Mar

03

The Purple Mutha: A Night of the Music of Prince, a fundraiser for Motherlodge Live Arts Exchanges The Purple Mutha: A Night of the Music of Prince, a fundraiser for Motherlodge Live Arts Exchanges

with Corn Mo and .357 Lover, Lady Rizo, Sam Cohen, David Nagler, Michael Shannon, Balthrop Alabama, Xavier, Dawn Landes & many more

Mon March 3rd, 2014

10:30PM

Main Space

Minimum Age: 18+

Doors Open: 10:00PM

Show Time: 10:30PM

Event Ticket: $12

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free for members
event description event description

On Monday March 3, 2014, the Motherlodge Live Arts Exchange, which produces music and theater collaborations between New York City and Louisville, KY, throws its annual New York fundraiser to support 2014 programming. The show will feature downtown performers and Brooklyn rockers collaborating on a night of music and performance.
 
Following last year’s sold-out Fleetwood Mac Orgy, this year’s Purple Mutha show will be a night of covers and celebration of music by Prince and Prince and the Revolution.
 
The Purple Mutha features performances by Corn Mo, Balthrop Alabama, Lady Rizo, Michael Shannon, Sam Cohen, David Nagler, Thomas Bartlett, Hannah Cohen, Elysian Fields, Shy Hunters, Erin Hill And Her Psychedelic Harp, Oren Bloedow, Annie Nero, Tiffani Barbour, Mesiko, Jon Natchez, Michael Arthur, Ray Sapirstien, Chris Buckridge, Jason Lawrence, Paul Loren, Brian Vinson, Xavier, Don Piper, Dawn Landes and more!
 
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TABLE SEATING POLICY
Table seating for all seated shows is reserved exclusively for ticket holders who purchase “Table Seating” tickets. By purchasing a “Table Seating” ticket you agree to also purchase a minimum of two food and/or beverage items per person. Table seating is first come, first seated. Please arrive early for the best choice of available seats. Seating begins when doors open. Tables are communal so you may be seated with other patrons. We do not take table reservations.
 
A standing room area is available by the bar for all guests who purchase “Standing Room” tickets. Food and beverage can be purchased at the bar but there is no minimum purchase required in this area.
 
All tickets sales are final. No refund or credits.

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The Purple Mutha: A Night of the Music of Prince, a fundraiser for Motherlodge Live Arts Exchanges

Since 2009, Motherlodge has been mixing creative communities together under one roof and presenting Live Arts Exchanges that combine diverse performance mediums, including music, theater, visual arts, storytelling, film, and culinary arts. Each Motherlodge program centers around the organization’s mission to provide growth for and encourage cross-disciplinary collaborations with artists, venues, community organizations, and individuals.
 
Motherlodge Live Arts Exchanges are produced in both Louisville and New York City. Events are designed with an inclusive open door policy with the aim of better engaging artists in both communities. Each spring in Louisville, KY, Motherlodge offers a one-week workshop environment called Spring Motherlodge to develop new stage work, premiering the results during a program at the week’s end that includes music, live performances, a long table discussion, and opportunities for visiting artists to meet the local community and explore it’s environs. The timing of Spring Motherlodge intentionally coincides with The Humana Festival Of New American Plays.
 
Every new year of Motherlodge is a fresh start creatively and on the balance sheet, shaped by the core group of performers, musicians and live arts lovers who have a taste for getting their hands dirty and creating on the fly. This laissez-faire approach helps facilitate a broad and open artistic dialogue that greatly contributes to the economic and artistic output of the Motherlodge program. Motherlodge independently raises funds to cover performance production costs; participating artists receive 80% of all ticket proceeds. Motherlodge operates through the support of fiscal sponsorship provided by Fractured Atlas, which allows it to accept tax deductible contributions.
 
Motherlodge has presented performances by David Amram, Penny Arcade, Balthrop Alabama, Bonnie Prince Billy, Michael Cerveris, Conni’s Avant Garde Restaurant, Corn Mo, Jim James, LePetomane, Liberation Prophecy, The Lisps, The Louisville Leopard Percussionists, Taylor Mac, Uncle Monk, Adam Rapp, Lady Rizo, Michael Shannon, The Slow Charleston, and Una Mimnagh. Past Motherlodge collaborators include The Salvation Army, The Ernest Becker Foundation, Judson Church, and over 20 venues between including The Rudyard Kipling and Actor’s Theatre of Louisville in Louisville, Summit City in Whitesburg, KY; as well as the Barrow Street Theatre, Bushwick Starr, Cherry Lane Theatre, Joe’s Pub, City Winery, Goodbye Blue Monday, and Rattlestick Theater in New York. Plays created and/or workshopped at Motherlodge have been produced in New York City, ART, and San Francisco.

Corn Mo and .357 Lover

You’d be forgiven for thinking CORN MO & .357 LOVER were a novelty act, what with their songs about wrestling gods and Gary Busey. But behind the mutton-chops and flashy suitcoats is an infectious performer with a lung-busting vocal style who has worked with the best in the business.

Lady Rizo

Though it is rumored that she is the product of a night of unrestrained indulgence between Peggy Lee, Mel Brooks, Nina Simone, Dean Martin and Janis Joplin the truth is Lady Rizo was raised by theatrical gypsies with the highest show business ethics. When she almost looked of age she rebelled against the comforting, unscrubbed, rustic life and set out for a world of harsh metropolitan sophisticates.
 
The ‘Cabaret Superstar’ (New York Magazine), comedienne and chanteuse revives the genre by creating vintage arrangements & theatrical explorations of pop songs from every decade. Lady Rizo (nee Amelia Zirin-Brown) co-created the cult caburlesque spectacular Lady Rizo & the Assettes in 2005.
 
In January 2010 she won her first Grammy on a duet with acclaimed cellist Yo-Yo Ma that was released on a Holiday album featuring Diana Krall, James Taylor and Alison Krauss among others. She also sings and records with multi-platnum recording artist Moby and was nominated for an MVPA for the choreography the video for the single New York, New York featuring Debbie Harry.
 
She is the Mistress of Ceremonies for current hotspot The Darby, a decadent modern supperclub in the West Village. In the same location as the legendary nightclub Nell’s, she performs her pop arrangements there nightly to entertain music luminaries like Prince, Ashford and Simpson, Beyonce & Jay-Z.
 
A proud recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in 2010, she has performed her sold out show monthly at Joe’s Pub since 2009 and has been commissioned for a full length piece by the Public Theater that will premiere as part of the New York Voices series in November 2011.

Sam Cohen

Sam Cohen on Facebook | Sam Cohen on Twitter | Sam Cohen on Instagram

Sam Cohen’s second solo LP, ​The Future’s Still Ringing In My Ears​, just might be a magical thing. An album blessed equally with melody, melancholy and depth. A richly psychedelic listening experience, immaculately produced, often the work of one man toiling away alone in his studio but sounding like a cast of many, chasing his dreams late into the night. A collection of songs that take stock of a maddening present and a potentially dark future, but delivered with heart, warmth and wit.

It’s also an album that might never have happened.

Backtrack to 2015. Cohen had just completed work on his first solo album, ​Cool It, after spending his 20s with psychedelic rockers Apollo Sunshine, then taking flight as Yellowbirds, a bedroom project that somehow ended up as a real, live band.

In tandem with Yellowbirds, Cohen began nurturing a career as a producer (Kevin Morby, Benjamin Booker, Curtis Harding and others), thanks in large part to the production on his two Yellowbirds albums. With the growing demands of producing, coupled with the impending birth of his first child (he has two kids now), Cohen reluctantly disbanded Yellowbirds to streamline the completion of ​Cool It. While the album won a cult of loyal fans following its 2015 release, Cohen says, “Commercially, the album didn’t connect as I had hoped, and I might have been content, at that point, to have just decided, ‘Well, that was my final album as an ‘artist,’ I’ll just concentrate on collaborating as a producer now.’ The vanity of laboring to promote myself started to take a back seat to other ways of doing what I love, and it became a welcome path of less resistance.”

Fortunately for Cohen, however, one of ​Cool It’​s most loyal cultists was Brian Burton, better known as Grammy-winning producer, songwriter and musician Danger Mouse – and he didn’t want to see Cohen stop releasing music of his own.

“Brian got in touch, and was, like, ‘No man, you need to continue doing this’,” says Cohen. Burton signed Cohen to his 30th Century Records label, reissued ​Cool It,​ and gave Cohen the boost of confidence he needed to return to writing and recording his own material, setting the album that would become ​The Future’s Still Ringing In My Ears​ in motion.

“Brian really helped me get motivated to make this record,” says Cohen. “His support pushed me to get started, and to value myself as an artist. It came at a time when I needed to hear that from someone.”

Danger Mouse’s divine intervention was just the latest twist in a career that began on a school playground in Houston, TX, when, aged 12, he and his friends decided to start their own group, fashioned after the biggest band on the planet at that time: Guns N’Roses. “When I picked up the guitar,” he remembers, “I was like, Oh, I get this. I could definitely do this for the rest of my life.”

Six years later, after moving to Boston to study music, he formed Apollo Sunshine with fellow students Jeremy Black and Jesse Gallagher. “I’m glad I spent my 20s as a rock’n’roll monk,” he laughs. “We happily gave up everything for that band: we didn’t have apartments for a long time, we kept the van running on vegetable oil…sort of running! Jesse and Jeremy are still like my brothers, and that band formed my ethos, which is still very DIY. Do more with less.”

It’s an ethos still in play on ​The Future’s Still Ringing In My Ears​. The album’s roots were far from grandiose, beginning during a session where Cohen was expecting to help Burton work on another artist’s material. When the session fell through, Burton suggested they spend the studio time on some of Cohen’s own material. “I hadn’t written a song since ​Cool It,” remembers Cohen, “so Brian said, ‘Okay, let’s write something now.’” The first track they cut was “Lose Your Illusion,” released as his first single on 30th Century Records. Then they cut a bass and drums loop with the Strokes’ Fab Moretti, which Cohen took home to work on, later building it up into the album’s stately opener “I Can’t Lose.”

This session kick started Cohen’s work on the new album. “I obsess over certain details of my music, but then I let other stuff totally go,” he says. “I record really fast and crazy, I leave little errors and flubs, but I’m always tweaking the sounds, and especially the lyrics.” The fruits of this approach blossom across the album, in its mixture of handmade and homespun with artful exactitude.

Recording at his own studio gave Cohen the luxury to record in haste and sculpt at leisure. “This record was very much built in the cracks between helping other people make their albums,” he reflects, but the slow gestation has yielded something remarkable, Cohen reveling in his dual roles as artist and producer.

“When I’m producing, it’s mostly about the sound and arrangements, and I get ​really excited about those elements” he says. “But I also really love helping out when an artist is stumped on lyrics because they start talking about what the songs mean to them. All these ideas and images pour out, and it’s always better than what was on the page. I’ll tell them ‘say that!’. It’s made me more direct in my own writing.”

The words within ​The Future’s Still Ringing In My Ears are certainly direct, though hardly upbeat. “I’ve been writing about climate change and the decline of the west for a long time, and those issues have amplified to sort of a fever pitch. It’s on a lot people’s minds.”

The title itself is a statement on Cohen’s own state of mind. “It’s just always reverberating in my head,” he says. “What is our future? Is there a future?”

Becoming a parent put a fine point on his worldview. “For years I was like, ‘Alright, humans are killing the Earth — we had a good run, but…party’s over, guys!’” he laughs. “It pains me more now. You can’t protect your kids from what’s to come.

“The only way to go on is to laugh at it a little, because the weight of it and the profundity of the problems can destroy you. What I want for this music is to connect with people struggling with these same thoughts and feelings. I want people to hear this and say, yes, this is all really heavy, and I also feel helpless, and we don’t have any good answers…but we have each other. And this music sounds really good! It’s all I can offer.”

Consider ​The Future’s Still Ringing In My Ears as a respite, then, a chance to laugh at the absurdity of it all, to revel in all the unlikely beauty that still surfaces amid the chaos and meaninglessness, a soundtrack to the apocalypse you’ll struggle not to whistle along to.

It’s an album Sam Cohen almost never made. You’ll be glad he did.

 

David Nagler

David Nagler helps lead the band Nova Social with Thom Soriono. The duo recruited many talented performers to help complete the album: avant-garde guitarist and arranger David First, alt-country luminaries Deanna Varagona (Lambchop) and Michael Daly (Whiskeytown), and the modern classical ensemble the Flux String Quartet. The final result, The Jefferson Fracture was a far more diverse and accomplished affair than their previous EP, revealing Nagler to be a gifted and fearless songwriter and Soriano to be a master of odd sounds and quirky arrangements. Both musicians had a hand in stirring up the pot in N.Y.C.’s music scene: they have hosted and curated Nova Nights, an eclectic evening of music that took place in a comfy, couch-filled basement called the Den of Cin, normally a screening house for independent films. A bevy of artists from a multitude of genres (avant-garde jazz, spoken word, acoustic pop, experimental rock) appeared throughout the year.

Michael Shannon

Balthrop Alabama


Dawn Landes

Dawn Landes is a Kentucky born singer-songwriter now living in Brooklyn, NY. Her songs have been featured in commercials, popular films and TV shows (The Good Wife, House, Gossip Girl). Landes tours internationally and has shared the stage with Ray LaMontagne, Bryan Ferry and Suzanne Vega. She has also performed with The Boston Pops, NYC Ballet and recently at TED. Her album “Bluebird” won the 2015 IMA award for Folk/Singer-Songwriter Album of the Year and features guest appearances by Norah Jones and others.
 
In 2015 Landes toured in Sufjan Steven’s band and was a featured artist in Lincoln Center’s American Songbook Series. She is currently at work on “ROW” a new musical under commission from NY Voices and Joe’s Pub/The Public Theater. “ROW” tells the story of Tori Murden McClure’s quest to become the first woman to row across the Atlantic Ocean in 1999.
 
Her latest release, the EP Desert Songs is a collaboration with British songwriter Piers Faccini.
Out Jan 15, 2016 (Six Degrees/ Beating Drum).
 
Thomas Bartlett, piano
Tony Scherr , bass
Ray Rizzo, drums
 
Dawn Landes official site
Dawn Landes on Facebook
Dawn Landes on Twitter
Dawn Landes on Youtube
Dawn Landes on Instagram

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