- Mitsuko Uchida
If you’re sick of hearing about South by Southwest I recommend checking out a flyer lo-fi pop musician Jimmy Whispers made for his headlining show at the Hideout on Friday; he’s calling the show the “Mid by Midwest Interactive Festival,” and Whispers’s artwork pokes fun at the rampant corporate #branding taking over SXSW. I also recommend checking out the show, which, in addition to Whispers, features Yawn, Roommate, Thin Hymns, and special guests Sharkula and Chris Condren.
“Aside from Chicago tenor legend Fred Anderson, no free-jazz musician has had a second act as fruitful as that enjoyed by Poughkeepsie multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee,” writes Peter Margasak. McPhee’s been recording for more than five decades, and he’s been quite prolific since the mid-90s. “On last year’s What / If / They Both Could Fly (Rune Grammofon), a fantastic duo with British saxophonist Evan Parker, their horns sometimes melt together—as though the two men can predict each other’s every turn, jag, and shimmy—and sometimes form fleet contrapuntal architectures. McPhee’s 2013 duo album with ferocious Norwegian drummer Paal Nilssen-Love, Red Sky (PNL), demonstrates their powerful rapport: they move confidently and logically from hushed cymbal patter and gentle tenor cries to carpet-bomb beats and upper-register howls. McPhee performs with another drummer tonight, New York native Milford Graves, and incredibly it’s their first-ever meeting—despite the fact that they’ve both been active in free-jazz circles since the 60s.” Richard Hell and Thurston Moore open, Hell with a reading from his own work (including the 2013 autobiography I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp) and Moore with a live soundtrack to James Nares’s 2011 video Street.
Sun 3/16: Russian Circles at Metro
