Bars and Nightclubs

Subterms

    Latest story

    38 Shares20 Views

    Kacey Musgraves’s Nashville

    by

    “I always knew that Nashville would be a destination of some sort for me, that I would land there in terms of music,” said the singer-songwriter Kacey Musgraves during a Zoom call. A native Texan who is nominated for five Grammys this year, including best country album for “Deeper Well,” her fifth studio album, she began singing at a young age and at 18 competed on season five of the country music television show “Nashville Star.” A year later she moved to Nashville and never looked back. “I do owe so much to the community there for absolutely shaping me and my songs, and for giving me the opportunities that I’ve had,” she said.Her love for the city runs deep. “Nashville is home to an unparalleled songwriting community. Some of the best songwriters in the world are based there,” she said. Indeed, the city pulses with the energy of its musical heritage, and you can soak it all up everywhere you go — from its groovy lounges to its record stores and hole-in-the-wall bars.So where should a visit to Music City begin? “Even if you’re not necessarily a fan of country music, the Country Music Hall of Fame is really interesting,” she said. “Country music is a very historic genre, and this museum really honors the roots of that.”One of her favorite haunts in the East Nashville area is Grimey’s, a record store set inside an old church, complete with vaulted ceilings and stained-glass windows. Right next door is Anaconda Vintage, a used clothing store where she “can always find a little treasure or two.” Across town near Vanderbilt University is Brown’s Diner, the oldest burger joint in the city and “notoriously John Prine’s favorite spot to get a hamburger.”Ms. Musgraves is currently on tour across North America in support of “Deeper Well,” which was reviewed in The Times as “a study in quiet thoughtfulness rooted in gratitude.” Her last stop, on Dec. 7, is back home in Nashville at Bridgestone Arena.Here are her favorite places to visit in the city.1. Sperry’sRoast of prime rib beef with creamy horseradish sauce, asparagus and a twice baked potato is one of the classic dishes at Sperry’s.William DeShazer for The New York TimesWith its classic decor, Sperry’s is the kind of restaurant that seems frozen in time.William DeShazer for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 138 Shares148 Views

      in Music

      Jack Jones, a Suave, Hit-Making and Enduring Crooner, Dies at 86

      by

      With his smooth voice, he drew crowds to cabarets and music halls for six decades. He also sang the themes for films and TV shows, including “The Love Boat.”Jack Jones, a crooner who beguiled concert fans and stage, screen and television audiences for decades with romantic ballads and gentle jazz tunes that even in large venues often achieved the intimacy of his celebrated nightclub performances, died on Wednesday in Rancho Mirage, Calif. He was 86. His wife, Eleonora Jones, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was leukemia.While his popularity peaked in the 1960s, Mr. Jones found a new audience in later years singing the theme to the hit television show “The Love Boat.” But even then he seemed always to have stepped out of an earlier generation, one that dressed in tuxedos for the songs of Tin Pan Alley and reminded America of its love affairs with the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen.He won two Grammy Awards and recorded numerous albums of American Songbook favorites that hit the upper reaches of Billboard’s charts on the strength of his smooth vocal interpretations. He performed at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, the White House and the London Palladium, and for more than 60 years drew crowds to cabarets and nightclubs around the world.At the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan in 2010, marking his 52nd year in show business, Mr. Jones opened and closed a two-hour retrospective of his songs with Paul Williams’s “That’s What Friends Are For.” He sang to a packed house of longtime fans:Friends are like warm clothesIn the night air.Best when they’re oldAnd we miss them the most when they’re gone.“Those lyrics evoked the vanishing breed of pop-jazz crooner, of which Mr. Jones and Tony Bennett remain the great survivors,” Stephen Holden wrote in The New York Times. “Mr. Jones, now 72, draws the same kind of well-dressed sophisticated audiences that used to attend the annual appearances at the defunct Michael’s Pub of his friend Mel Tormé, who died 11 years ago at 73.”Mr. Jones with his fellow vocalist Tony Bennett in 1972.Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      With Stickers on Phone Cameras, Clubs Defend the Party Vibe

      by

      It’s standard practice in Berlin, and camera covering is catching on in London, Ibiza and New York as clubs seek to protect an anything-goes atmosphere.On a recent Sunday afternoon, the line outside Berghain, the Berlin techno club, stretched for hours. Hundreds of visitors, sweating in black outfits, lined the dusty path to the door, hoping to be allowed into the former power station, which is known worldwide for its tough door policy, starry D.J. lineups and hedonistic parties lasting nearly 36 hours.The club is also notorious because, despite its reputation as one of the world’s pre-eminent techno venues, its parties aren’t documented online. Clubgoers are warned at the door that photos and videos are banned: Any violation will result in expulsion. To ensure compliance, door staff place stickers on the front and back of patrons’ smartphones, covering their cameras.Although this may seem excessive to visitors, such camera policies have become standard practice in Berlin clubs as a crucial tool for maintaining an anything-goes atmosphere, and clubs elsewhere are increasingly following Berlin’s lead.Respected venues, including Fabric in London and Radion in Amsterdam have all brought in similar sticker rules in recent years. Pikes Ibiza, on the Spanish island famous for its nightlife, announced last month that all visitors must now cover their cameras, so that “what happens at Pikes stays at Pikes.”Téa Abashidze, a founder of Basement, a Brooklyn techno club that has been stickering visitors’ phones since 2019, said in an email that it was part of a “cultural shift” toward “genuine, distraction-free experiences.” The club rigorously enforced the rule, she said, sometimes throwing several rule-breakers out per night.On a recent Sunday night, people lining up to enter R.S.O. were uniformly in support of the club’s stickering policy.Gordon Welters for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares139 Views

      in Music

      A New Venue Beckons Jazz Musicians and Beyond to Upstate New York

      by

      The Mill, an arts center with art galleries and a performance space in an old flour mill, opened over the weekend. Its owners hope it sparks a “ripple effect.”Fourteen years ago, Taylor Haskins, a veteran jazz trumpeter, and Catherine Ross Haskins, a visual artist, moved from Brooklyn to Westport, N.Y., a picture-book town on Lake Champlain, 275 miles north of Manhattan. It became “the place on Earth that we love,” Taylor said. “But sometimes it could use a little bit of an injection of the outside world.”So three years ago, they bought an abandoned, 11,000-square-foot flour mill on Main Street, gutted it and refashioned it as the Mill, a center for contemporary visual arts with a chapel-like performance space.The venue, which had its official opening on Saturday, is exhibiting and commissioning esteemed visual artists. And it is booking musicians — including the pianist Guillermo Klein, the slide trumpeter Steven Bernstein’s Sexmob and the violinist Sarah Neufeld of Arcade Fire — who don’t often drive up to the Adirondacks for a gig. (They’d typically perform at downtown Manhattan clubs like the Village Vanguard or Joe’s Pub.) The hope, Taylor said, is to create “a cultural oasis” that the community will embrace.The Haskinses, both 52, are financing the project with their own funds. During their years in New York City, they watched as empty industrial buildings were given new lives, too often as condos (they lived in one), but sometimes in creative ways. They thought they’d give it a try: “We could fail,” Catherine said. “But what are we even alive for if we don’t do something we believe in?”Visitors gather in one of the Mill’s five galleries.Sinjun Strom for The New York TimesPieces in Mayer’s Slumpies series installed in one of the Mill’s galleries.Sinjun Strom for The New York TimesSituated about 100 miles south of Montreal, the Mill isn’t yet on anyone’s performance circuit. At the same time, it is one node in a network of far-flung venues that operate largely under the media radar. “It reminds me of places I’ve encountered not in the U.S. — in Japan, in Poland, in France,” said the harpist Zeena Parkins, who performed at the opening on Saturday. “And it’s always the energy of one or two people that makes this incredible thing happen just because they love the music and they love the art, and they’ve developed a trust with their community.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      How a ‘Dirty Gospel’ Minister Spends His Sundays

      by

      The Reverend Vince Anderson, a mainstay of the Brooklyn music scene, fills his day with worship in two languages, the Mets and a full hour of watering his 92 houseplants.When most people picture a minister, Vince Anderson is not who comes to mind.He curses. He wears caftans. He has played a “dirty gospel” residency with his six-member band, The Love Choir, on Monday nights for the past 26 years, a majority of them at the Union Pool bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. His signature song is “Get Out of My Way,” a growling, percussive call-and-response anthem he wrote in 2000. (He used to get naked by the end of every show; he stopped in the mid-2000s.)Mr. Anderson, 53, who left seminary after three months in 1994 to pursue music, is the minister of music and community arts at Bushwick Abbey, an Episcopal church in Brooklyn, and plays the piano for Sunday services at Iglesia de la Santa Cruz, a Spanish-speaking congregation in the same building.Known as Reverend Vince, Mr. Anderson said he was ordained in 2003. He has played with all of his band members since at least about that time, and he said they’ve never had a rehearsal. “Once in a while I send the band a crude recording, but most of the time I just play a new song once onstage for the first time on piano, and they kind of get it, and then we go into it,” he said.He was the subject of a 2022 documentary, “The Reverend,” which is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video and the Criterion Channel. He lives in a two-bedroom apartment in the Ridgewood neighborhood of Queens — about a 15-minute walk from his Bushwick congregations — with his wife of five years, Millicent Souris, 50, a cook and a writer, and their 3-month-old rescue kittens, Ace and Sonny.DAILY DEVOTIONS I wake up around 7 a.m. — lately I’ve been trying to keep my phone out of my bedroom, so I just use my Apple Watch for an alarm — and read a book or some psalms. I’m currently reading “Wandering Stars,” Tommy Orange’s new novel. I let the kittens come in and cuddle with me for a minute. Rather than doomscrolling, I’m trying to just be thankful and count my blessings; it’s important to me to be present in the moment to start my day.GETTING CENTERED I started drawing mandalas during my recovery from spinal surgery in January (I had five herniated discs in my spine, all from me playing piano) and I’ve kept it up. I’ll paint or draw something in a circle, which gives me focus. It opens up the spiritual side of me and gets the creative side of me flowing in a different way than music does.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More