A tremendous lineup headed by Patti Smith and Iggy Pop has been unveiled for this year’s Tibet House benefit concert happening Thursday, March 16th at Carnegie Hall.  Laurie Anderson, Alabama Shakes, and Sufjan Stevens as well as Bernard Sumner, Phil Cunningham, and Tom Chapman of New Order will all perform along with Philip Glass who – besides being a brilliant composer – has been a pillar of Tibet House since its inception.  If you click on that last link you can see how many cool movies like The Hours, Kundun, Dracula and Hamburger Hill that Glass has written scores for as well as what’s brewing for his 80th birthday concert season. Among the offerings of the octogenary celebration is an appealing opportunity to see and hear members of the Philip Glass Ensemble offering a live interpretation of the music he composed for Jean Cocteau’s film La Belle et la Bête at Town Hall.

The beneficiary of the benefit concert, Tibet House US, is located at 22 West 15th Street and include… a gallery, exhibition space, and the spiffy room where Glass generously sat down with me last year to speak about the event and its reason for being.  As the interview with Glass took place not many weeks after the death of David Bowie, I’ve included a bonus video here as his remarks about him are worth sharing.  His relationship with Bowie was such that he based symphonies on two of the albums –Heroes and Low –that Bowie made with Brian Eno in the Berlin trilogy.  In addition, to which he alludes, he crossed paths with him quite a bit in the first few years of the century when Bowie recorded at Looking Glass Studios in Soho.  Glass reveals he may yet complete a symphony for Lodger to complete the trilogy with Heroes and Low…

Yesterday I participated in the final broadcast of The Alternate Side radio station.  It was emotional!  After Russ Boris, Alisa Ali and I played New Order and Joy Division back to back, I recalled the once in a lifetime pairing of Iggy Pop and New Order performing a couple of Joy Division songs last Spring at the Tibet House Benefit Concert at Carnegie Hall.  I got a few queries about the video so here is the report from March of 2014 that includes interview bits with Bernard Sumner of Joy Division and New Order – as well as Matt Berninger with the Dessner brothers of The National, and Philip Glass as they were part of the event as well… as was Patti Smith, Lenny Kaye, and Sufjan Stevens. By the way, a new New Order album, their first proper one in a decade, will be out next month.

Plus here’s a special bonus minute of Iggy with New Order performing Joy Division’s Transmission with no voice over…

Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, The National & New Order…