THENEWYORKER,M AY9, 2022 5
As ever, it’s advisable to confirm engagements
in advance and to check the requirements for
in-person attendance.
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MUSIC
Julianna Barwick
AMBIENT In Julianna Barwick’s early record-
ings, the musician transformed her voice into
a chorus of one, looping wordless singing
into an aquatic blur. “Healing Is a Miracle,”
Barwick’s stormy album from 2020, opens
up to include such prominent collaborators
as Mary Lattimore (a harpist), Nosaj Thing
(an electronic producer), and Jónsi Birgisson
(of Sigur Rós). Albums from the ambient
realm often ride a single emotional note, yet
“Healing Is a Miracle,” which the singer has
said arose from personal turmoil and her move
from New York to Los Angeles, aims for a full
journey, replete with dramatically shifting
moods and sonic landscapes. At the core of
both her recordings and her solo stage show
remains her singular voice—a vehicle of purity
and uplift, even when pushing against music
flecked with rage.—Jay Ruttenberg (First Uni-
tarian Church of Brooklyn; May 6.)
Carnegie Hall
CLASSICAL In the course of a four-day span,
Carnegie Hall hosts a pair of soloists with
major orchestras, two ambitious vocal works,
and a world première by a multi-instrumen-
talist recently anointed at the Grammys.
Augustin Hadelich tackles a combination
of sweetness and drama in Mendelssohn’s
Violin Concerto alongside the Orchestra of
St. Luke’s (May 5), and Igor Levit, a pianist
whose insights sound both uninhibited and
deeply considered, plays Brahms’s Piano Con-
certo No. 1 with the New York Philharmonic
(May 6). Osvaldo Golijov’s “Falling Out of
Time”—a poetic song cycle, written for the
Silkroad Ensemble, about losing a child—has
its New York première (Zankel Hall; May
6), and the English Concert, led by Harry
Bicket, resumes its annual series of Handel’s
operas and oratorios with “Serse” (May 8).
Jon Batiste, rounding out his “Perspectives”
series after taking home the Grammy for
Album of the Year, unveils his “American
Symphony,” which he considers a tribute to
Black greats such as Duke Ellington and Nina
Simone (May 7).—Oussama Zahr
Ron Carter
JAZZ Ron Carter’s present-day stature as a
jazz deity is a curious thing: he’s never led
an epochal ensemble or composed a corpus
of distinctive tunes, and he wields an instru-
ment—the bass—that usually characterizes
a support player. Yet by dint of adaptability,
rare talent, and staunch professionalism (he’s
reportedly appeared on more than two thou-
sand recordings in his six-decade career), as
well as associations with some of the most
important figures in the idiom—particularly
Miles Davis, in the nineteen-sixties—Car-
ter has deservedly become widely exalted
in jazz circles. His eighty-fifth birthday, in
May, is a perfect excuse to applaud a lifetime
of polished music-making.—Steve Futterman
(Carnegie Hall; May 10.)
For more than two decades, the rapper Pusha T has made music almost
exclusively about selling cocaine, first as the younger brother in the
Virginia duo Clipse and then, in the twenty-tens, as Kanye (Ye) West’s
consigliere and attack dog. Pusha’s emphatic, unapologetic style lends
itself to drug-lord splendor—he often cites the ruthless kingpin Alejandro
Sosa, from Brian de Palma’s crime drama “Scarface,” as an inspiration
in his songs—and his insistent lyricism has always brought his music
a certain materiality and urgency. His new album, “It’s Almost Dry,” is
as leisurely as it is confrontational, performed from a casual position of
assumed superiority. Produced by Ye and Pharrell Williams, the tracks
fixate on the spoils accumulated through Pusha’s peddler empire and
dismiss rivals as charlatans. His verses are more loose than piercing
here, concerned primarily with high fashion and upward mobility. But
beneath this luxurious veneer are signs of caution (Kevlar-lined Balen-
ciaga jackets, a supervillain lair fit for Architectural Digest) that reveal
an unwillingness to ever set his smuggling ways aside.—Sheldon Pearce
HIP-HOP
Mark Farina
ELECTRONIC A veteran of the Chicago house-
music loft scene that proliferated in the late
eighties and early nineties, the d.j. Mark Fa-
rina rose to global prominence after relocating
to San Francisco, in the mid-nineties, and
issuing a series of mixes called “Mushroom
Jazz.” That title gets at the trippy delight and
liberal use of jazz samples that continue to
buoy Farina’s sets. His track selections tend
toward the rhythmically loose, and he strings
them together with an offhandedness that con-
trasts smartly with the recordings’ typically
gleaming polish. This week, Farina plays the
Brooklyn venue Moonrise; Love & Logic, Like
Mee, and Denninger open.—Michaelangelo
Matos (Moonrise; May 7.)
Jenny Hval
EXPERIMENTAL The pop philosophies of the
Oslo-based artist Jenny Hval are always ex-
panding. Across eight studio albums and nu-
merous collaborations, her high-stakes music
has incorporated self-reflexive conceptualism,
critique, and spoken word. Her multidimen-
sional songs—expositions of feminist interi-
ority and adventure, alive with the pleasures
of melody—often make explicit reference to
other artist-thinkers. But in 2020 Hval, like
many of us, “was reduced to the problematic
entity of ‘just me,’” she wrote in a statement.
That purported limitation produced the in-
timate and irreducible songwriting on her
recent full-length “Classic Objects,” which
evokes dub, devotionals, and the cosmos.
She challenges the status quo through sim-
ple tales of leaving home, playing shows, and
her literal birth; these grains of life become
portals for interconnection, justice, and the
unknown. Hval tears at the edges and, as ever,
lets us in.—Jenn Pelly (Elsewhere; May 10.)
ILLUSTRATION BY NICK LITTLE
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A RT
Frédéric Bruly Bouabré
In 1948, this Ivorian artist, who was then a
civil servant in his mid-twenties, had a vision
