There are few places better suited to celebrating John Kander and Fred Ebb than Dizzy’s Jazz Club. On Sunday, October 4, New York was misty beyond those magnificent windows, the room was filled with Kander and Ebb melodies, and, making the evening even more special, John Kander himself was sitting at the table directly behind me listening to his music come alive.

John Kander

Hosted and curated by Deborah Grace Winer, Songbook Sundays: Life Is Kander and Ebb brought together three very different vocalists—Karen Ziemba, Matthew Scott and Vanisha Gould—with music director and pianist Jon Weber, Mark McLean on drums, Jay Leonhart on bass and Sam Chess on trombone. The talent was unquestionable, the musicianship superb and the surroundings quintessentially New York.

Karen Ziemba

Yet I left wanting more as I know this songbook inside and out.

Vanisha Gould, Karen Ziemba, Matthew Scott Vanisha Gould

Not more talent. There was plenty of that. What I wanted was more Kander and Ebb.

Karen Ziemba opened with “Where You Are,” immediately reminding us why she has had such a remarkable career. Ziemba doesn’t merely sing a lyric; she understands what is underneath it. That quality served her particularly well throughout the show, whether she was having wicked fun with “Don’t Tell Mama,” finding the aching simplicity of “My Coloring Book,” or delivering “How Lucky Can You Get.” Kander and Ebb frequently wrote characters who perform one emotion while another one is quietly breaking through, and Ziemba knows exactly how to live in that contradiction.

Matthew Scott has a terrific voice coupled with genuine acting chops, something especially evident in “Not Every Day of the Week” and “Love and Love Alone.” When he arrived at “Theme from New York, New York,” he wisely didn’t try to compete with the ghosts surrounding one of the most recognizable songs ever written about this city. Instead, he found his own way into it, allowing us to hear the song rather than an imitation of the singers who made it famous.

Then there was Vanisha Gould, who possesses a fabulous smoky, growling voice that sounds as though it was made for the 1930s. There is something wonderfully lived-in about her sound, a little dangerous around the edges, and it gave “Funny Honey” and “All That Jazz” an entirely different texture. “Maybe This Time” allowed her to move beyond the sass and into the vulnerability underneath, where Kander and Ebb so often do their best work.

The musicians were every bit as important to the performance.

Weber knows how to support a singer without disappearing beneath one, and McLean, Leonhart and Chess gave the music the swing and bite it requires. “Sing Happy” put the band front and center, while

Leonhart—whose career has included playing for an extraordinary roster of great performers—stepped into the spotlight to deliver his own “Razzle Dazzle.” It was an irresistible reminder that sometimes the musicians have a few tricks of their own.

Ziemba and Scott joined forces for “But the World Goes ‘Round,” another quintessential Kander and Ebb song about continuing when life has other plans. “Cabaret,” naturally, also made its appearance, bringing us back to the musical that remains inseparable from the Kander and Ebb name.

Which brings me to the one thing that bothered me about an otherwise beautifully performed performance.

Jon Webber and John Kander

Perhaps having John Kander sitting directly behind me made me even more aware of the sheer size of the catalogue being celebrated. Here was one of the architects of American musical theatre, listening to songs from a collaboration that stretched across decades, and I kept thinking about everything we weren’t hearing.

Vanisha Gould, Karen Ziemba, Matthew Scott

There were three selections from Chicago and three from Cabaret, along with two each from Flora the Red Menace and New York, New York. They are terrific songs, certainly, and nobody is going to object to hearing them sung this well. But Kander and Ebb wrote so much more.

John Kander, Matthew Scott

Where was The Happy Time, Zorba, 70, Girls, 70, The Act, Woman of the Year, The Rink, Steel Pier, Curtains, or The Scottsboro Boys? There is an astonishing amount of material in that catalogue, including songs that deserve to be rediscovered rather than allowed to sit quietly in the shadow of “All That Jazz” and “Cabaret.”

That is particularly what I look for from something called Songbook Sundays. A songbook series has the opportunity not merely to celebrate the songs everybody already knows, but to open the book a little wider. Give us something we have forgotten or haven’t heard in years. Give a younger audience a song they didn’t know existed. Let us hear the journey of the writers, not simply their greatest hits.

Kander and Ebb were never just Chicago and Cabaret. Their partnership was far richer and stranger than that. They could be cynical and sentimental, sophisticated and vulgar, politically savage and heartbreakingly romantic. Again and again they wrote about people performing confidence while quietly falling apart underneath it. Their characters keep dancing, keep singing, keep putting on the makeup and facing the world because, as one of their greatest songs reminds us, the world goes ’round.

Maybe that’s why I wanted more.

What Winer gave us was beautifully sung and beautifully played. Ziemba remains a masterful interpreter, Scott impressed with both voice and dramatic instinct, and Gould made me want to hear much more from that wonderfully smoky voice. Weber and his musicians gave us sophistication, warmth and swing.

Outside those windows was a mist-covered New York, while inside sat John Kander himself listening to his songs. Really, how much more New York can you get? Except, of course, for a few more Kander and Ebb songs.

I enjoyed Life Is Kander and Ebb immensely. My complaint is actually a compliment: with a songbook this extraordinary, I didn’t want the afternoon to end with so many pages still unopened.

Only in New York would it make perfect sense to take Monet, Klimt, Redon and Cross out of the museum and put them in your makeup bag.

Two decidedly New York institutions have come together for the limited-edition Bobbi Brown x The Met Collection, pairing the beauty brand born in New York City with The Metropolitan Museum of Art and transforming details from some of its celebrated works into objects considerably more portable than a masterpiece. The result is part makeup collection, part miniature art exhibition—and considerably easier to take home from The Met.

The collaboration draws upon works by Henri-Edmond Cross, Gustav Klimt, Odilon Redon and Claude Monet, translating their colors and imagery into packaging that makes opening an eyeshadow palette feel just a little more decadent. It is an inspired pairing because cosmetics and painting have always shared a language: color, shadow, light, texture and the occasional illusion.

At the center of the collection is an eight-well eye shadow palette filled with golds, bronzes and browns in matte and shimmering finishes—the sort of shades that can move easily from an understated New York afternoon to an evening when understated has left the building. A three-in-one Brightening Blush offers that elusive lit-from-within flush, while the Luxe Eye Shadow provides multidimensional shimmer for anyone who believes eyelids deserve their own little work of art.

The lips haven’t been neglected. Bobbi Brown’s Luxe Lipstick gets the museum treatment with skincare-infused color and a pressed, canvas-inspired bullet, while the Extra Lip Tinted Balm delivers a sheer, pH-reactive wash of color with plumping hydration. In other words, one can now contemplate great art while simultaneously wondering whether one needs another lipstick. We know how that usually ends.

The cleverness of the collaboration lies in the packaging. Rather than simply stamping The Met’s name onto a cosmetics case and calling it culture, the collection brings actual works from the museum’s holdings onto the pieces themselves. The compacts become tiny canvases, turning something normally destined for the bathroom counter into something you may be reluctant to throw away once you’ve hit pan.

There is also something wonderfully New York about the entire enterprise. The Met has spent more than 150 years collecting objects of beauty from across civilizations. Bobbi Brown built its reputation on a distinctly modern idea of beauty. One hangs masterpieces on Fifth Avenue; the other gives us the tools to create our own faces before heading out the door.

High art and highlighter were probably destined to meet eventually. The limited-edition Bobbi Brown x The Met Collection is available now through Bobbi Brown Cosmetics.

You may not be able to hang a Monet in your apartment, but apparently you can now keep a little piece of The Met on your vanity.

Cool is a peculiar thing. The moment you have to tell everyone you possess it, chances are you don’t. Frank Sinatra had it. So did Bobby Darin, Nat King Cole, Elvis Presley, Louis Armstrong and Sam Cooke. Burt Bacharach made it sound effortless, Cab Calloway made it swing, and Tom Jones somehow made an open shirt seem like formalwear. On Thursday, October 8 at 8 p.m., Russell Moss brings that particular breed of American cool back to The Triad Theater with the return of his acclaimed A Night of Cool.

Russell Moss and five piece orchestra – Photo Courtesy DDPR

Moss isn’t simply assembling a collection of familiar songs. He is recreating the atmosphere surrounding them, turning The Triad into a 1960s-style showroom complete with a five-piece orchestra, choreographed production numbers, dancers Brooke Schulte and Shanley O’Brien, and guest artists Hannah Celeste and Evan Buckley Harris. It is a throwback to the era when going to see an entertainer meant exactly that—you expected to be entertained.

At the center is Moss, a singer and showman who has performed everywhere from Las Vegas to New York and clearly understands the difference between singing a great song and knowing how to sell one. A Night of Cool moves through music associated with Sinatra, Armstrong, Jones, Presley, Hank Williams, Darin, Cooke, Don Ho, Bacharach, Calloway and Cole, allowing Moss to wander through several decades when singers had distinctive voices, orchestras mattered and personality was part of the arrangement.

Russell Moss & Hannah Celeste – Photo Courtesy DDPR

Joining him is Evan Buckley Harris, who knows a thing or two about stepping into the shoes of an American music legend. Harris played Johnny Cash in both the national tour and Las Vegas productions of Million Dollar Quartet and has also appeared as Corny Collins in Hairspray, Huey in Memphis and Kenickie in Grease. Hannah Celeste, meanwhile, began her professional career at eight in Annie under the direction of the musical’s creator Martin Charnin, and has since appeared in productions including The Diary of Anne Frank and The Miracle Worker.

Then there is the band—which is hardly background decoration. Music director Andy Warren leads on trumpet, joined by Grammy Award winner Paul Francis on drums, Grammy nominee Stan Killian on saxophone, Peter Brendler on bass and Antongiulio Foti on piano. Andrea Bodine supplies the choreography. With musicians of that caliber in a room as intimate as The Triad, there is nowhere for the music to hide—and absolutely no reason it should.

Moss says the evening is ultimately about “great music, laughter, and that wonderful connection that happens between a performer and an audience,” and that may be the most old-fashioned thing about A Night of Cool. Before concerts became oceans of cell phones and performers became content, there was simply a room, a band, an audience and somebody charismatic enough to make everyone forget about everything outside.

That kind of cool never really went out of style. It was simply waiting for somebody to bring the band back.

A Night of Cool plays Thursday, October 8 at 8 p.m. at The Triad Theater.

Akea Brionne at Arlo Soho

Last Wednesday, Arlo SoHo‘s opening reception for Akea Brionne drew a crowd that wanted art with their evening kiki and cocktail. I too, came for the artist… however, I lingered for the curator. 

From left Jasmine Arakel, Akea Brionne and Stacilyn Silvers-Setayesh

Jasmine Arakel is a shyly prescient impresario that has been showcasing her way from Boston to Miami with her “Living Room” series. Thanks to a heap of heart and sweat equity, Arlo guests can enjoy art of the moment and creator talks without so much as leaving the lobby. Arakel’s hotel-as-gallery idea has caught fire even as major galleries and traditional art markets burn to cinders. To wit, the mighty Waldorf-Astoria hosted its own premiere of the MVo Art Show the evening prior, on its way to a tangentially targeted audience from its former life at Sotheby’s.

Akea Brionne opening at Arlo Soho

Like MVo, Arakel came to art by way of Madison Avenue, with campaigns for Nike, Samsung, Chevrolet, Adidas and Google behind her. In 2022 she founded Curated by Jas, an advisory and curatorial firm that places blue-chip contemporary work in public and private spaces. She brought an advertiser’s instincts with her: she knows what makes people stop walking and she knows what makes them buy.

Akea Brionne opening at Arlo Soho

Down in front! Art talks at Arlo SoHo’s Living Room Gallery

Her newest treasure is Akea Brionne, who holds a dual BA/BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from Cranbrook, all in the service of photography. 

Akea Brionne at Arlo Soho

She uses those credentials the way a good architect uses a blueprint. The photographic portrait is her structure… and then she sews it. The figures are stitched onto the canvas in thick black thread, and the color comes in panels of bright glitter and a library of fabrics. Jacquard is the one that has captured her imagination. “The jacquard loom was our earliest computer system,” she explained, which is the sort of sentence that makes a room full of creatively curious people suddenly look at a tapestry from the left lobe. The layers are, by her own admission, a reflection of her Virgo nature. She loves to sort chaos into beauty. Who among us wouldn’t? 

Akea Brionne at Arlo Soho

Brionne was born in New Orleans in 1996 until the diaspora of 2005 and now lives and works in Detroit. According to her website, the large-scale woven works are portals where figuration dissolves into abstraction, holding personal and ancestral memory in the same frame. 

Akea Brionne at Arlo Soho

Water, gardens, celestial bodies, thresholds and domestic architecture recur as metaphors for transformation, migration, care, grief and return. The practice is rooted in her experience as a Creole woman, and in Black Southern folklore, Indigenous knowledge systems and somatic approaches to healing. 

Akea Brionne at Arlo Soho

This latest series grew out of her search for creative satisfaction outside her familial duties. “I think my art is much more flamboyant than my personality,” the young mom told me with a chuckle. She was dressed in calm dove grey and linen harem pants, a staid counterpoint to the bold, glittery work on the walls. It was the most elegant case of an artist hiding in plain sight that I’ve seen since Clark Kent.

Producer Kaisha Huguley of Broadway’s Wanted

The room was full of the right kind of people, including Kaisha Huguley, producer of Broadway’s Wanted, who was clearly mesmerized by Arlo’s activation for the evening. I should really say “activator,” because it arrived in the dazzling form of Pepe Muñoz, the fashion illustrator from Spain. 

Pepe Muñoz at work

Fashion plated guests

Pepe dashingly served bold strokes and savvy squiggles as he turned party-goers into fashion plates. We left clutching our textured watercolor paper, each presented in a chic black envelope, giddy at being seen so elegantly. Some of us were also giddy because the artist bears a distinct resemblance to Pedro Pascal’s younger, hotter brother.

The writer as illustrated by Muñoz

In an era when art is often sold on a screen, Arlo and Arakel are betting that people still want to stand in a room and look at something real, preferably with a drink in hand. On the evidence of last Wednesday, they are winning.

Arlo Hotel SoHo
231 Hudson Street
New York,NY 10013