Whether it's the annual Marathon or the summertime Loud Weekend up in the Berkshires, Bang on a Can has mastered the art of wall-to-wall music presentation over the past 35 years. This week, they are expanding to a full weekend of shows with the first annual Long Play Festival, sited at venues in and around downtown Brooklyn. According to BOAC founders Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe:

"There has never been a time when music contained so much innovation and diversity, so much audacity and so much courage. And we want to show you all of it...It’s a lot of music!”

The festival, which was originally supposed to be held in 2020 but postponed due to COVID-19, is serving up more than 60 shows across a wide range of genres, including jazz, electronic, world and new/experimental music. Highlights include Matmos performing Robert Ashley's Perfect Lives, the Bang on a Can All Stars performing Terry Riley's In C and Brian Eno's Music for Airports, the Vijay Iyer Trio, Moroccan Sufi Blues masters Innov Gwana, and an epic closing night presentation of Ornette Coleman's seminal 1959 album The Shape of Jazz to Come, with Jason Moran, Wallace Roney, Jr, James "Blood" Ulmer, and Coleman's own son Denardo, among others.

Most of the venues are within a reasonable walking distance of each other (BAM, the Mark Morris Dance Center, Roulette), while others will require a bit of a hoof (Littlefield, Public Records.) Masks and proof of vaccination required.

Passes for individual days and the full weekend are available here. More info on participating artists and composers here. And below, you can find the festival map, along with my own schedule grid, broken out by day. (You're welcome. :))

Friday, 2/11

Ethan Iverson at Roulette, 8pm

Ever since leaving The Bad Plus, the rock-jazz trio he co-founded in 2000, pianist Ethan Iverson has flourished as a solo artist while also branching out into composition.  This double bill features Iverson wearing both of his hats: on the first half, The New England Conservatory Jazz Orchestra performs Ritornello, Sinfonias, and Cadenzas: a 45 minute through-composed work premiered in Italy last summer. Then, Iverson plays selections from his just-released album Every Note is True (Blue Note) with an all-star trio featuring bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Nasheet Waits.

New York Philharmonic with Yuja Wang at Alice Tully Hall, 8pm

The always captivating (and occasionally cringe-inducing) pianist Yuja Wang returns to the Phil to perform Franz Liszt’s explosive First Piano Concerto, part of an Eastern European program led by the young Czech conductor Jakub Hrůša that also includes Zoltan Kodály’s colorful Concerto for Orchestra and Bohuslav Martinů’s richly textured First Symphony (Repeats on Saturday).

Saturday, 2/12

Tristan Perich, Lesley Flanigan and Christopher Tignor at National Sawdust, 7:30pm

Very excited to see these three electroacoustic mavens, who haven't performed in NYC in more than two years. Tristan continues his exploration of 1-bit music with "Tone Patterns," (see above) featuring cascading harmonies of 1-bit tones generated by his own custom-built hardware. Lesley will perform "Subtonalities," featuring two sine-wave oscillators generating low-frequency tones that she'll combine with pitches from her own voice. And Christopher debuts new music for violin and percussion, along with his custom-built interactive live processing platform.

Flying Lotus at Carnegie Hall, 8pm

Part of Carnegie's ongoing (and somewhat curious) Afrofuturism festival, Grammy Award–winning producer, composer, and rapper Flying Lotus takes over the Stern Auditorium with a performance that promises "a transportive electroacoustic musical blend in Carnegie Hall’s unrivaled acoustics." Should be...different.

Sunday 2/13

No live music, but I (like most of America) will be watching the Super Bowl Halftime Show, which features hip hop for the very first time. Not exactly cutting edge - nothing the NFL does is - the show features a billionaire (Dr. Dre), a beer salesman (Snoop Dogg), a shill for the Home Shopping Network (Mary J. Blige), and a white kid from Detroit (Eminem). Fortunately, someone had the presence of mind to include the brilliant lyricist Kendrick Lamar, though I doubt he'll get as much airtime as his elders. Should start around 8pm.

by Steven Pisano

(All photos by Steven Pisano)

The beach season may be winding down along the area's shorelines, but at the Brooklyn Academy of Music it is just starting. After 18 months of its theaters being darkened by the pandemic, BAM opened its 2021-2022 season last week with "Sun & Sea," which has the unique distinction of being the first opera set entirely on a beach. (Unless you count Einstein on the Beach.)

To create that beach, workers unloaded 25 tons of sand into the Fishman Space. (After the show's run, the sand will be cleaned and reused.) This is where the performers sprawl out on their blankets and beach chairs, surrounded by food containers and toys and lots of beach stuff, singing softly and sometimes blandly to a gently melodic electronic score. At first, it almost seems innocuous, but a closer listen reveals a more ominous message. 

In 2019, "Sun & Sea" won the Golden Lion award at the Venice Biennale--the festival's top prize. (See here for a video from that production.) The work was created by three young Lithuanian artists--director Rugile Barzdziukaite, librettist Vaiva Grainyte, and composer Lina Lapelyte.