Ilé Ìlù | House of Drums: A Celebration of Afro-Descendant Music & Culture

DJs & Live Music: Jazz, Bata, Rumba, Palo, Bomba + Visuals/Art, Food & Bar.

Saturday, May 13 · 7pm – midnight

Golden Palace 123-08 Jamaica Avenue Queens, NY 11418

Event Schedule
7pm | Doors – DJs Nina Creese & DrumPriest
8pm | Food, Bar Open
8:00pm| JAZZ BATA
9:00pm| DJs Nina Creese & DrumPriest
9:30pm| ANTHONY CARRILLO
10:30pm| Rumba/Descarga Jam
11:30pm| DJ’s w/drums
Visuals by BigShortsFilms/Iris Goodwin
*Minors must be accompanied by an adult guardian.
*Hot food & bar cash only

Click For Ticket Link


Blurring the lines between culture, tradition & performance, Ilé Ìlù | House of Drums is a place to become immersed in Afro-descendent culture live in NYC. Featuring world-class artists from the African music Diaspora, a Yoruba market, Ancestor & Ifa shrines, art+visuals, plus DJs + food/bar. The Òtúrá Rigbè Temple in Queens becomes a traditional village bringing together traditionalists and lovers of music & culture from across the vast NYC community and Afro-descendent culture – from West-African/Yoruba Ifa, to Ghana/Akan, Brazilian Candomble, Palo Congo, Division 21, Haitian Vodoun, Garifuna, Santeria, Trinidadian Sango, Rastafarian – all these expressions of African culture are ALIVE and vibrant in NYC. However, these different communities have been somewhat isolated and their incredible musical traditions. Ilé Ìlù | House of Drums celebrates these traditions in a setting organically connected to traditional (Isese) culture.

Giant Step – Retrospective 1990-1995

Event promo image for MOMENT NYC: Giant Step – Retrospective 1990-1995 at SOBs Sunday, March 5th 2023

A convergent moment in downtown New York City club history

MOMENT NYC invites you to a retrospective on the groundbreaking underground Giant Step party of the 1990s. This roving downtown party attracted generations of artists, jazzers, MCs, dancers, celebrities, and fashionistas – an eclectic mix of all kinds and personalities, creatively intermingling. Unique and of its time but also part of a long continuing tradition of underground music and dance club culture in NYC nightlife. This was the club where artists like Jamiroquai, Massive Attack, Gilles Peterson, Guru’s Jazzamatazz, Daft Punk and Digable Planets first performed. It was also a jumping off point for local artists like Groove Collective, Dana Bryant and Repercussions. Giant Step inspired other like minded parties from Los Angeles to Toronto and beyond.

The event will feature the photography of Alice Arnold with archival audio; a panel discussion w/ Maurice Bernstein, Erica Lee, DJ Smash, and David Hershkovits; and after-party DJ set by DJ Smash w/ guest performers.

6:30pm Discussing ’90s NYC Giant Step parties in the context of NYC nightlife history

David Hershkovits (founder of Paper Magazine), facilitates a discussion with Maurice Bernstein (Giant Step co-founder and CEO), Erica Lee (former Director of Events at Giant Step, and DJ Smash (original Giant Step DJ)

8pm Live exhibit of photos by Alice Arnold, Giant Step archival audio mixes, and context

8:30-11:00 After-Party DJ set by DJ Smash w/live guest performers

Tickets available here

Early bird $8 tickets available until Feb 14th here

This event is all-ages with chaperone

Everybody L.E.S. Culture Mash Music Fest

MOMENT NYC & Subterra Soundsystem present a live music mash-up party celebrating the diversity that has kept the Lower East Side / East Village so interesting and creative for over a century.

Ticket Link

DROM 85 Avenue A, NYC, Sunday, June 5th, 6 pm doors

Frank London, founder of the Klezmatics, will lead Bagels and Bongos. Splicing klezmer with Latin rhythms this music defies sedentary listening; Ukrainian Village Voices presents the traditional polyphonic singing style of Ukraine’s villages; Arthur Kill + Xi Feng embellishes rock and pop with traditional Chinese instruments and will dip into the story of Kurt Weill’s connection to the Lower East Side and his classic “Mack the Knife” from Threepenny Opera, in its original German version (“Die Moritat von Mackie Messer”); Momento Rumbero will channel the rumba roots that once colored every summer day around Loisaida’s streets and parks; members of Groove Collective will cook up soul-jazz-Latin-disco grooves with special guests Ruben Rodriguez, Avram Fefer, Ernesto Abreu, Bryan Vargas, and Milo Z; Faith NYC, fronted by Felice Rosser, will bathe us in waves of reggae, soul, and rock as they have throughout the neighborhood since the 1980s; the evening will conclude with the, newly minted, local underground gathering, Subterra Soundsystem. Following the Subterra group, there will be an open jam. Throughout the evening there will be pieces of oral history, local lore, and archival notes giving context to the place we call home – the original melting pot.

$15 adv / $20 at the door / $10 student & seniors / rsvp to info[at]momentnyc.org for guest list info – All are welcome

At one time, everything South of 14th Street to Canal Street and East of Broadway to the East River was known as the Lower East Side of New York. The area has been fertile turf for underground creative street-bred activity as far back as the 1800s and probably further.

A place where terms such as “dives” and “hookers” would be coined. Beer gardens, pleasure halls, saloons, and black and tans – where races and fluid gender roles first mixed – thrived in the Lower East Side well before they were accepted by mainstream society, let alone legal.

Home to early tap dancing, Little Germany, Yiddish theaters, the Gershwins, Irving Berlin, Eddie Cantor, Jimmie Durante, Al Jolson, Charlie Parker, beat poets, punk rock, Little Italy, China Town, Little Tokyo, Irish, Polish, Ukrainians, Puerto Ricans, Muslims, Indians, Alphabet City, Loisaida, the infamous masquerade balls of Webster Hall, disco at the Saint, the classic rock of the Filmore East, glitter rock, freak folk, anti-folk, the drag scene that spawned Wig Stock, Slug’s in the Far East, the Five Spot, the Half Note, University of the Streets, ABC No Rio, Basquiat, Hells Angels, CBGB, Great Glildersleeves, Henry Street Settlement, Save the Robots, the Gas Station, A7, C-Squat, seed bombed community gardens, Sonny Rollins, Sun Ra, the Velvet Underground, NY Dolls, Talking Heads…and so many others have called this little patch of the world home.

Celebrating this all-of-a-kind family, we’ll do our best to pay tribute to the lust for life, dark humor, and creative flamboyance that has defined and drawn people to the Lower East Side for so long.