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Boston Globe
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
At Somerville concert, Amanda Palmer says she feels ‘overwhelmed'
'You said you'd quit, but you didn't,' she sang. Another song detailed a 'list of things you've stolen from me.' A third was a cathartic exhortation to herself to 'get divorced.' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up A second show at National Sawdust in Brooklyn was Advertisement 'I feel f—ing overwhelmed all the time,' she said, noting that she and the nine-year-old son she has with Gaiman have moved back into the Lexington house where she grew up. Advertisement Many in the audience indicated they were contributors to Palmer's Patreon, the crowd fundraising platform that allowed her to build a solo career outside the corporate music industry. This month's shows in Boston and New York City were intended as 10-year celebrations of the launch of her subscription service. She took the stage with Lance Horne, the nightclub performer who was music director of the 2010 'Cabaret' performances at the former Oberon in Cambridge, in which Palmer played the Emcee. Palmer, dressed in a maid's black dress and apron, joked that her new songs were conceived in her 'Cancel Kitchen.' She grabbed a whisk broom and began sweeping the stage, while Horne, wearing a tall red chef's hat, sat at the white grand piano at center stage. Other than their laughter at that ice breaker, the audience was mostly hushed. 'I used to love playing the piano,' Palmer began one new song, which referenced the psychic toll of the charges against her. A few fans caught their breath. Alone onstage, she let the new songs speak for themselves. When she was finished with those, she noted that going so long without editorializing between songs was 'a new record' for her. Switching from piano to ukulele, she played 'Bigger on the Inside' from her third solo album, 'There Will Be No Intermission' (2019). The song ends with an appeal from a beloved friend who is dying: 'Trying is the point of life/ So don't stop trying/ Promise me.' Horne returned to accompany Palmer on a number from 'Cabaret,' the dramatic 'I Don't Care Much.' 'Cabaret,' Palmer reminded the audience, is about decadence during the rise of Nazi Germany – about 'escaping so far that you go through the other side, and you don't notice the tanks rolling down the street.' Advertisement After ending with the Dresden Dolls' anthemic 'Sing' (2006), on which some of Palmer's friends and family (including her father) joined her onstage, she sat down and took questions from the audience. Noting that she wouldn't directly address the allegations, she answered mostly sympathetic questions about her artistic process and online trolls. Palmer spoke about artists who have been important to her (the comedian Margaret Cho, the writer Ocean Vuong), practicing 'radical compassion,' and her despair over the Internet, which she once saw as an ideal conduit between creators and their admirers. It has been a struggle, she said, 'to watch the court of public opinion tear me apart.' That has 'mangled' me, she said. Earlier, in one of the new songs, she expressed her typical defiance. 'You broke me,' she sang, ''til I'm unbreakable.' James Sullivan can be reached at .
Time Out
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Domino Park will host an outdoor performing arts series next month—and it's free!
Domino Park is serving more than just waterfront views next month. From June 4 to 28, the Brooklyn greenspace will debut Sugar, Sugar!, a brand-new outdoor performing arts series packed with experimental theater, live music, dance, puppetry and joyful weirdness—and yes, it's totally free. Set against that stunning skyline backdrop, the month-long series is kicking off with performances by Nile Harris and dance duo Lena Engelstein & Lisa Fagan, followed by a kaleidoscopic parade of programming including drag-augmented puppetry (Evan Silver a.k.a. Tiresias), a celebration of horseshoe crabs and 'crabaoke' (Eli Nixon), and a live jazz-meets-minimal-electronics set curated by National Sawdust featuring Isaiah Barr, David Frazier Jr. and William Parker. Organized by Public Assembly with creative direction by Ellpetha Tsivicos of One Whale's Tale, Sugar, Sugar! is the first cultural program staged at the brand-new Domino Square amphitheater. The space, just a short stroll through the five-acre waterfront park, is already a favorite for salsa nights and school graduations. Now, it's getting a full-on arts glow-up. And the series isn't just throwing performances at a park—it's curating a vibe. Each night begins with Capicu! hosting dominos, DJs and dancing, and ends with something magical. Case in point: the two-night immersive spectacular QUINCE, which fuses a quinceañera, family drama and queer identity into a theatrical party with food, music and dancing under the stars. A special Juneteenth performance from Troy Anthony & The Fire Ensemble promises an emotional high point, using nonreligious rituals and music to honor Black liberation and joy. Expect a playful, participatory energy throughout, from time-traveling dance to foam-sculpted puppets made from salvaged materials. The festival closes on June 28 with a daytime blowout plaza party featuring live music, local food vendors, domino tournaments and family-friendly art activities.
Vogue
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Vogue
Director Jessica Grindstaff Talks Us Through Port(al), Her Innovative, Multimedia Collaboration With the Brooklyn Youth Chorus
When they first put their minds together a couple of years ago, Jessica Grindstaff and her creative partners on Port(al)—a sprawling, ambitious, innovative new collaborative production with the Brooklyn Youth Chorus that premiered this week at the Brooklyn Navy Yard—faced the kind of problem that certain artists always seem to relish. How could they do the impossible, and do it within some fairly precise constraints? The task at hand: to inhabit, animate, investigate, and otherwise bring back to life the 35,000-square-foot Agger Fish Building, the only still-unrenovated structure in the Brooklyn Navy Yard ('There are holes in the walls that birds are flying in and out of,' Grindstaff says before a full-dress run-through earlier this week), and to tell a new story about not just a building, but also a port, a city, a country at war, a way of life. While the kaleidoscopic team working alongside Grindstaff includes co-composer Paola Prestini (co-founder and artistic director of National Sawdust), co-composer and co-librettist Jad Abumrad (creator of the podcasts Radiolab and Dolly Parton's America), and co-choreographer Ogemdi Ude, the beating heart of Port(al) is the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, whose 44 members range in age from 12 to 18, led by founder and artistic director Dianne Berkun Menaker.
New York Times
19-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
This Japanese Sax Polymath Might Be a Postmodern Bach
Halfway through 'Bye Bye Kipling,' Nam June Paik's mash-up of music and video graphics from 1986, the camera pans to a tenor sax player as he leaps through 'Tribute to N.J.P.' with its composer, Ryuichi Sakamoto, behind him on piano, conjuring a blend of Shostakovich and Keith Jarrett. The two musicians had joined Paik's project, which was simultaneously broadcast from New York and Tokyo, to help rebut Rudyard Kipling's line, 'East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.' The twain meets again this week, when that saxophonist, Yasuaki Shimizu, embarks on his first North American tour, starting at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, Thursday and Friday, before going on to Chicago, Toronto, California and Seattle. And on Saturday, at the Metrograph theater on the Lower East Side, Shimizu will introduce four films that he scored, including 'Bye Bye Kipling.' For a musician whose inventive arrangements of Bach and whose TV and movie scores have made him a minor celebrity in Japan, the tour is long overdue. (He last performed in the United States in the 1970s.) A career retrospective, it should give audiences a taste of Shimizu's wide-ranging music. He has recorded some 40 albums in as many years — starting in the late 1970s with slick fusion boogie and progressive rock — and has been a prized sideman in the electronic and improvised scenes. With most of his recordings still out of print in the States, he has remained something of a cult figure here. Shimizu, 70, described the tour plainly: 'The approach is to take a simple theme and challenge it through improvisation.' The same could be said for much of his music, from the minimalist overdubbed grooves of 'Kakashi' (1982), the album that broke him out of straight jazz and rock, to his electro-world albums in the late '80s with Martin Meissonnier and David Cunningham, which brought him attention in Europe. And then there's his Bach. In the 1990s, Shimizu took a sharp turn into classical, adapting Bach's cello suites for tenor saxophone. With avian squawks, throaty swoops and foghorn blasts, those recordings injected some caffeine jitters into Bach's stately measurements of time. (Exactly how stately, we don't know, as Bach didn't specify bowings.) Shimizu also arranged Bach's 'Goldberg Variations' for five saxophones (his 'Saxophonettes') and four contrabasses, starting in 2010. Various quirks of the horn, like jazzy runs and almost tropical syncopations, suggest that the instrument you choose governs the flavor of your adaptation. With interventions, Shimizu is polite but strategic. In the 'Goldberg Variations' this shows in the 'subtle modification,' he said, of certain 'inner voices' between Bach's phrases to match the pentatonic scale, which is based on five rather than eight notes. A pillar of Japanese music 'passed down since ancient times,' Shimizu said, 'the pentatonic scale runs through my veins, like my own blood.' It's more evident in Shimizu's 'Pentatonica' (2007) and earlier electroacoustic records that might otherwise have sounded stateless. For the cello suites, he came up with what he calls the 'Bach-Saxophone-Space relationship.' For each of the six suites, he chose a different (and dramatic) sound stage, recording the second suite, for instance, in the Oya Stone Quarry in Tochigi, where the lonely, 20-second reverb melts together Bach's trills and arpeggios as would the sustain pedal of a piano. 'What captivates me is the texture of sound,' Shimizu said, 'how it moves within a space, and my relationship with time as the sound floats through it.' Shimizu was born in the Shizuoka Prefecture, near Mount Fuji, to a musical schoolteacher mother and a lumber worker father who led an amateur band. His childhood home, he said, was 'filled with records spanning everything from jazz to Latin, chanson to Hawaiian music,' and littered with instruments and tape machines that 'I often played with as toys.' He is fully self-taught as a musician: 'My experiences have been my master,' he said. When his father's saxophonist called in sick one day, Shimizu, then a teenager partial to clarinet and piano, filled in on tenor, 'immediately captivated by its elegant curves.' Invited onto Tokyo's jazz circuit, he sat in on 'incredibly moving' gigs with John Coltrane's drummer Elvin Jones in 1979 and '81. (Shimizu's bebop phrasings can be heard in 'L'Automne à Pékin,' his electronic revamp of the American songbook, from 1983.) He also formed lifelong partnerships with Sakamoto (who died in 2023) and with touring regulars like the bassist Bill Laswell, who enlisted Shimizu into often raucous free improv sessions at the Shinjuku Pit Inn, a Tokyo jazz club. 'He has a voice,' Laswell said in a phone interview. In Japan, the cello suites made Shimizu's reputation. The American composer Carl Stone heard them in the shopping center by his Tokyo home, 'literally every day,' he said in a phone interview. When they finally collaborated, Stone would manipulate the microphoned horn through electronics, then reamplify it back to the saxophonist, prompting Shimizu's colorful 'duo with himself,' Stone said. For the present tour, too, Shimizu will bring only one collaborator, Ray Kunimoto, 33, who will send his saxophone input through a cockpit of electronics, in real time, interweaving the live acoustic performance with beds of Shimizu's looped sound. They will play from Shimizu's compositions and some Bach. This sound-on-sound method, with its exaggerated acoustic decays messing with how the duration of a piece is perceived, is a staple of his early electroacoustic work, especially 'Kakashi' and 'Music for Commercials' (1987), a buoyant, propulsive suite of micro-compositions he created as jingles for Bridgestone, Seiko and other advertisers. Shimizu likened their recording to haiku, pulling from his synthesizer 'collages of sounds and meanings.' (For that work, Daniel Lopatin, an electronic producer known as Oneohtrix Point Never, called Shimizu 'a postmodern Bach' in an email.) Both albums are part of a wave of recent reissues. Jacob Gorchov of Palto Flats, the label that has released 'Kakashi' and an album by Shimizu's band Mariah, said 'the turning point for Japanese reissues was around 2015, 2017,' when licenses became more accessible in America and 'the floodgates opened.' He added: 'Before then, there just wasn't enough household recognition, not just for Yasuaki but for most Japanese artists.' As a composer, Shimizu could be said to share the goal of ambient music: to behold time, rather than shape its passage. In our email correspondence, though, he seemed more playful, even adventurous, with the heady ideas he tackles. 'If one were to step outside the linear flow of time,' Shimizu asked, 'where would the mind find itself?'
Boston Globe
15-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Brooklyn venue cancels Amanda Palmer's show after complaints; New York's City Winery picks it up
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up But the date at National Sawdust has been scrubbed from the venue's website, and in an email to a woman who objected to Palmer's performance there, Ana De Archuleta, managing director of National Sawdust, wrote: 'Your voice matters. After careful consideration, National Sawdust has decided not to present the May 17 event.' Related : Advertisement In an email to Globe on Saturday, De Archuleta, who co-founded the nonprofit performance space with composer Paola Prestini, confirmed that Palmer's show is off. 'Once the leadership and Board of Trustees of the non-profit organization became aware of the complex situation surrounding the artist, the Board decided not to move forward with the show,' De Archuleta wrote. Gaiman, the British writer best known for the comic book series 'The Sandman' and the novels 'Good Omens,' 'American Gods,' and 'Coraline,' was accused in a Palmer, a Advertisement 'I thank you all deeply for continuing to respect my recent request for privacy as I navigate this extremely difficult moment. I must protect my young child and his right to privacy,' she wrote. 'With that as my priority, I will not respond to the specific allegations being made against me except to say that I deny the allegations and will respond in due course. My heart goes out to all survivors.' The Gaiman accuser who urged National Sawdust to rescind its invitation to Palmer is included in both the podcast and the New York magazine story. In an email to the venue, the woman wrote: 'I'd like to register a huge complaint that you are hosting an Amanda Palmer show at your beautiful venue…She is currently involved in a civil suit that credibly implicates her as a sex trafficker. Her values seem unaligned with the values of National Sawdust. And by allowing her a platform to amplify her voice, you would be simultaneously alienating and silencing the voices of her many, many victims.' Through her publicist, Dini von Mueffling, Palmer issued a statement to the Globe on Saturday, saying that the canceled show will now be held at City Winery New York City. ('I can confirm we have offered our stage for her art,' City Winery CEO Michael Dorf wrote in an email.) Palmer said she's grateful for the opportunity to perform in New York. ' I'm thrilled that City Winery is offering us a safe haven for my show and community, and also deeply grateful to the many people who fought to keep my show at National Sawdust,' she said. 'I reiterate that I look forward to the truth coming out and must remain agonizingly silent at the advice of my attorneys — not because I am guilty, but because of how our legal system works. Silence is not a natural state for me and I am very eager for facts and the truth to come to light; to all who support and see me, my endless gratitude.' Advertisement Mark Shanahan can be reached at
