Captivating Cutting-Edge New Indian Sounds from the Women’s Raga Massive

True to their bandname, the Brooklyn Raga Massive draw on a huge talent base, including but not necessarily limited to players who specialize in Indian classical music. Their rise from their early days at a grungy little Fort Greene bar to big summer festivals is a rare feel-good story in recent New York music. These days, they reinvent John Coltrane and Terry Riley, put on all-night raga parties and push the envelope with where Indian music can go.

Because all of their members are busy with their own careers, the cast is constantly rotating. The Brooklyn Raga Massive also have a subset, the Women’s Raga Massive, whose new compilation, compiled by brilliant violinist Trina Basu, is steaming at Bandcamp. 20% of the proceeds from the album are being donated to the nonprofit Indrani’s Light Foundation, dedicated to empowering women and combating gender violence. They’re playing Joe’s Pub tonight, March 31 at 7 PM; cover is $20.

The artists here are a mix of singers and instrumentalists. Although most of the tracks ultimately draw on centuries-old melodies, most of the arrangements are brand-new and very innovative. The album opens with flutist Rasika Shekar’s Uproar, rising from a brightly modal swirl to a mashup of Afro-Cuban jazz and modal carnatic riffage fueled by Hooni Min’s emphatic piano.

Basu’s string band Karavika contribute The Time Is Now, its warmly undulating melody over alternately scattergun and hypnotically thumping percussion. Cellist Amali Premawardhana’s memorably gentle solo sets up a brightly soaring response from Basu. A bit later on she and her violinist husband Arun Ramamurthy join forces with the aptly titled, epic Tempest, building from a hypnotic, rhythmic pulse to echo effects, a funky sway and all kinds of juicy, microtonal bends and churning riffs before a final calm.

Multimedia artist/singer Samita Sinha represents the avant garde with the sparse, childlike vocal piece Suspension. Arooj Aftab’s poignantly melismatic vocals swirl over Bhrigu Sahni’s delicate acoustic guitar and Baqir Abbas’ bansuri flute in the sparse, spacious Man Kunto Maula, a more traditional piece.

Mitali Bhawmik’s vocal ornamentations rise from restraint to pure tremoloing bliss in Miyan Ki Malhar, above a stately backdrop of Ramachandra Joshi’s harmonium and Meghashyam Keshav’s tabla.

Pianist/singer Ganavya Doraiswamy’s Nithakam: Dedication to Prashant Bhargava is a somber Indian take on Gershwin’s Summertime. Violin/piano sister duo Anjna & Rajna Swaminathan team up with guitarist Sam McCormally for the broodingly modal Indian gothic trip-hop anthem Ocean of Sadness. Then paradigm-shifting carnatic choir the Navatman Music Collective flip the script with their playfully hip-hop tinged Urban Gamaka (Hindolam Thillana), singers Roopa Mahadevan and Shiv Subramaniam trading shivery microtonal licks over a steady, swaying backdrop.

Navayee, by Persian-American singer/guitarist Haleh Liza Gafori is a balmy love ballad animated by Matt Kilmer’s clip-clop percussion. Psychedelic soul singer Shilpa Ananth works subtle dynamics with similarly lush atmospherics in Enge Nee, against Takahiro Izumikawa’s bubbly Rhodes piano.  

The album’s longest and most trad track is sitarist Alif Laila’s twelve-minute-plus segment of Raga Kedar, a brisk romp right off the bat that doesn’t wait to get to the shivery, spine-tingling heart of the matter. It’s arguably the high point of the album; the ending is a complete surprise.

Violinist Nistha Raj matches and then jauntily trades riffs with alto saxophonist Aakash Mittal in Jayanthi, which is only slightly shorter. Yalini Dream narrates an imagistic antiwar poem over Ganavya’s vocalese and atmospherics to close the album. Fans of cutting-edge Indian sounds like these should also check out the Brooklyn Raga Massive’s other albums, especially their Coltrane covers collection, which feature some of these artists.

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Why Is Tonight Different From All Other Nights?

Because tonight, the first night of Passover 2018, marks the very first time a meme has been featured on the front page of New York Music Daily – intentionally, at least. It’s time for Beyonceder, a mashup of Passover imagery and Beyonce lyrics. The better you know Beyonce, the funnier it is.

The meme first simmered in the irrepressibly subversive brain of New York public intellectual Amy Schiller. To say that she always has a gig is an understatement. Her two main ones these days are as Brooklyn College professor and media provocatrice. Her witheringly prescient 2014 piece on the renaming of Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall is essential reading for every New Yorker, particularly for anybody who’s spent a significant amount of time in this city’s venerable classical venues.

For fun, her sometimes wry, sometimes outrageous images of crossing the Red Sea with R&B are all available on t-shirts, coffee mugs, tote bags, the whole megilla. Double-dipping is encouraged.

Subtlety and Savagery From the Rhythm Method String Quartet at Roulette

This past evening’s performance by the Rhythm Method String Quartet at Roulette was a stunning display of fearsome extended technique and fearless programming. The American avant garde has a long and sometimes painfully precious tradition of art strictly for art’s sake – and this all-female quartet seem hell-bent on changing that. Beyond the concert’s transgressive themes, from Margaret Atwood dystopia to the struggles of women and immigrants, the segues between the works on the bill followed as well musically as they did thematically.

To what degree was this music successful in conveying those ideas? Circling, repetitive phrases stopped and started unexpectedly, with syncopation that defied any attempt to predict it. Slowly and methodically, the group built momentum, a vividly recurrent trope throughout a series of works, mostly by the group themselves. A reflection on, say, how the Metoo movement has reached critical mass, or how gains for human rights won by previous generations built a foundation for today’s victories? Maybe. Whatever the case, there was plenty of suspense punctuated by drama…and a savagely conflagrational payoff at the end.

All of this pushed the limits of how a stringed instrument can be played. If there was a central theme, musically, it was flickery, slithering, whispery, silken textures punctuated by more emphatic gestures. all of them requiring minute inflections within the most delicate high harmonics.

The centerpiece was Lewis Nielson’s Le Journal du Corps, whose sepulchral wisps and poltergeist accents engaged not only the violins of Leah Asher and Marina Kifferstein but also Wendy Richman’s viola and Meaghan Burke’s cello. Subtly but matter-of-factly, the group developed a theme and variations that relied more on attack than melodic shifts, an illustration of an Aime Cesaire poem giving voice to the horrors endured by slaves, and their resilience against those injustices.

Kifferstein’s An Alien with Extraordinary Abilities foreshadowed that piece, notably with its herky-jerky, off-kilter rhythms, although melodically it was closer to horizontal music. Likewise, Asher’s Hollux Rey relied on rhythmic variations for its dynamics, an almost punishing maze of glissandos, plucks, squirrelly shivers and the occasional siren or doppler effect.

Everyone in the group sang, cool and calm, in contrast to the music’s flashes of agitation. Burke spent more time on the mic than anyone else since she’d contributed two pieces to the program, driving the music to a crescendo midway through. Her work as a soloist and bandleader is closer to the subversive cello rock of Rasputina or the stark grooves of the Icebergs, and this pair of alternately atmospheric and incisively propulsive tunes had a similarly sharp sense of melody. The first, Siren Song, referred to The Handmaid’s Tale and was the more serious. The second, Hysterie, was inspired by primitive medical attempts to cure hysteria, once thought to be exclusively a female malady. Burke got the crowd howling by revealing that doctors once employed primitive vibrators as a treatment: “Everybody wins…or maybe doesn’t win,” she mused.

The quartet encored with the incendiary shrieks and jet-engine trajectories of Kristin Bolstad‘s And Nobody Gets Everything Right, screaming their way through the intro – literally – and concluding with a fierce swordfight, Asher and Kifferstein duking it out with their bows. Asher won; the audience basically didn’t know what hit them.

The next concert at Roulette is April 3 at 8 PM with new music chamber group Tak Ensemble – with Kifferstein on violin once again – playing an all-Mario Diaz de Leon program including a New York premiere for bassoon and electronics and his 2016 Sanctuary suite. Advance tix are $20; there may be some sonic extremes but probably no swordfighting. 

Dark Beasts: Brooklyn’s Most Riveting, Relevant Young Band

The cold gaze of a black python greeted the crowd on their way up the stairs at the Gatehouse concert series in Fort Greene last night, where Dark Beasts played a tantalizingly short set of catchy, surreal, unflinchingly relevant songs that defy categorization. The band name suits the trio perfectly: their songs are dark, and they are definitely beasts.

Lead singer Lillian Schrag was responsible for that menacing creature and its removable green scales, in addition to the lowlit stage design and her band’s painted bestial faces. Their first song, The Python’s Lament, was more distantly sinister, Schrag’s torrents of lyrics over Trixie Madell’s enigmatically anthemic psych-folk guitar chords, violinist Violet Paris-Hillmer running an icy, creepy loop over and over.

Over the past couple of years, Dark Beasts have built a devoted following among their fellow musicians. Many of those fans are three or four times older than the group’s members. Each is a multi-instrumentalist. Schrag, the daughter of Rose Thomas Bannister – one of this era’s greatest songwriters – plays piano and bass, but in this group her main contribution is vocals. She’s also the primary lyricist. Whether on guitar or piano, Madell brings a deep David Bowie influence to the songs. Paris-Hillmer plays percussion in addition to violin, and has a background in classical music as well. Technique-wise, they’re a work in progress – although their proficiency continues to grow in all kinds of  unexpected ways. And their songwriting is astonishing. We give children too little credit for their depth and their insights. 

Madell switched to piano, balancing eerie highs against stygian lows throughout the second number, Soldier’s Song, a terse, brooding, mythologically-influenced antiwar anthem. Paris-Hillmer moved to frame drum for that one, where she’d remain for the rest of the set.

Standing tall – about four feet eight inches – in front of the band, Schrag was a somber, charismatic presence throughout the third song, Stop Polluting or the World’s Going to Die. Madell’s uneasy guitar vamps anchored Schrag’s clever wordplay in Night Animals, a Maurice Sendak-ish catalog of nocturnal wildlife. They closed with The Wolf, a brief, forlorn anthem

Schrag played the encore solo on bass, churning out a pitchblende drone beneath a lyric that seemed at least partly improvised. “If you’re smart enough to fire a gun, you should use your mind,” she cautioned. The crowd responded with a standing ovation. Afterward, the group signed balloons for the audience, then got into the ice cream.

Dark Beasts will probably be on hiatus until school vacation this June. In the meantime, at least one adult Brooklyn band has been playing Dark Beasts material. There are innumerable other children’s bands in Brooklyn, but most of them are cutesy, or at best they struggle to play cover songs. As Margaret Atwood once said – more or less  – compared to other little girls, Dark Beasts are lifesize. Watch this space for upcoming live appearances.

Populist Songwriter Courtney Marie Andrews Reinvents Classic Americana at the Mercury Tonight

Don’t let the hazy faux-70s Polaroid filter on the album cover of Courtney Marie Andrews’ latest album May Your Kindness Remain – streaming at Bandcamp – fool you. It isn’t dadrock. It’s a vivid, sobering collection of narratives set in a bleak, impoverished Trump-era milieu. The instrumentation behind the Americana songstress’ wounded wail is an unlikely blend of churchy organ and resonant, sometimes roaring washes of electric guitar. You might think that this mashup of oldschool soul, vintage C&W and psychedelia would be jarring to the extreme, but it works. Andrews is at the Mercury tonight, March 27 at 8 PM; cover is $12.

Andrews opens the record with the title track, a broodingly vivid 99-percenter ballad, hope against hope in a dingy blue-collar setting where kindness is “not something that can be bought or arranged.”

Lift the Lonely From My Heart is an oldschool country ballad reinvented as lingering psychedelic tone poem:  “Do you still see the good inside me or am I a shell of who I once was?” Andrews asks, dreading the obvious answer. The band – Dillon Warnek on lead guitar, Daniel Walker and Charles Wicklander on keys, Alex Sabel on bass and William Mapp on drums – pick up the pace with Two Cold Nights in Buffalo. “El Nino brought a blizzard…only the cheap motels were open, wrong side of the tracks,” Andrews recounts, ”That American dream dying, I hear the whispers of the ghosts.” As a paint-peeling indictment of real estate bubble era greed and despondency, it ranks with Jack Grace’s Get Out of Brooklyn for relevance and bite.

Andrews goes back to mashing up gospel and psychedelia in Rough Around the Edges: you could drown an entire congregation with the amount of reverb on that slightly out-of-tune piano. Fueled by echoey Fender Rhodes and sunbaked guitar, the southwestern gothic ballad Border salutes the resilience of Mexican immigrants: “You cannot measure a man until you’ve been down the devil’s road.:”

Andrews’ narrator manages to find solace amidst crushing poverty in Took You Up, another slow, enveloping psych-soul number. She keeps that ambience going with This House – hey, it’s a dump, but it’s home – and then lets the embers blaze through the wickedly catchy, embittered Kindness of Strangers. “How do you dive deeper in a shallow riverbed, when the current pulls your further?” Andrews wants to know.

The sarcasm in I’ve Hurt Worse is crushing: “Being with you is like being alone,” the woman in this relationship tells her abusive boyfriend. Andrews winds up the album with the swaying, summery, considerably more optimistic slide guitar ballad Long Road Back to You. Andrews’ previous album Honest Life was solid, but this is a quantum leap: fans of acts from Lucinda Williams, to Tift Merritt and Margo Price ought to check out Andrews.

Brilliant Balkan Singer Eva Salina Channels Empowerment in the Face of Despair

Since her days in the previous decade as an underage teenager belting over brass bands in Brooklyn bars, Eva Salina has established herself as one of the most distinctive and haunting voices in Balkan music. Although that’s her specialty, she doesn’t limit herself stylistically as a singer: her 20010  collaboration with fellow singer Aurelia Shrenker is a riveting glimpse of how radically she can reinvent classic Americana. Salina’s previous album was a blazing, horn-spiced, hard-rocking full-band tribute to legendary, tragic Romany crooner Saban Bajramovic.

Her latest album, Sudbina – streaming at Bandcamp– is a radical shift, a spare, rivetingly intimate reinvention of songs from the catalog of another Romany legend, Vida Pavlovic. For the most part, the instrumentation is just Salina’s voice backed by the accordion of her longtime collaborator Peter Stan. The two are playing the album release show this March 29 at 7:30 PM at Greenwich House Music School; cover is $15 and includes a copy of the new album.

Pavlovic was sort of a Balkan counterpart to Billie Holiday. She was unlucky in love; profound sadness and a sense of abandonment pervade her music. Yet there’s also a defiant, resolute joie de vivre, a quality that Salina explores deeply. In an era of global women’s marches and the Metoo movement, Pavlovic’s aching ballads are more relevant than ever. Which makes it all the more odd that it’s fallen to the American-born Salina to revive interest in her music.

The album opens with Pusti Me Da Zivim, an embittered born-to-lose theme, more or less. There’s despondency but also defiance in Salina’s slightly breathy delivery as Stan spirals and trills elegantly behind her: “Leave me to live my life alone,” is the main message; the moody minor-key melody has subtle bolero echoes.

E Laute Bašalen Taj Roven has a more brisk, marching rhythm, Stan a one-man accordion army as Salina’s voice chronicles the grim realities and constant displacement faced by Romany populations over the decades. The stark arrangement of Ostala Je Pesma Moja, Pavlovic’s signature song, underscores its theme. It’s a self-penned eulogy of sorts, the world-weary chanteuse addressing a new generation: “Remember, your mother gave you everything she had.”

Ćerma Devla Crikli is a lively dance number whose irrepressible bounce mutes an ever-present unease, a metaphorical perspective on the struggle to escape rural poverty. That dispersion comes into stark focus in the gently poignant Aven, Aven Romalen, a plea to men who’ve gone off to earn a living to come back to their families. It’s another study in contrasts, Salina’s brittle, vulnerable vocals against Stan’s balletesque leaps and pulses.

E Dadeći Cajori/Dema Miro is one of Pavlovic’s biggest hits:  the gist is “Give me peace, because you are eating my heart.” Salina’s wintry, ghostly vocals are arguably the album’s quietest yet most riveting moments.

The album winds up with Ostala, a final instrumental sendoff to Pavlovic featuring the simmering doublestops of popular Serbian trumpeter Demiran Ćerimović. Throughout the album, Salina maintains a meticulous focus on ornamentation and accents – she genuinely could pass for a Romany song diva. Which makes sense, considering she’s been singing this repertoire practically her whole life. You’ll see this on the best albums of 2018 page at the end of this year.

Three Charismatic Women Push the Envelope with Arabic Music at the Met

Last night at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the World Music Institute staged a triplebill of three individualistic, charismatic women bandleaders who’re pushing the envelope with how far music across the Arabic-speaking diaspora can go. The concert raised many questions, one of them being that as New Yorkers, is it our birthright to be able to immerse ourselves in great art from cultures around that world that we may not necessarily be immersed in? Or are we being priced out? Tickets for this one were $35, and while there was a big crowd, the Met’s Rogers Auditorium wasn’t sold out. Likewise, the museum is charging everyone but us full-price admission now – and probably making a killing from all the tourists.

Alsarah & the Nubatones opened the show with a very brief set of bouncy, catchy, vamping dance numbers, rising from a gathering hailstorm of notes from Brandon Terzic’s oud. The bandleader calls their music “retro Nubian pop,” a 21st century update on the slinky sounds produced in the wake of forced migrations to northern Egyptian cities in the 1960s. Blending the edgy chromatics and modes of Arabic music with catchy grooves from deeper in Africa, the band pulsed and pounced, Terzic trading riffs with bassist Mawuena Kodjovi over percussionist Ramy El Asser’s supple drive. Alsarah remarked that she’d come to reinvent the notion of a museum being “where art goes to die,” and then left that thread hanging: art never dies as long as people have access to it.

Tunisian-born Emel Mathlouthi received an overwhelming standing ovation for barely half an hour onstage, leading an icily atmospheric trio with multi-keys and syndrums. Resolute in a black dress, twirling slowly and elegantly and singing in both Arabic and English, she channeled simmering anger and defiance. Her slowly swaying opening number was an invitation to gather and join forces against oppression. After that, another minimalistic, slowly crescendoing minor-key dirge – whose Arabic title translates roughly as “Hopeless Humans” – sent a shout out to the working classes whose exhaustive efforts benefit nobody besides the bosses.

She closed on a more optimistic note with a tone poem of sorts, an Arabic counterpart to an epic from Nico’s Marble Index album – except with infinitely stronger vocals. Mathlouthi’s stage presence, her vocals and lyrics are vividly and often wrenchingly emotional; the mechanical thump of the syndrums made a jarring contrast with all the subtlety she brings to the stage. The music was plenty cold and foreboding without them.

Singer/acoustic guitarist Farah Siraj headlined. “She reminds me of Lauryn Hill,” an attractive, petite Jewish woman in the audience remarked. That observation was on the money, considering how Siraj blends elements of 90s American radio pop, flamenco, Romany ballads, bossa nova and Andalucian sounds with classical Arabic music. Her lead guitarist provided spiky intros and exchanged hard-hitting riffs with oudist Kane Mathis and bassist Moto Fukushima over the drummer’s shapeshifting grooves, moving effortlessly from the tropics to the Middle East. From there they took a detour toward India with an undulating ballad that Faraj wrote with Bollywood composer legend A.R. Rahman – which became a chart-topping hit for her. 

A hauntingly crescendoing Jordanian ballad gave Siraj a launching pad for her most chillingly melismatic vocal of the night – and a chance to salute the bravery and resilience of refugees from Syria, Palestine and around the world. After that, she blended habibi pop, Brazilian balminess and Spanish sizzle, sometimes within a few bars of each other. 

Fans of global sounds ought to check out the free show the WMI is putting on at the atrium space at Lincoln Center on Broadway just north of 62nd St. on May 3 at 7:30 PM with hypnotic Saharan rock band Imharhan.

Two Thirds of a Potentially Magical Triplebill Revisited at the Met Tonight

More about that great triplebill staged by the World Music Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art tonight, March 24 at 7 PM: it’s a reprise of two thirds of what should have been the best concert of 2017 but wasn’t. The problem wasn’t the artists on the bill: it was the sound. But the Rogers Auditorium at the Met has superb sonics. Central Park Summerstage is an outdoor venue and can’t compare, and although the sound there last summer was usually pretty good, it was problematic that August evening when two charismatic singers with North African ancestry, Emel Mathlouthi and Alsarah led their respective bands, opening for the godfather of Ethio-jazz, Mulatu Astatke.

Mathlouthi and Alsarah & the Nubatones are both on tonight’s bill along with Jordanian chanteuse Farah Siraj, and as of this morning it wasn’t sold out, probably because of the price, $35. But if you have the cash, it’s worth it, especially if you figure that each artist is only about twelve bucks apiece.

On one hand, the Central Park gig was a chance for each woman to put their strengths front and center. Both draw on a long tradition of allusive, imagistic classical Arabic poetry for their lyrics and subject matter. Alsarah’s kinetic dancefloor anthems address themes of Nubian longing and displacement in Aswa Dam-era Egypt. Mathlouthi’s icy, cinematic art-rock opaquely references struggle and resistance: in her formative years, she was a heroine of the  Arab Spring in her native Tunisia.

Alsarah’s set kicked off the afternoon. Her not-so-secret weapon is oudist Brandon Terzic, whose rippling microtones drove the rise and fall of the songs. It wasn’t til the end that he got a chance to stretch out and solo; the time out, the band’s most wildly applauded solo spot was a boomy trip through a funhouse mirror of North African rhythms from master percussionist Rami El Asser. Given less time onstage than her epic album release show at Flushing Town Hall back in the spring of 2016, the bandleader didn’t talk to the audience as much but still found room to mention how the Nubians’ forced relocation to cities mirrors the ongoing refugee crisis in the Middle East as well as anti-immigrant violence here at home.

Mathlouthi was next on the bill. Her not-so-secret weapon is her voice, a powerful weapon that began looming and eventually took some dramatic flights upward. Backed only by keys and drums, she stood more or less motionless, drawing the crowd in. But while the stage monitors were probably working, the PA wasn’t. Midway through the show, the atmospheric keys that have been a major part of her sound lately disappeared from the mix and didn’t return until almost the end. Much as her voice was strong against the beats – a trippy, techy electroacoustic mix – the grandeur and angst of her songwriting never reached altitude. As with the opening act, she didn’t interact with the crowd as much as at her own epic show at the Global Beat Festival downtown back in 2015: “The world’s biggest terrorist is capitalism,” was her most acerbic comment.

Mulatu Astatke headlined. It was strange to see that the space wasn’t completely sold out for the guy who, if he didn’t invent Ethiopian jazz, has done more to bring it to a global audience than anyone else. Joined by an inspired, horn-spiced pickup group including but not limited to Jason Lindner on keys, Marcus Gilmore on drums and Roman Diaz on congas, Astatke delivered a haunting, gracefully rippling,  chromatic mix of mostly midtempo numbers punctuated by a very long percussion interlude. He took the lead on electric piano on most of the tunes, Lindner holding his own when taking over on the techier songs and taking them subtly toward P-Funk territory without ripping their austere fabric. It was great to finally get to see Astatke live, but a bad taste lingered. What an incredible show it would have been if the PA had been working for Mathlouthi.

Tarek Yamani at Lincoln Center: A Haunting, Ceaselessly Shapeshifting Vision of the Future of Piano Jazz

Playing to a rapt, sold-out, mostly under-30 crowd, Beirut-born pianist Tarek Yamani opened his Lincoln Center concert last night with an a cumulo-nimbus chordal crescendo and then took the band spiraling and rippling through a long, chromatically slashing series of variations on a hundred-year-old Egyptian classical melody. Bassist Sam Miniae danced between the raindrops as drummer Jean John boomed and rattled the rims, Yamani parsing the passing tones in the minor scale for every fraction of intensity he could find. From there the music rose and fell, sometime hypnotic, sometimes with an elegant neoromantic gleam, to a long, insistent peak. It was like witnessing peak-era 70s McCoy Tyner with more Middle Eastern influences.

Yamani’s distinctive style is a confluence of Arabian Gulf khaliji music and American jazz, with a healthy dose of Afro-Cuban groove as well. It’s no surprise that Yamani gravitated toward jazz, considering that khaliji sounds have more African swing than Levantine sway. It wouldn’t be outrageous to call the self-taught pianist and composer Beirut’s (and now New York)’s answer to Vijay Iyer.

Even so, it was impossible to predict how funky the night’s second number, Hala Land – a Nordic Latin Middle Eastern swing prelude of sorts – would get, from John’s irrepressible shuffle as Yamani teased the crowd with an easy resolution he wasn’t going to give in to anytime soon before pinwheeling and then icepicking through a subtly shifting series of Arabic modes. Yamani revealed afterward that although the melody is considered iconically Lebanese, its origins are actually Turkish. “It’s like falafel – it doesn’t really matter,” he grinned.

The night’s third number was an original in 10/8: “If you’d like to count, please do, but do it silent,” Yamani deadpanned. The blend of catchy Afro-Cuban acerbity, Middle Eastern otherworldliness and emphatic, punchy, ceaselessly shifting meters made sense considering that the pianist is also the author of a popular book on polyrhythms. Miniae ran circles and pounced, John gave it bounce and strut.

Ashur – named after the “Egyptian god of sex,” Yamani smiled – was a friendly, methodically crescendoing, wickedly memorable Kind of Blue-style theme and variations that John kicked off hard. Then Yamani completely flipped the script with an expansive take of Lush Life, subtly pushing it further and further toward the Middle East but finally opting for energetic wee-hours postbop lyricism. Then he launched into a tireless, grittily insistent arrangement of paradigm-shifting Egyptian composer Said Darwish’s workingman’s anthem The Melody of the Movers, circling and rippling over the rhythm section’s propulsive swing. 

The trio closed with a cantering detour toward Cuba and then a glisteningly jubilant melody that Yamani explained is claimed by pretty much every culture throughout the Levant. It was amazing how light and seemingly effortless Yamani’s touch remained after all the evening’s exertion.

Auspiciously, this concert was booked not by Lincoln Center but by their Student Advisory Council, whose agenda is to make the world of the arts in New York “a more inclusive and accessible space,” and help discover new talent who might be flying under the radar. Challenged to find an act worthy of the venue, third-year Juilliard percussion student Tyler Cunningham won the competition by suggesting Yamani after seeing the pianist listed on a bill at National Sawdust, where a friend works.  A specialist in symphonic percussion, the personable, articulate Cunningham gravitates toward postminimalist composers like Marcos Balter but has the kind of eclectic taste required in a field where he’s going to be asked to play outside the box more often than not. Cunningham also has a revealing interview with Yamani up at The Score, Lincoln Center’s online magazine.

The next show at Lincoln Center’s atrium space on Broadway just south of 63rd St. is this March 29 at 7:30 PM with Portuguese fado-jazz crooner/guitarist António Zambujo. The show is free; the earlier you get to the space, the better.

Heroes of Toolik Reprise One of 2018’s Most Entrancing Shows in Williamsburg This Weekend

On one hand, the idea of Heroes of Toolik squeezing themselves into Pete’s Candy Store might seem incongruous. On the other hand, the band have pared down their sound to a more acoustic, pastoral, overcast psychedelia. Their show at the irresistibly intimate new Spectrum, out by what’s left of the Brooklyn Navy Yard last month, revealed a side of the band that they’d been percolating for a long time but really perfected with their 2016 album Like Night. They’ll be at Pete’s at 8;30 PM on March 25, and then at Sunny’s on April 17 at 9:30.

At the Spectrum show, the psychedelic factor might have been ratcheted up a few notches by a ringer rhythm section. Brian Adler took over Billy Ficca’s drum chair with a slithery pulse, using his hardware and rims for all kinds of spectral flickers. On bass was the most acerbic and funniest composer in jazz, Mostly Other People Do the Killing’s Moppa Elliott, playing the changes with a deadpan slink. Frontman Arad Evans played acoustic guitar with more of a spiky, incisive attack than he typically does when he’s on electric.

The songs ran the gamut of several decades’ worth of psychedelic, new wave and early CB’s era postrock influences. A swaying anthem with meticulous, nuanced vocals from violinist Jennifer Coates and tersely looming trombone from John Speck came across as sort of a mashup of lo-fi 90s British rock – think Comet Gain – and the Grateful Dead. Throughout a vampy post-Television rainy-day psychedelic mini-epic, the guy/girl vocals of Evans and Coates brought to mind similarly slinky, hypnotically jangly zeroes Brooklyn band Liza & the WonderWheels. Coates took lead vocals on another much more spare, marching number, with a clipped, broodingly precise delivery that brought to mind another luminary from the zeros, Erika Simonian.

As the show went on, there were several detours into freer improvisational interludes, individual voices going out on a limb and then reconfiguring in turn. Was Elliott going to indulge the crowd in any tongue-in-cheek shenanigans? As it turned out, no: he was just having fun chilling back with the drums. The overall ambience was enigmatic, sometimes bordering on trance-inducing, a constantly shifting textural intertwine of violin, guitar and trombone over a thicket of beats. Get your trance on at Pete’s on the 25th.