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues.” CABP definitely have Fela’s sound down pat—they even fuse his “Just Like That” with Radiohead’s “I Might Be Wrong” on the opening track—but their take on it sometimes feels self-conscious and bland. And it doesn’t help that local rapper S. Squair Blaq adds some verses to the Gaye cover that back down from Fela’s radical politics to rather timidly demand an end to the war on the middle class—it sounds depressingly like an uninspired Obama stump speech. —Peter Margasak Nick & the Ovorols open. $10

Recommended Soundboard All Ages

Action Bronson, Calez, Alex Wiley, Impala Sound Champions

Queens rapper and former chef Action Bronson spent most of last year supporting Blue Chips, a Reebok-sponsored mixtape cut with Brooklyn producer Party Supplies. It was one of the most celebrated rap releases of 2012—the Reader’s Miles Raymer praised its boldly sloppy subversion of NYC hip-hop—and a wave of year-end best-of roundups that mentioned it began right around the same time Bronson released the Alchemist-produced mixtape Rare Chandeliers (Vice/Warner). Though Rare Chandeliers doesn’t have the rule-breaking, free-for-all aesthetic that helped make Blue Chips a hit, Bronson preserves the playful energy he demonstrated on the earlier recording, delivering lines about his lothario-foodie lifestyle with a just-blazed attitude that smooths out his rough, sometimes piercingly nasal voice. Alchemist’s beats recall 70s exploitation-film soundtracks, their dramatic horn melodies, burning guitar solos, and buoyant bass lines bolstering Bronson’s outsize rebel-without-a-cause character—together they’re as much fun as a midnight screening of a grindhouse flick with a half dozen rowdy friends. —Leor Galil Calez, Alex Wiley, and Impala Sound Champions open. $22, $20 in advance, $40 VIP tickets

Recommended Soundboard

Ital, Chrissy Murderbot, Hieroglyphic Being

According to a Village Voice profile by Michaelangelo Matos, San Francisco postrocker turned Brooklyn dance-music producer Daniel Martin-McCormick considers Malcolm X his primary fashion inspiration and says that he tries “to exclusively wear Bob Marley shirts”—in other words, he’s either a completely radical guy or the worst kind of obnoxious smirking ironist. But I don’t care which—Dream On, the 2012 album he released under the pseudonym Ital on incredible British label Planet Mu, is so good that I’d forgive behavior more egregious than fake Marley fandom. Martin-McCormick also plays in noisy experimental group Mi Ami, where his work has grown increasingly electronics-based, but nothing he’s done there has suggested that he was developing into what Dream On has revealed him to be: a full-blown techno producer with one foot in the form’s Detroit roots and one in its wiggy, art-damaged fringe. The album is full of odd sounds and challenging ideas, but more crucially it’s also the sort of thing that can get a crowd moving. —Miles Raymer Chrissy Murderbot and Hieroglyphic Being open. $8

Recommended Early Warnings (Music) Sold Out (Music) Member Picks

Lucinda Williams, Doug Pettibone, Kenneth Brian

Recommended The Short List (Theater) Closing (Theater and Galleries) Member Picks

Faith Healer

TurnAround Theatre had a hit with this drama by Irish playwright Brian Friel back in 1995. Now the Den Theatre has reunited director J.R. Sullivan with the original cast for another go. Comprising four monologues by three unreliable narrators, the play recounts the slow unraveling of self-doubting faith healer Frank Hardy (Si Osborne), his embittered wife (Lia Mortensen), and the Cockney showbiz promoter (Brad Armacost) who loves them both. Every second of Sullivan's remount is riveting, thanks to a cast who manage to seem deeply connected to one another even though they're never onstage at the same time. I didn't see the original version, but it's hard to imagine younger performers conveying the same depth and hard-won experience. —Zac Thompson $28

Recommended The Short List (Theater) New Review (Theater and Comedy)

Lady M

Laley Lippard has taken apart Shakespeare's "Scottish play" and reassembled it with the idea of making Lady Macbeth the protagonist. To achieve that aim Lippard cleverly elides key elements (the prophetic witches are entirely omitted) and adds others (such as a sultry sex scene) that are merely alluded to in the testosterone-fueled original. If Lippard's deconstruction is effective, her direction is even more impressive. She makes smart uses of minimal space (by banging on the outer walls of the theater, for instance, to simulate inner turmoil) and primitive lighting, relying on little more than four light bulbs, a doorway, and a lantern. Kristi Webb is terrific as Lady Macbeth; the other actors didn't seem as strong to me, but then I may've been distracted by the bizarre decision to outfit them in cargo pants. --Tal Rosenberg $15-$20

Recommended The Short List (Theater) Member Picks

The Unveiling and Dozens of Cousins

James Joyce had Stephen Dedalus, David Mamet had Bobby Gould. And Vaclav Havel had a hapless alter ego named Ferdinand Vanek, bearing witness to life's absurdities in four plays that Havel wrote over the course of 25 years. Trap Door Theatre mounts the first and the last of those plays. In 1975's The Unveiling, Vanek spends an excruciating evening with maniacally status-conscious Vera and Michael, who are hell-bent on "resolving his situation" by turning him into a consumerist clone of themselves. In 2010's Dozens of Cousins, Vanek returns to find the dissolute but defiantly condescending couple in the throes of collapse. Beata Pilch's manicured, high-strung staging makes the submerged menace of the pieces hilarious, bracing, and deeply disturbing. Her laser-sharp cast turn 65 minutes of increasing irrationality into a giddy psychological thrill ride. —Justin Hayford $20-$25

Recommended The Short List (Theater) Member Picks

Pygmalion

This fine Stage Left/BoHo Theatre coproduction reminded me how much richer and deeper George Bernard Shaw's 1912 comedy is than its sentimentalized musicalization, My Fair Lady. The tale of a misogynistic phonetics professor who teaches a cockney flower girl to speak well—and in so doing, transforms her into an independent woman beyond his control—Shaw's classic brilliantly satirizes gender roles, class, and morality, even as it delivers a sublimated but potent romance. In Vance Smith's staging, leads Steve O'Connell and Mouzam Makkar bring bristling intelligence to their strong-willed characters, both of whom use intellectual achievement to harness their chaotic emotions. —Albert Williams $25

Recommended The Short List (Theater) New Review (Theater and Comedy)

Beautiful Thing

Jonathan Harvey's tender, tough dramedy focuses on working-class British teen Jamie and his complicated, sometimes combative relationships with the two most important people in his life: his barmaid mother, who dreams of owning her own pub, and Ste, the handsome young schoolmate who lives with his abusive father in the council flat next door. The material feels familiar because it's true to life, and Harvey's 1993 script tackles still-timely themes--bullying, domestic violence, teenage sexual identity conflicts--with a hard-edged humor that doesn't sacrifice seriousness. The success of John Nasca's Pride Films and Plays production hinges largely on Robert Hilliard's engaging performance as Jamie, a stocky, sports-averse 16-year-old whose confidence blossoms as he journeys toward self-acceptance. --Albert Williams $23-$25