Tuesday April 1 * doors at 7, event at 730 * $10-20 * TICKETS
An 80-minute talk and listening session surveying the immigrant performers who recorded in Lower Manhattan during the first half of the 20th century, giving detailed biographies that illuminate the context of their time and place in New York. The lives and music of immigrants from Aleppo, Baghdad, Ioannina, Istanbul, Izmir, and Thessaloniki who settled in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx and worked with Albanian, Armenian, Bulgarian, Greek, and Syrian compatriots here in New York as well as the touring performers from Cairo and Athens who collectively provided music for their communities will be given an opportunity to be heard and felt again.
Ian Nagoski is an independent music researcher and reissue record producer in Baltimore, Maryland who has specialized for 20 years in early 20th century recordings made by immigrants to the U.S., especially musicians from the Ottoman Empire. He has made anthologies for Dust-to-Digital, Tompkins Square (including To What Strange Place: The Music of the Ottoman-American Diaspora in 2011), the Database of Recorded American Music, Mississippi Records, and his own Canary imprint which has released over 150 digital albums. He has toured widely as a speaker from Thessaloniki to Fresno, including talks at the Library of Congress, Brandeis, Carnegie Mellon, NYU, UCLA, the University of Chicago, the Armenian Museum in Watertown MA, and the Onassis Cultural Center in Athens. He has presented installations at the Museum fur Naturkunde in Berlin, the Wellcome Center in London, the Center for Postnatural History in Pittsburgh, and the Jewish Museum of Maryland in Baltimore.