wnyc.org / 93.9fm / am 820

New Sounds

Tuesday, March 18, 2008
  • Night in the Old Marketplace animation still
    Night in the Old Marketplace animation still (Mornography with Tine Kindermann)

    Meet Me in the Old Marketplace

    Frank London's A Night in the Old Marketplace is a "folk opera," a 90-minute musical re-imagining of I.L. Peretz's sprawling 1907 supernatural drama. The score mixes folk, jazz, classical, rock and world beats with a dose of Kurt Weill cabaret. Beware, the players are some of the most versatile musicians, whose credits include salsa, radical Jewish "downtown" jazz, punk, and thrash-klezmer bands. Then there are the vocalists Manu Narayan (star of Broadway's Bombay Dreams), Craig Wedren (of Shudder to Think), Irish singer Susan McKeown, pop geniuses They Might Be Giants, and The Klezmatics' Lorin Sklamberg, to name a few. We'll sample from the recording of "A Night in the Old Marketplace" on this edition of New Sounds in advance of the concert staging at Merkin Hall this Thursday night, March 20, 2008.

PROGRAM #2777, Jewish Ghost Stories (First aired on Tuesday, 3-18-08)

ARTIST(S)

RECORDING

CUT(S)

SOURCE

Frank London

A Night in the Old Marketplace

The Bottom of the Well [2:30]
What Is Man’s Worth [1:00]
Madness [4:30]
Tale of the Drowned Klezmorim [2:30]
One Prayer, One Lullaby [2:30]
Forever Yours [3:30]
The Ten Faces of G-d [3:00]
A Tavern In Pinsk [1:00]

Soundbrush #1010** www.soundbrush.com*

The Klezmatics

Possessed

Music from “A Dybbuk: Between Two Worlds” [19:00]

Xenophile #4050 Reissued on Rounder Records. Try Amazon.com*

Gary Lucas

NS Live, World Financial Center, 1-27-99

The Golem, excerpts [7:00]

Available on DVD, www.garylucas.com

Leave a Comment

Please stay on topic, be civil, and be brief.
Email addresses are never displayed, but they are required to confirm your comments. Names are displayed with all comments. WNYC reserves the right to edit any comments posted on this site. Please read the WNYC.org Comment Guidelines before posting.

Your comment


* required
The information entered into this form will not be used to send unsolicited email and will not be sold to a third party.
 

Twitchy Renaissance-Infused Minimalism

New Sounds

From the New Sounds Live concerts at Merkin Hall, Nico Muhly presents a series of new electroacoustic ensemble works, combining “twitchy Minimalism” and Renaissance polyphony. Hear brand-new works from "Mothertongue," along with other works, recorded live.

In Robert Moran's Kitchen

New Sounds

From October 30, 1989, the infamous "cooking show" with composer/raconteur Robert Moran. Recorded while cooking an Indian dinner in John Schaefer's kitchen, for reasons still not entirely clear. Along the way, we hear an "acoustic" version of Cage's 0:00 - for amplification of chopping vegetables and blender. And don't miss the teary conversation as onions are chopped. View the the recipes.

Michael Hedges and Michael Manring

New Sounds

The incredibly gifted and astonishingly original guitarist Michael Hedges left the planet much too soon in 1997. Avant-folk and ever-entertaining, Hedges made brilliant music with alternate tunings, harmonics and was known for striking the guitar’s body and strings with his fingers, palms and knuckles. His close friend and sometime collaborator, electric bass virtuoso Michael Manring, was a genre-bender, before music writers ever discovered that hyphenated term. He started out in the New Age bins, but moved all over with various projects, including the very first New Age-death-metal-jazz-funk-fusion record, among other things, with his “hyperbass”, (a fretless instrument which makes re-tuning mid-piece a little easier). On this October 10, 1987 edition of New Sounds, the two artists visited and played at the WNYC performance studios.

Caravan Variations

New Sounds

Like camels slogging through the sand, the exotic strains of “Caravan,” by Duke Ellington and his sometime trombonist Juan Tizol (with rarely heard lyrics by Irving Mills), have been played loose, fast, swinging, and/or slow by just about everyone. For this New Sounds program, it’s another of the occasional series of programs of Theme and Variations, where the premise is simple: take a single piece of music and explore what a number of musicians have done with it, through arrangements, deconstructions, and revisions of the original theme. This time around, it’s Duke Ellington’s “Caravan.” Listen to arrangements by Romania’s Fanfare Ciocarlia, Hungary’s Kalman Balogh & The Gipsy Cimbalom Band, the California Guitar Trio, the ska group Hepcat, banjoman Bela Fleck, Lebanese composer Rabih Abou-Khalil, and trumpeter/composer Jon Hassell, among others.