“Shāshwat”

Live Tonight on Millennium Stage:
Sawani Mudgal & Khushal Sharma – Hindustani Vocal
Sibasankar Satapathy – Tabla & Mardal
Sujith Naik – Flute
“Shāshwat”—Eternal. Such are the music and values of the legendary musician Pandit Kumar Gandharva. An offering of music to the musical genius for the milestone of his birth centenary, Shāshwat celebrates Gandharva’s exemplary life and musical legacy.
Pandit Kumar Gandharva’s timeless music bridged dualities, assimilating the best from tradition and modernity, from both classical and folk traditions. Kumar-ji lives on in the hearts of disciples and rasikas, through the sheer bliss of his art.
Kumar-ji’s unique compositions are played by his prashishyas (grand-disciples): Sawani Mudgal and Khushal Sharma. Their guru, Pandit Madhup Mudgal, is a prime disciple of Pandit Kumar Gandharva, and the guru passed on a rich legacy that carries forward through them.

MWOTG Takes Kennedy Center To Church

Caught on March 2nd live on Millennium Stage at the Kennedy Center: Washington Performing Arts: Men and Women of the Gospel Choir (MWOTG) has celebrated the heritage of gospel music and its related genres with vibrant, dynamic performances in venues across the nation’s capital for 30 years. Under the leadership of Artistic Director Theodore Thorpe III, the choir is dedicated to presenting this American art form at its highest artistic level, performing contemporary and classic works of African American heritage including gospel standards, hymns, anthems, and other choral repertoire. As a resident ensemble of Washington Performing Arts, the choir has shared the stage with a wide array of artists, including Richard Smallwood, Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, the late Edwin Hawkins, the late Walter Hawkins, Ramsey Lewis, and Sweet Honey In The Rock!!

Gone to church.

House The Houseless

Musician & WWOZ radio host Cole Williams is in the vanguard of a powerful movement of direct action in the city of New Orleans, defending the rights of unhoused people.

In recent years New Orleans housing activists created a political space for people to come together. Following frequent street demonstrations at City Hall, activists succeeded in getting the City to provide emergency housing in empty hotels. Now grassroots activists are renovating City-owned blighted houses with unhoused people by their side. Organized by The Greater New Orleans Citizens Relief Team (GNOCRT), they are asking the city government and those individuals with construction skills to assist in this dramatic and impactful Project.

Cole Williams is leading this struggle with deep community participation and her powerful songs of love and struggle. Her new album with the Cole Williams Band, “Give Power to the People” puts them in the tradition of Gil Scott-Heron, creating songsthat reflect the everyday experiences and hopes of Black people all around the world. These songs are anthems of the Movement for Black Lives and certainly for people struggling to make sense out of this dangerous and hopeful moment.

Dan + Claudia Zanes Holiday Bash

This Holiday Sing Along with Grammy Award® winner Dan Zanes and his musical wife, Claudia Zanes, (family to greenarrowradio), is a multicultural all-ages wintertime celebration based on the Christmas gatherings Dan experienced as a child growing up in New Hampshire, in which friends and neighbors came together to sing carols around the piano. This event is/was an ideal Sensory Friendly performance.

But it’s the 21st century!

And now the singers are from a variety of traditions and the songs are from here and there, near and far—Christmas and Hanukah classics in English, Hebrew, and Ladino; as well as holiday songs from Korea, Tunisia, Puerto Rico, Wales, and Haiti. Instead of a piano there are the sounds of guitar, mandolin, harmonica, flute, trombone, tambourine, melodica, ukulele, and anything else that happens to make it in the door. Songbooks are distributed and the audience becomes a part of the festivities. I have to thank the Kennedy Center for having another great thing for me (and you) to be a part of wherever we are around the globe – innovation means INclusion.

The Dan + Claudia Zanes Holiday Sing Along offers a chance for people to experience some of the best of life’s possibilities… while singing with wild abandon! Watch the entire performance here.

Enjoy!!

Sculpting Sound

The visually gorgeous, sonically rich and artistically inventive performances on Sculpting Sound feature a dozen of music’s most forward-looking artists playing with, and on, sound sculptures by Harry Bertoia. Presented by Pyroclastic Records and premiering on the Winter Solstice, December 21, 2023 at 10:27 p.m. ET, SculptingSound.org offers free and complete access to a series of revelatory performances recorded at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. The musicians were given unprecedented access Bertoia’s sculptures. The results blur the lines between music and visual art and provide an opportunity to hear strikingly fresh and innovative work from some of the most vital improvisers of our time and to explore Bertoia’s work, not just visually, but as he fully intended: sonically. At the heart of the website is the collection of six high-definition concert films. Each hour-plus long concert places two musicians famed for their distinctive voices in dialogue with Bertoia’s Sonambient sculptures: guitarists Nels Cline & Ben Monder, trumpeters Ambrose Akinmusire & Nate Wooley, saxophonists Ingrid Laubrock & JD Allen, acoustic string players Jen Shyu & Brandon Seabrook, drummers Marcus Gilmore & Dan Weiss, and pianists (friend of the proGram, Kris Davis & Craig Taborn. All 12 musicians are known for their genre-crossing & expansive outlooks, and here they push their art even further by engaging in a complex interplay with each other, their instruments, and the sculptures—which ring with bell-like tones, vibrate & shimmer, boom & whisper, echo & reverberate, chime & crash, sing out & sing on. The music that emerges is unique—a new collaborative form at the juncture of improvisation, ambient & experimental music, art, & chance.Although Harry Bertoia (1915-1978) was best known during his lifetime as one of the greatest furniture designers of the 20thcentury, he has since become revered as a visionary visual artist. Following the commercial success of his iconic wire chairs, Bertoia dedicated himself to sculpture. Central to his practice were a series of sound sculptures, his Sonambients, whose evocative, encompassing tones could be called forth by a passing wind, ambient vibration, or the touch of a hand. Bertoia himself captured their sounds on eleven LPs released during the last years of his life. Until now, however, musicians have had precious few chances to interact with these works. In 2022, the Nasher Sculpture Center included many sound sculptures among the more than 100 pieces in their exhibition Harry Bertoia: Sculpting Mid-Century Modern Life. Writer, poet and record producer David Breskin seized on this opportunity to create and curate a week-long festival called SCULPTING SOUND: Twelve Musicians Encounter Bertoia, during which the expressive possibilities of the Sonambient pieces could be fully explored. Breskin’s long career has often straddled the worlds of contemporary music & art. In 2002, he brought Bill Frisell to the work of German painter Gerhard Richter, which resulted in the creation of Frisell’s 858 Quartet and the multimedia book Richter 858; and then, in 2010, married Nels Cline’s music to Ed Ruscha’s paintings, producing the poetry/music/art mashup DIRTY BABY. More recently, Breskin has produced an eclectic array of albums for artists including Mary Halvorson, Patricia Brennan, Kris Davis, Ingrid Laubrock, Cory Smythe, Craig Taborn, Brandon Seabrook, Dan Weiss & Ches Smith.

Day 1 of Unsound NY

The opening event of the Unsound Festival New York is at the David Rubenstein Atrium on December 1, with two leading voices of the Polish avant-garde scene. Guitarist Raphael Rogiński is an expert improviser who draws from jazz, blues, and folk traditions from across the globe. Rogiński’s key inspirations lie in his Jewish roots and the American outsider audio art of experimental composers and performers like Harry Partch, John Fahey and Henry Cowell. For this performance, he’ll present his interpretations of John Coltrane classics as well as his new Unsound-commissioned project Žaltys, inspired by Lithuanian mythology. The ambient and experimental artist Martyna Basta opens the evening with a set of delicate atmospheric sound that Pitchfork calls “enchantingly enigmatic.”

La Banda Chuska At Lincoln Center

La Banda Chuska merges the sounds of vintage Peruvian cumbia and psychedelic chicha with 1960s Latin American and Middle Eastern surf rock. They then add a dose of the surreal intensity of New York City to amplify their diverse musical and cultural backgrounds: Peru, Argentina, Puerto Rico, and various corners of the U.S. The result is a fireball of post-punk energy and subversive playfulness, a sort of tropical funk meets The B-52s. La Banda Chuska’s self-titled EP is a darkly cinematic, musically expansive, and eminently danceable weirdo party on wax that’s whipped up the fanbase they attract at regular performances at Brooklyn’s Barbés and other NYC music mainstays. For their Lincoln Center debut, they’ll play songs from their first EP and introduce new cuts from their forthcoming LP.

Dante’ Pope and The Jazz Collective at Millennium Stage

Dante’ Pope is a multi-genre percussionist from the westside of Chicago, based in Washington, D.C. Dante’ serves as the newest addition to Grammy Award®–winning, Nashville–based group Old Crow Medicine Show as the percussionist & featured vocalist. Dante’ was featured on percussion and vocals on the 2019 Grammy®–nominated album Black Cowboys. The album is a collaboration with friend of the proGram, Mr. Dom Flemons, founder of the Carolina Chocolate Drops and Smithsonian Folkways. Dante’ also served as drummer and music director for soul artists and lyricists Raheem Devaugh and Wes Felton, known as The Crossrhodes. His arranging and musicianship was featured for their NPR Tiny Desk Concert in 2017. Since his debut EP release After Five Music in 2019, Dante’ Pope has released several singles and EPs based in soul, jazz, blues, and hip hop traditions. As a solo act, he has played Rockwood Music Hall in New York City, the Strathmore Performing Arts Center, DC Jazz Festival and a host of venues throughout the U.S. He and the band put on yet another exception show on the Kennedy Center‘s Millennium Stage last night.

Nduduzo Makhathini At Detroit Jazz fest

Award-winning pianist, improvisor, healer and scholar from South Africa. A recipient of prestigious awards such as the Standard Bank Young Artist Award, multiple South African Music Award (SAMA) and AFRIMA among others that have made him an influential figure. Nduduzo Makhathini has 10 albums with his last album ‘In the Spirit of Ntu’ on Blue Note Records. Makhathini has an extensively touring schedule including this powerful story share from the moments in Detroit. The band was feeding off one another in the landscape they were creating and I felt the notes grow.

Crying Nut & Say Sue Me At Lincoln Center

Presented in collaboration with Korean Cultural Center New York

As part of Lincoln Center’s spotlight on Korean artists this summer, from afar I got to join Seoul punk and indie rock pioneers Crying Nut and Busan surf-rock indie band Say Sue Me for an energetic taste of Korean rock n roll! Crying Nut became a household name in South Korea following their performances at the 2002 FIFA World Cup and Say Sue Me won Best Modern Rock Album and Best Modern Rock Song at the 2019 Korean Music Awards. This rare opportunity to see both bands performing in New York City must have been amaing in person since it was easy to feel some of that enerGy all the way here in Madison, WI.

David Rudder at the Lincoln Center

From his humble teenage beginnings as a backup singer for the legendary Lord Kitchener to his majestic reign at The Trinidad and Tobago Carnival, over the course of a more than 50-year career as a composer, live musician and producer, Calypsonian maestro David Rudder has always proudly represented the beating heart of Trini culture. A designated recipient of the esteemed Order of the Caribbean Community and a UN Goodwill Ambassador, Rudder is perhaps best known for his massive 1988 hit, “Calypso Music,” which remains one of the genre’s most lasting and beloved songs. Rudder continues to musically experiment in collaboration with major artists, including Machel Montano, Alison Hinds, and Etienne Charles. I just could not miss (virtually) this opportunity to celebrate the King of Calypso’s 70th birthday bash, live at Damrosch Park and it was worth every momnet.

2023 Grammy Winner Samara Joy in Madison

Jazz singer Samara Joy has been celebrated for her effortless control of timeless jazz standards. Just a few months after winning her first two GRAMMY Awards, including the coveted award for Best New Artist, she showcased her smooth, mature vocals when she brouGht IT to Shannon Hall in Memorial Union on May 4. Joy’s performance was the final event of the Wisconsin Union Theater’s 2022-23 Jazz Series. Prior to her GRAMMYs, she won the Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition in 2019 & became an Ella Fitzgerald Memorial Scholar in 2020. She has a significant number of followers on social media platforms, revitalizing jazz for a new, younger audience through her genuine love of the music. Each of her songs highlights the regal resonance and effortless ease of her vocals. Critics & listeners have likened Joy’s proficiency in the genre to music legends like Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald & Billie Holiday. After making her jazz debut with her eponymous first album in 2021, she released “Linger Awhile” in 2022 through Verve Records, the label home to many of the jazz greats to which Joy has been compared. “Linger Awhile” features a mix of familiar jazz standards and lesser-known gems. Samara also flexes her own lyricism on the album using vocalese, a technique in which an artist writes their own lyrics atop a pre-existing melody, so DOPE! “Linger Awhile” earned her a GRAMMY Award win for Best Jazz Vocal Album. She also won the GRAMMY for Best New Artist, a category that the GRAMMY Awards describes as recognizing an artist who has notably impacted the musical landscape. All of this was on full display here in Madison at the Theater. A person who I see as a path backwards for anyone who does not remember, and a jetliner forward into the future of that past. If you get a chance, be like the Union Theater and have Samara come to town, and then go be a part of yesterday and tomorrow.

Linda Sikhakhane at the Lincoln Center

30-year-old saxophonist Linda Sikhakhane stands as an outstanding voice among the rising generation of South African musicians—along with his collaborators Nduduzo Makhathini, Thandiswa Mazwai, and the late Sibongile Khumalo—who are changing the sound of contemporary jazz. Mr. Sikhakhane’s latest album, 2022’s Isambulo (“Revelation” in Zulu) finds the composer exploring the sonic histories of modern music filtered through the prism of transatlantic movement from across the African diaspora. A continuation of his earlier LP, An Open Dialogue, Isambulo presents a full and mature expression of Sikhakhane’s talent and growing chops as a bandleader. A regular performer on Lincoln Center‘s many stages, this appearance with his amazing quartet at the David Rubenstein Atrium, is his premiere headline show on the campus.

Anthony McGill with UW-Madison Symphony Orchestra

Principal clarinetist of the New York Philharmonic, Anthony McGill, will join the UW-Symphony Orchestra as a guest soloist under the direction of conductor Oriol Sans. This evening’s performance will be held at the beautiful, Mead Witter Foundation Concert Hall | Hamel Music Center. Mr. McGill is the first African-American artist to hold a principal position in the NY Philharmonic. As one of classical music’s most familiar figures, he was awarded the Avery Fisher Prize in 2020, and he previously performed at the inauguration of President Barack Obama.

The Program:

1. Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
– Première Rhapsodie (1910)

2. Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826)
– Clarinet Concerto No. 1 in F minor, Op. 73 (1811)

3. Gustav Mahler (1860–1911)
– Symphony No. 1 (1888)

House The Houseless | Music and Action with Cole Williams

Musician & WWOZ radio host Cole Williams is in the vanguard of a powerful movement of direct action in the city of New Orleans, defending the rights of unhoused people. In recent years New Orleans housing activists created a political space for people to come together. Following frequent street demonstrations at City Hall, activists succeeded in getting the City to provide emergency housing in empty hotels. Now grassroots activists are renovating City-owned blighted houses with unhoused people by their side. Organized by The Greater New Orleans Citizens Relief Team (GNOCRT), they are asking the city government and those individuals with construction skills to assist in this dramatic and impactful Project. Cole Williams is leading this struggle with deep community participation and her powerful songs of love and struggle. Her new album with the Cole Williams Band, “Give Power to the People” puts them in the tradition of Gil Scott-Heron, creating songs that reflect the everyday experiences and hopes of Black people all around the world. These songs are anthems of the Movement for Black Lives and certainly for peoplestruggling to make sense out of this dangerous and hopeful moment. Listeners are invited to observe on web2 platforms Youtube and Twitter, or to participate in VR at The Ropeadope Lounge. VR participants will be granted microphone access to speak directly with the panel, and the discussion will continue in VR as we play selections from Cole’s album.

Sandeep Das HUM Ensemble At Lincoln Center

Internationally acclaimed tabla virtuoso Sandeep Das and his classical Indian instrumental HUM Ensemble harness the transformative power of Eastern music as an inspiration of positive social change. The ensemble’s newest project, Delhi to Istanbul, is the latest initiative in their socially driven series, Transcending Borders One Note at a Time. This eclectic mix of original compositions and traditional arrangements explores the shared musical heritage of India and Turkey via the conjoined traditions of Indian ragas, Arabic maqams, Sufi poems, and lyrical thumri. The Grammy Award-winning Guggenheim Fellow Sandeep Das leads his quartet—featuring Tamer Pinarbasi on the kanun (zither), Rajib Karmakar on sitar, and Jay Gandhi on bansuri—for the NYC premiere of this transcendental work. This was an amazing event that was free to anyone near the Lincoln Center and online. This is the spot to go if you can make it there, on way or any way.

Imani Winds At Hamel Music Center

Known for their dynamic performances, adventurous programming, imaginative collaborations and outreach endeavors, two-time GRAMMY-nominated Imani Winds has revolutionized the wind quintet in the past two decades of performing. Their latest album, “Bruits” received a 2022 GRAMMY nomination for “Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance.” The group beguiles audiences with an amply diverse repertoire ranging from traditional chamber music to jazz to contemporary works that reflect significant historic and prevailing events.

Tonight’s Performance

Jeff Scott (b. 1967)
Titilayo (2006)

Reena Esmail (b. 1983)
The Light Is the Same (2017)

Paquito D’Rivera (b. 1948)
Aires Tropicales (1994)

Valerie Coleman (b. 1970)
Rubispheres for Flute, Clarinet, and Bassoon (2015)

Wayne Shorter (b. 1933)
Terra Incognita (2006)

Júlio Medaglia (b. 1938)
Belle Epoque en Sud-America

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They always take me out of my seat and leave me breathless – I feel more complete after an evening with Imani Winds and this time was no different. Open and opening, that’s what they do for me.

Elvin Jones Revival: Live At Pookie’s Pub

Attending a livestream panel discussion celebrating the brand new Blue Note Records release, Elvin Jones Revival: Live At Pookie’s Pub. As you can see the list of panelists is perfect. Friend of the proGram, Mr. Zev Feldman once aGain had the distinction of being heavily involved in this coming to life. Stories from times gone by, observations about the creation of the music and the man as well as snippets of the record itself [I have shared it with listenrs already and it is beeter to hear it many times to really ‘SHUT UP AND LISTEN’].

Elvin Tree to find this new record.