75 DOLLAR BILL: LITTLE BIG BAND + DUO

Saturday, July 15th at 9pm (doors 8pm), ISSUE is pleased to present a special outdoor performance featuring Che Chen and Rick Brown’s celebrated duo 75 Dollar Bill performing in both their “little big band” ensemble format and in duo formation. The event marks the 10 year anniversary of 75 Dollar Bill’s first appearance at ISSUE—memorably performed under a brightly colored fabric canopy for the musicians and audience to gather under by Talice Lee. The evening also marks the auspicious return of ISSUE to its former home at The Old American Can Factory in Gowanus, Brooklyn to celebrate the occasion. 

In Fall 2023, ISSUE Project Room celebrates its own 20 year anniversary with a series of commissioned programs, orbiting around our annual Gala and affiliated Benefit events. ISSUE begins the 20th anniversary celebration with July activities featuring long-time friends and collaborators of the organization at key partner venues.

Since its inception in 2003 under the vision of late Founder Suzanne Fiol, ISSUE has evolved from a small East Village garage, to a grain silo on the Gowanus Canal, to a project space in The Old American Can Factory, to now owning our 22 Boerum Place theater as an internationally-recognized leader for fostering experimental cross-disciplinary performance.

Across 20 years of programming, ISSUE has sustained a thriving Artists-In-Residence program, encouraging generations of NYC-based artists to take creative risks in reaching the next stage of their artistic development. ISSUE has also inaugurated the Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellowship, assisting emerging curators to realize ambitious new projects. The organization has bolstered close partnerships within NYC’s cultural ecology, collaborating with like minded nonprofits, galleries, theaters, and non-traditional spaces as we’ve embarked on a period of off-site programming. Bringing commissions, premieres, and rare performances to new contexts and spaces throughout NYC, ISSUE has doubled down on its commitment to artists whose work eludes convention.

ISSUE Project Room is thrilled to return to The Old American Can Factory for this very special program, the last of ISSUE’s Summer Season and launching our 20th anniversary celebration and Summer Membership Campaign. 

Notes from Che Chen of 75 Dollar Bill:

“In May of 2013, Rick and I had been playing together for about a year, mostly avoiding rock and experimental gigs in favor of “Social Music” settings for our electric guitar and plywood crate music. Troost, a tiny bar in Greenpoint, was the main venue for this. I lived down the street and became friendly with the owner, John Ortiz, who eventually let us start playing there. We'd do a couple of sets a night, which went well enough to turn into weekly or monthly engagements, and even a few week-long nightly residencies. People came to listen or just happened to be there, some peered in through the front window from the street, and the bar was so small that when someone wanted to enter I had to step out of my spot in the doorway to let them in. I’d gone to Mauritania that March, to study music with guitarist and tidinitt player Jeich ould Chigaly. Tagging along with him and his wife while they went to work (she’s the incredible singer Noura mint Seymali), I got to witness ecstatic wedding band performances happen under ornately patterned tents pitched on the outskirts of Nouakchott, at the edge of the Sahara. We’d just self-released our first cassette, which included a sidelong track named in homage to Najeeb, a young Tunisian man with Down Syndrome I’d met a few years earlier while traveling in Kairouan, Islam’s 4th holiest city. He’d hang out at the cafe all day and the other guys would buy him sodas while he’d crack them up with fantastical and occasionally lewd bits about physical love, flying airplanes and tourists. Never missing an opportunity for a send up of the local religious piety, he’d attempt to order a drink you couldn’t get at this cafe in Kairouan, or anywhere as far as I know, وسكي بالحبرورش or “Whiskey with Hail”.

David Grubbs asked us to share a bill with him at ISSUE. The Boerum Place concert hall’s cold grand scale, crumbling plaster rosettes and pre-Crash hubris suggested that we might superimpose some of the lessons learned in the desert and on Manhattan Avenue. I knew that Talice Lee (then working the door at ISSUE) worked with textiles, so we asked her to help us make a light, brightly colored fabric canopy for the musicians and audience to gather under. A handful of friends even got up to dance to the limping rhythm of I Was Real.” 

2023 marks the ten year anniversary of 75 Dollar Bill’s first appearance at ISSUE Project Room (and 11th year as a band). Originally started as a duo, the group has always brought friends, family and guests into the fold as a way of expanding their sound and building community. Throughout the evening, the band will weave through duo and large ensemble arrangements for their 10-piece Little Big Band, a sort of survey of the band's mercurial nature over its first decade. Musicians and audience members will gather underneath a decorative tent canopy, newly designed and constructed by Talice Lee and Che Chen especially for the Can Factory’s courtyard space. This concert will also celebrate the re-issue of their first three self-released cassettes, cassette (2013), Olives In the Ears (2014) and Southeaster (2015). All three albums have been newly mastered and copies will be available for sale at the concert.

75 Dollar Bill was formed in 2012 in New York City by percussionist Rick Brown and guitarist Che Chen. Played on a deeply resonant plywood crate, Brown’s earthy, elemental rhythms are both the foundation and foil for Chen’s ecstatic, modal guitar style. The group’s electric, richly patterned music can shape shift from joyful dance tunes to slowly changing trance minimalism, an uncategorizable hybrid which draws on the modal traditions of Africa, Asia and the Middle East, early electric blues, Sun Ra’s space chords and the minimalist and No Wave histories of their hometown. While Brown and Chen are always at the band’s core, the band frequently expands into different configurations live and on record, from trios and large ensembles to marching band. Their Little Big Band is a flexible, multigenerational orchestra made up of players from a variety of backgrounds and musical histories, and for this concert will include Rick Brown (plywood crate, percussion, homemade horns), Che Chen (guitar, congas, violin), Sue Garner (bass), Cheryl Kingan (saxophones), Talice Lee (violin, organ), Steve Maing (guitar), Jim Pugliese (congas, percussion), Karen Waltuch (viola), Barry Weisblat (cowbell, shaker, electronics) and Chris Williams (trumpet). Their 2020 album Live at Tubby’s struck a chord by capturing an exuberant pair of sets recorded just days before the pandemic sent us all into lockdown, and their last studio album I Was Real was named #1 record of the year by WIRE magazine in 2019.