THENEWYORKER,AUGUST 5 &12, 2019 9
NPR Music’s Turning the Tables initia-
tive honors the voices of women and
nonbinary musicians, functioning as both
a critique of and a corrective to music’s
male-centered canon. The series primar-
ily lives online, as an ongoing dialogue of
essays and listicles, but it comes alive in
“The Motherlode,” a concert presented
at Lincoln Center’s Out of Doors festival
on July 31. Last year’s event, the “21st
Century Edition,” highlighted artists of
the present, but this year it trains its scope
on the past, focussing on the ground-
breaking and foundation-laying work
of female musicians from the earliest
recorded music up through the sixties. A
group of striking performers, including
Courtney Marie Andrews, Rhiannon
Giddens, Xiomara Laugart, Ledisi, and
Amina Claudine Myers, lend their tal-
ents to the show.—Briana Younger
OUTDOORCONCERTS
ILLUSTRATION BY MICHELLE MILDENBERG
1
NIGHTLIFE
Musicians and night-club proprietors lead
complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in
advance to confirm engagements.
Joan Osborne
City Winery
When City Winery first opened, a decade
ago, its plan to offer rock shows amid a SoHo
wine bar sounded like a recipe for some sort of
yuppie hellscape. Yet the club quickly proved
tasteful and smartly programmed, filling a
void left by the departure of such venues as
the Bottom Line and sprouting satellites na-
tionwide. Set to decamp for chic new digs at
Pier 57 next year, City Winery hosts a final
concert in its original space. Fittingly, it stars
Joan Osborne—the same bluesy singer who in-
augurated the club.—Jay Ruttenberg (July 31.)
Snail Mail
Brooklyn Steel
No one mopes quite like Lindsey Jordan, the
Baltimore guitarist and singer-songwriter who
mixtape of the Chinese diaspora,” as he put it,
to the museum.—Michaelangelo Matos (Aug. 2.)
Lone
Elsewhere
Matt Cutler, the Nottingham house producer
who works as Lone, manages a neat trick: making
new recordings whose proudly plastic tones and
sweeping, rascally melody lines evoke early-nine-
ties rave, even as their expansive production casts
them as thoroughly modern. He’s also a superb
d.j. who, naturally, spins plenty of vintage an-
thems. That approach seems apt for this showcase
of the thirty-five-year-old Belgian dance label
R&S, which also features its founder, Renaat
Vandepapeliere, on the decks.—M.M. (Aug. 2.)
Ingrid Laubrock
The Stone at the New School
Sixty-plus years after brave pioneers unleashed
free-jazz improvisation on unsuspecting audi-
ences, the style has lost little appeal for adven-
turous players—a fact proved by the fully com-
mitted saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, who has
fruitfully tangled with like-minded visionaries
since relocating from Germany to New York, in
- Some of those same players—Mary Hal-
vorson, Kris Davis, Nels Cline, Ches Smith—
join her at this residency.—S.F. (Aug. 6-10.)
RÜFÜS DU SOL
Brooklyn Mirage
Australian electronic artists, such as Flume
and Chet Faker, have made real inroads with
audiences in the U.S., thanks, in part, to their
judicious pop instincts; the Sydney-based
trio RÜFÜS DU SOL may be the savviest of
these acts. On each of its three albums—most
The Rolling Stone
Mitzi E. Newhouse
The most dynamic, dangerous, and riveting mo-
ments of this new play by Chris Urch, directed
by Saheem Ali, are a pair of sermons, delivered
by a young Ugandan pastor named Joe (the
intense, convincing James Udom), one offering
salvation, the other spouting homophobic bile.
Joe’s brother, Dembe (the marvellous Ato Blank-
son-Wood), is falling in love with Sam (Robert
Gilbert), a half-Ugandan, half-Northern Irish
doctor, and he’s worried that Joe and Wummie
(Latoya Edwards), their sister, will find out that
he’s gay; meanwhile, all Uganda is in a “Scarlet
Letter”-like revolt against homosexuals in their
midst. Arnulfo Maldonado’s pleasingly simple
set helps to broaden the harsh specificity of
the play, turning it into a kind of parable about
the necessity of open ears: keep listening; fig-
ure out when the shouting stops and the vio-
lence starts.—V.C. (7/29/19) (Through Aug. 25.)
Two’s a Crowd
59E
Following a computer glitch, Tom (Robert Yacko)
and Wendy (Rita Rudner) are assigned the same
room in an overbooked Vegas hotel. He’s a mel-
low retired electrician prone to loud shirts; she’s
a tidy, controlling wedding planner. The only
giveaways that this rom-com takes place in the
present are the cell phones and Starbucks jokes;
otherwise, it feels like a subpar version of a Neil
Simon farce. Rudner, best known as a comedian,
wrote the show with her husband, Martin Berg-
man (who directed), and she delivers a steady
stream of one-liners that feel lifted from her spe-
cials—meaning they have standup pacing and are
often very funny. Still, you have to wonder why
this is a musical (the innocuous folk-rock score is
by Jason Feddy, who performs many songs him-
self and leads the band), especially considering
the less than optimal singing abilities of some
of the cast members.—E.V. (Through Aug. 25.)
fronts the band Snail Mail. She started self-re-
cording wounded elegies about adolescent
heartbreak and angst when she was just sixteen,
earning her a reputation as a precocious lyricist.
But the magic of Jordan’s confessional, unbarred
style is that it tackles youth without ever feeling
juvenile; her 2017 début album, “Lush,” is filled
with gripping reflections that can time-warp
listeners back to their teens while maintaining
the benefits of hindsight and maturity. After this
appearance in Brooklyn, she performs at Webster
Hall the following night.—Julyssa Lopez (July 31.)
Avishai Cohen Trio
Blue Note
Avishai Cohen, the Israeli bassist (not the fine
Israeli trumpeter of the same name), has been
drawing attention as a first-rank instrumen-
talist since he began associating with Chick
Corea, in the late nineties. As a leader of his
own small, inquisitive groups, Cohen aligns
his superlative gifts with those of topnotch
players; here, he reunites with a 2008 trio
that featured the pianist Shai Maestro and
the drummer Mark Guiliana, two questing
improvisers who have since gone on to indi-
vidual acclaim.—Steve Futterman (Aug. 1-4.)
Chairman Mao and CZ Wang
Museum of Chinese in America
This early-evening, all-vinyl session, free
with admission to the Museum of Chinese
in America, features two sharp-eared spinners
building a musical path through what they
call the “dance-music continuum.” Both pack
plenty of ammo: Chairman Mao, a co-founder
of the legendary hip-hop magazine Ego Trip,
has an equally legendary twelve-inch collec-
tion, and CZ Wang, a Vancouver native and
house producer, recently contributed “a big
