Tribeca New Music Presents Concert For The Midterms - Political Music That Kicks Ass

No one has ever accused Jerome Kitzke, Frederic Rzewski, or Frank Zappa of beating around the bush. Tribeca New Music presents Concert For The Midterms - Political Music That Kicks Ass featuring the works of these three composers and the poetry of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, the Lakota and the Tewa, to send a powerful message for our time and encourage a hopeful change for the better. Performing will be the NakedEye Ensemble and special guest actor/singer Lisa Karrer.

Commissioned and performed by NakedEye, the anti-autocracy piece I Am Waiting (2020) by Jerome Kitzke (b.1955) receives its New York City premiere with special guest actor/singer Lisa Karrer. The text is made up of two Lawrence Ferlinghetti poems separated by nearly 50 years: Pity the Nation from 2007 and I Am Waiting from 1958. According to the composer, "the former puts laser focus on all that we should be fearing in the time of Trump's autocratic aspirations, and the latter is a litany of the ills plaguing society in 1958 that resonate to this day and that require, as ever, an ongoing recognition of wonder to produce hopeful change for the better."

Spurred by the current abominable war in Ukraine, NakedEye also performs a timely new arrangement of Kitzke's seminal 1991 antiwar piece, Mad Coyote Madly Sings. Using poems by the Tewa, Allen Ginsberg, and the Lakota, the piece makes a pounding point against all war while also saying no matter how much humans ravage each other on the earth, it will be the earth alone that survives.

The music in Frank Zappa's (1940-1993) Sinister Footwear II appeared in several contexts in his output, including as a part of a three-movement ballet and within the live set of his touring bands in the late 70s. Zappa's music calls for a unique kind of mastery, of rhythmic complexity in a groove-oriented, driving rhythmic context. The taut unison rhythms, overlapping percolating loops, and whammy bar-infused guitar solo in Mike Bitts's 2015 arrangement for NakedEye captures the enthusiasm for eclecticism that characterized Zappa and his cohort.

Frederic Rzewski (1938-2021) is well known as a composer of strong, leftist political convictions. He shatters structuralist convention but calls for social change with powerful use of folk songs, narratives, and politically charged texts. Rzewski's masterpiece Coming Together (1971) was inspired by the 1971 riots at New York's Attica prison and text from a letter written by an inmate, Sam Melville, who was killed in the riots. Less well known is that Melville was originally imprisoned for eight bombings in New York City, reflecting his opposition to the Vietnam War. In 2017, Attica's dark history resurfaced in the news for its leprosy experiments on non-consenting inmates. According to Los Angeles writer John Henken, Coming Together is "a performance masterpiece, very much of its time, but with an enduring moral and musical presence. Its seething anger at the injustices of incarceration has lost none of its power or relevance with time.