Tuesday Night at South Street Seaport: Michael McDonald at The Rooftop at Pier 17

(Video courtesy Shirley Calogero)

(More videos here)

Saturday Afternoon in Lower Manhattan: New York Chinese Opera Society presents Peking Opera "The Orphan of Zhao" at Pace University Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts

(Video courtesy 紐約梨園社 [New York Chinese Opera Society])

Friday Night at South Street Seaport: River to River Festival presents Patrick Watson with Loney Dear at Pier 17

This evening we were back at South Street Seaport to attend a wonderful free show featuring the masterly Patrick Watson and his eponymous band, preceded by a terrific set from Loney Dear, onstage at Pier 17.

The River to River Festival called tonight's concert

[a] chance to hear from Patrick Watson’s newest album Adventures In Your Own Backyard.
 . . made at home after a grueling five-year run that saw Watson and his band - bassist Mishka Stein, guitarist Simon Angell, and drummer Robbie Kuster - tour the world in support of two critically-acclaimed and successful albums, including the Polaris award-winning Close To Paradise.

Hailing from the small city of Jonkoping, Sweden, Loney Dear’s primary member Emil Svanängen first began recording homemade, overdubbed tapes of delicate, folkish indie pop in the early 2000s. After several years of touring stateside and abroad, Loney Dear released Dear John, its fourth full-length in January 2012. His album — the appropriately titled Hall Music, is an expansive record that finds Svanängen closer to creating the type of orchestral music he has always sought to bring to life on stage (whether he’s actually playing with an orchestra or not).

The M15 bus brought us to Pier 17 a bit later than we would have liked, but arriving at 7:20 p.m., we sat down in the back of the sitters on the pier, in front of the standards, and were entranced by Loney Dear's densely layered, harmonically intricate chamber pop music.

MusicOMH said of Loney Dear,

Svanängen's voice is still at the centre of it all, and his fragile, earnest performance is something to applaud (even when it's coupled with such obviously intentional heartbreakers like "I woke up, crying in my sleep," as in the stirring "My Heart"). And, for the most part, the swirling strings, stabbing brass, double bass, and clanging cymbals push Loney Dear's music into a new stratosphere of emotional intensity.

Despite the heat and humidity, the audience was large, and probably some of the many tourists at South Street Seaport ambled over to hear at least part of the show. The people who came for Patrick Watson (and Loney Dear) were mostly sitting down, a number of them with drinks, and some around us anyway, had taken off their shoes and gotten comfortable as the serenity of the musical evening took hold.

Patrick Watson pretty much killed it, moving from the piano bench to the keyboard to the microphone, doing what Corwin Kave aptly called "swoony sonic acrobatics."

Our favorite song was dedicated to us -- well, all quiet people -- the haunting, gauzy sound of "Quiet Crowd": The BBC in its review of Adventures in Your Own Back Yard

it’s the subtlety of Watson’s approach – whether he’s serenading us with the sweet comfort of Words in the Fire or offering a Broadway pastiche in a style familiar to fans of Rufus Wainwright – that makes this such a special record. Others this year will be brasher, more immediate, and maybe more innovative, but few will be lovelier, more rewarding or, indeed, better.

It was magical when Loney Dear joined Patrick Watson on the small piano bench on "Big Bird In a Small Cage." We agree with Kaori Fujii, who called tonight's concert "absolutely mind-blowing" and Adeline Tan, who said Patrick Watson was "incredible. . . moving, musically dynamic & mesmerizing."

We're grateful we got to be at Pier 17 tonight.

Friday Night at South Street Seaport: Bear in Heaven, Zola Jesus and Yellow Fever on Pier 17

Tonight we had the pleasure of seeing one first-rate free show with Bear in Heaven and Zola Jesus, with a brief surprise appearance by YellowFever at South Street Seaport, part of the River to River Festival's Friday night summer Seaport Music series.

We were not far away having lunch with a friend from Marine Park we grew up with at our fave Korean restaurant at noon today; on his way from work to his Connecticut country house, he told us he's retiring (the state is offering workers three extra years if they retire this year, and his pension will be a decent $90K) and asked if we were going to South Street Seaport for tonight's Bear Hands concert.

That is why guys our age retire.

He also said he'd never go because the Seaport shows never start on time, you can't find a seat (hey, our pal is a cancer and heart attack survivor, and did we say he's old like us?) and there's no shade.

Luckily our retiring friend is also getting deaf like us, so we can stand up close and endure the loud. Even when it flirts with twee.

This evening, shade wasn't an issue and there was a nice breeze.

If you want nice pics of this show, not like this

but professional quality not taken by a cell phone (no, we're too old to have a smartphone), go to The End of Irony or Brooklyn Vegan to see stuff like this:

Wow, that was a shock. Are we on the right blog? Did we mention we're old and our mom has had Alzheimer's for seven years? On the other hand, though she's lost almost all her memory, she can still get every word on the lyrics to late '40s and '50s swing and pops songs on that cable TV music channel (and she even knows some Beatles lyrics, too, though she was in her thirties by then).

Where were we? Oh yeah, South Street Seaport. At Brooklyn Vegan, a commenter writes:

why does such a terrible bro-filled venue have all these awesome free concerts. kind of stupid. i mean i'm glad for the free music don't want to fight a thousand tourists to see thee oh sees tho

We can't answer Carles's questions, and even though the crowd has more regular people like us than hipsters, we've always hated South Street Seaport. Like the other festival marketplaces created by Rouse back in the day, they've managed to take everything particular about the city it's placed in and squeezed it out. It's the least New York place in the whole city, but anyway, the music tonight was good, though another Brooklyn Vegan commenter wrote:

this is fake. pics are shop'd. u can tell because the crowd just isn't into it at all.

Yeah, our pics are "shop'd" too.

The MC - he's got a good memory, since he managed to recite all 323 corporate sponsors of the festival without looking at a sheet of paper - announced that he felt bad about YellowFever canceling out last week, but they were coming onstage now, at the start of the show. Jennifer Moore wore an orange jumpsuit supposedly like the one she wore last week in the Harris County Jail. Drummer Adam Jones just had a really good haircut but normal clothes.

After they sang like two songs - they had to rush to Williamsburg for their 11 p.m. show at Monster Island. We liked Jesus Zola a great deal.

She's been compared to Siouxsie, whom we were introduced to by our great, late, cute blue-haired California friend Blair Apperson almost thirty years ago and who we wrote about in the 80s as a columnist for the Hollywood (FL) Sun-Tattler.

Jesus Zola has also been compared to Diamanda Galas, whom we once shared a cab with in the late '80s up to our respective crash pads on the Upper West Side after she did this great show directed by our old friend Judd Lear Silverman, the show a tribute to her late brother, the great performance artist Philip-Dimitri Galas, who - like our friend Blair ("Blah") - died much too young of AIDS back in that dark decade.

We think the comparisons are apt. Jesus Zola had us spellbound. Then we took our meds and Bear in Heaven came on.

Aside from getting a cheap cheer by mentioning they're from Brooklyn (hey, we were born there, we should get cheered every time we walk down Flatbush Avenue), Bear in Heaven really were the stars of the night. As it got dark, the crowd got bigger and more enthusiastic, and they played a terrific extended set.

We leave it to the young and well-informed to do substantive music criticism.

We had a good time. We're old, so that's important.

Getting out of the Seaport was a bear, and not in heaven. We walked along Frankfort Street (who knew?) to the Brooklyn Bridge subway stop to go up to Union Square and get the L away from all those tourists.

Nice show, nice night.

Friday Evening at South Street Seaport: Seaport Music Festival presents Slow Club

Early this evening we found ourselves in front of the stage at South Street Seaport to see the deliriously enchanting folk-pop duo from Sheffield, England: Slow Club, which put on a really cool show for the appreciative crowd.

Although we were never were that big a fan of the Rouse Company's festival marketplaces like Pier 17 (see our 1987 rant about Miami's Bayside in one of our 1987 Hollywood Sun-Tattler columns), it's grown on us (and others) over time.

But we liked South Street Seaport back in the 1970s and can remember sitting in bleachers by the water before the stores were built, enjoying a really good folk concert on a cool September night, giving our friend Marilyn Citron - who still looks as good as ever and now can run a 5K race in San Francisco faster than anyone her age) the plaid flannel shirt boys wore over T-shirts then so she could be warmer).

Anyway, we were intrigued by The L Magazine's listing for this evening's Seaport Music Festival event, a tenth anniversary tribute to one of the UK’s best independent labels, Moshi Moshi Records:

With their cutesy, spacey dance-pop in tow, Casiokids may have the biggest name recognition, but they're not necessarily the ones you need to see. That's because the Wave Pictures have a song called "Now You Are Pregnant," and it's a bittersweet ballad towing the line between twee and folk and namedrops Johnny Cash multiple times. And then there's Slow Club, a girl-boy duo whose sing-along songs are so endearing and infectious, they could dress up like Care Bears and you probably wouldn't even find it nauseating.

So we were interested in seeing Slow Club. Afraid we'd gotten there late, we rushed from the Fulton Street subway station and made it just as they were being introduced.

Rebecca Taylor and Charles Watson made some small talk ("Everyone enjoying the shade?") and they actually were as endearing and infectious as the magazine said.

"Has anyone here ever heard of us before?" Rebecca asked. She got a lot of shouts and love back. "That's cool," she said. "It's usually just my mum going 'Wooooo!'"

It was their second time in New York City, they said. Last time it was so cold and this week it's been hot. "How do you cope?" Rebecca said. She's sooo cute, we wished we were a teenage boy again, or a teenage lesbian. Charles is cute, too. Did we say cute is what we live for?

Our only disappointment was that their set contained just seven songs. All were good, but our favorties were "Wild Blue Milk" and "Trophy Room." Rebecca said after we applauded one song that South Street Seaport was "the coolest place we ever played a gig."

For their finale, they sang "Christmas TV" acoustically, going offstage and into the audience.

On Monday evening, after our fun reading at McNally Jackson with Donal Mosher for Life As We Show It (thanks to everyone who came and to the bookstore's Dustin Kurtz for everything!), we sat in the cafe drinking iced tea with our dear old friend, the brilliant and multitalented Richard Kostelanetz. We told him the best advice he ever gave us back in the 1970s when we were starting out was that if there's anyone who can ever do something better than you can, defer to them and do something else. So in that spirit. . .

if you want a really intelligent review of the whole concert, you should check out the blog my so-called life, where Claire has some bright and funny things to say and also posted a video (she was to our left) of "Christmas TV" on YouTube:

We would have liked to stay to see what Rebecca called (she's not only cute but politic) her "two favorite bands in the world, at the moment," The Wave Pictures and CasioKids, but we had to get to the Lower East Side, to the bandshell at East River Park, for some theater.