The week’s cultural highlights include a global hip-hop collective, an avant-garde jazz quartet, a modern blues icon, sculpture, painting, and more.
Nomadic Massive brings its global hip-hop and dance rhythms to the Hunter Center at MASS MoCA in North Adams on Saturday at 7pm. The Montreal-based group has members who hail from Chile, Haiti, Brazil, France, Argentina, St-Vincent, Barbados, France, and Algeria, and its live show is a multilingual eruption of old school hip-hop with live instrumentation and a deeply global vibe. The eight musicians from seven countries rap in five languages, blending English, French, Spanish, Creole, and Arabic with old-school beats, live instrumentation, and reggae, funk, and Caribbean samples. Finding inspiration in hip-hop traditions of the past and combining them with their signature global attitude, Nomadic Massive represents a new, international frontier of hip-hop. They kind of remind me of the Roots. That’s Nomadic Massive at MASS MoCA, Saturday, at 7pm.
“Waking the Sleeping Giant” is a 1972 work by Herbie Hancock crafted for structured improvisation for solo piano and electronics. The piece will form the basis for “You Can Say That Again!,” an concert of electronic music and jazz by pianist/composer Bob Gluck, avant-garde keyboard and computer composer Neil Rolnick, bassist Christopher Dean Sullivan, and guitarist John Myers, in the Kellogg Music Center at Simon’s Rock College in Great Barrington on Saturday at 8pm.
The Hancock piece was performed in the 1970s by Hancock’s pioneering Mwandishi band, exploring the integration of free yet rhythmically dynamic improvisation within the jazz idiom with electronic sounds. Bob Gluck’s sonic commentary on the original work in 2008 was expanded by Gluck and Rolnick in 2012 to become a quasi-concerto for piano and computer.
Other works to be performed in the adventurous program include “Dynamic RAM & Concert Grand,” a virtuoso romp for piano and laptop computer, composed by Neil Rolnick in 2014.
“Cityscapes,” a group show of urban scenes by a dozen artists, opens at Carrie Haddad Gallery in Hudson today and remains on view through Sunday, March 1. There will be a public reception for the artists on Saturday at 6pm. Painters in the exhibition include Margaret Crenson, Darshan Russell, Arthur Hammer, Robert Goldstrom, Dan Rupe, Joseph Maresca, Bill Sullivan, Patty Neal, Edward Avedisian, and Richard Merkin. The show will also feature unique burned and scorched works on paper by Paul Chojnowski and watercolors by Scott Nelson Foster.
Five-time Grammy Award winner Robert Cray brings his modern blues to the Bardavon in Poughkeepsie on Saturday at 8pm. With five Grammy Awards, 15 nominations, millions of record sales worldwide, and thousands of sold-out performances, blues-rock icon Robert Cray is considered “one of the greatest guitarists of his generation.” Rolling Stone magazine credits Cray with reinventing the blues with his “distinct razor sharp guitar playing” that “introduced a new generation of mainstream rock fans to the language and form of the blues” with the release of his Strong Persuader album in 1986. Since then, Cray has gone on to record sixteen Billboard charting studio albums and has written or performed with everyone from Eric Clapton to Stevie Ray Vaughan, from Bonnie Raitt to John Lee Hooker. Inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2011 at the age of 57, he is one of the youngest living legends to receive the prestigious honor.
Seth Rogovoy is editor of Berkishire Daily and the Rogovoy Report, available online at rogovoyreport.com