Lyo added loops to the music using an array of pedals around his sock-feet throughout the performance as they improvised live.  The effect turned the duo into a full-fledged ensemble, with a jazz aesthetic and a dance edge too.  The Wall Street Journal has described their music as “lovely and occasionally breathtaking electronic pieces.”

Their next album is due in the fall, when they will also be touring Europe.  In the meantime, check out a few of their songs below, on their website, and live at their weekly Apotheke and Soho Grand residencies.

Live Footage’s music video for “1976″

An extended live track from their residency at Apotheke

And their take on Jay Z’s “Empire State of Mind”

The band played with virtuosity and playfulness.  The song styles ranged from the traditional “St. James Infirmary Blues” to the youth-inspired “Kindergarten.“  Songs like “Ooh Poo Pah Doo” lived somewhere in between, with flourishes of familiar hooks from other tunes woven in — a jazz equivalent of sampling.

Still in his 20s, Julliard alum Batiste comes from a musical New Orleans family, has already headlined at Carnegie Hall , and collaborates with singer Cassandra Wilson.

Check out Jon Batiste’s version of the “Star Spangled Banner”

Throughout the concert, Batiste invited the audience to clap, dance, singalong, and jump.  At time his fingers moved lightly across the keyboard.  At other times, his energetic playing lifted him off the piano bench.

Best known as a pianist, Batiste got his start on the drums, and he explored the percussive linkages throughout the set.  At one point, he stood up from his keyboard and joined Stay Human drummer Joseph Saylor.  Each wielding drumsticks, the two played on the instrument, even looping around it in a circle.

Sunny Jain, the drummer from the ensemble Red Baraat, also joined the percussion adventures with his traditional dhol (a double-headed drum from India), adding new texture to the beats.  Later in the performance, a total of five drummers playing together with the other instrumentalists providing call and response.

Later in the concert, Batiste picked up a melodica and the ensemble played a medley of Fugees songs, mixing jazz with hip hop, soul, and reggae, plus a little mid-1990s nostalgia.

Their first album is due out next month with a concert at the Bowery Ballroom on June 25 here in New York, to which Batiste encouraged  audience members to invite friends (if they liked the music) or enemies (if they didn’t).

In the meantime, if you’re lucky, you might even run into the band on the subway or at a sidewalk “love riot.”

Jon Batiste and The Stay Human Band’s “Ooh Poo Pah Doo”

His first major motion picture filmscore was for the 1966 movie How to Steal a Million, starring Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole.  Long before scoring for outer space (Star Wars), the wizard world (Harry Potter), and or global adventure hunting (Indiana Jones), he composed music for this comical heist in Paris under the name “Johnny Williams.”

In his conversation with Peter, he described the wonderful opportunity to work with the prominent director William Wyler.  Williams said of his approach to composing for the film, “I wrote a score that tried to describe Paris and the romantic aspect and sweet stylish innocence of the relationship of the two leading characters.”  He went on to explain that the soundtrack featured piano influenced by French composer Frances Poulenc’s etudes to suggest the style of the streets of Paris and the romance of main characters.  (Listen to the full soundtrack here.)

The movie trailer for How to Steal a Million:

Hear more about this and other behind-the-scenes glimpses of Williams’ career tonight at 11pm EST on SiriusXM Pops (Channel 75).

Perhaps best known for his iconic film scores, Williams also conducts leading orchestras and composes works for the live stage and special events.

Williams has served as music director and laureate conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra and holds the title of Artist-in-Residence at Tanglewood. Williams has also led such orchestras as the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducting concerts to soldout audiences at venues such as the Hollywood Bowl.

Williams has composed numerous concert pieces including two symphonies, as well as concertos for flute, violin, clarinet, viola, oboe and tuba. Enjoy these clips from a few of his diverse projects:

A cello concerto at Tanglewood (with Yo-Yo Ma)

“Liberty Fanfare” for the rededication of the Statue of Liberty

The theme for NFL Football on NBC

An arrangement of “Air and Simple Gifts” for President Obama’s first inauguration.

“Fanfare and Theme” for the Olympics.

Hear Peter Cummings and John Williams in conversation on LINKEDMusic, starting Saturday, May 18, at 9AM EST on SiriusXM Pops (Channel 75).

(LA Phil photo by vxla on Flickr.)

These film scores have earned him countless awards including five Oscars.

Enjoy these clips from a few of these movies and tune in this weekend to hear him speak with host Peter Cummings.

Fiddler on the Roof (1971 Best Adaptation and Original Song Score)

Jaws (1975 Best Original Score)

Star Wars (1977 Best Original Score)

E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982 Best Original Score)

Schindler’s List (1993 Best Original Score)

(Photo by Mutter Erde from wikimedia commons.)

Insurance executive by day and composer by night, Ives experienced little appreciation for his music during his lifetime. His composed his first symphony by the time he graduated from Yale in 1898. He wrote the second one between 1897 and 1901 but it did not premiere until a 1951 concert at Carnegie Hall with Leonard Bernstein conducting. Although Ives’ wife (Harmony Twichell–her actual name) attended the premiere, Ives listened to the radio broadcast in his neighbor’s home instead. The third symphony was written in 1904, and went on to earn Ives a Pulitzer Prize in 1947—another illustration of the extreme delay in the public acceptance of his work. Symphony No. 4, completed in 1916, was finally given its premiere in 1965, 11 years after Ives’ death.

Last month’s Linked Music guest, Maestro Leonard Slatkin, and the Detroit Symphony set themselves to the challenge of performing all four symphonies. Nearly 50 years after hearing the premiere of Ives’ fourth symphony at Carnegie Hall, Slatkin took up the conducting baton on that very same stage to present the survey of the composer he admires for “finding and creating the American concert music voice.”

In our recent interview, Slatkin explained the appeal of the four-symphony program, “If you start with the first and then go through to the fourth, not only do you get this 16-year or so span of the composer’s life, you literally see American music beginning.”

The evening culminated with Symphony No. 4, and the piece’s second movement left no doubt that we were hearing the music of a true revolutionary genius. During our conversation, Slatkin also spoke of how Ives’ symphony existed, “in a world that is so extraordinary and separated from his own time of composition that it’s easy to understand why this was not accepted…You’re talking about only a few years after the premiere of the Rite of Spring. You’re talking about a time Debussy is still alive…And then you listen to Ives’ fourth symphony and you go–how is it possible he could be thinking this way? It’s so far advanced.”

He described how the piece included mystical elements, ill-defined rhythms, and a menagerie of instruments, such as three pianos, five pianists, and adventurous percussion.

Layered atop one another, we heard the comings and goings of a distant marching band’s percussive instruments, patriotic melodies quoted from ”The Sweet By and By,” “Beulah Land,” “Marching Through Georgia” and ”Jesus, Lover of my Soul” interspersed with stray piano fragments, strings and chorus seemingly imported from another score entirely. In our conversation, he went on to explain, “So already the sound world is not like anything, and by the time the chorus comes in at the end, just humming, not even singing words, we are transported to a place that Ives probably equated with something spiritual.”

In a pre-concert discussion, Slatkin’s deconstructed the collage of sound, colors and texture by having the horns, percussion section, and strings each demonstrate their respective parts separately. In addition to grasping the work in its entirety, the audience was invited to seek out these individual sections from the complexity of Ives’ intricate arrangements.

Privileged to this never-before-performed Ives symphony experience, the audience listened enraptured as Maestro Slatkin and the Detroit Symphony chronicled the arc of truly American concert music.

Hear highlights from my interview with Maestro Slatkin here.

(Photo by Victor S. Mangona)

 Composer John Williams and Host Peter Cummings

(Top photo by Alec Mc Nayr/Wikimedia.)

Hear the maestro talk with Peter about selections from this week’s Detroit Symphony Orchestra concerts with the Spring for Music Festival (May 9 and 10 at Carnegie Hall):

*Rachmaninoff and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra’s upcoming concert including the rarely-performed Caprice Bohémien.

*The unique rhythms and qualities of Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead, composed 10 years after Caprice Bohémien.

*How Charles Ives found and created “the American concert voice,” and how you can hear the progression of American music through his works.

*The unique sound world, instrumentation, and staging of the Charles Ives’ Fourth Symphony.

Listen to the highlights online here.

More about the Spring for Music Festival concerts and tickets here.

Enjoy this preview of music that the Detroit Symphony Orchestra will perform at two concerts this week (May 9 and 10) as part of the Spring for Music Festival at Carnegie Hall.

Caprice Bohémien by Sergei Rachmaninoff

Isle of the Dead by Sergei Rachmaninoff (Leonard Slatkin leading the DSO)

Symphony No. 2 by Charles Ives

Leonard Slatkin demonstrates how Charles Ives overlaps multiple musical themes in his Symphony No. 4

More on the festival and ticket information here.

(Photo by Victor Mangona.)

The crowd whooped during solos and between songs.  Jokes about Brooklyn and scruffy facial hair prompted laughs.  Boldly patterned socks peeked out from beneath a musician’s pant leg.

But unlike many a night at the live music venue, in place of a rock band, we heard the string quartet Brooklyn Rider take center stage for their album launch concert.

NPR has credited the group with “recreating the 300-year-old form of string quartet as a vital and creative 21st-century ensemble.”  The new album marks the latest achievement in those endeavors, and we enjoyed having members (and brothers) Colin and Eric Jacobsen on our show last year.

For the concert, played songs from their new album A Walking Fire, which Q2 is featuring as its album of the week (and you can stream it online here).

Not only was the concert for friends and family, it also featured them–”Ljova” (cousin of viola player Nicholas Cords) and the Kontraband, complete with an accordion.  Calling themselves chamber-jam music for the “remix generation,” the group entertained with lively rhythms and amped up Yiddish and Russian songs.  (Several bonus tracks to A Walking Fire by Ljova are available through iTunes.)

Brooklyn Rider performed animated renditions of songs from the new album.  Their glanced at their music sheets, watched each other’s solos, and closed their eyes as they dug into the music.  Songs include include Béla Bartók’s second string quartet, contemporary Russian composer Lev “Ljova” Zhurbin‘s Culai, and violinist Colin Jacobsen’s suite Three Miniatures for String Quartet.

Check out this clip “Three Miniatures for String Quartet” (part one):

Jacobsen patterned his suites after the Iranian miniature paintings containing epic stories.  The suites connected the dots with an earlier Brooklyn Rider triumph, Silent City, featuring collaborations with Persian musician Kayhan Kalhor.

Heavily influenced by inspirations from afar, they proclaimed how glad they were to be playing back home in Brooklyn.  Underscoring their New York City connection, they even have an illustration of a subway car on their album cover.

For the finale, Brooklyn Rider and the Kontraband played together, remixing chamber music yet again and eliciting more whoops from the audience.

Check them out live in New York this weekend as part of the Carnegie Hall neighborhood concert at 3pm at the Abrons Arts Center at Henry Street Settlement.