April 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th
4 Nights of Kneebody
@ Littlefield, Brooklyn, $15

We’re doing it again because we enjoy repetitive fun. This year the festivities happen at at Littlefield, an awesome club in Gowanus, Brooklyn. As with prior years, each night will feature two sets, one set of Kneebody classic, and one with special guests. This year we have some great guest vocalists, splitting the nights up in some really cool ways. The breakdown:

April 11th - 9pm start time The Music of Tom Ze + Guests:  Mark Guiliana , Gretchen Parlato and more TBA

April 12th - 9pm start time The Music of Judee Sill, Guest vocalist : A mystery for now until a high profile show for him is passed, but he’s a past collaborator of the band.

April 13th -7:30pm start time, EARLY  The Music of Louis Cole and Genevieve Artadi

April 14th - 7:30pm start time, EARLY  Supremely Special secret guest

TEAM KNEE IN ACTION 

If you were looking for an entry point to the music of Brazilian maverick Tom Zé, it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to imagine cash registers. We’re not talking figuratively, as in the overheated commerce of a Gaga or an Adele, but rather literally, as in the ch-ch-ching that’s a cousin to the peck-pick-peck and carriage return of a pre–computer age Smith Corona. Zé’s singular place in Brazilian pop history was pretty much assured once he began expanding the windswept sonics of samba with typewriters, car horns and blenders, even if it took rediscovery by David Byrne in the late ’80s to remind Brazilians that there had always been a punk in their midst.

“I’ve always considered these sounds undomesticated,” Zé says, in Portuguese, of his Carnaval additives, speaking through a translator from his home in São Paulo. “But it’s not as if I’m in danger like a lion tamer might be. They certainly won’t kill me if I can’t tame them.”

Zé’s work has the gestalt of a country boy (he is originally from Irara, a small town in the rural northeast) who has embraced urban sophistication with his fingers crossed. In a taped conversation with Byrne and samba noisemaker Arto Lindsay, included among the extras in last year’s handsome three-LP box set Studies of Tom Zé: Explaining Things So I Can Confuse You, Zé, now 74, remembered that he was in his late teens when electricity came to his town in 1953. “It made it difficult for people to breathe, everyone was in so much awe,” he says. “The size of things seemed different.”

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