One way to get people to smile at you on the street in New York City is to carry a giant floating smile emoji. Another is to hum Stevie Wonder’s Sir Duke. Anyone walking past me on Monday night would have had the opportunity to experience both, thanks to the wonder of Mr Wonder. Stevie Wonder played three shows in three different cities – starting in Washington DC, then moving onto Philadelphia, before finishing at Central Park. The 65-year-old’s team made the announcement on the Internet, as links and passwords spread online, for the chance to see the legend perform a free show. Online, the tickets were gone in about a minute,…
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In Living Colour – Literally.
In one of those New York moments, I found myself in a back lot in Little Italy on Sunday night, watching Corey Glover, lead singer for funk-metal pioneers Living Colour, drop his mic – and actual mic stand – to the ground, after he’d delivered a Sunday sermon that seemed to shake the very walls around us. Walls that had fresh paint on them as part of the L.I.S.A Project’s Loman Arts Festival. Walls, Glover encouraged us to look at instead of at him, but the way he was quivering and moving with the spirit of the songs he was singing, that was very hard to do. I had hoped…
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Brandon Flowers Returns
One of the things I love the most about living in New York is that you can hear a new song by an artist you like in the morning and that very same day, in the evening, you can hear said song performed live. That much was true on Tuesday, for fans both of Brandon Flowers and Action Bronson, who each released new tracks, and took to Webster Hall and Terminal 5, respectively, to show them off. I’m a true blue Brandon Flowers fan so after listening to Can’t Deny My Love a few dozen times, that’s where I ended up – once I’d done a few laps around the East River Track…
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Virtually and Live, A Sunday with Bjork
There were two things I was hoping to do this month after seeing Bjork’s MoMA exhibition. One was to experience her perform live – something I’d never done before – and the other was to experience the virtual reality world she’d created as part of the extension of her museum retrospective. Sunday was the day both of these things came to pass. Since releasing Vulnicura, Bjork has lined up shows at Carnegie Hall, Kings Theatre and City Center in Manhattan. I wanted to see Bjork sing at Kings Theatre because it’s a movie palace from a bygone era, built in 1929, that was only just restored and opened back up to the public again last month after…
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Bjork in Retrospective at MoMA
All these accidents That happen Follow the dot Coincidence – Jóga When it was announced last year that Bjork would be getting the MoMA-retrospective treatment, I joined the rest of her fans in rejoicing at the chance to look back over the work of one of the most talked-about, exciting artists of our time. How much of the Icelandic warrior-princess’ influences over the 8 albums she’s recorded would she reveal? How much of her roughly-drafted early song lyrics would we be privy to? How would her daring music videos with the likes of Michel Gondry and Chris Cunningham be presented? And, most importantly, would the swan dress from the 2001 Oscars make an…
