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TNY—2019_05_13—PAGE 5—133SC.—LIVE ART—R34288—PLEASE USE VIRTUAL PROOF. 4 C
ILLUSTRATION BY RICHARD A. CHANCE
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NIGHTLIFE
Musicians and night-club proprietors lead
complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in
advance to confirm engagements.David Murray with Saul Williams
Birdland
Back in the eighties and nineties, it might have
seemed as if every new dawn also brought a
new David Murray recording. The still mighty
tenor saxophonist and bass clarinettist may
have cut down on his productivity of late,
but his taste for experimentation and variety
remains. Here, he reunites with the politically
attuned spoken-word poet Saul Williams in
a collaborative venture entitled “Blues for
Memo”; they front a quintet that also features
the acclaimed drummer Nasheet Waits.—Steve
Futterman (May 7-11.)Maceo Parker
Blue Note
The saxophonist Maceo Parker’s fame was
insured by his work as the Johnny-on-the-spot
soloist for James Brown and by his later contri-
butions to modern funk, but his affection for
R. & B.-inflected jazz-horn work—a tradition
that runs from Louis Jordan to Hank Crawford
and beyond—is never far below the surface. At
seventy-six, he remains a soulful instrumen-
talist and occasional singer who still bows to
the majesty of the groove.—S.F. (May 7-12.)Mavis Staples
Apollo Theatre
The Chicago soul aristocrat Mavis Staples
spent her seventies recording albums—includ-
ing “We Get By,” a forthcoming LP produced
by Ben Harper—with starry young allies. She
greets eighty with a bash that features, among
others, Jon Batiste, Valerie June, and David
Byrne, whose Talking Heads song “Slippery
People” gave the Staple Singers a late-career
hit. This flood of cameos is no fluke: Staples
maintains a peer-approval rating roughly on
par with sunny days and ice-cream cones.
In an age of walls, she continues to see only
bridges.—Jay Ruttenberg (May 9.)Avalon Emerson
Nowadays
The producer-d.j. Avalon Emerson makes and
spins plangent New Wave-tinged house and
techno, but her sets tend to be heavy on more
traditional songs. Her grooves are also chunkier
than is usual for those sleeker styles, with selec-
tions as likely to be built on breakbeats as on the
straight-ahead four-four. That approachability
is heightened by her sure pacing and sharp
timing: Emerson knows just how long to tease
a familiar vocal.—Michaelangelo Matos (May 10.)ESG
Le Poisson Rouge
Founded by the sisters Renee, Valerie,
Deborah, and Marie Scroggins, the Bronxminimalist-funk band ESG has long
been a touchstone of modern club music,
thanks to a handful of releases on New
York’s 99 Records in the eighties. The
group began gigging again regularly in
the early two-thousands, and it can still
burn a house down with such rubbery
classics as “UFO” and “Moody.”—M.M.
(May 10.)Nicky Jam
United Palace
The tough-and-tatted reggaetón rapper
Nicky Jam saved himself from obscu-
rity by softening his sound. In the early
two-thousands—after falling out with his
superstar mentor Daddy Yankee, strug-
gling with addiction, and being relegated
to singing in hotel lounges in Puerto Rico
for work—he moved to Colombia. There,
he used his newfound vocal technique to
shape a lighter strand of Latin urban music,
marked by bouncy pop hooks and smoothed-
out melodies. Now he has fully graduated
to industry veteran, having reinvented
both his music and himself.—Julyssa Lopez
(May 10-11.)Lizzo
Brooklyn Steel
Lizzo’s music is often described as “feel-good”
and “empowering”—accurate, if overused, ad-
jectives for her brand of blissful, sunny-side-up
anthems, teeming with self-love and body-pos-
itive affirmations. An endlessly charismatic
multi-hyphenate, she raps, sings, twerks, and
plays the flute with magnetic aplomb; her long-
awaited début album, “Cuz I Love You,” which
was released last month, amplifies her ebullient
sound and reveals her sweeping, stadium-pop
ambitions.—J.L. (May 12-13.)Tone Stith / Marco McKinnis
Elsewhere
The past and present of R. & B. interlace in
Tone Stith’s music, which owes just as much
to the neo-soul and baby-making grooves of
the nineties as it does to edgier contemporary
styles. The slippery-smooth qualities of his
voice are matched only by his aptitude for
dance, which he incorporates generously in
his performances. Here, he’s joined by an-
other rising crooner, Marco McKinnis, whose
crisp tenor and sparkling falsetto are sublime.Progressive experimentalism can be an arduous endeavor for creator and
audience alike, but some musicians seem to pull it off with ease. The Phil-
adelphia-based artist Moor Mother (BRIC, May 9) interrogates societal
and systemic ills with a charged mélange of noise music, punk, hip-hop,
and spoken-word poetry. Where she chooses cerebral defiance as her
mode of expression, the rapper Tierra Whack (Rainbow Room, May 10),
who is from the same city, opts for surrealism. Whack’s fifteen-minute
audiovisual début project, “Whack World,” exists as an innovative exercise
in concision and imagination. Elsewhere, the British singer FKA Twigs
(Park Avenue Armory, May 11-12) uses the physicality of her body to
mimic the shape-shifting qualities of her music in mesmerizing displays
of both artistic fortitude and athleticism. The Red Bull Music Festival,
which runs through May 18, brings these performers, among others, to
various venues throughout the city.—Briana YoungerFESTIVALSEASON
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