Event Research & Music Discovery: A Blankman List Playlist
9 musical artists that I learned about from writing the Blankman List
While I’ve become more efficient in some ways, the Blankman List continues to be a substantial amount of work for me. NYC is a nexus of so many different scenes, and researching and narrowing down what to do can get difficult!
This project persists because of those of you who have found value in my monthly lists, even if just one of month of a “buy me a coffee” tip. Thank you for helping to keep this project alive.
Subscriptions might be what keeps this newsletter/website/Substack/whatever alive, but they were not what got me started. I fundamentally keep writing because I like learning every month about what’s happening around NYC. So help me, I find it fun.
One of the highlights for me is a chance to discover new music each month. As I pore through different venues’ calendars, I am introduced to countless new musical artists. I give every listed artist at least a cursory listen and have cut events when I didn’t think they were that good. (Said artists shall remain nameless.) The opposite happens, too. Sometimes after previewing an artist on the list, I develop a new personal favorite.
In this article, I share 9 artists that I learned about because of my work making a monthly list of things to do in New York City. These artists are not all NYC-based (though some are), but all of their music has passed through this city. Below is a short Spotify playlist featuring a track from all of them.
Please note that this is a reflection of my learning experiences. These artists might be new “discoveries” to me, but part of my discovery was learning just how renowned some (arguably, all) of them already were.
Cécile McLorin Salvant
This is one of those artists where after I learned about her, I had to wonder: how had I never heard of her before?! I found her music for the first time when I saw she was performing at Carnegie Hall. Then I started to listen to the depths of her discography. The French-American vocalist defies genre, sliding between folk tunes, musical theater songs, and jazz standards, giving each track a life of its own. Her 2018 Tiny Desk Concert is sublime. Most of my personal playlists are organized by activity (“cleaning,” “cooking,” “getting ready,” etc.) and many others are organized by genre (“country,” “classical,” “jazz,” etc.). Salvant probably holds the current record for being on the most number of playlists.
Melanie Charles
Part of my list curation every month is to double-check I’m providing high-quality options. (Though not without mistakes.) I know full well everyone has their own musical tastes, so I don’t really listen to the artists and simply think, “Do I like it?” I listen a bit more clinically: “Would I recommend it to someone seeking out this genre?” Sometimes—often, actually—I don’t know. I rely on friends whose tastes I esteem and online reviews to help. Sometimes, on the other hand, as was the case with Melanie Charles, a few bars of music was enough to know that no further research was required. I share her Tiny Desk Concert, from a few years after Salvant’s, below.
Castle Rat
I feel lucky that I personally know some of this newsletter’s readers, which include friends of mine dating back as early as college and even high school. I had many musical phases during these formative years as I fumbled to find my identity. My ska phase. My grunge phase. My top 40 phase. I fell deep into heavy metal music in some of my angstiest teenage years and was especially drawn to the slow, bellowing subgenre of doom metal. I still proudly wear my ill-fitting Orange Goblin T-shirt, and when I discovered there was a Brooklyn-based band playing Le Poisson Rouge whose name was also an evocative yet kind of random sounding word couplet, I was hooked before I even heard their first sludgy guitar onslaught of “medieval-fantasy galore.”
Max Richter
German-British composer Max Richter was not a new name for me. I’ve been a fan of minimalistic music for many years now, even growing up around Baltimore with Philip Glass as somewhat of a hometown hero. Last year, when I saw Woolf Works, a ballet centered around the life and works of Virginia Woolf, I was an instant ballet convert, something I wrote about at the time. The dancing was of course beautiful, but it was the music that swept me away. Richter’s score took small musical ideas and gave them a rich life, elevated by Wayne McGregor’s choreography, which bestowed upon them movement and meaning. I was crushed when the New York Times dismissed the music as “hackneyed.” It’s now a score I occasionally play when running if I want my workout to feel epic.
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Shenseea
I regularly check the schedule of Kings Theatre in Brooklyn. It’s a huge venue that not only houses major acts, but also welcomes musical acts that reflect a huge range of cultures and languages. To give a taste, the current calendar includes Israeli singer Hanan Ben Ari, Senegalese musician Youssou N’Dour, experimental German instrumentalist Nils Frahm, and Japanese singer-songwriter Ichiko Aoba. It was through looking at Kings Theatre’s calendar that I not only first learned of Shenseea but also in all honesty learned about the genre of dancehall. I did not grow up belonging to a Jamaican culture, but here in Brooklyn I feel privileged in being able to hear its sounds (and eat its oxtail) nevertheless. I grew to love Shenseea’s music quickly and easily, with her huge range of rhythms, influences, and vocal arrangements.
KMRU
Joseph Kamaru, who goes by KMRU, is an ambient musician with an illustrious lineage: his grandfather was a well-known benga musician with the same name. I learned of KMRU when looking through Roulette’s events calendar several months back. At first, I must confess I dismissed him, not even including the concert in my final list. But first impressions deceived me. I listened again later with a different mindset and went from dismissing him to eating up his entire catalogue. KMRU’s meditative works hold a magnifying glass up to the smallest sounds—a sensibility connecting him to Max Richter—and he crafts ambient soundscapes out of the clinks, buzzes, and hums.
Elaine Brown
Sometimes it’s a non-musical event that introduces me to new music. Elaine Brown is an activist associated with the Black Power movement that emerged in the mid-1960s. I was admittedly unfamiliar with her until 2023, when the Poster House held an exhibition on the branding of the Black Panther Party. I not only included this on a monthly list at the time, I also went with my friend N. to see to it. It was a relatively small yet impactful exhibit with more than posters, including—clearly—music. In college I worked on a research paper about protest singer Phil Ochs, and hearing Elaine Brown’s powerful voice brought me back to days studying music as activism. I heard the yearning, the poetry. The way that music can pick up where speech leaves off.
Fontaines D.C.
The Irish post-punk band was playing the Brooklyn Paramount several months back. The relatively new venue has booked so many iconic acts by now that I have practically blind faith in their lineup. The frequency illusion was in full effect for me with this group. I had vaguely heard of them until I added them to the list. Then all of a sudden, they were everywhere. They were showing up in Spotify playlists and playing in store radios. I was hearing about them in TV shows, video games, and the Grammys. Considering the band formed in 2014 and their first Grammy nomination was in 2021, the problem was clearly me being out of touch, not the band, whose songwriting is “brilliant, top to bottom.”
Aja Monet
One of the joys of writing my newsletter is being introduced not just to new acts but to new genres. Poetry as music is not exactly a new invention. Lyrics are poetry, after all. In terms of my personal tastes though, I rarely care about what’s being sung. Aja Monet forced me to reckon with this bias. Her music is beautiful, and moreover, it doesn’t exist without the lyrics. It’s poetry with rhythm and melody, and poetry that forces me to sit up and listen. This site is what alerted me to Monet’s career, and now my ears perk up whenever she performs in NYC. I’ve included her twice among my lists.
Made it all the way to the end?! Perhaps you’d enjoy my ramblings about opera or musical theater.