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26 Jan 2010 21:00 The Pendulum Swings (Jason Trachtenburg) w/.357 Lover (Corn Mo) Brooklyn
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Sunday Jan 24, 2010 The Pendulum Swings featuring Jason Trachtenburg in Brooklyn Pete's Candy Store 709 Lorimer Street
Brooklyn, NY 11211
Revolution Church with Jay Bakker 4
Open Mic 5-8
The Pendulum Swings featuring Jason Trachtenburg 8:30
"Original new (!) standards interpreted by NYC's most unique male vocalist. Highly recommended." Time Out NY Nov 2009.
Elizabeth Devlin 9
Elizabeth Devlin invokes influences from scratchy phonographs, combining bitter sweet, haunting vocals with poignant lyrics and angelic, cacophonous melodies. Papa Devlin fancied himself a gypsy and traveled the coast peddling his one-man-band street performance; Momma was a writer, who tended many children and hand sewed puppets to sell on the DC streets. Pulling these things to her, Elizabeth's performance art began as lyrical, melodic, acapella poetry but soon blossomed into an electroacoustic sound when she began to play the Autoharp.
Lady Blanche 10
Lady Blanche is a pop punk princess rooted in a slight country drawl who sings Flight of the Conchords-esque compositions, not so ladylike confessionals, and stream of consciousness rambles. Her live performances are often ruckus affairs including much laughter, an occasional tear, and more often that not a really bad 90's cover song.
I'm Turning Into 11
I'm turning into is a Brooklyn based experimental pop band. The band seeks to combine a great range of sound and technique with universal melodies to create appealing and innovative songs. Their can-do attitude translates into a fun and unique live performance.
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Thu, January 21, 2010 7:00 PM (Doors: 6:30 PM) $10.00
All Ages
Knitting Factory Brooklyn Presents
The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players
Supercute, Julia Weldon
Knitting Factory Brooklyn NY
Modern ‘Family’! The Trachtenburgs now live in Brooklyn
By Sabrina Jaszi
for The Brooklyn Paper
Modern family: The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players will bring their quirky show to the Knitting Factory on Jan. 21.
Rachel Trachtenburg is the youngest member of the group, but the linchpin.
Call it kitsch for the new decade or our world through cat-eye glasses, but the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players are now, officially, Bushwick-based.
Some 20 years ago, Jason and Tina Trachtenburg locked eyes across a Greenwich Village open-mic. Four years later, two became three, and six years after that, the trio became a band, with the littlest Trachtenburg, Rachel, on drums.
Their act — a thrift store-dressed show and tell of found vintage slides and Burt Bacharach-inflected musical narration — travelled the world before settling on Manhattan’s Lower East Side five years ago.
But last year, the band achieved its greatest success, moving to Bushwick. A few months later, the Knitting Factory did the same thing — and on Jan. 21, the two former Manhattan institutions will join forces again.
And the now–16-year-old Rachel’s teengirl pop trio, Supercute!, is slated to open that night.
“When I perform with my parents, my dad does all the songwriting and I keep the drums pretty simple,” said Rachel. “He loves Frank Sinatra and the Bee Gees, that kind of stuff. In my group, we do ukulele covers of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and write our own bubblegum indie stuff.”
The Slideshow Players’ set will include two new songs from a forthcoming album. New slides were bestowed upon the Trachtenburgs by an audience member who also housed and fed them one night during their most recent tour.
And that’s not unusual. Wherever they go, the family inspires warm, fuzzy feelings.
“I’ve seen them a few times and you always feel as if you’re in someone’s basement looking at pictures from their trip around the world,” said Chris Diaz, talent buyer for the Knitting Factory. “It’s great family fun.”
Maybe that’s because, for the Trachtenburgs, the sunny, nomadic Partridge Family is more than just a musical influence. The Players have created their own — albeit quirky and crafty — version of the archetypal show-biz family.
Father, guitarist and piano player Jason shuns e-mail and cellphones, occupying himself with a macrobiotic diet and his other band, The Pendulum Swings.
“It’s a swing band and Jason is the horned, Sinatraesque frontman,” said matriarch Tina, who is in charge of buying up Goodwill items and then reworking them into costumes.
Rachel is the most creative of the bunch.
“I like to play the ukulele while hula-hooping. I think I invented that,” she said.
Because mother, father and daughter are as kooky as a sitcom characters, it’s logical that they’ve made a pilot episode for a TV Show.
The kids program, to be called “Rachel Trachtenburg’s Homemade World,” is set in the family kitchen and its first plotline was inspired by real events. When a mouse finds its way into Jason’s spirulina, it turns green. The family fears that, hopped up on supplements, it will live forever. Since all three are vegetarians, they don’t want to kill it. Famed drag king Murray Hill plays the band’s manager.
Colorful, alternative fun ensues.
The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players and Supercute! at the Knitting Factory [361 Metropolitan Ave. at Havemeyer Street in Williamsburg, (347) 529-6696)]. Jan. 21 at 10 pm. Tickets are $10.
©2010 Community Newspaper Group
another article from here
By Meredith Deliso
The family that plays together stays together.
That, at least, seems to be the case with the Trachtenburgs.
Even as they juggle more and more creative projects, the trio keeps at their shtick, the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players, as they’ve been doing for the past 10 years ago.
Between dad Jason’s own swing band, The Pendulum Swings, daughter Rachel’s girl band, Supercute!, and mom Tina’s steering of their children’s program, “Rachel Trachtenburg’s Homemade World,” the three still find time to do slideshow shows. And on January 21, they do just that at the Knitting Factory in Williamsburg, with mom on the projector, dad on the keys and vocals, and their daughter on the drums as the family performs conceptual art-rock pop with a message.
“We’re informational artists,” says Jason. “We feel it’s our duty and responsibility to give information as we see it.”
That includes extolling the health benefits of vegetarianism (Jason and Tina are going strong 20 years, 16-year-old Rachel has been one most her life), individuality (“We can’t just turn into a culture of conformity,” says Jason), and politics (Rachel made the news last year as vocal opponent against third terms for city politicians).
The family makes a similar statement as they move into children’s programming. Next month, the second episode of “Rachel Trachtenburg’s Homemade World” will be shown in Brooklyn February 14, details TBA (the first episode is available here).
“We really want to influence and expand television entertainment,” says Jason. “I think we can raise expectations with what we’re doing with the show. It has real purpose, real ideas about art and life.”
The show, says Tina, is like “’H.R. Pufnstuf’ meets the ‘Partridge Family.’ But it’s real as opposed to a fantasy.”
It presents a day in the life of Rachel in their Bushwick apartment, with original music by Rachel and Jason and guest appearances from friends like Andrew W.K, Murray Hill and Kevin Allison. Then there’s Supercute!, Rachel’s trio which she fronts with a ukulele, (they are also on the Knitting Factory bill), and dad’s band, The Pendulum Swings, which gives him an outlet for music that doesn’t quite jive with the Slideshow Players’ aesthetic.
“The Slideshow goes in so many different directions, I will never grow tired of it. (But) ultimately, Rachel’s getting older and focusing on her band. It was essential that I started up a new project,” says Jason, whose new project is an indie swing band. Though no retro throwback here – “We’re trying to live in the culture of the time,” says Jason. And, unlike the Slideshow Players, “the emphasis is music, not so much politics or entertainment or art.”
While the Pendulums don’t make the Knitting Factory bill, don’t rule it out in the future.
“Lately we’ve been doing shows together, all of us,” says Jason. “Slideshow, Supercute and Pendulum Swings.”
Yep, they’re keeping it all in the family.
The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players are at Knitting Factory (361 Metropolitan Ave.) January 21 at 7 p.m. With Supercute! and Julia Weldon. Tickets are $10. For more information, call 347-529-6696.
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Tuesday 12 January 2010 Kissy Kamikaze at Knitting Factory Brooklyn (Brooklyn)
with Jason Trachtenburg, Magic Brian, Miss Saturn, and Roger Hailes
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Sunday January 9 2010 Supercute @ Let Them Eat Cake @ The Cake Shop 152 Ludlow Street $5.00
review from here
The Kids Are All Right (and Flaunting Their Hooks, Taste and Cred)
Published: January 10, 2010
On Thursday night Nick Jonas of the Jonas Brothers made his New York debut as a solo act at the Beacon Theater for around 2,000 shrieking young girls (and a couple of boys) and their chaperones. On Saturday afternoon, in the basement of Cake Shop on the Lower East Side, the all-girl Brooklyn kid-punk outfit Care Bears on Fire hosted a showcase of teen bands for an audience of a couple hundred: plaid-wearing peers, small children, parents scarfing down sandwiches and salads.
Not as different as they sound, really.
Scale isn’t much of a measure of talent or maturity, of course, or even of intentions. Exclude the size of the room, and the two shows looked alike: teenage performers eager to flaunt their bona fides and their taste, exactly the things that probably set them apart from their classmates, but not, it turns out, from one another.
These are also the things that have separated Nick Jonas from his brothers Kevin and Joe over the four-plus years in which the Jonas Brothers have been marching toward pop supremacy. Even as success took them beyond the world of Disney, the Jonas Brothers never felt sophisticated; of the three Nick came closest, with his sharp, forward fashion choices and name dropping of influences like Elvis Costello.
The primary aim of his solo debut, “Who I Am” (Hollywood), which is to be released next month under the name Nick Jonas & the Administration, appears to be re-education. A couple of songs revisit Jonas Brothers bop, but Mr. Jonas, 17, is more interested in reclaiming 1970s rock, a relatively unfashionable choice that will force fans to accept him on different terms.
“Who I Am” is reminiscent of Justin Timberlake’s first post-’N Sync solo album, “Justified”: eager to toy with new influences, far from perfect. Mr. Jonas’s plays for credibility are naked. Three of his four touring band members did stints with Prince’s New Power Generation. The song “State of Emergency” is a virtual rewrite of Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition.” “Olive & an Arrow,” a blues-rock number, recalls John Mayer.
At Thursday’s show he attracted a discerning, self-selecting subset of Jonas Brothers fans, drawn to his shy charm, perhaps, over Joe’s puckish flamboyance and Kevin’s, um, positive attitude? They were older too: many seemed to be in the upper reaches of teenagedom, taking style cues from “Gossip Girl,” and only a few wore hand-scrawled T-shirts of the kind ubiquitous at Jonas Brothers concerts. A handful were sipping Bud Lights by the lobby bar before the show.
They were rabid for Mr. Jonas, who seemed completely comfortable without his brothers, fitting in easily with his startlingly good band. It helped that he was in top form, far more convincing than on his album, but it didn’t matter: almost everything he did met with adulation. (Though his New Year’s resolutions — “As a country we’re in a place of fear, and we need to put that behind us” — provoked confused murmurs, and his cover of Mr. Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I’m Yours,” was appreciated more by the adults in the crowd.)
Charmed though it may seem, the path that Mr. Jonas has chosen is not the easy one. He’s savvy enough, though, to know he needs to shift gears. Soon he won’t be a teenager anymore — a conundrum also faced by his friend Taylor Swift, who turned 20 last month, effectively aging out of her old material — and the slate gets wiped clean.
By and large the bands that played at Cake Shop on Saturday afternoon as part of the Let Them Eat Cake showcase have chosen to skip right past the potential crisis of growing out of their sound by making music most adults would be proud of.
Mr. Jonas might find he has much in common with Ethan Levenson, 15, who opened his Cake Shop set with a cover of Girls’ “Lust for Life,” one of last year’s hipster anthems, obscuring the profanity slightly, but not completely. Mr. Levenson, who wore a loose gray cardigan and whose songs were filled with mopey inner-life-centric lyrics, might not want to talk to Mr. Jonas, though they probably have similar record collections.
Mr. Levenson was the only boy on the bill, save for two members of Blame the Patient, the third band on the lineup, effective miners of late-’80s and early-’90s indie rock with a ferocious lead guitarist, Hunter Lombard, and a kinetic lead singer, Sofie Kapur.
Last year Blame the Patient recorded an as-yet-unreleased album produced by Kevin March, drummer of the well-regarded post-hardcore band Shudder to Think. On the Let Them Eat Cake circuit such high-profile — in the indie rock world at least — hand holders are the norm. On its recent album “Get Over It!” (S-Curve), Care Bears on Fire worked with Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne and Jill Cunniff, late of Luscious Jackson, among others.
At 16, Rachel Trachtenburg of Supercute!, who opened the showcase with a set of tidy, clever bubblegum pop, is already a veteran thanks to her years with the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players. One song played by Supercute!, “Not to Write About Boys,” was incisive and cynical about inter-band relations: two group members fall for the same guy, then realize it’s tearing the group apart, and sacrifice the guy for the sake of friendship. For kids, it’s dark stuff.
And polished too: Supercute! has pop instincts as finely honed as Mr. Jonas’s. The same goes for Care Bears on Fire, who straddle the mainstream and D.I.Y. worlds, proving that they’re not that far apart. The group was signed to S-Curve by Steve Greenberg, who, as president of Columbia Records, signed the Jonas Brothers to their first major-label deal. Over the summer Care Bears on Fire toured with Nat & Alex Wolff, of the Nickelodeon series “The Naked Brothers Band,” and in November, Care Bears on Fire appeared on another Nickelodeon show, “True Jackson, VP,” in which the group subbed in for a gig blown off by Justin Bieber: not exactly the punk rock episode of “Quincy, M.E.,” but something.
More immediately the group recalls the Runaways, who were a teen punk band when that was still a dangerous idea. The members of Care Bears on Fire — Izzy, Sophie and Jena — are younger, and not nearly as salacious as the Runaways, but they have a similar verve. Their music is accomplished, tackling kid subjects in a mature way, with furiously energetic playing, especially on the part of the drummer, Izzy, who on Saturday was sporting a torn Patti Smith T-shirt.
The songs were cheerily scornful, thanks to Sophie, the guitarist and lead singer. And the band’s cover of Tears for Fears’s “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” was smart, comprehending that its lyrics were always far brattier than its arrangement. At the end of the show the punk pioneer Handsome Dick Manitoba went backstage and gave all the girls hugs.
plus video
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Tue., January 5, 8:00pm Knitting Factory Price: $5 Kissy Kamikaze + Jason Trachtenburg + Magic Brian + Miss Saturn + Roger Hailes
361 Metropolitan Ave.
Brooklyn, NY
347-529-6696
ting Factory Brooklyn
361 Metropolitan Ave (at Havemeyer St)
Williamsburg, Brooklyn
347-529-6696
Subway: L to Lorimer St, G to Metropolitan Ave | Directions
Prices
Tickets: $5
Description
Jason Trachtenburg, the adult musician in the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players, is underrated as a songwriter, and tonight’s solo gig is a good place to hear him sans slides and kid. Check out the Volume (timeoutnewyork.com/thevolume) to view an exclusive holiday performance from Trachtenburg.
When
Tue 7pm
Read more: http://newyork.timeout.com/events/music/319615/kissy-kamikaze-jason-trachtenburg-magic-brian-miss-saturn-roger-hailes#ixzz0bSm8bvDQ
review from here
Though he will be playing a show with the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players on January 21 at the Knitting Factory, Jason Trachtenburg took to the same stage solo on Tuesday night as part of .357 Lover's circus of a residency. There's always a lot of humor in his set (it's up for debate if this humor is intentional or not), and when he is solo, there's also a sort of simplistic beauty to his songs. Check out photos from the show after the jump.
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Sunday, January 3rd, 8pm
Pete's Candy Store
709 Lorimer Street
Brooklyn, NY 11211
Emily Manzo performing Katherine Young's Underworld (Dancing) for Tuba and Wurlitzer and piece for TBT
Clara Latham's Selected Songs
We are joined by tuba virtuoso Dan Peck, and play at 8pm, followed by Baby Copperhead and Jason from the Trachtenburg family slideshow- should be a wonderful evening!
