The Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts gets underway this Thursday, March 28th and will run through April 27th. With homebase returning to The Kimmel Center and a new theme of time travel this year, the month-long event will use performances, lectures and exihibitions to explore past moments in history including the discovery of America, the lunar landing and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Below, check out a few musical highlights that you won’t want to miss, including a selection of free concerts happening in the Kimmel Center’s “Time Travel Plaza” (where you will also find a spiraling time machine).
Last Call at the Downbeat (4/5-4/13, Red Room at the Society Hill Playhouse): Learn about Philadelphia’s jazz scene in the forties with this staged retrospective of trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. Watch a short video about the play from show producers Jazz Bridge below.
Prima! Rufus! Judy! (4/21, Verizon Hall): Rufus Wainwright reprises Judy Garland’s return to the stage with selections from her 1961 Carnegie Hall performance. The evening will begin with excerpts from Wainwright’s own opera Prima Donna. Watch Wainwright perform “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart” below.
Delicate to the point of being dangerously fragile, Talain Rayne’s “Wake Up, December” could very well be the Tiny Tim of Christmas tunes. It’s good-natured and optimistic, but the undercurrent of sadness that flows through the first couple of minutes makes you wonder what kind of immediate future—if any—lies in wait for a song that has seemingly struggled to get as far as it has already. Thankfully, around the 2:15 mark, Talain puts to rest any concerns of The Ghost Of Christmas Future showing listeners a vision of a tiny piano sitting in a dark corner all by its lonesome. The music swells, the the vocal melodies go into overdrive, the drums kick in—and, suddenly, Talain’s Tiny Tim has more energy than Mary Lou Retton backflipping across the stage in Scrooged.
Like your piano-driven pop infused with a tinge of sadness, but wrapped in the cozy warm blanket of boy/girl vocal harmonies and hummable melodies? Talain Rayne‘s “Dear Sister, Your Brother” (featuring Meg Lynch) sounds so upbeat, you’d probably never realize the poor guy is really crying on the inside. (Unless, of course, the Phoenixville, PA-based singer-songwriter straight-up told you his music is “influenced by nostalgia and his closest relationships,” contains lyrical content that “tugs on listeners’ hearts,” and that he “doesn’t hold back personal family struggles”—all of which he specifically mentions on his website.) Hey, Talain—cheer up, buddy! We can’t give you the kind of comforting reassurance you’re looking for in lyrics such as, “Please say everything is OK/tell me we can go play/like we did when we were younger”—but we can say that you write a pretty good pop song (which you can listen to