Friday 25 December 2009

Rocking and dancing from night into day

Some will be celebrating the end of a year of anxiety. Some, an entire decade of it. And some will be celebrating simply because they just paid $100 to enter a bar for the evening, so they darn well better get some celebration out of it.

Whatever the reason, New York has no shortage of ways to ring in 2010, and one of the best is with a live soundtrack. Bands add long-forgotten nuggets to their sets. D.J.'s give dancers a few more reasons to throw their hands up. And of course all music sounds better when you're wearing a sparkly cardboard cone on your head.

To aid your revelry, the pop and jazz critics of The New York Times have chosen some of the most promising shows. It's a varied menu, with Antibalas, whose members provide the Afrofunk soundtrack of "Fela!" on Broadway; legendary singers, be they Chuck Berry or Patti Smith; and sets by celebrity D.J.'s like Victor Calderone that go all night and into the next day.

Here are the choices of the pop and jazz critics of The New York Times for this year's most promising New Year's Eve events in the New York metropolitan region.

Mariah Carey

New Year's Eve as it should be: flamboyant, grand, emotionally conflicted, slightly manic, just a touch sloppy. Through all the iterations of Ms. Carey's public image, the one constant has been her voice, which has never softened, even if it's been underused in recent years.

It's almost certain, though, that in this show, the beginning of a two-month tour supporting her new "Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel" (Island), she won't be coy. There may be reveling elsewhere in the city, and an oversize scrum clogging Times Square just a few blocks away, but Ms. Carey's performance is certain to be this night's true spectacle.

The bawdy R&B singer Trey Songz will open. At 9 p.m., Madison Square Garden, 4 Pennsylvania Plaza, Manhattan, (212) 465-6741, thegarden.com; $20.10 to $175.75.

(excerpt from The New York Times)



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