A few nights ago I saw the Mountain Goats in Asbury Park. We had a violent thunderstorm a few hours before the show around here, so a number of the roads both on the way there and in Asbury Park were blocked by fallen trees. That was exciting ( Read more... )

Terri Lyne Carrington and The Bad Plus were two of the musicians I played when I did my panel on vidding to jazz music at Vividcon last year. I saw both of them last night at a concert at le Poisson Rouge ( Read more... )

Some CTY friends got me into Gaelic Storm when I was a teenager. They're an Irish folk/Irish rock band probably most famous for their stint as the below-decks band in the movie Titanic. The last time I saw them in concert was my 21st birthday, at some bar in New York. There was drinking and dancing and moshing and singing along and it was amazing ( Read more... )

I went to an Idan Raichel concert at the Beacon Theater on Tuesday. Crowd was like 120% Israeli and much of the rest of the crowd was Orthodox Upper West Siders. It was kind of delightful to be at a concert with a crowd like that, to not feel like a little bit of an outsider as the only guy in a yarmulke at the rock show ( Read more... )

New Josh Ritter album means a new tour- I saw him this past Sunday down in Philadelphia at Union Transfer, same place I last saw him play a year and a half ago ( Read more... )

I did something this week I'd been meaning to do since I was in college: Went to one of Andy Statman's regular residence gigs at the Charles Street shul in the Village. He's been in residence there since, like, the late 90s, and I spent four years in the mid '00s just a half mile east, and I knew he was playing shows, and I knew I loved Andy ( Read more... )

I saw Josh Ritter play on Sunday at the Union Transfer in Philadelphia. It's my fourth time seeing him play, after shows apparently in '09, '08, and '06... so I haven't seen him in half a decade, but I've been listening to his music for fifteen years and seeing him live for more than ten. I really enjoyed getting to see him again. I had a grin on ( Read more... )

Terry Riley's "In C" is a really special piece of music. It consists of about fifty short snippets of music, all of course in the key of C, to be performed by any number of musicians, in order, but each of the snippets is to be played any number of times, at the discretion of each of the performers. The result is amazing, a tug of war between ( Read more... )

Last night, I went to see Zion 80 at Joe's Pub. And ran into some friends, which is really not that surprising, because of course I have friends who are excited about Shlomo Carlebach/Fela Kuti fusion ( Read more... )

There are two concerts I didn't attend that are on my list of regrets. There are many other concerts I would have liked to have gone to, but these two took place when I was a student in NYC. I knew about them ahead of time. I wanted to go, could have afforded to go, had the time to go. And then... busy with school, forgetful, whatever, I didn't ( Read more... )