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Brian Slattery
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Sep 30, 2024 12:52 pm
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Kelly Jensen Photo
Cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum smiled from the stage at Firehouse 12 Friday night, explaining how good it was to be back there.“I cannot imagine my life without it,” he said, from his collaborations with Anthony Braxton to his numerous performances there with other groups. On Friday, however, he was there with UK-based pianist Alexander Hawkins, as part of the Crown Street bar- recording studio-performance space’s fall jazz series, running now into December.
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Brian Slattery
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Sep 27, 2024 1:02 pm
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Adam Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel in Megalopolis, which feels at times like an object lesson in what happens when no one is able to tell a filmmaker when his ideas are bad.
The lights dimmed in a movie theater Thursday night for maybe the most prime example of an arthouse film to come along this year, and together the audience watched as Cesar Catilina, played by Adam Driver, edged out of his office window to stand on a metal ledge at the edge of a skyscraper, balancing vertiginously over traffic. He wobbled, and almost began to fall.
It was the opening scene on opening night for legendary director Francis Ford Coppola’s new movie, Megalopolis: A Fable, but we weren’t in an arthouse theater. We were in Cinemark, in North Haven, the closest place screening the limited-release film. With the Criterion closed and New Haven without a first-run theater of any kind, would it be the same?
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Brian Slattery
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Sep 25, 2024 10:35 am
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Brian Slattery photo
One of the many artworks on display at the first ever show hosted by a Legion Avenue mental health, addiction, and homelessness services nonprofit.
The pill bottles hang suspended in the air, a testament to their ubiquity and the damage they cause. Behind them are arrayed a series of facts and statistics about drug overdoses. Over 1,000 people die from them in Connecticut every year. Since 1999, almost 1 million have died nationwide, with opioids accounting for two-thirds of those deaths.
Sarah, a client of Continuum of Care, made the piece to commemorate International Overdose Awareness Day, on August 31, tied to an event with Musical Intervention on the Green.“There were a lot of people looking for resources to help,” she said, after“mental health crises that they had.” Sarah’s piece now hangs alongside the work of many others in Continuum of Care’s first art show, running now for a month at the organization’s headquarters on Legion Avenue.
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Brian Slattery
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Sep 24, 2024 1:50 pm
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Kim Tester
Witness Tree — Do It Again.
Many of the pieces at the latest show at Creative Arts Workshop push at the boundaries of what printmaking can do; among those are works by Kim Tester, like Witness Tree — Do It Again. For Tester, the piece was“a one-of-a-kind experiment,” focused,“obviously, on the state of gun violence” in the U.S.“I printed an edition, then took a proof and shot at it with several guns that a friend had on his farm. He walked me through the process and helped me when the shotgun’s kickback was too much for my body. I was surprised that it took so many bullets to create so little damage to an inanimate object, yet one bullet kills a living thing so quickly and completely. The Sandy Hook school shooting was two years prior and took place 20 minutes from my town, where first responders, who I still see, went there to help. It was on my mind for this work.”
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Brian Slattery
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Sep 23, 2024 11:17 am
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Deerlady — a songwriting project of Abrego and Obomsawin, which started its tour in August in New Mexico and wound its way here in New Haven this past weekend — established itself within its first song as a band that layered complexity into what sounded first like deceptively straightforward music.
Austin Scelzo hit the two bottom strings of his violin, struck a couple higher notes, launched a high-lonesome lament that seemed to stretch back eight decades to rural Appalachia.
Trouble in my soul I know it’s wrong But it’s feeling so good …
Did Bill Monroe originally sing this? Was it a gospel number repurposed for bluegrass barn dances? It sounded as though it leaped from an old vinyl 78, minus the scratches.
Got a bad desire And it’s coming strong Been trying to chase this feeling away for so long
Whatever it was, Scelza was angel wrestling.
Take away my sorrow Wash it in water I need healing in my soul …
Scelzo fiddled and sang the song Thursday during an appearance on the WNHHFM’s tiniest-of-all-tiny desks“Acoustic Thursday @Studio 51” program.
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Brian Slattery
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Sep 16, 2024 2:11 pm
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Brian Slattery photo
Gogol Bordello.
In an election cycle marked by acrimony and fractious divisiveness, the music at Toad’s on Friday — featuring international punk band Gogol Bordello, supported by label mates Puzzled Panther and Crazy and the Brains — amounted to a ragged, full-throated cry for action and greater community, with a sharp edge.
Steve Mednick performing Thursday in the WNHH FM studio.
Steve Mednick played a song from a new album as well as from his next album — while waiting to see how both the track, and country’s political future, play out.
It was all one song. And it’s not finished yet.
Mednick — a veteran municipal government lawyer and former elected official who launched a side career as a prolific singer-songwriter in 2006 at age 50 — played the evolving song during an appearance on WNHHFM’s“Acoustic Thursday @ Studio 51” tiniest-of-all-tiny-desks program.
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Brian Slattery
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Sep 12, 2024 10:50 am
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Liah Sinq
For a split second, the kid is in the hands of gravity, but you just know he’s going to be all right. Maybe it’s the matching pajamas that give it away. It’s Christmas morning, perhaps, and the kids want to play with a father, or an uncle. But what really seals the deal on the tone of the piece is the quality of the sunlight, streaming through the window behind them. It lets us see the care the adult is putting into it, lets us see the way the kid is enjoying the ride. He may be falling, but the landing will be safe.
Liah Sinq’s photo is part of“Sunlight and Candlelight,” running now at the NewAlliance Foundation Art Gallery at Gateway Community College through Oct. 4. The mixed-media show, curated by Noe Jimenez,“combines three artists’ individual practices to create a colorful and quiet examination of light and instance,” an accompanying statement reads.
Brandt Taylor and Chris DePino in the WNHH FM studio.
A subdued Mystery Train took off Tuesday from WNHHFM’s studio.
Veteran blues performer Brandt Taylor offered that quiet, howling-at-the-moon, lament-evoking acoustic version of Paul Butterfield’s hard-driving electric“Mystery Train” during a live performance on WNHHFM’s“Acoustic Thursday” series (which occurred two days earlier than usually scheduled).
