Soundcheck

Hear favorite live performances from the WNYC studios this year including Mexico City-based cellist, producer, and singer Mabe Fratti; Norwegian punk cabaret sextet Kaizers Orchestra; and an intimate piano and a microphone version of the title track, "Lemons, Limes, and Orchids", from the latest record of the same name by Joan As Police Woman. Plus, Sinkane, aka Ahmed Gallab, the bandleader and songwriter who weaves the sounds of Afrobeat, disco, funk, and soul into his music for community and for shaking it; and the Brazilian pianist and composer Amaro Freitas plays the insides and outsides of our piano.

Playlist

ARTIST: Kaizers Orchestra WORK: Bøn Fra Helvete [1:01] RECORDING: Live on Soundcheck, Oct. 2024 SOURCE:  This performance not commercially available. The song appears on the album, Ompa til du dør INFO:  https://kaizers.no/

ARTIST: Sinkane WORK: How Sweet Is Your Love [5:30] RECORDING:  Live on Soundcheck, January 2024 SOURCE: This performance not commercially available.  INFO:  https://www.sinkane.com/

ARTIST: Kaizers Orchestra WORK: Bøn Fra Helvete [1:01] RECORDING: Live on Soundcheck, Oct. 2024 SOURCE:  This performance not commercially available. The song appears on the album, Ompa til du dør  INFO:  https://kaizers.no/

ARTIST: Mabe Fratti WORK: Kravitz  [2:54] RECORDING: Live on Soundcheck, Sept. 2024 SOURCE: This performance not commercially available.  INFO:  https://tinangelrecords.bandcamp.com/album/sentir-que-no-sabes

ARTIST: Amaro Freitas WORK: Danca do Martelos [9:48] RECORDING: Live on Soundcheck, Oct. 2024 SOURCE: This performance is not commercially available. INFO: https://amarofreitas.com/

ARTIST: Joan as Police Woman WORK:  Lemons, Limes, and Orchids [5:55] RECORDING: Live on Soundcheck, Sept. 2024 SOURCE: This performance not commercially available.  INFO: https://www.joanaspolicewoman.com/

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New York-based drummer and educator Matt Wilson has performed with and/or played on many recordings by other musicians - Joe Lovano, John Scofield, Charlie Haden, Lee Konitz, among others - and leads ensembles of his own, but at this time of year, the thing he might be best known for is his Christmas Tree-O. And yes, he went there – putting a pun right in the band’s name. The trio, featuring multi-reed player Jeff Lederer and bassist Paul Sikivie, takes holiday tunes as a whimsical jumping off point for a variety of jazz styles, from swing to free improv. They have a new album called Tree Jazz – The Shape Of Christmas To Come, and they’re here to play their gleeful, irreverent, and sometimes nerdy takes on music of the season, in-studio.

Set list: 1. Up on the Rooftop 2. Good King Wenceslas 3. Shine Your Light

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The band yMusic formed as a contemporary classical chamber music ensemble, but you’re more likely to have heard them playing with people like Paul Simon, Bruce Hornsby, Emily King, and John Legend. They’re also the sextet of choice for classical composers like Caroline Shaw and Missy Mazzoli. For 16 years they’ve been gleefully obscuring the line between classical and popular music, and their latest collaboration with choreographer Kyle Abraham, the new multimedia piece called “Dear Lord Make Me Beautiful” saw the group writing and performing their own music. They play some of these originals, in-studio. 

Set list: 1.Running 2. Mystique 3. Zebras

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Samora Pinderhughes is a singer, composer, filmmaker, and producer who has worked regularly with the rapper Common and scored several award-winning documentaries. His own works includes The Healing Project, a 10-year exploration of the prison system and the racism and violence that feeds it, which led to his official solo debut album Grief in 2022; and a new record, 8 years in the making, about love, grief, depression and forgiveness, called Venus Smiles Not In The House Of Tears. Pinderhughes was the first-ever Art for Justice + Soros Justice Fellow, is getting his Ph.D. at Harvard University, and is shaping new worlds through his art, his honesty, and his vulnerability. Samora Pinderhughes is at our piano with a small ensemble, to play tender and reflective songs from his latest, in-studio.

Set list: 1. Forgive Yourself / Gatsby 2. WCID 3. Drown

Venus Smiles Not in the House of Tears by Samora Pinderhughes

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Nour Harkati is a Tunisian musician and songwriter, now based here in New York City. His new album, Moulena, has just come out and it represents Harkati’s musical journey from North Africa to the US, featuring rhythms and instruments from traditional North African music blended with elements of Western pop and rock. The ancient Guembri used in trance music, combines with the gritty and modern sounds of guitar, electronics and drums, as Harkati and his band play in-studio.

Set list: 1. Rahmen 2. Sidi 3. DWE

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Guitarist Jeff Parker is probably best known for his work in the Chicago-based post rock band Tortoise, but he’s had a prolific career as a soloist and a sideman. In the past few years he’s been leading his ETA IVtet, an all-star group of musicians (saxophonist Josh Johnson, bassist Anna Butterss, and drummer Jay Bellerose) -  on the L.A. experimental music scene. Together, they create transcendent, long-form journeys into innovative, often uncharted territories of groove-oriented, painterly, polyrhythmic, minimalist and mantric improvised music (Bandcamp liner notes). The Jeff Parker ETA IVtet plays in-studio.

Set list: 1. Improvisation 2. Improvisation on Freakadelic

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Pom Pom Squad is the band led by singer and guitarist Mia Berrin; their debut album, Death of a Cheerleader, offered a gimlet-eyed, often ironic view of pop culture through a queer lens. Now Pom Pom Squad has released its sophomore LP called Mirror Starts Moving Without Me, full of punk attitude and blazing guitars, but also moments of intense vulnerability and reflection. The band plays in-studio. 

Set list: 1. Downhill 2. Messages 3. Everybody's Moving On

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Grammy and Mercury Nominated and Brit award-winning songwriter Laura Marling has mapped out new musical territories, including chamber pop and electronics. Her latest record, Patterns in Repeat was written following the birth of her daughter in 2023 and contains lovely songs crafted with propulsive riffs in motion, augmented by string arrangements. The album itself is an intimate affair, recorded at home, often with Marling’s daughter in the room, and the songs look at how generations interact with each other, passing on old memories and making new ones. There are protective vows to a child, as well as reflections on “a transition between one way of being to another”. Laura Marling plays some of these new songs, solo, in-studio.

Set list: 1. Patterns 2. Caroline 3. No One's Gonna Love You Like I Can

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Mulitple Grammy winning singer, songwriter and producer Rodney Crowell was one of the founders of the style that’s come to be known as alternative country. His career has been marked by notable collaborations, like the one with Emmylou Harris that brought Rodney to our ground floor performance venue The Green Space back in 2013. Now Rodney is back, with a new album called Close Ties, and it features collaborators like Sheryl Crow, and Rosanne Cash and John Paul White. The new album draws on folk, blues, rock’n’roll, and, yes, alt country, but mostly it draws on Crowell’s own deep well of stories and characters, whether fictional or not.  

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Jontavious Willis is a blues singer and guitarist from west Georgia, hence the title of his recent album, West Georgia Blues. He’s not even 30, but Willis has an old soul – he loves the blues musicians from the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, and when he writes his own songs they come from deep roots -and might easily be mistaken for music that could be nearly a century old. He has a soul singer’s croon, and an effortless sense of swing to his guitar playing; oh – and the wicked tunings and his slide playing! He has what legendary bluesman Taj Mahal thinks is “a great new voice of the 21st Century in the acoustic blues”. Jontavious Willis plays some of his recent songs, in-studio.

Set list: 1. Keep Your Worries On The Dance Floor 2. Ghost Woman 3. Time Brings About a Change

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