$30 - HONK! Hero - An additional contribution to tonight's ticket helps make our HONK! happen beyond the show!
$15 - Suggested Ticket Donation
NOTAFLOF - Pitch in to clean up after the show and help make HONK! happen.
An evening of music featuring:
🥁 Newman Taylor Baker
🎷 Criss-Cross Big Band
🎶 Loove Ritual Brass Ensemble
About the Bands
Newman Taylor Baker
Newman Taylor Baker, known artistically as WashboardXT, has been hailed as “a true virtuoso of the washboard,” “astonishing,” and “simply amazing.” After more than five decades as an internationally respected jazz drummer, Baker experienced a profound artistic shift in 2010 when he first picked up the washboard while performing with the Ebony Hillbillies. That moment opened a new creative and personal chapter, prompting him to explore his family’s history and the deeper cultural meaning embedded in the instrument’s sound.
His research led him to the remarkable legacy of his paternal grandfather, Rev. Dr. T. Nelson Baker—the only formerly enslaved student to earn both a Bachelor of Divinity (1893) and a PhD in Philosophy (1903) from Yale University. Traveling to Pittsfield and Boston, Massachusetts; New Haven, Connecticut; and the Eastern Shore of Virginia, Newman uncovered parallels between his grandfather’s achievements and the washboard’s prominence in 19th‐century African American life. This connection continues to shape his artistic vision.
Baker understands the washboard as a sonic vessel carrying the social history of enslaved Africans in the United States—a history of resilience, coded survival, and creative brilliance. He believes the instrument’s voice holds a message urgently relevant to the present: a reminder of the strength, love, faith, and action needed to build a more equitable society. His 21st‐century washboard music is offered as a balm and a call to collective uplift, honoring the past while imagining a more just future.
Approaching the washboard as a hand drum, Baker centers touch as the foundation of his technique, drawing out the instrument’s wide dynamic and emotional range. His setup blends tradition with innovation: 12‐gauge shotgun shells worn on his fingers, an air microphone, a contact microphone, a multi‐effects pedal, and a two‐channel amplifier. This hybrid acoustic‐electronic language gives WashboardXT a contemporary sonic identity that is both rooted and forward‐looking.
His groundbreaking work has earned recognition through awards and grants, including a NYFA/NYSCA Music and Sound Award (2019), a New Music USA Grant (2018), and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award (2023).
Recent highlights for WashboardXT include the CD release of Touzle Your Kurchy Frank London’s Loisaida Fife and Drum Corp (August 2026) and appearances with Vienna Carroll and the Folk at The Bitter End, NYC (February and September 2026; May and September 2025); Andrew Lamb’s Circadian Spheres Of Light Project at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery (August 2026); Andrea Baker’s Sing Sistah Sing: Tales of Transatlantic Freedom with Andrea Baker and Howard Moody (Dennis Union Church, Rose Academy, MA 2025; King University, Bristol, TN 2024); An Evening of Solo Washboard at Bin 141, NYC (2025); Seiki Yukimoto’s SoulBleed East Meets West at Nublu, NYC (2025, 2024, 2023); and the Onassis Foundation’s Cavafy Marathon at The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church (2023).
Criss-Cross Big Band
A performance experience devised in October 2023 by Frank London, Kenny Wolleson, Elijah J. Thomas, and Skyler Hagner, composed of various sonic, aesthetic, and lived experiences all intersecting at different points and different degrees in time. Such convergence of various experiences breeds the unexpected and the familiar, the known and yet unheard, in the tradition of forerunner musician Thelonious Sphere Monk and the very tune after which this ensemble is named!
Loove Ritual Brass Ensemble
Josh Roseman is a New York-based jazz trombonist whose presence has been felt in the downtown scene of improvisers from the 1990s onward.
Born June 5, 1967, in Boston, he picked up the trombone because it was the most prevalent instrument in his household. His father, uncle, and cousins were all musicians. Moving to higher education, Roseman stayed close to home, studying at both the Berklee and New England Conservatories. A quintessential sideman, Roseman has played with Dave Holland, Don Byron, Steve Coleman, Dave Douglas, Jason Moran, the Skatelites, the Roots, John Zorn, Medeski Martin & Wood, Meshell Ndegeocello, and the late Lester Bowie, as well as leading his own bands. His album New Constellations was released in the U.S. by Russ’s Accurate Records. Roseman is busy aside from staged music, as a trombone instructor and improvisation coach for the New School for Social Research at NYU, the Harlem School for the Arts, and the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada.
