It’s hard to find a more fitting act to open Lincoln Center’s annual Midnight Summer Swing series than Nellie McKay. Now, Lincoln Center isn’t new territory for McKay, who appeared in that institution’s Great American Songbook in March 2005, but the interesting development this time around is that she’ll be fronting a band called the Aristocrats, featuring musicians pulled from the Swingin’ Hot Shots. It may look like an idiosyncratic move for a singer-songwriter who usually backs herself on the piano live, but then McKay specializes in odd moves. And even when they don’t quite pan out, the results are never boring. Let’s not shy away from hyperbole here: McKay is possibly the most interesting artist to emerge out of New York in the past decade. read more
In music performance today, one of the hottest presenters around is Wordless Music . If you’re a New Yorker, they seem to be suddenly everywhere, and their concerts have been getting raves from critics from The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York magazine, and Gramophone magazine, as well as attracting audiences that represent the demographic holy grail: twenty-something hipsters. Wordless Music’s self-professed goal is “to demonstrate that the various boundaries and genre distinctions segregating music today—popular and classical; uptown and downtown; high art and low—are an artificial construction in need of dismantling.”
At the moment, they’re doing some of their dismantling at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where at 7 pm. on four Fridays in June, you can hang out with the other cool kids from the class at concerts that are free with pay-as-you-please museum admission. read more
What’s the opposite of a golden age? Whatever it’s called, it’s the age we’re living in when it comes to soundtracks—particularly from Hollywood movies. Trying to find a score that makes for decent home listening shorn of its accompanying images is a daunting task these days. Roughly speaking, your choices are either collections of pop songs (more or less inspired, cf. Juno) or formulaic scores that (1) tend to repeat a couple of themes ad nauseam and (2) are utterly predictable in their arrangements and melodic approaches. An ongoing film series at the Museum of Modern Art, “Jazz Score,” not only puts this dire situation in perspective, but shows us the birth of a specifically American approach to scoring. read more
The word “ethereal” is perhaps the adjective that comes to mind quickest when describing the voice of Maude Maggart, the 32-year-old who is a fast-rising singer of the Great American Songbook. But however you choose to characterize it, it’s the kind of voice that has critics from the New York Times to Time Out New York struggling to convey its particular beauty in words. From April 1 through May, she performs her latest cabaret show, “Speaking of Dreams,” in the Oak Room at the Algonquin.
Maggart’s renditions of 1920s-era songs like “Love for Sale” or “Love Me or Leave Me” uncannily evoke an earlier time, with their melancholy, yearning high notes, laced with a wispy, fast vibrato that makes her voice recognizable in an instant. She takes many standards at slower tempos—even “Happy Days Are Here Again,” recorded on her 2005 CD Look for the Silver Lining, often taken at march-like clip, is taken leisurely, as if from the wistful perspective of someone already looking back on happy days. Posted after the jump, you can hear her singing “Love Me or Leave Me” with John Boswell on piano from Look For The Silver Lining.
Maggart is the granddaughter of Millicent Greene, who performed in George White’s “Scandals” in the 1920s, and she is the daughter of musical theater performers Brandon Maggart and Diane McAfee. Her little sister is the singer/songwriter Fiona Apple. Just before one of her shows at the Oak Room, I spoke with Maggart about why she loves cabaret, her career, and her family.
On how she got started as a cabaret singer: I first heard Andrea Marcovicci when I was 16. My dad took me to the Gardenia [in California]. My life changed. read more
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