Joe's Pub Announces Virtual Winter Programming Featuring Carnatic Classical Music, Battle of The Bands Satire and More

Joe's Pub has announced their free digital winter programming from December 8 - January 8, 2021, available on Joe's Pub YouTube or otherwise noted. The virtual performances include Mai Khoi & Pete Drungles: In The Ruins, Roy Nathanson's 5pm Porch Concert: World on Fire, VICHITRA: In Order to Become, Nona Hendryx & Tariq Al-Sabir: YoungArts, Losers Lounge: Battle of the One Hit Wonders, Justin Vivian Bond: Good Morning Midnight, It's Christmas and Alicia Hall Moran: the motown project.

Joe's Pub Winter Programming:

While Joe's Pub is temporarily closed to public access, join us for Joe's Pub Live! - a free series of streamed performances from artists' HQ and our iconic stage in New York City. Facilitating social connectivity during this time of physical distancing, Joe's Pub remains dedicated to supporting performing artists at every stage of their careers through sharing concerts with our audiences each week. Chat with Joe's Pub, your fellow audience members, and the artists themselves via our YouTube channel during the premiere!

Mai Khoi & Pete Drungle: In The Ruins

Premieres December 8 at 8pm ET via Joe's Pub YouTube and The Public Theater Website.

A few months ago, a project was born between two musicians who have never met. Mai Khoi is a Vietnamese pop star turned dissident singer living in NYC. Pete Drungle is a Berlin-based neoclassical free jazz pianist. Connected by nothing but a Zoom call and a life-long devotion to music, these artists searched the depths of each other's souls for shared meaning and beauty. "In the Ruins" is the result of this trans-Atlantic, genre-splicing collaboration.

Mai Khoi is a Vietnamese artist and activist. She rose to stardom in 2010 after winning the Vietnam Television song and album of the year awards. Her new sound is an emotionally-charged fusion of free jazz and ethnic Vietnamese music, with her most political, yet personal, song lyrics ever. Today, she leads efforts to promote freedom of artistic expression in Vietnam for which she was awarded the Vaclav Havel International Prize for Creative Dissent. Her activism has, however, come at a high price. She has had her concerts raided, been evicted from her house, and has been detained and interrogated by the police. Mai Khoi is an artist in residence at SHIM NYC and an Artist Protection Fund fellow.

Pete Drungle is an award-winning composer, pianist, and producer living in New York City. He has made music with Ornette Coleman, Yoko Ono, Les Claypool, The Kronos Quartet, Ronald Shannon Jackson's Decoding Society, The Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Sean Lennon, Craig Harris and many others. As pianist, Drungle is an intrepid, adventurous improviser - possibly best known for his 24-HOUR CONTINUOUS SOLO PIANO IMPROVISATION. Wire magazine's Alan Licht remarked, "...Drungle's epic event pushed well beyond the limits usually imposed by the customary concert timetable; that he was still functioning at a high level of creativity after 23 hours of continuous playing pays new testimony to the improvisational mindset." Pete's music compositions, performances and sound installations have been exhibited at Centre Georges Pompidou (Fr), MoCA (Los Angeles), the Whitney Biennial (NYC), The Cannes Film Festival (Fr), The Serpentine Gallery (UK), Wundergrund Festival (Dk), TransArt Festival (It), Chapter Arts, Wales (UK), Le Confort Moderne (Fr), The Kitchen (NYC), Performa Biennials 07, 09, 11 and 13 (NYC), Merce Cunningham Theatre (NYC), The Warsaw Jazz Festival (Pl), Alterna Jazz Festival (Mx), The United Nations (NYC), and many other music festivals worldwide.

Roy Nathanson's 5pm Porch Concert Ensemble: World of Fire

Premieres December 10 at 5pm ET on Joe's Pub YouTube and The Public Theater Website.

Late March 2020, in a shuttered New York City due to Covid, saxophonist Roy Nathanson took a cue from Italians who sang to the world from their balconies, and he marched out onto his own second-story Brooklyn porch to play "Amazing Grace." He committed to playing one healing song each day, at precisely 5pm. Roy's musician neighbors heard the call and joined him on the Flatbush sidewalk to improvise and share the music together. After an impressive 82 consecutive days of 5pm concerts with an expanding local audience, the musicians turned to creating a learning program for local youth, whose summer camp was cancelled and were unable to do much of anything during the lockdown. Making music together under the supervision of professional musicians revealed a remarkable balm for the Covid blues. The 23-minute film documents the culminating performance of the 5pm Porch Concert Ensemble and their students. "World of Fire" is a pandemic-aware procession that visits a suite of diverse musical and cultural styles on porches, driveways, yards, and sidewalks of Marlborough Road. It is one neighborhood's heartfelt response to a city, a country, and a world that is now so full of Fire.

VICHITRA: In Order to Become

Presented by The Bushwick Starr in collaboration with Joe's Pub & The India Center Foundation. Directed by ​Shayok Misha Chowdhury.
Premieres December 10 at 7pm ET via ​thebushwickstarr.org​ through December 11.

Live talk-backs with the creative team immediately to follow.
FREE​ but guests must register for the showings and talk-backs at ​thebushwickstarr.org.

In Order to Become ​is a queer, multidisciplinary exploration of Carnatic classical music bringing together an impressive ensemble of collaborators from theater, music, visual art, and radio: ​Jeremy S. Bloom (Emmy nominated sound designer for Netflix's "FYRE" and WNYC podcasts ​RadioLab and ​Nancy​)​, ​Roopa Mahadevan (member of the ​Joe's Pub Working Group​, core performer in ​Brooklyn Raga Massive​, and soloist on the Grammy-winning album Calling All Dawns)​, ​Emily Oliveira ​(​The Electrolysis Farewell Tour at Ars Nova, and 2020 NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Craft/Sculpture), ​Kameron Neal (video artist and designer whose work has been featured in ​music videos for Billy Porter and Rufus Wainwright), ​Shiv Subramaniam ​(composer and vocalist in Navatman Music Collective and scholar of Sanskrit literature at Columbia University), ​Rajna Swaminathan ​(mrudangam artist and founder of the critically acclaimed ensemble RAJAS), and ​Sruti Sarathy (​Carnatic violinist/vocalist and Fulbright Scholar).

Nona Hendryx & Tariq Al-Sabir - YoungArts at Joe's Pub Live

Premieres December 15 at 8pm ET via Joe's Pub YouTube and The Public Theater Website.

This performance features the sensational Tariq Al-Sabir an alumus of The National YoungArts Foundation, paired with 2018 Joe's Pub Vanguard Resident Nona Hendryx.

Composer, Vocalist, Music Director and Producer Tariq Al-Sabir has been described as a "boundless talent" by Baltimore's City Hall and The Examiner deemed him "a rising musical mastermind." A performer and writer with a command over many styles including classical, gospel, jazz, pop, and musical theater, his early passion for music was supported by The Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University with a full scholarship for composition lessons that started while he was in middle school and maintained through his high schooling at the Baltimore School for the Arts. In 2006, Tariq's first job was lending his voice as a lead vocalist to the season 4 theme song for HBO's "The Wire."

Nona Hendryx a celebrated vocalist, record producer, songwriter, musician, and author, was an original member of the trio Labelle, whose smash single "Lady Marmalade" is a timeless classic. Her solo singles "Transformation," "I Sweat," "Rock This House," and "Winds of Change" from the 80s and 90's are as well-known as her work as a guest vocalist with legendary acts including Bernie Worrell (Parliament-Funkadelic), Talking Heads, and Peter Gabriel.

Losers Lounge: Battle of the One Hit Wonders

Premieres December 17 at 8pm ET via Joe's Pub YouTube and The Public Theater Website through March 18, 2021.

New York City's favorite down-town musical extravaganza, Joe McGinty and The Loser's Lounge presents the multiple-episode streaming series "The Battle of the One Hit Wonders," featuring hit songs from the 60's, 70's, and beyond! Each episode takes the concept of a "battle of the bands," but instead of "bands" it pits two classic songs by "one hit wonder" artists against each other. During each show's initial stream, YOU, the audience, will decide who wins, by commenting or "voting" for the "one hit wonder" that you love most. Tune in to each episode to find out which two classic "one hit wonder" songs Joe McGinty has selected for your listening pleasure, and as always don't forget to vote!

Justin Vivian Bond: Good Morning Midnight, It's Christmas

Premieres December 20 at 7pm ET via Joe's Pub YouTube and The Public Theater Website.

Joe's Pub and The House of Whimsy Present: Good Morning Midnight, It's Christmas! Starring Justin Vivian Bond, Matt Ray, Nath Ann Carrera and Claudia Chopek.

A Witchy Healing Protocol brought to all solitary practitioners on the Winter Solstice by The House of Whimsy.*

*Side effects may include numbness, apathy, cynical laughter, uncontrollable tears, alienation, anal leakage, anal-retentiveness, Anal and the Night Visitors, delusions of grandeur, gender dysphoria, homicidal thoughts, an uncontrollable urge to masturbate, impulse buying, bread baking, stocking stuffing, excessive consumption of alcohol, petty judgements, petty cash, Tom Petty, weight loss, weight gain, weight lifting, waiting for Godot, may contain traces of peanuts, distrust of government, a tendency to spout platitudes, disassociation, free association, Mrs. Sew and Sew, sew what, social isolation, the sound of one hand clapping, silent screams, resentful applause, the clap, hysterical gonorrhea, relapses, prolapses, ecstatic syntax, satanic possession, a messiah complex, a complex set of issues, two turtle doves, and a partridge in a pear tree.

With an assortment of ritualistic music by The Monkees, Peter Allen, Jimi Hendrix, Dolly Parton, Ricki Lee Jones, Benjamin Smoke, David Bowie, Bing Crosby, Melanie Safka, Christina, and more!

Like all Joe's Pub shows, all ages are welcome, but please be aware that performances may include adult language and topics.

Alicia Hall Moran: the motown project

Presented by Joe's Pub New York Voices Commission and Under The Radar Festival
Premieres January 8 at 8pm ET and on-demand streaming available through January 17th via Joe's Pub YouTube and The Public Theater Website.

Musical traditions yearning for each other across race, class and nation grace Alicia Hall Moran's meditation on the Motown Songbook. the motown project is a cinematic, movement-based aria that fuses Sugar Pie Honey Bunch/Mozart and Marvin Gaye/Purcell.

Executive Produced by Thomas O. Kriegsmann / ArKtype and featuring Thomas Flippin (guitar), Steven Herring (vocals), Barrington Lee (vocals), and Reggie Washington (bass) in collaboration with choreographer Amy Hall Garner, the motown project reimagines Motor City poetics in a study of desire and infatuation only soul and opera embodied by one chanteuse could endure.

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