National Sawdust

Family Affair, a new album by Senegalese bassist and composer Alune Wade in collaboration with New Orleans's Neighborhood Story Project, is rooted in Afro-Atlantic memory and contemporary dialogue. In the fall of 2026, it will be released alongside their documentary film TUKKI: From the Roots to the Bayou and accompanying book A Family Affair: Conversations Across the Atlantic (University of New Orleans Press). Building on the acclaimed New African Orleans (2025), which drew widespread praise for its fluid dialogue between West African traditions, contemporary jazz, and Louisiana heritage, Family Affair has the feel of a reunion — one that stretches across centuries of shared and scattered memory. It is not a tribute project. It is a celebration of what these connections actually sound like when musicians on both sides of the Atlantic meet in a room. With West Indian roots and a NYC upbringing emerges faiith , the current generation's newest voice that amplifies the in-between. Hailing from deep-seeded jazz study and pulling from foundational R&B culture, lives the compositions and eclectic energy and presence of faiith. Appearing on her debut album, Answer to Love , showcases genre bending artists and collaborations with kyngstxnn and donSMITH blending the sounds of Chicago, L.A and NYC into one seamless storyline. faiith’s emergence into the industry marks a turning point in self-development and an effortless blend between her traditional jazz training and her unique yet familiar songwriting. Answer to Love is a culmination of stories and responses to self-love, familial - love, romantic - love as well as love for the culture and the community. Answer to Love will be available on all streaming platforms August 2026 on Next Music Company. This is a standing room-only performance. If you require accessibility accommodations, please email boxoffice@nationalsawdust.org. This concert is presented by the Jazz Generations Initiative , a project of the Jazz Foundation of America with support from the Mellon Foundation. The JGI cultivates creative futures in jazz performance and scholarship by celebrating the music’s past and keeping its present rooted in community. Based in both New York and New Orleans, the JGI aims to promote interdisciplinary and intergenerational exchange; cultivate diverse audiences; address historical inequities; and expand archival preservation of jazz legacies. The JGI's New York Community Initiative celebrates jazz as an intergenerational, interdisciplinary tradition, which thrives in spaces of community. The JGI puts jazz in motion across NYC with live events, nightly jazz listings, public scholarship, media and documentation, and more.

Something sacred is crossing the bridge. DVT — the trio of composer Damani Rhodes, vocalist VADIA, and poet Tongo Eisen-Martin — makes its New York City debut at National Sawdust for one night only. What happens when piano keys build cathedrals, a voice moves between shadow and flame, and words cut through silence like light through stained glass? DVT is the answer — a collision of jazz, poetry, and soul that doesn't ask you to listen so much as surrender. Damani Rhodes is a visionary producer and composer whose piano becomes sacred architecture — building the structure that holds everything together in a single, breathing form. VADIA is the voice you feel before you understand, her soulful tones weave through poetry and piano, transforming sound into something that lives in your chest. And Tongo Eisen-Martin , San Francisco's 8th Poet Laureate and American Book Award winner, delivers words that are worlds unto themselves — each phrase a door, each silence a room. Apart, they are forces. Together, they are a frequency. This is not a concert. It is a communion — where composition, voice, and verse dissolve into one another and the audience becomes part of the architecture. DVT's first NYC performance is an invitation to experience music, poetry, and presence on a level that defies category. One night. One room. One breath. // This is a seated performance. If you require accessibility accommodations, please email boxoffice@nationalsawdust.org. ‍

On October 17, 2026, Weeksville Heritage Center and VisionIntoArt invite you to a day-long community experience in Brooklyn. The program weaves together performance, creative workshops, and community conversations that explore the key themes and questions of We Were Fridays—cultural memory, Gullah Geechee heritage, diaspora, and intergenerational storytelling. We Were Fridays is an interdisciplinary music project led by cellist Jeffrey Zeigler – a deeply personal exploration of cultural memory and diaspora. It follows a story that began in the Griot tradition of West Africa, traveled to South Carolina via the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, then north via the Great Migration, and beyond. We Were Fridays explores the music of the Gullah people of South Carolina's Lowcountry, a community that has preserved more of its West African linguistic and cultural heritage than any other African American community in the United States. Gullah music has influenced spirituals, gospel, ragtime, rhythm and blues, soul, hip hop, and jazz. We Were Fridays will extend that reach into instrumental cello music. Told through cello, electronics, and dance, We Were Fridays will explore forbidden love, fractured lines, and complex legacies. As covered in The New York Times , We Were Fridays is one of the most significant works of cultural memory and diaspora to come to Brooklyn this fall. “My father was raised in Philadelphia with no knowledge of his biological family until 1992, when a woman named Burnice Perry contacted him. She became the grandmother I never knew, tracing our lineage back to George Washington Friday. Before she passed, I recorded hours of our conversations; those recordings are the heartbeat of this work…” – Jeffrey Zeigler, cellist and project creator The work centers on new compositions from Etienne Charles, Tamar-kali, Hannah Ishizaki, and Jeffrey Zeigler, and features choreography/dance from Flexn pioneer Reggie “Regg Roc” Gray, plus a bespoke interactive book design from sister sylvester. The project is deeply rooted in an ethos of community and intergenerational learning, partnering with the Penn Center on St. Helena Island, South Carolina, the University of Georgia Culture & Community program, and the Weeksville Heritage Center to develop community engagement and education platforms. This work brings together community members and elders, along with students and teachers, to engage in dialogue, conversation, and creative exchange around the project’s themes of memory and diaspora. We Were Fridays x Weeksville Heritage Center: Community Day We will be updating the schedule with more details on the teaching artist workshops soon - check the Eventbrite link for the most up-to-date schedule. 11:30 - Open Doors 12:00 - 12:30 Opening Session -- Framing the Day 12:45 - 1:45 Teaching Artist Lab #1 2:00 - 3:00 Teaching Artist Lab #2 3:15 - 4:15 Teaching Artist Lab #3 12:45 pm - 5:00 pm The Gathering Space (drop-in workshop sessions around textiles and photos) 4:30 - 5:00 Community Conversation & Teaching Artist Session Integration 5:00 - 5:30 Break & Snacks 5:30 - 7:00 We Were Fridays Performance & Q&A We hope to see you there! This event is offsite at Weeksville Heritage Center at 158 Buffalo Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11213. Have a question about the show? Email info@weeksvillesociety.org.

There is a hush most of us only knew as children, the warm drift between familiar household sounds and being carried to bed, a place that belongs to you and to some self you have not met yet. June McDoom’s debut full-length, Follow the Light, lives in that dream space and then keeps walking, slipping out of time and waking somewhere new, barely familiar enough to feel like home yet wholly your own. This is a standing room-only performance. If you require accessibility accommodations, please email boxoffice@nationalsawdust.org. She came up in a Jamaican household on the edge of the Florida Everglades, an existence built of extended family, communal care, bass and harmonics. Her father, a carpenter and a student of sound, built his own speakers and kept three sound systems going across as many rooms. His low end would rise through her bedroom floor like some wayward cat while she lay above it with folk records, finding harmonies that were new and hers alone. Two musics in one room. Lushness as past and premonition. She found folk on her own, somewhere between the cast recording of The Sound of Music and Simon and Garfunkel, while everyone around her called it sleepy music. She did not mind being the only one. The solitude let her fall for harmony first, before words, before anything else, and harmony is still the thing she reaches for. Generationally speaking, the music was already in the air. Her grandfather, Colin Smith, is a distinguished mento man who played banjo and guitar and built his own rumba boxes, worked to keep Jamaica’s oldest acoustic folk form alive. Mento is the root of all of it: ska, rock steady, reggae, dub and everything after. He is the one who put a guitar in her hands. An inheritance, a gift and a map. Even her name is part of it, though she will tell you she landed on it more by feel than reason. She records as June McDoom, born Alyssa, June being a nickname one of her grandmothers, Joan, went by, a name she thought was cool to carry and simply liked the sound of. An etheric channel that reverberates all the same. A dub all its own. Made slowly and by hand with her longtime partner Evan Wright, Follow the Light lays the harmony of folk over the rhythm of dub, with Dionne Warwick, Minnie Riperton, Pentangle and the washed guitars of Cocteau Twins haunting its outer edges. Voice and guitar seeking each other out first, then everything else stacked across long days in the studio they keep at home, restraint kept on purpose. The lead single “Without You” is the whole method surfacing, split open and sparkling like a geode in a creek bed. Angelic heroics, and nothing less. At the heart is family. Her grandmother Aggie, the light behind “Memory,” guiding still. And underneath, the quieter truth the record keeps: none of us are only one person, but a continuum of selves, the ones who shaped us and the ones we have yet to meet. Future you is an ancestor your current self gets to greet. Press play and the same invitation is yours: A few minutes out of time, a place that turns familiar the longer you stay until you surface somewhere new and find it was yours all along.

“Where are you going, little cockroach? You were smelling crumbs in a forsaken shadow just a few seconds ago, I believe…” The Cockroach Diary is a song cycle for voice, classical guitar, and electric guitar in which a cockroach becomes an artist’s unlikely muse. Released in 2025, this one-woman operetta emerged during a period of artistic stasis and slowly became an emotional space mission—beginning in intimacy, drifting into outer space, and returning to Earth changed. Through theatrical interludes and surreal conversations with an uninvited houseguest, the piece reflects on vulnerability, resilience, and artistic identity. Blending contemporary classical music, storytelling, noise, and moments of humor, it embraces the uncomfortable, the absurd, and the deeply human. This presentation at National Sawdust reimagines the work as an immersive audiovisual experience with visuals by Xuan, transforming the stage into a dreamlike environment that invites the audience along for the journey. This is a seated performance. If you require accessibility accommodations, please email boxoffice@nationalsawdust.org. ABOUT NICOLETTA TODESCO Nicoletta Todesco is a Brooklyn-based guitarist and composer distinguished by her rare ability to sing while performing classical guitar. A native of Italy, Niki — as her friends call her — left home at 14 to study at the Conservatory of Trento, graduated with honors, and completed a Master's in guitar performance at the Conservatory of Bologna. In 2017, she moved to the United States to study at the Yale School of Music under the guidance of Benjamin Verdery. In May 2025, she released her debut album, The Cockroach Diary — a song-cycle of original compositions for voice and guitar, engineered by GRAMMY-nominated Jennifer Nulsen. Her concerts blend early music, original works, and arrangements for classical and electric guitar, held together by storytelling and a singular stage presence. Nicoletta has performed solo recitals across the United States, Italy, Mexico, Australia, and New Zealand. She has collaborated with Trinity Church Wall Street's contemporary orchestra NOVUS NY and Heartbeat Opera, and performs in a duo with flutist Laura Elena Gracia Guzmán and a trio with soprano Emily Donato and flutist Helen Park. Her composition for four guitars, Picking Berries in the Haunted Forest, won first prize at the 2022 Austin Classical Guitar Composition Competition. She is the director of the New York City Guitar Orchestra and artist liaison at Augustine Strings. ‍ ABOUT XUAN Xuan is a new media artist, filmmaker, and pianist working at the intersection of music, visual art, and technology. A trained classical pianist with a passion for “visual music,” she actively develops innovative, cross-disciplinary projects that broaden the immersive scope of new music and performance. Driven by themes such as alienation, power and multicultural identity, her work encompasses abstract scenography, experimental film, interactive installations, and public art. In recent seasons, her close partnership with composers and performers have produced feature-length multimedia concerts including High Heart with GRAMMY-nominated jazz saxophonist Ben Wendel , it feels like a dream with pianist Eunbi Kim , Ex Machina with pianist Clara Yang , Shifting Ground with violinist Alexi Kenney, and Three Bones , a three-hour triptych with Kronos Quartet. Her work has been seen at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (Chicago), the Smithsonian Museum of Art (Washington D.C.), Baryshnikov Arts (NY), Constellation (Chicago), SFJAZZ (San Francisco), Le Poisson Rouge (NY), Design Biennale 2019 (Zürich), the RESCUE Residency in Santo Stefano di Magra (Italy), Sound Forms 2021 (Hong Kong), ibug Festival für Urban Kunst (Saxony, DE), Ad Astra Music Festival 2020 (Virtual/Kansas), the Mizzou International Composers Festival 2021 (Missouri), CAP UCLA’s Tune In Festival 2021 (Virtual/California), the MATA Festival x Found Sound Nation 2023 (NY), the Ojai Music Festival 2024 (CA), The Experimental Media Performing Arts Center at RPI (Troy, NY) and Carnegie Hall (NYC).

Join us for a lively pre-release celebration of Anthony Roth Costanzo's new book Countertenor and its companion album of the same name! Featuring readings from Countertenor by celebrity guests and esteemed countertenors, alongside a special performance by Anthony Roth Costanzo. DJ Prince Terrence will close out the show with a set that will keep you dancing all night! The sound of a countertenor—often described as ethereal and otherworldly—is both familiar and foreign. It is a high voice close to what we might expect from a female opera singer. Though we recognize the range from contemporary pop music and cartoons, from Michael Jackson to Mickey Mouse, experiencing its penetrating power unamplified in an opera house can be surprising, elemental, and profoundly moving. In Countertenor , Anthony Roth Costanzo, one of the world’s leading opera singers, takes us on a journey through his life, his education in art, and the history of his extraordinary voice type. Countertenors, he tells us, have helped define contemporary opera for more than half a century, having inherited a repertoire originally written for castrated men in the baroque period. Part oddity, part divinity, the castrati were surgically altered before puberty. They are key to understanding the development of opera as a form, from its very origins to its expansion in the public sphere. The striking beauty and sheer otherness of the high male voice provide fertile ground for creative invention and innovation, evocatively challenging conventional notions of gender, sexuality, and identity. With wit, humor, and an irrepressible, irresistible energy, Anthony Roth Costanzo offers fascinating insights into the contours of the countertenor and his own extraordinary artistic career as both an opera singer and a savvy producer and curator. The result is a lively and stirring account of an art form in flux, in constant reinvention, of the excitement of new, boundary-pushing work, and of the development and triumph of a remarkable, uninhibited voice. Click here to purchase Anthony Roth Costanzo's book Countertenor (out October 27 via Farrar Straus, and Giroux), and his companion album of the same name (out October 23 via Nonsuch Records). This performance is made possible thanks to the generous support of Ann Ziff. This performance features mixed standing and seated room. If you require accessibility accommodations, please email boxoffice@nationalsawdust.org. ABOUT ANTHONY ROTH COSTANZO Anthony Roth Costanzo , the Grammy Award–winning countertenor, began performing professionally at the age of eleven and has since appeared in operas, concerts, recitals, and films and on Broadway. He has performed with many of the world’s leading opera companies, including the Metropolitan Opera—most notably in the title role of Philip Glass’s Akhnaten —and the Opéra national de Paris, and at a wide variety of venues, including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Versailles, the Hollywood Bowl, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In June 2024 he began his tenure as general director and president of Opera Philadelphia. He is also the artistic director of SongStudio at Carnegie Hall. He earned his master’s degree and an honorary doctorate from Manhattan School of Music and his bachelor’s degree from Princeton University. ‍ ABOUT PRINCE TERRENCE Prince Terrence is a New York–based musician, vocalist, drummer, DJ, and creative force behind Rare Form, his dark electronic pop project known for its genre-defying sound, commanding vocals, and visceral live performances. A dynamic multi-instrumentalist, he has also performed as a live drummer with Major Lazer, Steve Aoki, Louis Tomlinson of One Direction, Santigold, and HeartsRevolution, bringing his signature energy to stages worldwide. His work has been featured by Billboard, SPIN, Alternative Press, Rolling Stone, and more, while his performances and creative work have appeared across MTV, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, and The Today Show. A fixture in New York’s underground music and fashion scenes, Prince Terrence has brought his energy to events for major brands including Gucci, Coach, Red Bull, Milk, Nylon, Vice, and Diesel. He is also the founder of CELL VISION, an independent art and culture platform launched in 2019 to amplify emerging voices across music, fashion, and art subcultures.

Having spent over two decades establishing themselves as the UK’s prime purveyors of psychedelic rock’n’soul, GRAVITY FREEZE is Little Barrie’s sixth studio album. It is also the band’s first album released solely under their own name since the passing of drummer Virgil Howe who, ten years after joining the band, unexpectedly succumbed to a heart attack in September 2017. Howe’s sudden death understandably devastated Cadogan and fellow founder member/bass player Lewis Wharton, placing Little Barrie’s future in question. “Have you ever had sleep paralysis?” asks band leader Barrie Cadogan, discussing the title track of Little Barrie’s latest offering. “That’s what Gravity Freeze is written about. It’s like a nickname I gave to that moment where you’ve woken up and you’re still dreaming. The first time that happened to me, I freaked because I couldn’t move but I couldn’t tell if I was awake or not. It’s a very strange feeling and you do weird things, like trying to walk through wardrobes. Some of those situations went into the lyrics of the song. There are a few elements on the album that reflect what we’ve been through in the last few years. We’ve been through a lot, some of which we’re still processing obviously.” “It was really difficult at first because you feel guilty for making music without your mate,” says Barrie, reflecting on the decision to keep the band going. “We had this unique thing, the three of us, so we didn’t know whether we could still do anything. But what else could we do other than play? Virgil will always be part of this band because when he joined he brought a sense of stability to what we were doing. He also made us more self-sufficient with his production and engineering skills. We realise that the band can never be the same without him, but it doesn’t mean we can’t do something good. It can just be different.” “Playing together felt therapeutic,” admits Barrie, “We’d known Malcolm for a long time, we hadn’t seen him for years but working with him felt great. In the end we ended up working on the new Little Barrie album in tandem with the music that we were making for Electric War. The Little Barrie material definitely picked up where we left off on the last album but there’s also new elements to what we’re doing.” Barrie admits that 2017’s Death Express – the final album recorded with Virgil released seven weeks prior to his passing – was the band’s attempt at creating “our version of the Beastie Boy’s Check Your Head or Paul’s Boutique”, reflecting the band’s ability to draw on hip hop and funk alongside their love of classic rock and blues. “We had no idea what was around the corner at that time. We wanted to make that record, draw a line in the sand and go on to the next thing,” he explains. “The songs felt good together but it was all quite wild. In some ways Death Express felt as if we were trying to stop a train that was out of control. It was cool at the time, but on this record we wanted to sit back a bit and allow things to breathe a lot more. There’s a lot more leaning back on this album.” True to the DIY process that the band had developed with Virgil, the woodshedding process for GRAVITY FREEZE began by capturing material in rehearsals rooms on their trusty Tascam Portastudio. Demos in hand, the band convened at Rat Salad Studios in Hornsey, North London, to record in the company of Rupert Lyddon (co-founder of ‘80s-inspired outfit Grand National) who had already provided what Barrie refers to as “endless technical support” on Death Express and become an invaluable sounding board during that time and beyond. “I’d been working with Rupert on some instrumental library projects and I was getting really good guitar sounds with him so it was obvious that he should be the guy to record, engineer and co-produce the new album,” explains Barrie – whose library and soundtrack work is possibly most famously illustrated by Little Barrie’s creation of the theme tune to neo-noir crime drama, Better Call Saul. Equally significant was Barrie’s contribution to BBC2 documentary, 2022’s Year Of The Dog, which profiled the work of dog charity ‘Dogs On The Streets’ and for which he composed the music, aided and abetted by Lyddon as well as drummer Tony Coote. This is a standing room-only performance. If you require accessibility accommodations, please email boxoffice@nationalsawdust.org. A man who cut his teeth playing along to records by James Brown and The Stone Roses in equal measure, Tony had known Barrie for a number of years. Welcoming him into the band was both a logical and inspirational next step. “Tony and I had done sessions together so we knew each other pretty well. Once we got into making the album, his work was done in a matter of weeks,” says Barrie. “The cool thing about Tony’s drumming is that he’s always had that tasteful feeling. A lot of my favourite rock bands have drummers who learnt from jazz. They swing alongside that kind of fuzz element and those old school sounds that make the music feel good to us. Tony has that nice touch too.” Work on GRAVITY FREEZE began in late 2023, but Cadogan’s reputation as an in-demand guitar player for hire interrupted proceedings on more than one occasion. Stints as a member of Liam Gallagher and John Squire’s touring band as well as The Black Keys followed, while studio work involved a number of trips to Easy Eye Sound studios in Nashville at Dan Auerbach’s request to play on albums by Jeremie Albino, Robert Finley and Miles Kane. Barrie also found time to maintain his longstanding relationship with Matt Johnson’s alternative rock mavericks The The, appearing on 11 out of the 12 tracks that make up the band’s 2024 album, Ensoulment, and then playing the subsequent live shows. “I’ve learnt a lot from Matt. Everything that I’ve been doing has also fed in to where I am now as a player,” he acknowledges his impressive CV which also includes touring and recording with the likes of Paul Weller, Johnny Marr and Primal Scream . Certainly, GRAVITY FREEZE feels textured, concise and infectious. It’s less-is-more approach is defined by the brooding opener More Bad Miles Of Road – a track whose very title appears to echo the work of ‘50s guitar pioneer Duane Eddy, its sonic depth serving as a reminder of Little Barrie’s irresistible soulful qualities. “Those instrumental hits from the late ‘50s and early ‘60s by Duane Eddy, Link Wray and The Ventures became inspirations a while back because a lot of those tunes have that dark, dissonant feeling you get from movie scores. But More Bad Miles Of Road was written on the bass. The guitar and the wah-wah pedal is really sparse because we wanted the idea of the descending bass to carry the song. There’s just one guitar on there for the most part and a vocal with the bass and drums holding down the track. Lewis and Tony transformed the original idea and added so much flavour to it. It shows you where we’re at as a band. As a song, it has real movement,” says Barrie. Indeed, GRAVITY FREEZE is an album which is designed for maximum impact. Even the running order is deliberate, created as it was with vinyl in mind. More Bad Miles Of Road tumbles into the dappled psychedelia of the fuzz-heavy It Isn’t Soul before moving to two tunes that form the reflective, emotional heart of the album: the wistful, Shuggie Otis-styled December and the seven-minute-plus Brit-psych choogle of Luggin’ Hurt (both tracks enhanced by the talents of Holly Quin-Ankrah and Frida Touray on backing vocals). “December is quite melodic and less chaotic for us but it came together pretty quickly. It’s half a demo because we kept some of the guitars from the original demo,” begins Barrie. “Luggin’ Hurt is pretty much a live performance, all of us in the room playing. It came out of a long jam. We played the arrangement, it felt good so we just carried on playing. It was done in three or four takes. I liked the idea of using a seven-minute track to close Side One of the album. It’s what Television did with [the title track to] Marquee Moon which is 10-minutes long on the end of that first side. Having Luggin’ Hurt there helped balance out the record.” Side Two of the album (or, indeed, Track 5 for CD/cassette owners and streamers) opens with the smouldering, stomp-and-start of Talk It Up Like It’s Wanted, a tune that showcases Barrie’s own take on his eternal blues influences, as does the slow shuffle of Anything You Are. The driving brace of Coralisa and Wire, meanwhile, confirm the band’s decision to try capture genuine in-the-room performances on this album as well as revealing a renewed post-Can percussive impetus. “Rhythm’s always been a big inspiration for me. I’ve been inspired so much by drummers as I have guitar players,” reflects Barrie. “Wire has just got a steady groove which Tony kept going because it started out as a messy kind of loop originally. I wanted it to be hypnotic, almost like a dance tune, but with this really swampy guitar. I just wanted it to simmer.” And simmer it does. The album concludes with the loose-limbed title track, bringing to a close what is undoubtedly the most satisfying Little Barrie offering to date. As an album GRAVITY FREEZE also marks twenty years since the release of the band’s debut album, the Edwyn Collins-produced We Are Little Barrie, and underlines just how far they’ve come. “When we started, we couldn’t find singers so I ended up singing. We wanted to sound like a funky Chuck Berry and The Meters with a bit of the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Traffic thrown in, but I guess we’ve evolved since then. I’ve certainly evolved as a guitar player,” concludes Barrie, a man who has quietly become one of the finest guitarists of his generation. “I think I've become a bit more original, but it took me a long time. I don't think I've fully cracked it yet because it’s a constant work in progress but when people start saying that you sound unique, that’s when you start to notice that maybe things have changed.” Nine years on from their last album, things have indeed changed for Little Barrie and with GRAVITY FREEZE they are ready to go again. How grateful we are to have them back… ‍