Max Raabe and Palast Orchester @ Royce Hall 2.23.

The uber-suave Max Raabe and his sophisticated Palast Orchester bring a new, not-to-be-missed show to Royce Hall. The evening will feature the elegant high style and musical glory of the ‘20s and ‘30s this urbane group is beloved for, alongside tunes from its fabulous new album, One Cannot Kiss Alone. The album features exquisitely crafted modern love songs, somewhere between futuristic pop and classic song-styling, between vintage and vamp, cabaret and camp, Irving Berlin and Berlin-Mitte. This performance will include Weimar-era classics alongside modern love songs, imbued with the group’s consummate mix of irony, melancholy and wit. Blended throughout is Max’s effortless narrative banter and playfully imperious charm that woos audiences worldwide.

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Jubiläumskonzert Max Raabe from Grafschafter Nachrichten on Vimeo.

An Evening with Lucinda Williams @ UCLA Live 1.27. -

One of America’s finest singer-songwriters, Lucinda Williams’ substantial talents transcend the genres she works so handily with, from folk to blues and country-rock. After breaking out of the underground, she cemented her place in popular music with 1998’s Car Wheels On a Gravel Road. TIME magazine named her “America’s best songwriter” in 2002 and she’s won three Grammy awards (and counting). Her latest work, the emotional and evocative Blessed was released in March 2011 and was quickly hailed by many critics and fans as her finest work to date. Whether she’s plugged-in and backed by a full band, or solo with her guitar, Lucinda’s forthright style and authentic warmth always tug at the heartstrings and stimulate the mind.

It will be a very special evening of Lucinda’s forthright style and authentic warmth. She will perform a solo acoustic set, then a duo with rising guitar star Blake Mills, then a rousing set with her full band, featuring Mills on guitar. And, Blake will open the evening with a short solo performance set. The 23-year-old L.A. native, formerly of the rock outfit Dawes, has forged a remarkable career that has seen everyone from Kid Rock to Cass McCombs solicit his services as a guitarist. He’s been on tour with Lucinda throughout 2011 and recently released his debut solo album Break Mirrors, which comes out of a long tradition of mellow Southern California rock.


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They Might Be Giants Special Family Show @ UCLA Live 1.28. -

They Might Be Giants Special Family Show

This not-to be-missed show will draw on the band’s award-winning kids’ albums, including the Grammy-nominated Here Comes Science and the Grammy-winning Here Come the 123s. A great afternoon of fun for all, big and small—and as all attendees will attest, their previous Royce Hall appearance will go down in confetti history.

PLEASE NOTE: At the request of the artist, this performance will begin at 3:00 pm. Doors to Royce Hall will open at 2:00 pm – light food and refreshments will be available at the Royce Bar before and after the show. All tickets for the original 11:00 am start time will be honored.

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Wednesday 2.23. - Free-Flowing Spoken-Word with Writer/Director John Waters @ UCLA Live's Royce Hall.

Director, actor, author and all-around filth elder John Waters brings his wildly popular one-man show to UCLA Live’s Royce Hall Wednesday February 23, taking aim at Hollywood during the industry’s most self-indulgent week--the Oscars--with “This Filthy World Goes Hollywood.”

Waters has performed his free-flowing spoken-word lecture entitled “This Filthy World” at colleges, museums, film festivals and comedy clubs worldwide, including a 2010 appearance at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. Last year, Waters also played to a sold out audience at the Traverse City Comedy Arts Festival and appeared in the Sydney Opera House.

In this UCLA Live appearance, the multi-talented artist focuses his rapid-fire wit on show business, the art world and his own lunatic career in a one-man vaudeville performance.

Independent filmmaker, sketch artist and actor (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou) Matthew Gray Gubler serves as emcee and dynamic modern-rock artist Elvis Perkins opens the show with a solo set.

Waters’ sixth book, Role Models, debuted at No. 11 on the Los Angeles Times bestseller list in May of 2010, also earning spots on the bestseller lists for the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. Waters other books include Shock Value, Crackpot, Pink Flamingos and Other Trash, Hairspray, Female Trouble and Multiple Maniacs, and Art: A Sex Book (co-written with art critic Bruce Hainley).

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ORNETTE COLEMAN performs Wednesday, November , 3rd - @ UCLA Live's Royce Hall

Free jazz pioneer, Pulitzer Prize winner and peerless saxophonist Ornette Coleman has played a major role in the evolution of American music for more than five decades. At the 2009 Festival International de Jazz de Montréal, Coleman became the 16th person to receive the prestigious Miles Davis Award, instituted to honor an international jazz musician for his or her complete body of work and influence. Coleman was instrumental in breaking down jazz conventions in the 1960s, becoming the father of free jazz and returning the medium to its daring, revolutionary roots. Joining him on stage are his son Denardo Coleman on drums, Tony Falanga and Al MacDowell on basses.

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TONIGHT! Thu, Oct 21, @ UCLA Live's Royce Hall - Laurie Anderson - Delusion

Conceived as a series of short mystery plays, Delusion jump cuts between the everyday and the mythic. Combining violin, electronic puppetry, music and visuals, the work speaks the colorful, poetic and imagistic language that has become Laurie Anderson’s trademark. Inspired by the breadth of Balzac, Ozu and Laurence Sterne and employing a series of altered voices and imaginary guests Anderson tells a complex story about longing, memory and identity. At the heart of Delusion is the pleasure of language and a terror that the world is made entirely of words.

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Genre-Bending Artist Laurie Anderson Returns to UCLA Live with ‘Delusion’ Oct. 21

Laurie Anderson returns to UCLA Live’s Royce Hall Thursday Oct. 21 with the Los Angeles premiere of her newest multimedia stage work, titled Delusion.

Marking Anderson’s sixth appearance at UCLA Live, Delusion employs the genre-defying exploits audiences have come to expect from the groundbreaking multimedia artist, combining violin, electronic puppetry, music and visuals. Conceived as a series of short mystery plays, Delusion encompasses Anderson’s colorful and poetic language to tell stories ranging from the mystic origins of the Russian space program to theories of time and speed, tales of mythic ancestors, silence and animals. Backed by a trio of musicians, Anderson performs Delusion’s two main characters, herself and Fenway Bergamot. “The electronically altered voice I’ve used for many years, the one that turns my voice into a male voice, has been gradually evolving onto a more nuanced one,” Anderson says of her Bergamot character. “I’ve written Delusion as a conversation between that voice and my own.” Two pieces from Delusion are drawn from Anderson’s critically acclaimed record, Homeland, released in June 2010. Anderson is known for her innovative use of technology and multimedia as a writer, director, vocalist and visual artist whose works span the worlds of theater, art and experimental music.

Her visual work has been presented in major museums around the world. Delusion was originally commissioned by the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad, Vancouver and Barbicanbite 10, London. The piece debuted February 17, 2010 at the Olympics in Vancouver. Anderson opened BAM’s 2010 Next Wave Festival in New York this week with Delusion, where it will run through Oct. 3.

Single tickets are on sale now. UCLA Live at Royce Hall, Thursday, October 21 at 8 p.m.

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Saturday 3.6 @ UCLA LIVE - The Blind Boys of Alabama and Allen Toussaint

One of the most beloved traditional gospel groups and the musical laureate of New Orleans celebrate the sounds of the Crescent City. The Blind Boys of Alabama is still creating bold new music a full 70 years after its founding at the Talladega Institute for the Blind, finding the soulful core of songs by Tom Waits, Prince and others. As a composer, producer and musician, Allen Toussaint was behind “Mother-in-Law,” “Workin’ In a Coal Mine,” “Lady Marmalade” and dozens of other hits, as well as an acclaimed collaboration with Elvis Costello, “The River in Reverse,” recorded after Hurricane Katrina. On his new album “The Bright Mississippi,” his elegantly spirited piano playing honors Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton and other New Orleans legends.

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Tuesday @ Royce Hall - UCLA Live Presents - The U.S. Premiere of Teatr Zar's 'Triptych'

Years in the making, Teatr Zar’s “Triptych” is an intimate, haunting experience. The Wroclaw-based troupe employs a revolutionary theatrical method emphasizing ritual movement, ancient sacred songs and visceral acting techniques that dissolve the separation between actors and spectators. In three discrete sections—“Gospels of Childhood,” “Caesarean Section” and “Anhelli”—these ingredients meld into potent stories of love, death, suicide and redemption. Director Jaroslaw Fret and his international cast present “Triptych” for a very limited audience in Royce Hall.

Tue, Dec 1 @8p
Wed, Dec 2 @8p
Thu, Dec 3 @8p

*Staged in multiple locations in Royce Hall; some seat locations will not be adjacent in the second seating configuration of this performance. No late seating.

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Omara Portuondo@ ROYCE HALL this Friday 10.23 @ 8p

From dancing on stage of Havana’s famous Tropicana cabaret as teen, to appearing on movie screens around the globe in “The Buena Vista Social Club,” Omara Portuondo’s career has been full of remarkable moments and unforgettable music. For her first U.S. tour since 2004, Omara explores songs that mark her path from celebrated Cuban chanteuse to international stardom, including aching boleros and new Brazilian-influenced ballads.

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Goran Bregovic's West Coast Debut Tommorrow Night @ Royce Hall

Goran Bregovic and his Wedding and Funeral Orchestra

With a lively ensemble that includes a 4-piece classical string orchestra, a 6-man choir, and two Bulgarian female vocalists,- international star-Goran Bregovic & his Wedding and Funeral Orchestra are perhaps the largest, most diverse and most irresistible world music group to hit the Royce Hall stage. A household name in his native Balkans for more than three decades as a film composer and rock musician, Bregovic has been broadening his appeal around the world with his ecstatic, eclectic and charismatic style of gypsy dance music. The Spanish paper El Pais described the group as “one of the most beautiful symphonies of Old World Europe … [Bregovic] creates the most breath-taking music on this continent … intense, vigorous, colorful, passionate, exotic, fascinating.”

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at Royce Hall Thursday Night

UCLA Live Presents

Sing Sing

Created by multi-award-winning musician David Bridie from the Australian band Not Drowning Waving, Sing Sing – a Papua New Guinea expression for “large musical gathering” – brings together some of the most important indigenous artists from the Oceania region around Australia for a rousing celebration of traditional and contemporary music and dance. From the highlands of West Papua and the forests and coral atolls of Papua New Guinea to the vast deserts of Australia, the region boasts a plethora of vibrant musical and cultural traditions that are rarely experienced outside their native lands. Sing Sing offers a unique journey through the physical and cultural landscape of urban and grass roots village life in these areas with a thrilling visual show and an exhilarating mix of traditional and contemporary sounds—from the haunting melodies of bamboo flutes to the upbeat rhythms of a string band.

At UCLA LIVE May 1-2- Ballet Preljocaj

Les 4 Saison

Daring, passionately sensual, and provocative, the dance works of French-born Albanian Angelin Preljocaj have left an indelible mark on international dance, including his ravishing Near Life Experience (at UCLA Live in 2004), his dramatically modern take on Romeo and Juliet (at UCLA in 1998) and his powerful version of Le Sacre du Printemps. Now Preljocaj takes on one of classical music’s cultural landmarks, Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, in a fantastical interpretation bursting with color, playful energy and magic. Featuring irrepressibly vibrant dancing and the surreal and eccentrically beautiful set design of renowned French sculptor Fabrice Hyber, this imaginative work unfolds like a lucid dream as each season evokes primal thoughts and desires in the form of cool femme fatales, bright green Martian-like figures, and a giant prickly hedgehog lurking across the stage.

Fri-Sat, May 1-2 at 8p @ Royce Hall

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Quizas, Quizas, Quizas: Lila Downs @ Royce Hall

Thursday, April 9th at 8pm | Royce Hall

Described by the New York Times as “a mezzo-soprano with a three-octave range, a hungry mind, and an arresting stage presence,” Mexican American singer Lila Downs creates a strongly layered music in which blues and jazz cohabitate with rap and ranchera, and honky-tonk swings alongside romantic boleros.

“At a time when Mexico’s rich native styles are being shunned as old-fashioned or irrelevant, Downs offers a fresh, modern document that joyfully reveals the rich well of inspiration” [Los Angeles Times]. Following sold-out Royce Hall appearances in 2004 and 2007, Downs returns to UCLA Live to perform her electrifying, cross-cultural blend of Mexican roots music.

Tickets Here.