Freak Scene Extra: See Rafiq Bhatia in Springfield, Gratis
Hope Center for the Arts offers free tickets to Bhatia's show on Friday, Oct. 10
A Guide to Music in Western Mass. (and sometimes Connecticut)
This is a first for Freak Scene: a mid-week special edition to give away concert tickets. I’m sending this out to preview Friday’s newsletter, which includes an interview with the composer and guitarist Rafiq Bhatia in advance of his concert that night at Hope Center for the Arts in Springfield. Hope Center has generously offered free tickets to Freak Scene readers, who can select seats here and, on the checkout page, enter FREAKSCENE in the coupon code field.
Here’s why you should go: The venue is intimate, the sound system is unbelievably good and Bhatia’s new album, Environments, is a fully improvised collection of tracks featuring him, trumpeter Riley Mulherkar and drummer Ian Chang on acoustic and electric percussion. (Chang is Bhatia’s bandmate in Son Lux, a trio perhaps best known for their Oscar-nominated score for the 2022 movie Everything Everywhere All at Once.)
In our conversation, Bhatia talked about the differences between creating improvisational music, and playing it later for an audience.
“One of the things that becomes different, I think, is that the album version of this music was very much it captured right at the moment of discovery,” Bhatia said. “And in this case, we now have some amount of a pre-awareness of what it can be. I think that that is both something that we embrace and that we try to push off of or away from, ultimately, because there is a layer of discovery that needs to take place every time we play this in order for it to live up to its original kind of conception.”
He continued, “We’ve all experienced a thunderstorm, but we've never experienced two of them that were the same. And so it really is seeking to evoke these worlds that each track on the album kind of speaks to, but to do so in novel ways.”
I’ll have more with Bhatia in Friday’s Freak Scene, as well as an interview with Northampton band Norma Dream, who play Saturday at Bombyx in Florence (tickets). See you Friday evening in Springfield?