Blue Note New York
Sid Sriram with special guests Theo Croker & Weedie Braimah

    $20 Minimum Per Person
    Full Bar & Dinner Menu
    NO REFUNDS OR EXCHANGES.

    • All seating is first come, first served. 
    • Bar Area seating is limited and first come first served. When all available seats are occupied, the remaining bar area is standing room only.
    • Table Seating is all ages, Bar Area is 21+. Bar Area tickets for patrons under 21 will not be honored. 
    Group Reservations:
    • Groups larger than 10 must purchase a group package at club@bluenote.net, or by calling 212.475.8592.
    • Groups larger than 10 without a group package will be subject to group surcharges added to your bill. 
    • Groups arriving late or separately are not guaranteed to be seated together. All seating is first come, first served. Arrive early for best seats.
    Tickets for Blue Note New York shows are only available for purchase on Ticketweb. We are not affiliated with any third-party sellers. Tickets purchased on third-party sites will not be honored. The credit card used for original purchase of tickets will be required at the door upon entry.
     
     

    • Sid Sriram

      For Sid Sriram, there is a quality inherent in the Carnatic music of South India that he describes as "universal truth." The 32-year-old singer/songwriter has spent years imparting this truth to audiences in India and across the world; today, he ranks as one of the most popular Bollywood singers of the past decade. On his new English-language album Sidharth, however, he departs from the musical lineage of his family's home country, where he has lived since 2015, and draws on the R&B, indie rock, and American pop styles he grew up with as an immigrant kid in Fremont, CA, in the '90s and 2000s. Through doing so, he hoped to find a way to communicate "truth" in music through deeper personal exploration.

      "For maybe the first time, I was able to make music where all these different elements that feel like part of my DNA breathed through the songs," Sid explains. "I didn't have to try and think about how to express these things. It started to come out on its own."

      Sidharth is a massive-sounding record: soulful, ethereal, and emotionally dense. Many of its 14 tracks sound like they are echoing down from a mountaintop. However, the album was recorded in an intimate context. In the summer of 2021, Sid took a leap of faith and hopped on a plane to Minneapolis, where he and producer Ryan Olson (Poliça, Gayngs, Bon Iver), who had previously only met on Instagram, spent an intensive week in the studio. Most of the songs were tracked live by a small team of Olson associates, including Bon Iver's Justin Vernon, of whom Sid was a longtime fan. "There was no ego," Sid remembers. "Everyone was just really happy to be back in a room making music with each other. Granted, I didn't know any of them at the time. But it felt really quickly like a family."

      Fronting this band, Sid threw his entire creative self into crafting vocal hooks and elaborate songforms on the fly. "I had to trust in chaos and let it guide me," he recalls. The music that resulted from that studio joyride is a dizzying combination of pop anthems and progressive experiments, centered on Sid's heart-wrenching vocal performances and Olson's adventurous electronics. Hook-forward tracks with dance floor energy, like the Afrobeat-inflected "Friendly Fire," slot in next to unexpected diversions like "The Hard Way," a celebration of family and loved ones featuring a hyperactive drum 'n' bass groove that splits the difference between Janet Jackson in her Velvet Rope era and post-Kid-A Radiohead.

      All this may seem like a far cry from the music that has made Sid famous with Bollywood fans worldwide since breaking out with his first hit soundtrack song, "Adiye" (from 2013's Kadal), just a year out of music school. Indeed, many of the million-plus-viewed videos of Sid feature him singing ragas backed by traditional instruments, not freestyling personal narratives over glitchy 808s and Auto-Tune beds. But before his sudden success, Sriram was an American 20-something obsessed with pop and R&B; he found early viral success by posting a Frank Ocean cover ("We All Try") to YouTube. In many ways, Sidharth highlights the ways in which the musical personalities of that younger version of Sid and the Carnatic music star Sid relate to and complement one another.

      During some of the record's most breathtaking moments, Sid combines contrasting these musical modes to moving effect. "Dear Sahana," a song about "yearning for companionship," mixes R&B and gospel with Indian classical melismas and country music flourishes. In a nod to his earliest musical memories, the children's choir his mother has led since Sid's youth lends support at the song's climax, a moment that always makes him tear up while listening back. Country music, on the other hand, was mostly alien to Sid, but he found that it fit naturally into his musical universe. "I realize that pedal steel lends itself to the way my voice moves," he explains. "The way it can bend felt like a cool mirror to the Carnatic-based melodies."

      Though its songs often look resolutely towards an open-ended future, Sidharth also represents a homecoming of sorts for Sid, re-embracing American culture after spending years absorbed in the musical traditions of his ancestral homeland. This return to his roots is reflected in the album title, which relates to a moment of childhood self-actualization. "When we first moved to the Bay, in second grade, I decided to change my name to Sid since so many people fucked it up," he says. "Sidharth, in a way, is me reclaiming the name and everything that comes with it, not just culturally, but for me personally." It is a fitting title for a record across which Sid seems to be — as he puts it — "excavating" his life experiences in search of clues that can help him on an uncertain and exciting journey ahead.

    • Theo Croker

      Theo Croker is a storyteller who speaks through his trumpet. A creative who refuses boundaries, the GRAMMY Award-nominated artist, composer, producer, thought leader, and influencer projects his voice through the music. After seven years of sojourn in Shanghai, Croker crash-landed with a simmering original sound on the 2014 Dee Dee Bridgewater-assisted album "Afro Physicist". Following the success of "Escape Velocity" in 2016, he ascended to a new stratosphere with "Star People Nation" in 2019. The record garnered a nomination in the category of "Best Contemporary Instrumental Album'' at the 62nd GRAMMY Awards. It attracted widespread critical acclaim including The New York Times who called it “an album that gallivants from swirling, left-field hip-hop beats to propellant swing to entrancing passages of African percussion. Through it all, Croker’s understated trumpet playing holds his small band together with swagger and poise.” Along the way, he also lent his sound to platinum selling albums by everyone from J. Cole to Ari Lennox while touring his band across the globe many times over. In 2020, he hunkered down at his childhood home in the midst of the Global Pandemic and wrote his sixth full-length album, "BLK2LIFE || A FUTURE PAST" [Sony Music Masterworks]. BLK2LIFE || A FUTURE PAST is a contemporary oratorio inspired by the forgotten hero's journey of becoming through the universal origins of blackness. On the record, Theo unpacks moments of heroism, trials, tribulations, awakenings, and apotheosis within a musical pastiche brought to life by a myriad of fellow cultural renegades and threaded together by his playing. Traditions of the past, foundations in the present, & explorations of the future. A sonic celebration & reclamation of Afro-origin. BLK2THEFUTURE
    • Weedie Braimah & The Hands of Time

      Weedie Braimah is a young premiere master of the djembe. He began his career at the early age of two, born in Ghana, where he was first introduced to West African culture and drumming. In East St. Louis, which is considered home for Braimah, he began his life long quest and professional career in the study of cultural music of the diasporas. A maverick performer of the highest caliber, Braimah has an almost insatiable knack to draw the entire audience into his grove, zigzagging through Africa on a breathtaking rhythmic roller coaster.
      Braimah comes from a long lineage of musicians; including his mother, a respected jazz drummer and his father, a world renowned composer and master drummer. Having studied with the greats such as Mamady Keita, Famadou Konate, Abdoul Doumbia, and Fadouba Oulare just to name a few, it was no surprise that Braimah excelled musically and became well known on the drum and dance circuit. Braimah has been a performer, teacher and preserver of African culture for over 20 years and continues to peruse new musical journeys every day.

    Get ahead of the crowd.

    Sign up to find out about upcoming concerts & experiences.

    Filter By

    Date Range

    Show Type