River To River Festival Announces Remaining Music Acts: Patrick Watson, Arieb Azhar and More
By: Kelsey Denette Jul. 03, 2012
The River to River Festival has announced the following remaining events:
Arieb Azhar
July 3, 7:30pm
Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts at Pace University, 3 Spruce Street
Sharp eloquence, humanist politics and mystic poetries are given a global voice by this singer-songwriter and his acoustic band from Islamabad, Pakistan. Defying easy categorization, Arieb Azhar’s mesmerizing baritone “encompasses about all the emotions life has to offer.” (PRI) He leads a quartet of musicians in an eclectic mix of urban and folk-based songs grounded in Sufi and other humanist poetries from across Eurasia. Azhar pays tribute to Irish balladeers, Croatian gypsies, Punjabi traders
and ancient Sanskrit texts.
Megan Burtt & The Cure For Love
July 5, 12:30pm
One New York Plaza
Megan Burtt travels the world relentlessly seeking the moments of grit and grace that make every day precious, capturing these emotional experiences in song. Burtt is joined by her band, The Cure For Love, featuring Louis Cato, Adam Tressler and James Williams.
Presented by Arts Brookfield.
Patrick Watson with Loney Dear
July 6, 7pm
Pier 17, The Seaport
Patrick Watson’s newest album Adventures In Your Own Backyard was made at home after a grueling five-year run that saw Watson and his band—bassist Mishka Stein, guitarist Simon Angell and drummer Robbie Kuster—tour the world in support of two critically-acclaimed and successful albums, including the Polaris award-winningClose To Paradise.
Hailing from the small city of Jonkoping, Sweden, Loney Dear’s primary member Emil Svanängen first began recording homemade, overdubbed tapes of delicate, folkish indie pop in the early 2000s. After several years of touring stateside and abroad, Loney Dear released Dear John, its fourth full-length in January 2012. His album—the appropriately titled Hall Music—is an expansive record that finds Svanängen closer to creating the type of orchestral music he has always sought to bring to life on stage (whether he’s actually playing with an orchestra or not).
Source of Uncertainty II with Mort Subotnick
July 7, 7:30pm
Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts at Pace University, 3 Spruce Street
Harvestworks and ((audience)) collaborate on Source of Uncertainty to celebrate the Buchla200e and DIY modular synthesis. On July 7, Source of Uncertainty will present the premiere performance of Energy Shapes by Morton Subotnick and excerpts from Silver Apples of the Moon. Preceding Mr. Subotnick’s performance will be a presentation of Orchestra of the Damned by Richard Lainhart. Lainhart and Subotnick are pioneers of electronic music and this concert will be an unprecedented opportunity to revisit the origins of the genre while looking into its future.
Presented by Harvestworks in association with The River To River Festival
Sundays at St. Paul’s: synesthetic engines
featuring Taylor Deupree, Blake Carrington and Daniel Iglesia
featuring Taylor Deupree, Blake Carrington and Daniel Iglesia
July 8, 7:30pm
St. Paul’s Chapel
Former LMCC Resident Artist Blake Carrington premieres a new work, Loci_Palimpsest, that combines field recordings of Lower Manhattan with images and architectural plans in a performance where image and sound are generated in real time following a loose compositional structure, played live and projected in HD on three screens totaling 30 feet. Next, composer and technologist Daniel Iglesia performs solo and with his ensemble Spirograph Agnew, who combine electronics, string instruments and live video for 3D glasses. Taylor Deupree, founder of the 12k label, rounds out the evening with a hand-crafted composition exploring the fragility and imperfection of sound, both acoustic and electronic. He creates a hushed, looping bed of texture and tones as hypnotic as it is engaging.
Locos Por Juana
July 10, 5:30pm
World Financial Center Plaza
This party band with an Afro-Colombian heart and soul creates the perfect urban-alternative musical experience. Locos Por Juana seamlessly blends elements of rock, funk and hip-hop with a wealth of Latin-American rhythms like cumbia, champeta and salsa and the Caribbean groove of reggae and ska. Locos Por Juana are Itagui Correa on vocals, Mark Kondrat on guitar and Javier Delgado on drums, joined by trombonist Lasim Richards and percussionist Carlos Palmet.
Presented by Arts Brookfield.
La India with Aurora & Zon del Barrio
July 10, 7pm
Rockefeller Park
La India, born Linda Viera Cabarello, is known as “La Princesa de la Salsa.” Nominated for both Grammy and Latin Grammy awards, this salsa legend has worked with Eddie Palmieri, Tito Puente, Grover Mitchell and Sergio George, as well as Marc Anthony, with whom she performed the huge hit Vivir lo Nuestro.
Aurora & Zon del Barrio bring music from the streets of New York to stages around the world, and music from the African diaspora to the streets of New York. A high-energy musical extravaganza that celebrates Nuyorican tradition and culture, the group is led by bandleader, composer and historian Aurora, with musical direction by David Fernandez, and features a 13-piece orchestra.
Presented by Battery Park City Authority.
Ian Link
July 11, 12:30pm
One Liberty Plaza
Ian Link sings. He sings whenever and wherever he can. Singing out of impulse, singing to pass the time, to entertain his friends, and in doing so, likely sometimes bothering them. But always singing. Supposedly from Michigan’s west coast with a few years spent in Detroit, Ian now resides in Brooklyn. Come hear what this singer is all about.
Presented by Arts Brookfield.
Missy Mazzoli & Victoire with Matt Mehlan and Skeletons
July 11, 7:30pm
Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts at Pace University, 3 Spruce Street
This musical portrait of “postclassical queen bee” composer Missy Mazzoli will feature Mazzoli at the keyboard fronting her internationally beloved ensemble Victoire. Performing songs with her own signature “shimmering, surging, post-Minimalist flow” (Time Out New York), she will be joined by Matt Mehlan and his band Skeletons who Pitchfork calls “an outsize global-a-go-go mélange of unceasing polyrhythms, Afrobeat guitars, free jazz, and Timbaland’s approach to kitchen-sink percussion.” The concert will feature world premieres by Mehlan and Mazzoli.
Dana Leong Trio
July 12, 12:30pm
One New York Plaza
The Dana Leong Trio, featuring Dana (cello/trombone/laptop), John Shannon (guitar) and DJ Icewater (turntables) is the latest incarnation of Dana’s ever-expansive compositions, bringing together an exciting electro-acoustic blend of jazz, classical and pop. The trio recently performed at Orange County Performing Arts, the 2011 Blue Note Jazz Festival in New York City, and the Sleepless Night Miami Beach festival in November 2011.
Presented by Arts Brookfield.
George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic
July 12, 7pm
Rockefeller Park
One of the most influential names in R&B and funk music, George Clinton is the leader of Parliament-Funkadelic (or P-Funk), a collective of wildly talented musicians who revolutionized soul music in the ‘70s by incorporating influences from Hendrix, Zappa and Sly. George and P-Funk have been rocking steady for more than 50 years with hit songs like “Flash Light,” “Mothership Connection” and “Chocolate City.” In 1997, George Clinton and 15 other members of the group became the largest band yet inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, proving that they are epic in both size and sound.
Presented by Battery Park City Authority.
Eleanor Friedberger with Ex Cops
July 13, 8PM
Pier 17, The Seaport
Eleanor Friedberger is an exceptional songwriter, a fearless performer and one of the sweetest alto voices in music. A masterful wordsmith, Friedberger mashes up colorful, complicated lyrical lines into beautiful refrains, often describing whirlwind New York moments within her narratives. Her performances are delivered with passionate vocal phrasing and excellent manipulation of melody, never ceasing in her explorations of sound. Although Friedberger is known for her role as the lead singer of The Fiery Furnaces, she is just as comfortable playing alone on a stage with an acoustic guitar as she is fronting a band.
EcstaticTM Summer: A Far Cry Orchestra with Daniel Lopatin and David Lang
July 14, 7pm
World Financial Center Winter Garden
Pulitzer Prize-winning composer (and co-founder of Bang on a Can) David Lang’s hour-long, slowly-evolving work for strings, Darker, is the starting point for a live re-imagination by Oneohtrix Point Never (Daniel Lopatin), who will real-time loop and electronically process the live string sound of A Far Cry Orchestra back over and onto themselves.
Daniel Lopatin will also present his own work with selections from of his critically acclaimed albums (Returnaland Replica) specially arranged for A Far Cry Orchestra.
EcstaticTM Summer is a production of New Amsterdam Presents in association with the Kaufman Center.
Presented by River To River Festival and Arts Brookfield.
CHERYL: On The Waterfront
July 15, 4pm–10pm
Pier 16, The Seaport
Art Party Impresarios CHERYL bring their signature high-concept hi-jinks—DJs and dancing, characters in costume, hands-on art-making activities for grown-ups and more—to Pier 16. Dockworkers, priests, blonde ladies and fishmongers populate the pier and The Ambrose for a waterfront dance party.
Alarm Will Sound performing John Cage’s Song Books
July 15, 7:30pm
July 15, 7:30pm
Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts at Pace University, 3 Spruce Street
Celebrate the John Cage centennial with Alarm Will Sound’s innovative staging of Cage’s extraordinary work,Song Books, receiving its U.S. premiere at River To River as a co-commission with The Holland Festival. Perhaps Cage’s greatest music-theater work, Song Books is a collection of instrumental compositions, songs, electronic music and theater pieces that can be combined in countless ways. Song Books holds an astonishing range of musical styles that is increasingly relevant to today’s musical world and resonates with the breadth of Alarm Will Sound’s repertoire. This original production—created by director Nigel Maister and Cage scholar Rob Haskins—re-imagines Cage’s 1970 text as a contemporary, smart and dramatic theatrical and musical event.
All descriptions provided by the Festival. Seating is first-come, first-served.
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