The task of filling up the blanks.
Welcome, newcomers! With enthusiastic tone, a little list of recommended live new-music events July 29–Aug. 5.
I’d like to extend a warm welcome to the many newcomers who’ve just learned about this passion project of mine via “A Love Letter to Music Listings,” the lovely essay Gabriel Kahane wrote for his debut in The Atlantic. If you’re a regular denizen here who’s not seen Gabe’s cri de coeur about how much we’ve lost since most mainstream media discontinued weekly listings, critics’ picks, and such, here is a gift link.
My name is Steve, and I’m a professional copywriter at a major arts presenter in New York City. My comprehensive bio and work history are here. And for close to 25 years I’ve been writing concert listings in one place or another.
I started following the listings quite a long time before I found myself in a position to write them. In Houston, where I lived for most of my life prior to 1993, I used to buy the Village Voice on the newsstand at the Alabama Theatre after it became a bookstore. I was reading the critics, of course: Kyle Gann and Gary Giddins especially. But I was also living vicariously through the listings, imagining what I’d be heading out to see if I lived in New York.
Turns out reading a meaty listings section week after week can give you a really good feel for what makes a city hum.
After I moved here in 1993, I continued to follow listings in the Voice, as well as the New York Press, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, too. I still recall vividly my excitement at discovering and buying the premiere issue of Time Out New York, an arts, culture, and lifestyle bible with an unforgettable slogan: “Welcome to New York. Now get out.” Everything about the magazine – the features, the previews and reviews, and certainly the listings – was designed to make you aware of everything you could experience here.
I started writing classical music listings at TONY in 2001, and non-classical listings a few years later. By 2006 I was a New York Times stringer and contributed to the listings there. I kept it up as an editor at the Boston Globe, while also attempting to develop and maintain a comprehensive list of new-music concerts in Boston on my personal blog.
Not long after I came back to New York in 2016, I started writing classical music listings for The New Yorker. For my first few years these were published without bylines; the day names were added to the blurbs, I learned along with the rest of the world that I’d been working regularly alongside four of my former TONY colleagues once again.
In every subsequent position I’ve held, I’ve incorporated listings into the job or found ways to publish picks on my own. And even now that I’ve left professional media, I’ve continued to wave a flag for the musical communities I’ve always championed: “contemporary classical music and jazz, electronic and electroacoustic music, and idioms for which no clever genre name has been coined,” as I describe it in the recording roundups I publish on Fridays.
There are two reasons why I’ve kept doing this thing that I do. One is that I feel very strongly about contributing to a historic record of the events that transpired during our period of time, without which we lose sight of who we’ve been and what we did. The other reason is the chief motivation behind virtually everything I’ve ever done – listings, reviews, feature stories, even guiding and editing other writers – and it can be summed up in a line:
“I just heard something amazing, and I have to tell you about it.”
In this, I’m far from alone. At the end of my listings every Tuesday, you’ll find links to four primary sources I turn to myself, all of which often include shows I overlooked or didn’t know about. Dada Strain is a newsletter by Piotr Orlov, a reporter, educator, organizer, and activist. Lament for a Straight Line is the old-school blog of Jim Macnie, whose jazz listings are like Mahler symphonies distilled to Webern-like gems. Extended Techniques is a monthly calendar maintained by two sharp academics as a complement to their podcast, and New Music Calendar is a no-frills spreadsheet maintained by one single overworked composer. (There’s a New Music Calendar Boston, too.)
As an omnivorous music consumer, I rely online calendars incessantly. Oh My Rockness suits my needs for pop music listings, and nyc noise covers outlier communities and activist initiatives. For jazz, Hot House and New York City Jazz Record provide solid calendars. For classical music, it’s hard to beat the straightforward monthly calendars published by New York Classical Review and Live Music Project.
Those comprehensive calendars are invaluable resources, but especially in a booming city like New York, there’s still nothing quite like finding guides you trust. For example, critic, musician, and burgeoning curator Emery Kerekes lately publishes his All Ears newsletter only once a month, but you will always find me poring over his formidable listings for early music, canon fodder, new music and more, caught in the ineluctable grasp of FOMO. And I’ll definitely be watching for the new Gig of the Week feature introduced this week by my friend and fellow TONY veteran Hank Shteamer on Dark Forces Swing.
Like Gabriel Kahane, I too hope that the mainstream media will embrace the value of arts listings again. But in the meantime, I’ll continue to play my part in making a thousand flowers bloom.
The Night After Night Watch.
Concerts listed in Eastern Standard Time
NOTAFLOF = no one turned away for lack of funds.
29
Orchestra of St. Luke’s
DiMenna Center for Classical Music
450 W. 37th St.; Midtown West
Tuesday, July 29 at 7pm; sold out
oslmusic.org
Brad Lubman conducts a chamber-sized cohort of the Orchestra of St. Luke’s in works by 2025 DeGaetano Composition Institute participants Lukáš Janata, Paul Novak, Sofia Jen Ouyang, and Zihan Wu, prepared under the supervision of composer-mentor Augusta Read Thomas. OSL superfans will also want to grab tickets now for the orchestra’s next two performances: performing with Aussie psych-rock cabal King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard in material from Phantom Island, the band’s new orchestral album, at the Westville Music Bowl in New Haven, CT, tomorrow and Forest Hills Stadium in Queens on Friday.
JG Thirlwell: Heaven and Earth Magic
Nitehawk Cinema
188 Prospect Park West; Brooklyn
Tuesday, July 29 at 7pm; sold out
nitehawkcinema.com
An iconic veteran artist who’s never lost his taste for invention or reinvention, post-punk post-minimalist composer-performer JG Thirlwell provides live music to accompany a rare screening of Heaven and Earth Magic, a 1962 stop-motion surrealist fantasia by the mystical anthologist and cultural shaman Harry Smith. This North American premiere is preceded by Thirlwell’s own exhilarating 11-minute film Sonder, commissioned by Sweden’s Frekvens Film Symposium in 2018 and photographed by Sebastian Mlynarski.
30
Memorial for Susan Alcorn
Zürcher Gallery
33 Bleecker St.; Greenwich Village
Wednesday, July 30 at 8pm; free admission
galeriezurcher.com
The visionary pedal-steel guitarist Susan Alcorn, whose capacious canon embraced free improvisation, Western swing, Olivier Messiaen, Astor Piazzolla, and beyond, played what would turn out to be her final concert at Zürcher Gallery on January 21, just 10 days ahead of her untimely demise. She’s remembered tonight by an extravagant constellation of colleagues and admirers, including guitarists Nels Cline, Mary Halvorson, and Ava Mendoza, saxophonists Ingrid Laubrock and Catherine Sikora, trumpeter Nate Wooley, and quite a few more stellar performers.
Nicole Mitchell
Glass Box Theatre, The New School
55 W. 13th St., Greenwich Village
Wednesday, July 30–Saturday, Aug. 2 at 8:30pm; $20 cash only
thestonenyc.com
Improvising flutist, composer, bandleader, educator, and inspiring futurist Nicole Mitchell comes to The New School for a four-night Stone residency. Her run starts on Wednesday with a reunion with a potent past collaborator, pianist Craig Taborn, and continues on Thursday with guitarist Mary Halvorson in another duet. Friday’s show features Mitchell’s Black Earth Strings project with violinist Mazz Swift, violist Melanie Dyer, cellist Teddy Rankin Parker, and bassist Anna Abondolo, and the run ends Saturday with a duet featuring pianist Vijay Iyer.
31
Teddy Abrams
Le Poisson Rouge
158 Bleecker St.; Greenwich Village
Thursday, July 31 at 7pm; $26.78–$38.93
lpr.com
Best known as the charismatic, inquisitive music director of the storied Louisville Orchestra, Teddy Abrams is also a resourceful composer, a point proved handily by the kinetic, swing-saturated Piano Concerto he wrote for Yuja Wang. He comes to LPR to celebrate the release of Preludes, a new collection of solo piano works he recorded for New Amsterdam in close collaboration with producers Gabriel Kahane and Casey Foubert, who carefully manicured the sound to suit each piece. Special guests are promised at this event; you probably don’t have to work hard to figure out who.
The Dream Unfinished
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture—New York Public Library
515 Malcolm X Blvd.; Harlem
Thursday, July 31 at 7pm; $40–$100, advance $30–$75, seniors and students $20–$50
eventbrite.com
Celebrating its 10th anniversary with a concert presented in partnership with the Center for Constitutional Rights, activist orchestra The Dream Unfinished offers a program titled “Keep Cathedrals High: An Orchestral Witness to Black Resilience,” featuring works by Julia Perry, Valerie Capers, Joel Bentley Thompson, and David Baker conducted by George Steel.
Riley Mulherkar
The Underground at Jaffe Drive, Lincoln Center
10 Lincoln Center Plaza; Upper East Side
Thursday, July 31 at 8pm; free admission
lincolncenter.org
Summer for the City. Best known as a founder of genre-flouting brass quartet The Westerlies, trumpeter Riley Mulherkar comes to Lincoln Center’s carport-turned-cabaret to showcase music from his arresting 2024 solo album, Riley, a mix of strong tunes, nimble improvisation, and stylish sound design by Chris Pattishall and Rafiq Bhatia.
1
Unheard-of
Gowanus Dredgers Bunker
2 19th St.; Brooklyn
Friday, August 1 at 8pm; boats $17.85, on shore free
eventbrite.com
Unheard-of, an insatiably curious contemporary-classical group, partners with Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club for a multimedia encounter featuring music by Christian Quiñones. The featured work, Eyecandy, is described as “a multimedia song-cycle… for chamber ensemble and virtual singer (Vocaloid Synthesizer), exploring themes of virtual excess, internet fatigue, and digital humor.” Pony up for a canoe and listen on the water, or grab yourself a prime patch of shoreline and listen for free.
2
Roomful of Teeth
The Glade, Little Island
Pier 55, W. 13th St. at Hudson River; Hudson River Park
Saturday, Aug. 2 & Sunday, Aug. 3 at 10pm; free and unticketed
littleisland.org
Mere weeks after composer, conductor, and performer Matthew Aucoin presented the New York premiere of his prodigious opera/vocal symphony, Music for New Bodies, at Lincoln Center, he’s in action again with a program billed as a “first listen” to The Lights, a new song cycle for the extraordinary vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth, incorporating poems by Ben Lerner.
3
Jessica Pavone
The P.I.T.
411 S. 5th St.; Brooklyn
Sunday, Aug. 3 at 8pm; $20
propertyistheft.org
Were this bill credited solely to Jessica Pavone, that would be plenty: she’s one of the most strikingly original violists currently working in creative music, with a singular, strong oeuvre rooted in the specifics of her tactile relationship with her instrument. (You’ll find evidence on her fifth and latest solo album, What Happens Has Become Now.) But that’s not all: eyeball the image on the event page and you’ll see Redacted written across photographs of a guitarist and a cellist, upping the ante for an even more memorable affair.
Emily Manzo & Shayna Dunkelman + Prime Time Time
Mabou Mines
150 1st Ave.; East Village
Sunday, Aug. 3 at 4 & 6pm; $35, advance $25
eventbrite.com
Re/Venue NYC, a pop-up performance series at the East Village theatrical institution Mabou Mines, concludes with a pair of disparate musical events. First up are pianist-composer Emily Manzo, a pianist, vocalist, and composer who easily moves among concert-music and singer-songwriter idioms, and similarly protean percussionist Shayna Dunkelman in Manzo’s Triangle Tower, mixing original music and compositions by John Cage and Henry Cowell in a 45-minute song cycle “exploring how relationships shift through birth and loss,” in the composer’s words. For the finale, composer-percussionist Aaron Siegel drives a killer combo of fellow polymath free spirits – including Jeff Tobias on saxophone – in the everything everywhere all at once canon of Ornette Coleman’s electric band, Prime Time.
5
Tim Berne
Lowlands Bar
543 3rd Ave., Brooklyn
Tuesday, Aug. 5 at 9pm; pass-the-hat
instagram.com/berneornot
Saxophonist and composer Tim Berne has been in residence at Lowlands on and off for many months now, a homespun residency he unpacked late last year in a New York Times feature (gift link) by Hank Shteamer. Tonight, Berne fields an embiggened version of his newest working outfit, the trio Capotosta with guitarist Gregg Belisle-Chi and drummer Tom Rainey, adding two ace guests: saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and bassist John Hébert. (Mark your calendar now: Berne’s back on Aug. 12 at the same time with multi-instrumentalist Aurora Nealand taking Laubrock’s spot in the lineup.)
Andrew Cyrille Quartet
Village Vanguard
178 Seventh Ave. S.; West Village
Tuesday, Aug. 5 at 8 & 10pm, through Aug. 10; $40
villagevanguard.com
Admired as a resourceful percussionist since the late 1950s and heralded as an architect of free-jazz drumming since his 11-year stint with Cecil Taylor in the ’60s and ’70s, Andrew Cyrille started recording with his own bands in earnest in the early ’80s. His working quartet – currently guitarist Bill Frisell, keyboardist David Virelles, and bassist Ben Street – has brought overdue renown as a composer via its excellent ECM albums, the latest being 2021’s The News. (Frisell fans take note: the guitarist will be in residence at jazz’s most hallowed basement with his own bands Aug. 12–24.)
To submit listings for consideration, email nightafternight [at] icloud [dot] com.
More vital directories of new-music destinations:
Find even more events in Night After Night Watch: The Master List, here.
Photographs by Steve Smith, except where indicated.
Just moved closer to Boston, so thanks for that link!