On Monday (6/10) at The L Magazine (Brooklyn, N.Y.), Henry Stewart reviews the Brooklyn Philharmonic’s June 8 and 9 concerts, for which the orchestra “invited hip-hop and R&B artists into BAM’s opera house, including Erykah Badu, who delivered an incredible song-cycle adaptation of her political 2007 album New Amerykah Part One (4th World War)…. The recently rejuvenated Philharmonic is built upon such unlikely juxtapositions, taking popular music from the borough’s different communities and reconfiguring it in a concert-hall context.” For the June 8 concert with Erykah Badu, the Philharmonic’s artist-in-residence this year, “Tickets sold out so quickly they added another show, which Badu did as a benefit [the next night] for the Brooklyn Phil. Composer Ted Hearne, who like Badu lives in Fort Greene, arranged six of her songs for orchestra, rhythm section, and DJ, mixing in his own interludes and bookends partially inspired by the album…. If the weekend proved a coup for Badu, though, it was also a real triumph for Hearne, whose compositions and arrangements gave largeness and depth to what on record can sometimes sound thin (like ‘The Healer’); they could be jazz, bordering on the Stravinskyian.”
Posted June 13, 2013
