SEVEN IN SEVEN
Welcome to Seven in Seven, where we look at shows coming to the region over the next week. As always, whether your musical tastes are rock ’n’ roll, jazz, heavy metal, R&B, singersongwriter or indie, there will always be something to check out.
Here are seven of the best on the docket for the week of Dec. 23:
1 Lori Williams — Friday at the Loft at City Winery
Lori Williams, jazz singer and founder of the nonprofit Positive Music for Positive Minds, comes to the Loft at City Winery. Having released six independent LPs over the past several years, she’s put her own spin on tracks made famous by the likes of Barbra Streisand, Carole King and Isaac Hayes, to name just a few. Williams has also put out her share of original recordings, which span between inspirational, soul and jazz. Seeing her this close to the hectic holidays is sure to bring a sense of much needed calm to even the most stressed among us.
2 Chrisette Michele — Tuesday and Wednesday at City Winery
Raised on gospel and having played saxophone in high school before studying jazz vocal performance in college, Chrisette Michele has been around the musical block. She’s released over 100 songs and collaborated with everyone from Jay Z to George Duke, Natalie Cole to Nas and John Legend to Drake. To put it mildly, it’s hard to keep Michele in a box because she’ll just
bound out of it and find something else to hit on, making it sound familiar yet fully her own. Next week at the City Winery, she’ll be performing Tuesday and Wednesday, with 6and 9:30 shows each night.
3 Gogol Bordello — Wednesday at Brooklyn Bowl
Combining their trademark Eastern European Gypsyswing with a relentless and furious punk passion, Gogol Bordello delivered “Solidaritine” back in September. The band’s eighth full-length album is inspired by survival in the face of adversity — a theme that can be applied to the pandemic just as much as it can be applied to the war going on in frontman Eugene Hutz’s native Ukraine. The sense of urgency and a fresh bolt of energy on the LP returns the band to their beginnings while keeping their agit prop leanings front and center, leading to an incendiary live show.
Steve Aoki — Wednesday at NOTO
As one of the most successful American crossgenre artists and a deeply forward-thinking creator, Steve Aoki brings a sense of community to all of his work, offering shared
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spaces and connections for like-minded fans and fellow artists. At the core of everything, though, is his music, which the DJ and music programmer releases both under his own name and through a number of aliases. He’ll be doing his own thing down at 12th and Vine in Philly, celebrating New Year’s Eve days before the amateurs cut loose throughout the world. It’s a good thing, too, because attendees will need a few days of recovery time afterward.
5 Dreamland — Wednesday at Ardmore Music Hall
Dreamland is the group of all of Narberth’s Zumi Records artists performing together, collaboratively and doing solo songs. There is a wide variety of sounds — still cohesive — which will roll out through the night. Rius has a dignified and poetic feel to fusion of old school R&B and rap with alternative vibes, while Lucho Ritmic has a more global feel, mixing his distinguished bars and flow in Spanish with drill and trap style beats in the background. Xander Ray mixes a modern sound with light vibes, pop and trap that just makes you bop along. A.N.T.16 is another feel-good artist, while headliner Zumi has many facets to his music like alternative, reggae and anything Latin. It’s truly a community of artists which blend together seamlessly onstage and off. 6
Devon Gilfillian — next Thursday at Ardmore
Music Hall
Philly native Devon Gilfillian grew up on a steady diet of R&B, hip-hop, rock, blues and soul music, gravitating to records that ignited his mind while making his body move. For him, listening to the towering icons of his musician father’s era like Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder and The Temptations was just as formative and exciting as discovering the new sounds of his own generation. He began to recognize a connective thread in the sounds he loved best, from the golden throwbacks sampled by the hip-hop beat makers to the raw, emotional vocal deliveries of the Motown greats. Gilfillian took the key ingredient in the “soul,” not simply the genre, but the feeling and vibe of the music, which he gets across every evening he’s performing live.
7 Acute Inflections — next Thursday at the Loft at City Winery
The jazzy NYC duo Acute Inflections is made up of gifted singer, songwriter, dancer and actress Elasea Douglas and Sadiki Pierre, a talented upright bass player who is uniquely capable of playing and fusing almost any style of music including classical, jazz, Latin, reggae and R&B. Together, the pair bring to mind a different era, full of neo-soul accents, smoky jazz clubs from the ’40s and an authenticity to their craft that many of a similar ilk spend an entire career trying to obtain.