This New Year’s Eve, let’s pop a bottle at the Waiting Room. Spend the biggest party night of the year with all of your friends at Pin Ups and Pompadores, After Dark’s 2014 NYE party, which includes a four hour open bar, food by Osteria 166, a photo booth, DJs, complimentary coat check and more.
[ARTS] This Saturday, December 6 for the first time ever Dreamland will be hosting a red show. The eclectic multi-media venue will be dedicating itself to the color red for the night - red light bulbs, red instruments, and encouraging attenders (that means you) to wear all red attire. Accept the challenge and you will most certainly be rewarded. Live musical performances by Bryan Johnson and the Family, Lesionread, and Scajaquada Creeps.
[SCREENING] At the age of 14, Ornette Coleman picked up his first saxophone. Coleman grew up in segregated Texas. This is not a cliché: but the young boy who would eventually become a cultural icon in the jazz world and beyond, actually saved up money to buy his first saxophone by shining shoes. He says that the first time he picked up the instrument, he played it as well as he would 25 years later in Hamburg, Germany when he reunited the original Ornette Coleman quartet.
[ROCK] The city’s five member surf rock staples, Wooden Waves, are releasing their long anticipated LP Wilder Dreams on the December 9 via One Percent Press. And to celebrate the hard work, they’re throwing a release party this Friday, December 5 at Mohawk Place. In addition to showcasing the album live, they’ve rallied some of Buffalo’s most distinguished outfits to add in the lineup: Jack Topht and Little Cake, Mallwalkers, and TMMC.
Growing up isn’t easy. It’s fraught with looming uncertainty and awkward, uncomfortable moments galore. But some of us roll with the punches more gracefully than others. Michigan-based quintet the Ragbirds, who’ll play the 9th Ward at Babeville this Friday, have spent the last few years in a quirky, coming-of-age period, facing a number of personnel changes while parenthood entered the picture.
[ROCK] Schwervon is a veteran indie rock two-piece transplanted to Kansas City from New York City’s anti-folk scene. Matt plays a guitar that ranges from grunge to folk, Nan plays the drums, and they both sing. Opening is the Buffalo four-piece fronted by The Public contributor Shane Meyer, Difficult Night.
[ROCK] Lead by ferocious frontwoman Megan Brown, Dirty Smile might be the next breakout Buffalo rock band. Earlier this year the band won the regional Hard Rock Rising competition, and placed in the top three globally. That’s no small feat. If the five piece band—including drummer Erik Eimiller, bassist Mike Suda, and guitarists Jesse Raderman and Gus Walters—can impress the crowd at Buffalo Iron Works on Saturday, December 6 at their EP release show, they might be on to something big.
[ARTS] The Buffalo Public Schools Art Department and El Museo will be present an exhibition featuring the work of students, teachers, and teachers’ own children, and how delicately they are all inter-connected on Friday, December 5. There categories of awards for youth, teen, and adult will be recognized. If you haven’t checked out one of these exhibitions before, it’s an uplifting complement to a night out in Allentown.
[BEARDS] We’ve all wondered: “who boasts Buffalo’s best beard?” The answer may finally be given on Friday, December 5 at Buffalo Beard Brawl: The 2014 Beard and Moustache Championships at the Town Ballroom. Now you may be asking, “are you serious?” The answer to that question is yes, yes this is serious. “How does one judge a beard?” might be your next logical question.
[ELECTRONIC/DANCE] As far as bass music goes, Seven and Joe Raygun make a good pair. Raygun’s lush vocals perfectly compliment Seven’s reverberating synth tones and steaming hi hats, which the UK jungle master has been perfecting since the early 1990s.
You can bet that when Sean Tyas takes the decks, it’s a fist pumping good time. The DJ from New York—who now calls Teufen, Switzerland home—has made a career of churning out synth stabbing, hi-def, high energy trance and techno music. Earlier this year, Tyas inked a deal with Black Hole Recordings, a label known for releasing music by artists like Deadmau5, Jordan Suckley, and Julie Thompson—the latter with whom he’s released several collabrative tracks, inlcuding 2012’s, “What I Am.” Holding a steady 130-150 beats per mintue, Tyas certainly keeps the crowd working.
[TRIBUTE] Local Pink Floyd tribute band, The Relics, will play at Buffalo Iron Works on Friday, December 5. With an experimental, cutting-edge group like Pink Floyd, paying homage must be uniquely executed. The Relics achieve this by incorporating improvisational jam cutaways into Floyd’s original album tracks, and creating a visual experience—a notoriously Floydian quirk—through multimedia lightshows.
[ELECTRONIC/DANCE] Buffalo’s newest electronic dance music spot, Lift Nightclub, at the corner of Franklin and Chippewa, is finally having a grand opening party on Thursday, December 4. The free event includes the music of house DJ Nik Styles, two free drinks and hors D’oeuvres, as well as your chance to win some cool prizes.
[ARTS] New works by Tanya Chutko, Darlene Garcia Torres, and Ashley Smith will be on exhibit in the expansive first floor of Artspace this Friday, December 5. These three art educators are revisiting the chops that launched their careers. Chutko is a teaches at Olmsted #156, Smith at Elmwood Village Charter School, and Garcia Torres a doctoral education student at UB.
[FUNK] Existing at the intersection of funk and soul, After Funk are making a name for themselves in their hometown of Toronto, and now, beyond. Tracks like their old-fashioned flow-funk tune “The Way It Is” would not sound out of place on a fuzzy AM radio station sandwiched between James Brown and Sly & The Family Stone. The band, currently in the midst of a four-month winter tour of the East Coast, will make a stop into Nietzsche’s on Saturday, December 6 with support from ABTrio and The Goods.
[AMERICANA] Three of Buffalo’s finest Americana acts come together at Nietzsche’s on Friday, December 5. Uncle Ben’s Remedy, Folkfaces, and the Andrew J. Reimers Country Punk Extravaganza, each band with their own distinct style—Folkfaces with their edgy folk rock, CPX with their aggressive country sounds, and Uncle Ben’s Remedy with their outlaw rock sound—will take the stage for a whole night of downhome rock.