MEDESKI, MARTIN & WOOD SUN., OCT. 31 DESPITE ITS RICH tradition of ...

TIN & WOOD

SUN., OCT. 31

DESPITE ITS RICH tradition of iconoclasm and innovation, the term "jazz" has been so codified that it can only be seen as a starting point for Medeski, Martin & Wood, who also incorporate elements of Meters-obsessed funk, jammy-sounding instrumental improv, hiphop at its most arty and ambient. When they put 'em all together, they come up with an inventive, futuristic melange that merely suggests remnants of its component ingredients and sits proudly misshapen outside of any category.

MMW also shift gears dramatically from album to album. Their latest, the cleverly titled End of the World Party (Just in Case), sounds like what a tripped-out, trip-hopped Tom Waits might have come up with if he wanted to shake a tail-feather from time to time. Its listenability rates high compared to some past efforts, which, understandably, must sacrifice the listeners' comfort in order to take them to new sonic destinations. (The ride is sometimes bumpy but always worth the stomach butterflies at the end of the day.) As expected, End of the World prominently features guest contributions, but since there's only a handful-most notably guitarist Marc Ribot and producer John King-the album achieves a favorable cohesion.

Onstage, MMW are just as fluid and far-reaching as on their recordings, but they also place a high premium on improv, which casts rawness and even greater unpredictability across the ever-changing face of their material. Where other different styles can often be detected floating in MMW's sound, the fiercely political Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra fuse dub and percussion-driven Afro-Caribbean grooves into a seamless, hypnotically repetitive whole. Be prepared to keep moving for the entire show.

Hammerstein Ballroom, 311 W. 34th St. (betw. 8th & 9th Aves.), 212-485-1534; 6:30, $34.50, $32 adv.

SABY REYES-KULKARNI

THE LIVING JARBOE

FRI., OCT. 29

SINCE PLAYING DEAD Cher to a desiccated Sonny during the run of their screeching sinister Swans (and promise me, Michael Gira, that a reunion will one day be possible), Jarboe has made her solo self into an extreme Saint of the Possessed. Make that solo selves. For this includes not only her dozen or so voices-her quivering, curious cackle, her accursed coo, an unholy holler-or her tongue-spoken lyricism, but the musical base she acts upon. Like Gira (with whom she is still a psychic partner), Jarboe's multitude of singing and lyrical styles are as uncomfortably applied to angular, glimmering folk, flashy dance-tronics, greasy Southern gospel blues and vicious prose-related ambience as they were to the scarred guitar squalor that was Swans.

Though she'll highlight material from collaborations with Larry Seven, Neurosis and Gira, listen hard for the non-verbal and verbal enterprises from her solo catalogue's past.

P.S. 122, 150 1st Ave. (E. 9th St.), 212-477-5288; 8, $12.

A.D. AMOROSI

THE DRESDEN DOLLS

FRI., OCT. 29

THERE ARE TWO ways in which you can think of Beantown's doyennes of decay, the Dresden Dolls. With their cabaret twinkle, wily whiteface and silly derbies, they can be a gothed-up, blaringly loud Fosse-esque version of A Clockwork Orange, something whipped up by Disney for the kiddie-winks and googlie-mooglies until it hits that gang-rape scene. Then it's jazz hands for Alex and the boys in the milk bar.

Instead, the Boston-based duo of singer/pianist Amanda Palmer and percussionist Brian Viglione make a brand of vivid, confessional music as intimate and jazzy as Nina Simone, yet as primitive and rip-snorting as R.L. Burnside without succumbing to trite showiness. Leaping from tender touch-dancing waltzes to torrid tangos to raw-powered preening punk tracks-often all in one song-Palmer controls their literate, lyrical passions like a foot on a piano's pedals. Of course, there's some florid, tortured-soul moments that daringly and dramatically go over the top, but along with the joie d'esprit of makeup and sleazy lingerie, their music's scented headiness is exactly what sucks you in. Elegant ballads, ferocious fox trots, greasy garage rock-they sound like cat-and-mouse games between drum and piano. Or better still, like a pair of lovers racing to complete each other's thoughts.

Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey St. (betw. Bowery & Chrystie St.), 212-533-2111; 8:30, $15.

A.D. AMOROSI

4:48 PSYCHOSIS

THROUGH SUN., OCT. 31

"MY MIND IS the subject of these bewildered fragments," states one voice in Sarah Kane's play, 4:48 Psychosis. As Kane's final script aids the Royal Court Theatre production (now at St. Ann's Warehouse) with neither names, numbers of actors, not even specific genders, it's little surprise that the work's aimed sublimely at itself-or that Psychosis was first performed posthumously (for the playwright, 4:48 a.m. pinpointed life's farthest ebb, when suicide or redemption lay nearest at hand: "At 4:48/when desperation visits/I shall hang myself/to the sound of my mother's breathing?").

An extreme mesh of form and content, Psychosis gets its stateside premiere in the 2000 RCT production directed by James MacDonald. It's the Lear, the Under Milk Wood and the poetical Ariel of the controversy-hounded British playwright's brief canon, which hit hot in early '95 when Blasted opened in the Royal Court's Theatre Upstairs. In that play, a tabloid journalist dying of lung cancer lures an acquaintance to his Leeds hotel room; failed seduction precedes rape, a Balkans soldier bursts in after the girl's morning departure and sucks the journalist's eyes out before shooting himself (the journalist will still speak after stage directions have him dead "with relief").

The girl and an infant have returned from the war-torn world outside: not Leeds at all, evidently, though such latitudes didn't prevent the Daily Mail from titling its review "This disgusting feast of filth."

Most papers pounded; playwrights Caryl Churchill and Harold Pinter kudoed Kane's upsetting achievement (Pinter's hand-delivered letter sensed her "facing something actual and true and ugly and painful"). The productions kept coming: Cleansed (at a university/concentration camp, a woman gets her murdered brother's cock and an eyeball gets syringed with dope); a take on Seneca called Phaedra's Love for the Gate Theatre (the Telegraph said a critic wasn't needed-a psychiatrist was); the pseudonymous Crave; and a short film, Skin, screened on Channel 4.

On finishing Psychosis, Kane-who was raised by journalist/evangelical parents whose faith she rejected in her teens-had undergone bouts with depression as deep as she dared. Fifty sleeping pills and three times that many antidepressants put her in hospital only because her flat-mate found her in time. Alone for 90 minutes while convalescing, Kane slipped to the lav and hanged herself with her shoelaces. The daring and clarity of her work, though, keeps coming back for more.

St. Ann's Warehouse, 38 Water St. (under Brooklyn Br.), Dumbo, 718-254-8779; Tues.-Sat. at 8, Sat. at 3, Sun. at 1 & 4, $35-$45.

ALAN LOCKWOOD

WILLIAMSBURG ART NEXUS BENEFIT

SAT., OCT. 30

WILLIAMSBURG ART NEXUS, or WAX, has been home to hundreds of performances in its short five-year history, not to mention offering thousands of hours of affordable rehearsal space for emerging dance and theater companies. The four directors of the space (Marisa Beatty, Melissa Rodnon, Brian Brooks and David Tirosh) have used a real estate crisis (their rent being doubled at the end of their current lease) as an opportunity to expand the scope of their project. By becoming homeless. The final performance in their N. 7th Street location, Harvest, will be held this weekend.

WAX as an entity will survive its deconstruction. Beatty intends to continue the original vision of the space: to support and inspire discourse among artists of all media. The other three directors will step down or morph into new roles. Possible new sites for WAX programming are being investigated across the boroughs.

Harvest, planned to capture the energy of WAX as we have known it, is a benefit evening to launch this next phase. General admission offers a sort of aleatoric in-and-out of theater/gallery-space experience. In-the-almost-round banquet seating is also available for the four-course, four-act evening of more than 20 performers doing five-minute tributes to or reminiscences of the space. Beatty says her intention is to "take down the curtains, get it back to its bare bones, make it someplace that people can wander around in."

Each act will be married to a course of the meal: cocktails, appetizer, entree, dessert. Sounds like a fantastic opportunity for a food fight. Or to heckle emcee Antonio Rodriguez with a little penne in vodka sauce.

The roster of performers is sort of a greatest hits medley and includes a cross section of artists who have done shows over the years: Fiona Marcotty, Alexandra Beller, Clare Byrne, Troika Ranch, Katie Workum. Graffiti art by Ghost and others will be shown.

WAX, 205 N. 7th St. (betw. Driggs Ave. & Roebling St.), Williamsburg, 718-599-7997; 6:30, $20-$40.

CHRIS DOHSE

COMIC GROTESQUE-WIT AND MOCKERY IN GERMAN ART, 1870-1940

THROUGH MON., FEB. 14

FROM SILLY, TO sublime, to deadly serious, Comic Grotesque-Wit and Mockery in German Art, 1870-1940 at the Neue Galerie offers an interesting look at the artist as agitator, witness and casualty.

The show opens with the work of Swiss landscape painter Arnold Böcklin. An outsider in German art circles, Böcklin won his 15 minutes of fame in 1874 thanks to his "foolishly strange" mythology paintings. They featured, for example, a terrified mermaid caught in the net of two dumbfounded fishermen, and a devilish cupid playing pipes off tune to a cringing Pan. Though Böcklin lived only briefly in Germany, his combination of folk humor and romantic styling was hailed as a "unique German phenomenon." Critics loved the "contradictions (that) connect all that is dissimilar."

The movement's influence can be seen in Emile Nolde's fairytale pictures of monsters and Paul Klee's childlike drawings. At first playful, the pieces over time become aggressively critical of society and the government. After Böcklin's death in 1901, a new generation of critics denounced his art, and comic grotesque went "underground."

Entering the second gallery, you jump forward to the early 20th century. However, the first painting in the room is a nod to the past. Pissing Death (1880) by Max Klinger is your standard romantic river landscape, but in the foreground a skeleton is crudely pissing into the water. Many of the artists on display in this room had been soldiers, and this painting epitomized their disillusioned mood. Inspired by the satirical and nonsensical aspects of 19th-century comic grotesque, they added their own anti-tradition, anti-technology twist and created a new art form they called Dada.

Dadaism left few masterpieces, yet it was arguably the most important force in 20th-century art, launching surrealism, conceptualism, performance art and post-modernism. The exhibit features stinging posters by John Heartfield and samples of the literary magazine Simplicissimus. Throughout, the incendiary nature of satire is put to work against industrialism, communism, the bourgeoisie and even art itself.

In the final gallery we see the Dadaist collages of Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann, puppets, playbills and the malevolent-looking Castor and Pollution-a painting of two finger-sucking men floating in a tub by Max Ernst. Flying overhead is a construction of a stuffed, life-sized, pig-faced soldier by Georg Grosz. His collection God with us, critical of the fascists yet mild by today's standards, landed Grosz in court and nearly in jail.

In 1933 Hitler became dictator and most of the artists displayed here were forced into exile or placed under house arrest. Ernst Kirchner committed suicide. And their art was confiscated. Klee, for example, lost 102 works, and Heckel lost 729. The last photo in the exhibit documents the 1937 Nazi exhibition of "degenerate art." The picture shows a jumble of Dadaist work; scribbled on the wall is a statement dismissing the art, instructing visitors to think of it as a sick joke. Oddly enough, by criticizing the fascists these artists were, in fact, presenting a tragic comedy of the grotesque.

Neue Galerie New York, 1048 5th Ave. (86th St.), 212-628-6200; call for times, $10-$7 st./s.c.

JULIA MORTON

ISAAC MIZRAHI

FRI., OCT. 29

BETWEEN THE NEEDLE and the damage done, there is Isaac Mizrahi. Not that needle, not that sort of damage and certainly nothing to do with Neil Young, doll. Instead, Mizrahi-the king of the ready-to-wear, of the shoes, of the couturier costumes for Broadway theatricals and whatever it is he does for Target-has become a male Sandra Bernhard, a walking, talking cabaret act whose weary emotive vocals and choice of song and arrangement are shockingly affecting. You certainly saw it coming-with the constant singing, nancing and blabbing throughout 1995's documentary of his day-to-day, Unzipped.

Not to sound corny, but the boy's a natural. Anyone who saw him backinnaday singing through the slow jazzy jive and tenement blues of Les Mizrahi would tell you as much. Back then, he was flitting about through Broadway schmaltz, Vegas-y cheese (songs from Valley of the Dolls) and stunningly stark jazz standards like Billy Strayhorn's "Lush Life." Maybe he didn't have the chops of a Johnny Hartman. But he had an Impressionist's weary way with a song, moments of light and shade, of duskiness and dawniness that proved Mizrahi to be a chatty stylist-a breathy Mabel Mercer sort.

What's coolest about Mizrahi (and is most reminiscent of Miss Sandra B.) is that he seems to find sympathetic musicians who roll, melodically and rhythmically, behind and aside him (think of Without You I'm Nothing and the elegant stately arrangements of "Four Women," etc.). For Mizrahi, his musical saving grace-along with a torchiness indigenous to drag performances-is his piano player, Ben Waltzer, and his intuitive quartet. His mother, Mrs. Sarah Mizrahi, has called her son Isaac "a fabulous singer and a consummate musician." Listen to his mother. Go and be surprised.

Joe's Pub, 425 Lafayette St. (betw. E. 4th St. & Astor Pl.), 212-539-8778; 7:30, $20.

A.D. AMOROSI

TEARS FOR FEARS/DIRTY VEGAS

THURS., OCT. 28

WHEN TEARS FOR FEARS came about in the woebegone New Romantic 80s, no one wanted to be them-at least not in the way they wanted to be, say, studly Tony Hadley of Spandau Ballet or the kohl-eyed Duran boys. Ugly Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith-fuzzy bad hair, squooshed pruney faces-making syn-neurotic songs like "Mad World" with their irritating tick-tock rhythm. Ick, right?

But I'm a sap. I prefer that slow-building epic, and Tears for Fears had a way with broody musicality and throaty vocals that soared above the NuRo radar. Like their orchestral psych-pop classic Seeds of Love without the ornamentation, Tears for Fears' first album since 1989, Everybody Loves a Happy Ending, is charmingly Beatles-esque-only without the over-produced frippery of the former. Cooingly melodic, weirdly organic and positively dreamy in its hammered atmosphere of big pianos and small guitars, tunes like "Call Me Mellow," the title track and the swinging-60s "Secret World" make the duo's return one of the happiest and most happening within recent memory.

No one probably ever called Tears for Fears happening before, so this is their big "fuck you" to their friends.

Opening is Dirty Vegas, the South London car-commercial-hawking trio whose slippery syn-dance track "Days Go By" was actually cool and spectral until y'all wore it out.

Beacon Theater, 2124 B'way (betw. 74th & 75th Sts.), 212-496-7070; 8, $43-$75.

A.D. AMOROSI