Tag: music

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Arts & Entertainment News

‘Place from Space’ Launches Placemaking Design Competition

Placemaking is a word that is often tossed around by designers, planners, architects and others in the industry of building and construction. From monolithic towers in the park, to the traditional neighborhood business corridors, people react to the nature and condition of the buildings and other elements in their surroundings. But the question remains, what are great places and how are they made?

Elizabeth Schmidt and Brad Cooper saw opportunity in converting vacant and underutilized spaces throughout the Cincinnati region into places.

“There are places all over the city waiting to be activated and there are many successful ways to activate a space,” organizer Schmidt told UrbanCincy.

So they decided to work together and create Place from Space, a design competition that seeks to construct a winning design that converts an underutilized space into a great place next year. Place from Space is part of  this year’s ArchiNati Festival which runs from October 4th to 13th.

IMG_1104-1024x768The former Church of the Assumption will host the event. Image provided.

“The competition gives individuals the chance to propose and implement positive physical changes to their community that should be fun, imaginative, and vibrant.” Cooper told UrbanCincy. 

Seven neighborhoods are participating in the contest including East Walnut Hills, Walnut Hills; East, West and Lower Price Hill, Covington and Over-the-Rhine. The first round of submissions for applications to be accepted into the contest will end on November 4. From there applicants go on to a second round of judging where one project will be selected for construction.

The first opportunity to see the group’s efforts will be on display tomorrow where they will be showcasing the submissions they have received so far. The event will be held at the former Church of the Assumption along Gilbert Avenue in Walnut Hills. The church, built in 1884 has been vacant for years until artist Justin Poole began using the space as his art studio. His art will also be on display Friday evening. There will also be a special performance by the band the Kentucky Struts.

Admission to the event is free. Parking is on-street and the venue is easily accessible from the #4 and #11 Metro bus routes.

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Arts & Entertainment News

PHOTOS: Over-the-Rhine Impresses More Than 30,000 Spectators for LumenoCity

In welcoming Louis Langrée, the new music director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Over-the-Rhine hosted LumenoCity, a community-wide celebration which encompassed all five of Music Hall’s fine arts groups as well as the building itself. Performances included the Cincinnati Pops, Ballet, Opera, May Festival Chorus, and of course, the Symphony.

The ensemble was complimented by a light show that used the façade of Music Hall as a canvas. Projections synchronized with 40 minutes of live music, with song selections ranging from Tchaikovsky and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 to Broadway hits including selections from Les Miserables and Hairspray.

An estimated 15,000 spectators gathered at Washington Park Saturday night, and another 18,000 on Sunday, to witness this first-ever light and orchestra music spectacular.

“Five years ago, something like this never would have happened in Washington Park,” mentioned Edith Fairgrove, who was visiting from West Chester Township. “The area [Over-the-Rhine] has changed so much in such little time.”

A few seats away, Devon Marshall had traveled from Price Hill with his family to see the show both Saturday and Sunday. Each day, they parked at Union Terminal then took the free shuttle to Washington Park. Despite there being long lines for the shuttle after the show, Marshall appreciated the service.

“If Cincinnati keeps having events like this, we’re going to need that streetcar to help get people around,” he grinned.

With over 30,000 people in attendance this weekend, LumenoCity became the largest gathering in Washington Park, dwarfing the sizeable turnout for last year’s World Choir Games performances. As Over-the-Rhine’s revival continues to succeed, Cincinnatians look on with wonder as to how the historic neighborhood will impress them next.

Paige Malott and John Yung contributed photographs for this story.

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Up To Speed

MOTR ownership team to renovate Woodward Theater into 600-person music venue

MOTR ownership team to renovate Woodward Theater into 600-person music venue.

MOTR Pub has become an Over-the-Rhine destination with seven days a week of live music. The success at the small music venue has encouraged the owners to embark on a new venture, and they will acquire the vacant Woodward Theater building across the street and open a second venue. More from the Cincinnati Business Courier:

The new renovations will be extensive. McCabe plans to eliminate a staircase in the center, add a new staircase to one side, install bathrooms and bars, and build a stage that juts out into the crowd.

For bands, the Woodward would provide the bridge between smaller bars like MOTR and larger area venues such as the Taft Theatre and Bogart’s. It would also give Cincinnati a leg up in attracting musicians, McCabe said. When a band is making its way from Chicago to Nashville, it doesn’t make stops at Indianapolis, Columbus and then Cincinnati; it just picks one.

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Arts & Entertainment Opinion

Afghan Whigs return to Cincinnati to ring in 2013, possibly end career

Cincinnati’s Afghan Whigs reunited in 2012 for a world tour that began with a dozen dates in Europe, Israel, Australia, and Canada, appearances at various summer festivals including Lollapalooza 2012 in Chicago, and ended with a fall tour of the United States. The band did not appear in Cincinnati until late in the tour, and by all accounts the band’s October 25 performance at Bogart’s was a dominating one, centered around material from 1993’s Gentlemen and 1996’s Black Love.

The New Year’s Eve show differed dramatically from their October appearance, with a 9-piece stage band and almost no overlap in the set list. A horn section and backing singers enabled faithful performances of songs from 1965, the Whigs’ final and most technically ambitious studio album. Although the band performed much material from 1965 elsewhere in 2012, the band largely skipped over these songs at the October 25 performance in anticipation of the special New Year’s Eve show.

The Afghan Whigs play at Bogart’s on New Year’s Eve. Photograph by Travis Estell for UrbanCincy.

The full instrumentation of the 1965 tracks and the three closing songs from Black Love, played in sequence during the encore, were the show’s highlights. Conspicuously absent were “Milez is Dead”, “Honkey’s Ladder”, “Debonair”, and a number of other well-known songs that in place of ballads and other scattered material could have avoided the lull that marred the midpoint of Monday night’s show. Further, the PA mix was completely different – the searing sizzle of the guitars heard in October was pulled back and at times obscured by muddiness coming up from the bass guitar or some other source.

Hanging like a cloud over Monday night’s show was the knowledge that it was probably the final live performance by the Afghan Whigs, ever. Singer Greg Dulli announced that possibility late in the evening, soon after asking for a show of hands from people who traveled to the show from outside of Cincinnati. With hundreds hands raised, Dulli paused for a moment as if he might start a natives vs. visitors shouting match resembling the Ohio vs. Kentucky shouting heard each year at the Riverfest fireworks.

Instead, he never called on Cincinnatians and let the uncomfortable silence speak for itself – a slap at the local radio stations, other media outlets, and local music fans who never supported the band in their heyday or during the 2012 reunion. Aside from CityBeat, no local media source made anything more than a casual mention of the 2012 tour, and with the demise of WOXY, The Afghan Whigs are heard today only on low-wattage WAIF and WNKU.

Anecdotally, I have not heard the Afghan Whigs even once in public – either at a bar or at a party – since moving back to Cincinnati in 2007. The band’s failure to become the Next Big Thing in the 1990s is discussed ad nauseam on seemingly every Internet discussion board and YouTube comment section, but the failure of Cincinnati to embrace them then or now is another. Neighboring cities like Cleveland and especially Detroit have always celebrated their native sons, but Cincinnati seems determined to ignore The Afghan Whigs as much as they do James Brown and the legacy of King Records.

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Up To Speed

Which cities did the biggest music hits come from in 2012?

Which cities did the biggest music hits come from in 2012?.

South Korea’s PSY took the world by storm in 2012 with his smash hit single “Gangnam Style.” His song, however, was an anomaly for Asian cities with regards to internationally pop song hits, with the vast majority originating from artists in North America and Western Europe. More from The Atlantic:

In this evolving international soundscape, just how global is the popular music Americans listen to? Where are its major locational epicenters? To get at this, UCLA urban planning doctoral candidate Patrick Adler took a look at the geography of two lists of the year’s best music: Pitchfork’s Top 100 Tracks and Billboard’s Hot 100 Songs.

Adler used geographic data from Twitter, SoundCloud, AllMusic, and Pitchfork to assign a location to the metro area where the artist behind each track currently resides. He gave preference to the locations identified by the artists themselves. The list is based on where artists currently live and work, not where they originally hail from. This can sometimes penalize non-U.S. locations.