It seems every year or two another blazing young improviser emerges from the Chicago jazz scene, boasting some uncanny maturity and a rangy freedom within the broader acoustic-jazz tradition.
The tenor saxophonist Isaiah Collier is the latest in line. With the release last year of “Cosmic Transitions,” a weighty LP featuring his quartet, the Chosen Few, he has established himself as an heir apparent to both the Chicago lineage and the post-Coltrane sax tradition: It’s in his rough, pinched tone and his penchant for minor-key incantation, which he uses to stir the group to action.
Collier, who last month released a darkly rousing, 13-minute-long rendition of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (an outtake from the “Cosmic Transitions” sessions), will perform on Saturday at 8 p.m. at Soapbox Gallery, an intimate concert space in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, adorned with sculptures and pictures. Collier will appear with a slightly altered version of the band from the album: Jordan Williams on piano, Jeremiah Hunt on bass and Michael Shekwoaga Ode on drums. In-person tickets are $25, and the show can be livestreamed for a price of your choosing at soapboxgallery.org.
GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO
These days, trash seems to be a theme for the comedian Moses Storm, but in a good way.
Later this year, Storm, whose screen credits include roles in the films “Plan B” and “The Lovebirds,” is set to co-star with Phoebe Robinson as her character’s roommate and best friend in “Everything’s Trash,” her upcoming TV series for Freeform.
And back in January, his brilliantly choreographed comedy special “Trash White” debuted on HBO Max. From the executive producer Conan O’Brien, whom Storm opened for on a Team Coco tour a few years ago, this one-hander features Storm surrounded by a gleaming mound of garbage poking fun at his hardscrabble childhood and offering this refrain: “Crazy beats scary.”
Will Storm do some “Trash” talking when he’s at Carolines this weekend? Find out when he takes the stage on Friday and Saturday at 7 and 9:45 p.m. Tickets start at $24.50.
SEAN L. McCARTHY
Art & Museums
Party Like It’s 1990
Rodney Barnette is the best kind of troublemaker. His daughter, the artist Sadie Barnette, has dedicated part of her practice to his history as an influential member of the Black Panthers. Now, Sadie has created an installation inspired by the gay bar that her father opened in 1990 — New Eagle Creek in San Francisco — to provide a safe haven for people who were otherwise subject to the scene’s racism. The work is on view free through March 6 at the Kitchen in Chelsea.
Not much of an archive of gay nightlife for people of color exists, so madison moore, a professor of queer studies at Virginia Commonwealth University who is doing a nightlife residency at the Kitchen, has been hosting Saturday afternoon parties in Sadie Barnette’s installation. The final one, with the artist and producer Tygapaw as the D.J., will be held on Saturday from noon to 6 p.m. Timed tickets are on a sliding scale, from $5 to $15, and available at thekitchen.org.
MELISSA SMITH
Film Series
An Outsider’s Outsider
The independent filmmaker Nina Menkes defies obvious categorization. Writing in The New York Times in 2012, Dennis Lim, now the director of programming for the New York Film Festival, which played a restored version of Menkes’s “The Bloody Child” last fall, called the director “an outsider both on the indie film scene and in avant-garde circles.”
First shown in 1996, “The Bloody Child” is one of two of her features receiving daily screenings at the Brooklyn Academy of Music starting on Friday as part of a broader, weeklong Menkes retrospective. The film, which enigmatically pivots around brusque Marines involved in a murder arrest, tosses out conventional rules of chronology, image and sound; Menkes’s distanced compositions refuse to direct the eye, and as mixed, the dialogue often seems to misdirect the ear.
Also showing daily, and similarly nonlinear, is “Magdalena Viraga,” which premiered in 1986 but apparently is receiving its first full run in New York. Like “The Bloody Child,” it stars Menkes’s sister, Tinka Menkes, who delivers an affectless, almost somnambulant performance as an impassive prostitute detained for a killing.
BEN KENIGSBERG
KIDS
Girls for All Seasons
Vivaldi never married — he was ordained a Roman Catholic priest — but you can’t say he didn’t appreciate women. The longtime musical director at the Ospedale della Pietà, a Venice home for foundlings, he trained many gifted girls for its acclaimed orchestra and choir.
Now the Little Orchestra Society is honoring both him and Women’s History Month with “Vivaldi’s Virtuosas,” part of the L.O.S. Kids concert series for ages 3 to 10. Sent on a quest for female talent, the composer and a protégé, portrayed by actors, obtain an impressive array: students from the Juilliard School’s Pre-College division and its Music Advancement Program, as well as the guitarist Gabriele Leite.
Tickets to these live performances, on Saturday and Sunday at 11:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. at the Kaye Playhouse in Manhattan, start at $16. The program will present excerpts from several Vivaldi works, including the D Major Lute Concerto (featuring Leite) and, of course, “The Four Seasons.” And just to give winter and young women their full due, you will also hear the teenage composer Yuri Lee’s “Blustery Day.”
LAUREL GRAEBER
