Prospect Park Concert Schedule 2010

The pianist, singer and songwriter — and now, Brooklyn resident — performs her first free outdoor show in the borough. With numerous Grammy Awards to her credit and tens of millions of albums sold, Jones remains an active member of New York City’s singer-songwriter community. In a neighborly style that epitomizes Celebrate Brooklyn!, she gives back to the city and the borough with this free concert, performing material spanning her career, from her breakthrough Come Away With Me through her most recent release, The Fall.

The show will be preceded by Celebrate Brooklyn’s Opening Night Gala at 5:30pm. Tickets for the gala — which include reserved seats for the concert as well as cocktails and dinner, are available for $325 and up at (718) 855.7882 x33. Following Jones¹ concert, at 9:45 pm, there will be a Celebrate Brooklyn After-Party with I Love Vinyl for gala guests and Friends of Celebrate Brooklyn (i.e., members).

An undisputed architect of New Orleans music and a national cultural treasure, Allen Toussaint has produced, arranged for or collaborated with not only with fellow Crescent City legends like Dr. John, the Neville Brothers and Irma Thomas, but also the Rolling Stones, Elvis Costello and The Band. Describing Toussaint’s live performance, Downbeat recently said, “The generosity and grandeur of his melting pot vision invokes nothing but joy.” Toussaint shares this bill with a direct descendent, the electrifying piano player and singer Davell Crawford, who is often referred to as “The Prince of New Orleans.”

Brooklyn comic and impresario Eugene Mirman has been described by Esquire as “equal parts Andy Kaufman and Andy Warhol.” Spin has said that “Mirman has a skewed observational wit rather than a sweaty Friar’s Club shtick — and kills with self-deprecating ease.” Here he hosts a scaled-up version of his regular comedy spectacular, which has become something of a local institution. John Hodgman, Michael Showalter and Hannibal Buress are scheduled to appear, along with others TBA, plus music and other oddball surprises.

The prolific Australian composer, producer, performer, visual artist and longtime DUMBO resident JG Thirlwell is an elusive but profoundly influential presence in New York City’s underground music world. Working under many pseudonyms, including Foetus, Manorexia, Baby Zizanie, Clint Ruin, and Wiseblood, his varied body of work — which stretches the gamut from orchestrations, big band, cathartic noise-rock to abstract electronics and sound sculpture, chamber music, serial music and imaginary soundtracks (sometimes all in the same album) — is linked by a dramatic intensity and an evocative, cinematic quality. He has collaborated with the likes of Nick Cave, Lydia Lunch and Soft Cell, done remixes for NIN and Pantera, scored Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim series The Venture Brothers, and been commissioned by Kronos Quartet and Bang on a Can. Celebrate Brooklyn! is proud to present the New York debut of Thirlwell’s rarely heard large ensemble Steroid Maximus, a big band/exotica mini-orchestra. The evening will begin with a set by Dr. Lonnie Smith, the turban-wearing Hammond B-3 wizard.

This concert brings together a dazzling, multi-generational array of artists to explore the legacy of the Miles Davis landmark on the 40th anniversary of its release. The night begins with a performance by the virtuosic Mike Stern, one of the premier jazz-fusion guitarists of his generation and a veteran of Davis’s band.

The great Omara Portuondo, the female voice of the original Buena Vista Social Club, is a living legend of Cuban music. She now fronts the extraordinary Orquesta Buena Vista Social Club, which on recent tours has taken “the atmosphere up to a breathless level” (The Independent) in performances that “left audiences awe-struck” (Financial Times). Opening will be flamenco dancer Nelida Tirado, who moves, The New York Times says, “as if her body were a medium for some unearthly force.”

According to Time Out NY, the DJ, graphic novelist, musician and producer Kid Koala “pairs his deck skills with a songwriter’s smarts and the timing of a stand-up comedian.” At Celebrate Brooklyn!, he will offer a sampling of his wide-ranging talents, including excerpts of his Short Attention Span Audio Theatre, a vinyl vaudeville of all sorts of mischief featuring DJ P-Love; as well as The Slew, in which six turntables worth of live sampled guitar riffs meets the ex-Wolfmother rhythm section for a head-banging finale. Led by deadpan Danish pop-provocateur Mikkel Hess, Hess is More channels Jon Brion, Flight of the Conchords and Steve Martin with gleeful abandon, switching instruments mid-song and looping riffs and beats to create what they call freestyle disco jazz.

In the midst of a bona fide revival, the Tex-Mex supergroup Texas Tornados lives on with originals Augie Meyers and Flaco Jimenez as vital as ever and the spirits of the late Freddy Fender and Doug Sahm presiding. On tour and on their new album Esta Bueno!, which came out earlier this year, Shawn Sahm steps to the front and “pulls off his dad’s old tricks with a few of his own” (Austin Chronicle). They will be preceded on the bill by the timeless North Carolina string band The Red Clay Ramblers, who, according to The New York Times, play like “a fantasy roadhouse band from a vanished rural America” in whose music “bluegrass, New Orleans, classical folk and gospel sounds emerge in nutty profusion.”

Integrating cell phones, projections and live music, ZOOM, the latest of choreographer Zvi Gotheiner’s “heroically surging, exalting dances” (The New York Times), shatters the wall between audience and performers, with photos and text conversations from the crowd becoming an exhilarating, interactive real-time video collage of images and unscripted dialogue to which the dancers respond. The evening begins with a collaboration between the forward thinking classical/electronic/hip-hop composer Son Lux — whom NPR’s “All Things Considered” named Best New Artist in 2008 — and Lottdance, an evolving group of cultural conspirators that draws together dancers, musicians and visual artists to create multimedia events.

Four decades into their career, the Fab 5 have played countless live shows and created a veritable library of live vintage party mix recordings. To be sure, the group embodies the history of reggae and lives up to their billing as “Jamaica’s #1 Showband.” The percussionist Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn, master drummer of Broadway’s The Lion King and founder of the Jamaican roots collective Ancient Vibrations, gets things started with his latest project, Uzalo.

Former “punk ballerina” Karole Armitage, who has choreographed for everyone from Baryshnikov to Michael Jackson, “is always pushing the limits of possibility, spectacularly deconstructing the body with a diabolic flair” (Le Nouvel Observateur, France). In ITUTU, her company shares the stage with the West African band Burkina Electric to create a haunting amalgam of dance and live music that combines ballet and African dance, electronica and ancient rhythms — a uniquely modern synthesis of new and old, pop and tradition.

The singular music of Ozomatli blends hip-hop, salsa, dancehall, cumbia, samba, funk, merengue, comparsa, East LA R&B, New Orleans second line, Jamaican raga and Indian raga, among other styles to be found in Los Angeles’s cultural melting pot. This summer, they return to their favorite NYC stomping ground. Also on the bill are Afro-Argentine reggae stalwart Fidel Nadal, founding member and front man for of the fabled Rasta punk rock band Todos Tus Muertos, and the Monterrey, Mexico-based DJ Toy Selectah, who has produced or remixed Calle 13, Café Tacuba, Control Machete, Manu Chao, Eminem, Plastilina Mosh and Cypress Hill.

The Roots headline this World Cup party, which celebrates the first time in its 80-year history the tournament will take place on African soil. With a kick-off by Sahr Ngaujah, the star of Fela! on Broadway, the show features performances by artists from all corners of the Diaspora, including host Talib Kweli (Brooklyn), Bajah + The Dry Eye Crew (Sierra Leone), Blitz the Ambassador (Ghana), and many others to be announced. Check bricartsmedia.org/celebrate for updates.

Celebrate Brooklyn!’s annual celebration of African music, food and culture will build to an ecstatic crescendo this year with the distortion-drenched trance music of Congolese thumb-piano wizards Konono No. 1. Also featured are Dakar’s Omar Pene & Super Diamono, seminal figures in the birth of the modern Senegalese sound; the distinctive voice of Zimbabwean Afro-soul diva Chiwoniso; the pan-African reggae of Meta & The Cornerstones; and the festival horns and drums of Haiti's Djarara.

The Brooklyn-born, UK-based Carl Davis is a conductor for the London Symphony Orchestra who has composed music for more than 100 television programs and countless silent films. He returns to Celebrate Brooklyn! to conduct the Brooklyn Philharmonic in live performances of his original scores to three of Charlie Chaplin’s classics from the Mutual Film Corporation: Easy Street, 1 AM, and Behind the Screen. Antic, the fun, old-timey Two Man Gentlemen Band will kick off the concert.

Masterminded by bassist-producer Simón Mejía and fronted by the singer Liliana Saumet, Bogotá's Bomba Estéreo is at the forefront of the Latin Alternative scene. The band merges traditional sounds from Colombia’s Caribbean coast — like cumbia, bullerengue and champeta — with electronica, reggae and hip-hop to conjure what Hispanic Magazine describes as “homegrown folkloric music being etched upon the global DNA of urban beats.” La Secta Allstar are considered the kings of Puerto Rican rock en español, and Rita Indiana is a rapidly rising Dominican star.

The Grammy-winning producer Andres Levin and the Bruce High Quality Foundation are devising a Bandshell-wide, all-day, DIY world’s fair. The event will feature a broad range of musical and theatrical guests: Cucu Diamantes, Luis Guzman, Pablo Picasso, M1 from Dead Prez, Los Hanky Panky vs. Yerba Buena, Les Nubians, Raven O, Forro in the Dark, John Medeski and others TBA.

MI21 is a dynamic audio/visual re-scoring and re-visualizing of the profoundly influential Mother India (1957), the first Bollywood film to be nominated for an Academy Award (Best Foreign Language Film) and a talismanic piece of cinema history that came to symbolize the post-colonial Indian psyche. MI21 re-imagines the three-hour epic into an impressionistic 60 minutes of arresting imagery with a live score by DJ Tigerstyle, who is accompanied here by strings, keyboards, and percussion. The evening will kick off with a performance by Falu, the “indie Hindi,” who trained under the legendary vocalist Ustad Sultan Khan in Bombay and brazenly mashes up rock, funk, Bollywood and purely Indian classical music.

Glen Hansard, of the Irish band The Frames, and the classically trained Czech pianist and singer Marketa Irglova, won an Oscar for “Falling Slowly,” from the Once soundtrack, a film in which they also starred. As the Swell Season, they have gone on to achieve further success. Rolling Stone has called their newest music “hot Irish soulŠenergetic folk rock and dream-pop-touched balladry.” The concert begins with the gospel-tinged Americana of The Low Anthem, one of the most celebrated indie rock bands to emerge over the last year.

Sonic Youth’s glorious noise will engulf the Prospect Park Bandshell in a free show that promises to be one of this summer’s live music highlights. The No Wave pioneers have contributed as much over the last three decades as any band to the rise of alternative rock, and their sway over today’s indie scene cannot be overestimated. They are joined on the bill by the “bewitching tales and eerie, obsessive melodies” (SF Gate) of the Bay Area trio Grass Widow and the propulsive riffs of Brooklyn’s own Talk Normal.

Uncut recently said that Metric’s mercurial front woman Emily Haines is “still secretly one of the most articulate, compelling performers in modern rock.” Indeed, the band’s intense, always-evolving fusion of psychedelia, disco and electro-rock has made them one of the most exciting and enduring outfits to emerge from the fertile Toronto music scene that grew up around the collective Broken Social Scene (to which Haines and Metric co-founder James Shaw belong). Representing Brooklyn on this triple bill are the “sublime... absolutely devastating” (Q Magazine) soul-punk diva Joan as Police Woman and Holly Miranda, who has been widely acclaimed as a rising star.

Cult B-movie auteur Roger Corman’s 1960 adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s masterpiece of death, madness, and familial decrepitude stars a wild-eyed Vincent Price. The film is a study in creeping, diabolical menace. To celebrate its 50th anniversary, BRIC has commissioned organ virtuoso and indie jazz crossover phenomenon Marco Benevento to write a new original score, which he will perform live as the film plays on Celebrate Brooklyn!'s 50-foot screen. Brooklyn denizens White Magic will embrace the last bits of sunlight before the darkness descends, providing gripping avant-folk and witchy psychedelia.

The Bushwick label Daptone Records, long committed to delivering the finest soul, funk, gospel and afrobeat sounds to be found on analog tape, will bring to the Bandshell their unstoppable materfamilias, Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, on a bill of Daptone artists that will deliver an unforgettable night of Brooklyn soul.

The 32nd Celebrate Brooklyn! season concludes with a day of family-friendly American roots and folk music to honor the legacy of the progressive children’s book author and illustrator Ezra Jack Keats. Brady Rymer’s downhome, foot-stomping Little Band That Could “might just be the best-sounding band in children’s music,” according to NPR’s “All Things Considered. Elizabeth Mitchell’s renditions of Woody Guthrie classics and other folk gems have made her the first modern children’s artist to be signed to the venerable American Folkways label. She also gleefully covers the likes of the Velvet Underground and Bob Marley.