Gotham Presents Kristen Lee Sergeant
3/23/23

Last March I saw on her Instagram that former Gotham sommelier Kristen Lee Sergeant was playing Joe’s Pub. I remembered admiring her performance at a Gotham brunch many years before and was happy to see her star on the rise. Keyed up to cheer on this Gotham alum, Bret and I got tickets and planned to make our “Village Voyage” from Gotham to The Public, a perfect example of the sort of downtown walking tour between dining and art that we love.

Kristen blew the roof of Joe’s. In sixty riveting minutes, she presented an album of original tunes that were not only highly enjoyable and splendidly sung but brain-tickling, too. On subjects ranging from Orpheus to Sisyphus (punished for killing his guests!), Kristen’s album Falling is a marvel of protean beauty and variety. It was easy to praise her highly after the show.

Thus began a friendship born of our connection through Gotham and bonded by music. I quickly conveyed interest in presenting Kristen’s show at Gotham, where we had just started a jazz program and our beautiful 5,000 square feet beg for use between meals. It wasn’t evident quite how to work a full-scale performance around dinner service, as Kristen’s show would not be background music, but there had to be a way. Fast-forward to tonight, almost one year later to the day, when we are fulfilling our dream of turning Gotham into a music venue, a supper club where we can uniquely present world-class food, drink, and music alongside each other. As the somm in the musician that is Kristen said, “You shouldn’t have to choose!”

Since leaving the somm world Kristen has stayed connected to wine, even making her own Two Notes Bordeaux-style blend with her partner in life, the great and Grammy-winning saxophonist Ted Nash, who will make a guest appearance at our show tomorrow. We recently heard Ted for the first time at Mezzrow a couple weeks ago and to say it was a religious experience would not, in my view, be an exaggeration.

We hope you will join us tonight for a bite before the kitchen closes at 9:30 then stay for the show. All-comers are welcome to reserve for just drinks, too, with an entrance of $45. The show will run one hour and the bar remain open following.

Congratulations and thank you, Kristen, for our beautiful history and meeting-of-minds today.

—Cassandra Csencsitz

ABOUT KRISTEN

Kristen Lee Sergeant is a singer, songwriter, and arranger who has “gone beyond music. She is a conceptual artist…” in the words of author and producer Kabir Seghal. After releasing two albums that both received the distinction of DownBeat Magazine Editor’s Pick, she now brings us “Falling” – her third studio album of largely original material and wholly original vision.

In it, Kristen synthesizes her training as a vocalist (from opera to theater to jazz), abilities as a poet, instincts as a songwriter and dramatic sensibility as an arranger to creates a world for us to inhabit in sound through her vision and deft use of her extremely talented ensemble.

Early in her career, her passion for music and theater led her to work professionally as an actor and singer on the dramatic stage, until she fell in love with jazz while singing with a big band regularly in NYC. She found inspiration from performers current and past such as Marilyn Maye, Dianne Reeves, Mark Murphy and Judy Garland. After finding her voice in jazz, she began writing her own songs and creating her own arrangements — finding both a freedom and a control that no other art form could offer.

In “Falling” we hear all of her influences — from the music of theater to 70’s rock, from the Great American Songbook to chamber music. Her music has brought her to stages at Birdland, Dizzy’s Club Coca Cola, Zinc Bar, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, L.A.’s The Blue Whale, and Joe’s Pub for the premiere of this new work — and she is poised to travel farther as the music broadens its reach to the world.