9/25/14-NYC: Antibalas performs the music of John Lurie

We're participating in an event called "Strange and Beautiful" celebrating the musician/actor/painter John Lurie.  It goes down in New York on 9/25 at Le Poisson Rouge. Don't know who John Lurie is? Read up HERE.

Since the early 1980s, Lurie has been a major force and inspiration in avant garde jazz, particularly in downtown New York, and has collected and composed for some of the wildest, most talented musicians New York has seen. You may have seen him in any number of films by Jim Jarmusch, or as host of the popular TV series "Fishing With John."

For the past dozen years or so, he has been focusing on painting which has revealed another aspect of his creative brilliance.

At Le Poisson Rouge, we'll be performing a selection of Lurie's compositions for the Lounge Lizards which intersect in various ways with our own music. We haven't done something quite like this before, so expect some beautiful surprises.

We'll be with the group Hellbent, which features several esteemed Lurie veterans including Steven Bernstein, Michael Blake, Calvin Weston, and Marcus Rojas.

The show is part of a week-long, four-show celebration of Lurie and his work. FESTIVAL info -> http://bit.ly/LURIEFEST

Summer 2014: Daptone Super Soul Revue, Arcade Fire

Thanks for stopping by and please pardon the radio silence...we've been busy. This summer has been another whirlwind. Nine countries and tens of thousands of miles later, there is a spare write a blog entry.

We performed live at the Primavera Festival in Barcelona, Summer Jazz in Leiden (NL), and two shows at Le Zenith with Arcade Fire.

Then we flew back to the US and played two shows at Mountain Jam in New York.

Then we flew to Rome, and did a show there with Arcade Fire. Then we got on a shuttle, a subway a train and a bus, and went to Verona, where we played in a castle, also with Arcade Fire. Then we woke up, flew to London, and met up with the 18 other musicians from the Daptone Super Soul Revue.

We had a long day of rehearsal, then played the next night at the Shepherd's Bush Empire. From there Glastonbury and a whole bunch of other festivals, zigzagging across Europe in a caravan of three buses and a production truck with Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, Charles Bradley and the Extraordinaires, Saun and Starr, and the Sugarman Three. You can read more about the day-by-day of the tour (logged by Antibalas's Martín Perna) here: http://daptonerecords.tumblr.com/

One of the best shows was in Vienne, France. Here's a video of the complete performance:

Each night we would finish the whole revue with "Family Affair" by Sly and the Family Stone. Most nights it was something like this...

After Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland, we flew back to the US and a few days later went played Maximum Fun's Atlantic Ocean Comedy and Music Festival on a boat full of comedians and musicians that left from Florida and went to two islands in the Bahamas.

Coming up in August we have a few more big shows with the Arcade Fire in Maine, Massachusetts and Washington, DC.

In September, we'll be doing a show in NYC at Le Poisson Rouge where we'll be playing some of the music of prolific composer John Lurie along with our original music and will be spending a lot of the fall working on finishing (and maybe even recording) new material.