MUSIC
FRIDAY & SATURDAY, MAY 4 & 5, 2019 (continuing on MAY 11)
8:00 PM

Look & Listen Festival
FRIDAY:  BRIC House
647 Fulton Street, Fort Greene, Brooklyn
SATURDAY:  Areté Venue & Gallery
67 West Street #103, Greenpoint, Brooklyn

Free (with R.S.V.P.)
http://www.lookandlisten.org/festival/2019-festival/

This annual festival presents New Music alongside complimentary visual art works.  And I have to say, based on music alone, this year's is one of the most appealing line-ups they've yet come up with.  Putting aside the themes of the several shows, Friday night's, at BRIC House, includes cellist Seth Parker Woods playing, among other composers, Nathalie Joaquim (who makes eloquent use of field recordings from her native Haiti) and the great George Lewis (who shows that the border between contemporary jazz and contemporary classical is illusory); the noise/chamber TAK Ensemble playingNatacha Diels (who never met a sound she couldn't make something of) and Doug Bailliet (baroque-inflected, rap-inflected, indie-pop-inflected, I-care-if-you-listen music); and Angélica Negrón (madcap electronic tropical contemporary classical).  Saturday's amazingly compelling show has a set by Majel Connery, who doesn't care that you can't tell if she's singing New Opera or avant-pop; the exciting voice-and-winds quartet loadbang; and the fabulous, meaty neo-gutbucket jazz saxophonist Darius Jones playing duets with the ethereal out-of-India vocalist Amirtha Kidambi.

MAKE A NIGHT OF IT:  The BRIC House pairs well with The Rockwell Place, a new cocktail bar with an excellent pedigree.  For Areté, I'm going to continue to push Cherry Point, which looks like a bar but serves amazingly well-prepared English-inflected meat dishes.