Arts for Art, a long-standing nonprofit organization located on the Lower East Side, is known for its vast music programs (festivals and panels). In other words, they are one of the few who promote musicians whose creativity soars beyond the stars into that far-away Land of Oo-Bla-Dee, the altar of avant gardism.
Their Artist Series Thursdays at 62 Avenue C continues on March 21 when Devin Brahia Waldman curates NuBlu Classic. The multi-instrumentalist’s bio indicates it will be a most intriguing evening. The native New Yorker, who leads the group BRAHJA, is the co-founding member of such diverse configurations as Radical Reversal, Diva of Deva Loka, and Notable Deaths. He is also a member of Heroes Are Gang Leaders (led by poet Thomas Sayers Ellis and saxophonist James Brandon Lewis).
The evening begins at 7 p.m. with Yale scholar, mbira player, and advocate of African culture Kevin Nathaniel Hylton. He will perform solo percussion. Other performers will include Lexiglass: pianist Alexis Marcelo and drummer Will Glass.
Marcelo’s sound is embedded in the creative and forward-thinking traditions of African American music. He began his studies at the Harlem School of the Arts, where he studied classical piano, music theory, and ear training.
Tickets are $15 (Pay-what-you-can at door). For a complete schedule, visit the website: artsforart.org.
Another Lower East Side organization featuring boundless music is FourOneOne, which is committed to providing an equitable and open space for New York’s many audiences to engage with multiplicity and alternative approaches to time and space. They support historically aware and rooted performance practices that blur the dominant esthetic and social categories that marginalize communities and their creative lives.
The cornetist and composer Graham Haynes is FourOneOne’s Artist in Residence now through April 15. Haynes’s residency will be the second in its new series of artists in residence. The project will highlight his voyages and their artistic consequences, from his 1980s co-founding of the seminal M-Base Collective; collaborations with performers in African, Arabic, and South Asian idioms; 1990s albums of soundscapes largely drawn from Paris’s immigrant populations; work with New York’s drum’n’bass DJs and the turntables and digital samplers of the 1990s hip-hop scene; releases like 2000’s BPM, a marriage of drum’n’bass and opera; and, starting in the 2010s, densely layered chamber works, including the upcoming “Requiem for Young Black Men Assassinated by Police in America,” an evening-length performance for a 40‐voice chorus and orchestra, with an English text by Carrie Mae Weems.
Haynes, the composer, bandleader, and musician currently based in Bahia, Brazil, expands and confounds what we understand as jazz and electronic music. The project will span performances, listening parties, public conversations, and master classes with Robin D. G. Kelley, Adam Rudolph and Maalem Hassan Hakmoun, Nublu Orchestra, Shakoor Hakeem and Lucie Vítková, Momenta Quartet, and others.
On March 27, welcome an evening with Vijay Iyer and Graham Haynes at Blank Forms (468 Grand Ave #3d).
March 28 features Momenta Quartet: Graham Haynes’s String Quartet No. 1 at Greenwich House Recital Hall (46 Barrow Street).
For a complete schedule, visit www.fouroneoneprojects.org
Melvis Santa & Jazz Orishas will close the Women’s Jazz Festival series at the Schomburg Center on March 25. The singer, composer, pianist, and Afro-Cuban dancer will celebrate women’s legacy in Afro-Cuban and Jazz traditions. The band will perform Santa’s original compositions and reimagined jazz classics infused with the sounds of Cuba and the diasporic music of today. There will also be a special appearance from the ACVT Community Choir.
Santa just returned from an engagement at the Blue Note franchise in Milan. After that gig, she was off to play with saxophonist Kenny Garrett (she is a regular band member). She has performed at venues such as the Birdland jazz club, Zinc Bar, Jazz Gallery and Bronx Museum with her two musical projects Melvis Santa & Ashedi, which explores the connections between her Afro-Cuban–rooted musical traditions, bolero, and jazz influences; and Ellas-Son, an all-female ensemble formed by multi-instrumentalist and talented musicians honoring Women in Cuban Popular Music.
For times and tickets, visit nypl.org/Schomburg.
Rome Neal, the producer, director, vocalist, and actor, presents his three-decade Banana Puddin’ Jazz Production on March 25 at Theater for the New City (155 First Avenue at 10th Street). Lady Jazz Thespians will feature vocalists Ria Alexander, “Lady Leah” Fennie, Allison Semmes, and Tracy Titus with musicians pianist Mamiko Watanabe, bassist Melissa Slocum, and drummer Wen-Ting Wu. An open-mike jam session to follow.
For tickets, visit https://ci.ovationtix.com/35441/production/1195296.
At 7:30 p.m. on March 29–30, Harlem Stage presents composer, trumpeter, and bandleader Ambrose Akinmusire in “banyan seed,” a multi-part suite that incorporates interviews with jazz elders who share their ideas, knowledge, history, and community with younger musicians, and connects audiences to the living stories of jazz.
He will be joined by alto saxophonist Cosmo Lieberman, guitarist Emmanuel Michael, pianist Estaban Castro (piano), bassist Jeremiah Edwards, and drummer Timothy Angulo.
For tickets, go to harlemstage.org.
Camila Meza is musically inspired by jazz guitarists like George Benson and Pat Metheny, as well as influenced by South American music and folk. She first studied with Jorge Vidal and Jorge Díaz. Increasingly oriented to Claudia Acuña from the mid-2000s, she worked on the jazz scene of her hometown, where her first recording, “Giovanni Cultrera, Espinoza y Cia” (Navidad en Jazz), was released in 2005. In 2007, she presented her debut album “Skylark” (Stateside).
Meza will appear in two separate configurations, implementing her jazz interpretations with roots of her native Chile to the Jazz Gallery on March 22-23. She opens with the Camile Meza Portal and on March 23, she appears with the Nectar Orchestra. Two shows each night at 7:30 p.m. and 9:30 p.m.
For reservations and schedule, visit jazzgallery.org.