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 photographs by Steven Pisano)

If you haven't been following the career of Taylor Mac, you've been missing out on one of the most protean theater artists of our time. Winner of a MacArthur Genius Grant, International Ibsen Award and Pulitzer Prize nomination, Mac achieved wide praise for 2016's tour-de-force “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” not in the least because it was 24 hours long (with short allowances for food, drink, and bathroom breaks). One could fill stadiums with the number of people still kicking themselves for missing that show!

Now, Mac has brought a new opera, “The Hang” to HERE, written with the composer Matt Ray and directed by Niegel Smith. Originally scheduled to be presented as part of the cancelled Prototype Festival of new opera, “The Hang” is not as ambitious in scale as some of Mac's previous work, clocking in at a mere 100 minutes. But, as a celebration of live musical theater in all its bristling, visceral glory—music, lyrics, sets, make-up, and costumes—this “jazz opera" will make you ecstatic to be back in the theater. It is a love letter to the act of creation itself, and to how essential it is that we all “hang” together.

“The Hang” recounts the persecution and ultimate death of the famous Greek philosopher Socrates. But don’t be misled. This is not a classics lesson brought to life (even if knowing something about Aristophanes will elicit snickers from those in the know). What will delight you is the sheer, queer exuberance of this outstanding production.