Nightlife
Room for Everyone, Brian Newman and Angie Pontani After Dark
Lady Gaga's jazz bandleader and his burlesque star wife take their late show to The Box for Halloween and press a record for a November party at Joanne
The trumpet holds a note. A dancer on the stage holds a pose. The song lasts as long as the room wants it to. When Brian Newman's band plays for Angie Pontani, the number can stretch and bend to the room.
"We can make that song five minutes. I can change where the bumps are. We can ride the wave of energy with the audience together," Pontani told Brooklyn Paper in a profile of Newman published this week. "When we're on stage together, it's like I'm a member of the band."
The show is called After Dark. It mixes live jazz and burlesque, and it has a New York home at The Box. On Friday, October 23, it returns for a Halloween edition, according to the calendar on Pontani's site. Two weeks later, on November 6, the couple throws a record release party for Newman's latest album at Joanne, the Upper West Side trattoria owned by Lady Gaga's family. It is also Pontani's birthday.
From a U-Haul to the Javits Center
Newman came to New York in 2003 with a U-Haul and $500, he told Brooklyn Paper. He waited tables. He found gigs on Craigslist. "I just started beating the pavement and looking for work, waiting tables, whatever I could do to stay here," he said.
The big night came by phone. Newman was in Cleveland visiting his parents when Gaga called and asked if he could get to the Javits Center that evening for the Robin Hood Gala. His father drove him to the airport. Pontani brought his suits into the city. In Brooklyn Paper's telling, that night led to Cheek to Cheek, Gaga's 2014 album with Tony Bennett. Newman still remembers the moment backstage when the idea of making a record together was first put to Gaga.
His official biography fills in the rest. Bandleader, arranger and trumpeter on Cheek to Cheek and its tour, and on the duo's follow-up, Love for Sale. Bandleader and arranger for Gaga's Jazz and Piano residency in Las Vegas. And the man behind After Dark, which runs at The Box in New York and at the NoMad Library inside Park MGM in Las Vegas, and has featured Terence Blanchard, Ashanti, Robbie Krieger and Gaga herself.
Still, he does not call any of it an arrival. He and Pontani like to joke about how short the trip is from glamour to grit. "One day you're on the red carpet and the next day you're getting changed in a bathroom," he said.
"One day you're on the red carpet and the next day you're getting changed in a bathroom."
Not a Jazz Scene Guy
Newman has spent years programming rooms as much as playing them. Brooklyn Paper lists music programming at the Roxy Hotel and work at the Oak Room at the Plaza. He is blunt about the scene he came up next to. "I never got into the jazz culture. I don't like the ego, I don't like the cliquiness of it," he said. "I'm not trying to impress a bunch of jazz musicians. I'm trying to bring love and light and music to people in a fun way and like, as an entertainer."
It is a different idea of a jazz night than the one on offer at the Village Vanguard. His influences run from Cole Porter and Louis Armstrong to Nirvana, Thin Lizzy, Earth, Wind and Fire and Bruce Springsteen. His mantra is short. "There's room for everyone," he said. "And if you don't see a space for you, you have to create it."
Pontani has spent years pushing burlesque toward the mainstream, Brooklyn Paper notes, and her site credits her with burlesque consultation for Gypsy on Broadway. Working with a live band, she said, has spoiled her. "I'm so spoiled rotten as a burlesque dancer to be able to perform with this band," she said. "It's almost ruined me in a sense because now when I go out and I work on my own, I'm like, 'Oh, I have to perform to a track?'"
The two do not always agree before the curtain. "We have two different working styles when it comes to pre-production," Pontani said. "But we meet on stage and we're good." After one heated fight before a show in Las Vegas, they went on and turned it into one of their best performances. Newman said everybody told them they were great that night. "We're like, 'That's 'cause I wanna kill him!'" Pontani said.
Songs for Lonely Lovers
The new record leans old. Songs for Lonely Lovers draws on the Great American Songbook and on the spare records Tony Bennett made with the pianist Bill Evans. Newman cut it live with a small group that includes the pianist Caelan Cardello. "Everything's live, not processed and not overdubbed," he said.
He pictures it playing at dinner or during a breakup. Ideally, he said, he would hear it in a smoky bar, if bars still allowed smoking. On the material itself, he is plain. "The songs all have depth. The lyrics are heartbreaking at times. And those kind of songs, all the sad ones always make me happy."
Joanne, on West 68th Street, keeps live music on every night, and the couple wants the vinyl party to feel intimate, almost like a family party. "I would love to spend my birthday at Joanne's, because it feels like family," Pontani said.
Home, after all of it, is Marine Park. The couple lived in Williamsburg and Kensington before settling there, where their daughter rides her bike around the block. Newman has a plain view of what that is worth. "I feel like this is the last vestige of some affordability for artists," he said.