Randee Mia Berman is a writer/performer/on-air commentator, baroque recorder musician, tv/radio host, comedienne, and graduate of Cornell University, where she performed Tillie in Paul Zindel’s The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds. Credits include CNN, HBO, ABC News, NPR, gigs at Caroline’s and Gotham Comedy Club, where she performed her one-woman show, Mia’s World and the life of silent film actress/photographer Tina Modotti. Currently a co-host for Centanni Broadcasting, Mia has a unique linguistic skill – talking backwards.

Meredith Meyer is a music artist from Oklahoma City. She played in various bands in LA before releasing two solo albums, Items You Won't Find Elsewhere, and It's Spooky to Be Young. She currently resides in NY where she fronts the band Young Unknowns. Their first album will be out in 2012 and is produced by Bill Racine (Rogue Wave, Mates of State). Hear her on www.meredithmeyer.com or http://youngunknowns.bandcamp.com

Stephanie Parello has been a member of the New York STORY Exchange family for many years. Often finding life upside-down, she has been around the world and back. Her eclectic experiences and love of traditional tales blends into unique tellings, often with unexpected twists.

Thomas Pryor’s work was published in The New York Times, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, New York Press, Our Town, The Westside Spirit, and A Prairie Home Companion. His blog, “Yorkville: Stoops to Nuts,” is listed in The New York Times. Thomas appeared on public radio’s This American Life, and has columns in NearSay.com & AskaNewYorker.com. He was featured in Public TV Ch 13’s Baseball: A New York Love Story.

“Each time Elizabeth Rowe (http://www.storytellerowe.com/journal.html) steps center stage, she demonstrates how a master storyteller helps people grow whole as human beings. Whether sharing a traditional folk/fairy tale or a personal story. Audiences fall under her spell as they respond to her warmth and empathy for the human condition.” Artistic Director, N.Y. Story

$7.00 includes a drink

  www.yorkvillestoopstonuts.blogspot.com/

"I play the trumpet like it's my last chance. End of story." -- Leif Arntzen

$10 cover (plus $10 minimum)

This French Night at the Cornelia Street Cafe will be dedicated to theater. We will be reading both in French and in English an entire one-act play, named Gzion.

Gzion is a « space drama » written by Hervé Blutsch and published in 2010, by Editions Théâtrales. The three main characters are Captain York, Lieutenant Turt and Sergeant Ptol. They are in their Gzion spaceship, somewhere in the outer space. It appears, though discussed in a very farcical way, that they have been lost for years. According to their on-board computer « their chance of survival is zero point zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero one ». Sergeant Ptol’s sudden appearance as a bear changes the comical farce into a cruel tragedy.

This one act play was translated into English this last fall by Sophia Tejeiro, a NYU French studies graduate student specializing in literary translation

The reading will be lead by Édouard Signolet – a French director who will come to New York this spring to work on the play.

$ 7 includes a drink

The simple act of “plugging in” is easy to take for granted, but it provides power, illumination, charge; the same could be said for connecting a power cord or for the meeting of creative minds. On "Plugged In" (Bee Jazz), his fifth album as a leader, French-born, Brooklyn-based saxophonist Jerome Sabbagh discovers the spark of inspiration provided by both and assembles an exhilarating electric quartet.

“The French New York-based saxophonist Jerome Sabbagh has been turning heads with his series of elegant inside-out efforts over the last few years […] There’s a consistent feeling of exploration on display with an unforgiving discipline – a great combination.” -- DownBeat

$10 cover (plus $10 minimum)

  www.jeromesabbagh.com

What happens when a Wandering Jew stops wandering? At the end of LAST DANCE AT THE HOTEL KEMPINSKI, Robin's earlier memoir, our hero had found a measure of peace, had even, for want of a better word, settled down. He had married, produced two children, and however tentatively, begun to explore the notion of home...

But the notion of home, for a Wandering Jew, is a complex one. For Robin, it includes, most tenderly, the Cornelia Street Café, which he opened in 1977 together with two other artists, an Irish-American actor and an Argentinean-Italian-Canadian painter and sculptor. Over the last thirty-five years it has been a home not just for three starving artists, as they then appeared to themselves to be, but for a whole host of performers: from Carolyne Mas and The Songwriters Exchange to Eve Ensler and the Vagina Monologues, from Nobel Laureate Roald Hoffmann to Poet Laureate Billy Collins, from Senator Eugene McCarthy reading his poetry to neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks reading his prose, from members of Monty Python to members of the Royal Shakespeare Company, from comedians to cellists, from stiltwalkers to ventriloquists. And for all kinds of civilians and celebrities.

Amid the turmoil of this passing throng, however, the sheer act of standing still after half a lifetime of wandering allows our hero, an exile from his native country, in which his parents were themselves exiles, to sift the nuances of arrivals and departures, of family and community, of longing and fulfillment, of exile and homecoming. And all this in a city where to stand still at all is at once an achievement and an act of betrayal.

In 1987, on its 10th anniversary, New York's Mayor Koch proclaimed the Cornelia Street Café "a culinary as well as a cultural landmark."

In THE WHOLE WORLD PASSES THROUGH: Stories from the Cornelia Street Café, Robin Hirsch picks up the personal history begun in Last Dance and finds in the midst of a myriad of other people's stories the continuation of his own.

$15 includes a drink

BOOM TIC BOOM represents a confluence of diverse musical backgrounds, personal histories, and a shared willingness to approach Allison's semi-traditional music with an avant-garde sensibility; embracing tradition yet deconstructing it, making use of silence, extreme dynamics, metric modulation, collective improvisation, loose chord structure, and the interplay around repetitive melodies.

"Miller established herself as a powerhouse jazz drummer and composer on her second album as a leader (BOOM TIC BOOM.)" --Chris Baron, LA Times

$10 cover (plus $10 minimum)

  www.allisonmiller.com ,  www.myspace.com/allisonmillerdrums

STREAMING LINK: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jePhgT9RRM

$10 cover (plus $10 minimum)

  www.geraldcleaver.bandcamp.com

Bassist, composer and educator Cameron Brown began his career in the mid-sixties, recording in Europe with George Russell and Don Cherry. These important innovators remain life-long inspirations and influences. Beginning in 1975, Mr. Brown anchored some of the most important ensembles of the seventies, eighties, nineties, and into the current century. Sheila Jordan, Roswell Rudd, Archie Shepp and Beaver Harris were his mentors and bandleaders. He is on the faculty of the New School University and teaches at the summer workshop near Venice, Italy co-sponsored by the New School. At present, Mr. Brown performs and/or records in duo with Sheila Jordan, with various ensembles led by Joe Lovano and Jason Rigby, as well as with Ben Riley, Lisa Sokolov, Jay Clayton, Archie Shepp, Don Byron, Dave Ballou, Steve Slagle, Marco Tamburini and Carl Stormer (www.jazzcode.org). He leads two ensembles: Cameron Brown and the Hear and Now and Cameron Brown and Dannie’s Calypso, and records for the Omnitone record label.

$15 cover plus $10 minimum

  http://www.sheilajordanjazz.com/ ,  www.CameronBrownMusic.com

For at its heart, the physical world is a musical world. From the vibrations of a guitar string to the sunlight that sweeps away the dark, and even as far as the notorious Higgs boson, our universe is awash in waves.

Professor Matt Strassler, host of the website "Of Particular Significance", and Andrea Wittgens, "silver-tongued'' singer-songwriter-pianist, join forces to reflect on these notions from perspectives scientific, sonic and poetic.

They'll sing us tales of the unknown, turn the volume down to the quantum level, shine photons on the mysterious particles of nature, and have fun doing it! And you'll leave knowing why the grandest of all musical instruments is the universe itself.

 Cover $15 (includes one house drink)

Peter Calo - " a masterful guitarist... Boston Globe. One of the most engaging performers in the biz" London's Time Out. Peter has performed/recorded with Carly Simon, Queen Latifah, Willie Nelson, Hall and Oates, Phil Ramone, Jimmy Webb, Kris Kristofferson & many more.

Norbert Goldberg - has accompanied jazz artists including Cleo Laine, Dewey Redman, Slide Hampton, and composers Lalo Shifrin and Michel Legrand. Recording credits include Gerry Mulligan, Grover Washington Jr., various Latin artists as well as jingles and film scores.

$15.00 includes a drink

  www.lisajanelipkin.com ,  www.petercalo.com

Classical and contemporary jazz collide as pianist Kayo Hiraki and flautist/poet/composer Kat Georges cut-the-edge with "Cornelia Suite," an anthology of cut-the-edge neo-classical jazz for piano, flute, iPad and vocals. The event will include the world premiere of Ms. Georges' hard-bit Punk Symphony for Four Classical Elements in C Minor (for Flute, iPad and Vocals)".

New York based pianist and Steinway piano artist, Kayo Hiraki appears in Cornelia Street Cafe for the first time. Steinway Artist Kayo Hiraki was born in Japan, the daughter of a classical pianist. A child prodigy, she started playing the piano when she was three years old. She has been performing five nights a week for seventeen years as the house pianist at the famous jazz spot, Arturo's in Greenwich Village. She has played at the Blue Note NYC with her Kayo Hiraki Piano Trio, including the legendary bassist Ron Carter, who notes: “Rarely have I heard a musician as gifted as Ms. Hiraki. To hear her play is to experience the joy of her creative ability and the depth of her experience as a talented performer.” She tours regularly in Europe and Japan and was recently featured in Japan Airline in-flight magazine. She will perform with her trio a series of jazz tunes inspired by classical compositions.

Kayo will be joined onstage by New York-based poet/composer/flautist Kat Georges. Kat will present the World Premiere of her hard-bit neo-classical, "Punk Symphony for Four Classical Elements in C Minor (for Flute, iPad and Vocals)." Kat Georges is a musician, poet, playwright, performer and designer. Her full-length poetry collection, "Our Lady of the Hunger," will be released soon on Three Rooms Press, which published two previous collections, "Punk Rock Journal" and "Slow Dance at 120 Beats a Minute." In New York since 2003, she has directed numerous Off-Broadway plays, curated poetry readings, and performed widely. She is co-founder and editor of Three Rooms Press; its most recent books include "Maintenant 6: A Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing and Art" and "Mike Watt: On and Off Bass," a collection of photos and distilled tour diaries from the legendary punk rock bass player.

$20.00 includes a drink

$7.00 includes a drink

"Dresser has synthesized all of these elements to create his own highly personal musical language—one that tempers freedom of expression through the navigation of extremely complex melodic and rhythmic inventions that challenge those improvisers skilled enough to join him. While this may sound formal and intellectual, the prime effect felt by the audience was one of joy." All About Jazz

$10 cover (plus $10 minimum)