Summer Concert Series Special Event! Lollise & The Gentleman Brawlers
Lollise
Lollise is a multi-disciplinary artist from Francistown, Botswana, based in NYC. She shares her bold Afro-futurist pop sound, rich with layers of kinetic, danceable percussion. Creating hybrid songs for this moment, she takes influence from the music she grew up with – Setswana and Kalanga folk songs, ’80s and ’90s South African electronic bubblegum and kwaito, Congolese soukous and Zimbabwean sungura. Using sound, color and movement, Lollise tells stories in real and imagined worlds that are multidimensional and nuanced, historical and futuristic. She performs with a potent energy and commitment to the music, in body and in spirit.
In 2025 Lollise recorded on the Kronos Quartet’s rendition of Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain” alongside Iggy Pop, Laurie Anderson, Asha Bhosle, Willie Nelson, Allison Russell and many others. She has performed extensively in New York, from DIY community spaces to arts institutions including BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn, Public Records, BAM, Pioneer Works, Brooklyn Museum, Little Island Festival, Elsewhere and Symphony Space. She has toured the US opening for Ibibio Sound Machine and Rubblebucket and played at the Durchlüften 2025 Festival at Humboldt Forum in Berlin.
Lollise has performed extensively in New York, from DIY community spaces to arts institutions including BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn, Public Records, BAM, Pioneer Works, Brooklyn Museum, Little Island Festival, Elsewhere and Symphony Space. She has toured the US opening for Ibibio Sound Machine and Rubblebucket and played at the Durchlüften 2025 Festival at Humboldt Forum in Berlin. Her music has been featured on Hearing Things, Pop Matters, KEXP, Rolling Stone, Bandcamp Radio, Bandcamp Daily, Okay Africa,and New Sounds with John Schaefer on WNYC radio.
The Gentleman Brawlers
When Brooklyn collective Gentleman Brawlers (led by creative duo Becca Fox and Matt Walsh) performs, it’s more than a concert: It’s an electrifying experience. “If you can MOVE you can DANCE!” shouts an exuberant Fox from the stage — or from the dance floor, where she’s joined the crowd. Whether an electronic trio or a 7-piece band with dancers, Gentleman Brawlers loves to engage an audience, and the audience loves them right back. The BBC’s Tom Robinson hailed them as “a virtuoso live band, grooving together like a beautifully engineered machine.”
Channeling musical inspo Talking Heads, the band’s distinct brand of Afrofunk and indie dance music becomes a visual as well as auditory feast on stage that Canadian blog The Revue calls “tantalizing and intoxicating.” Fox, leading an expandable cast of dancers, creates thrilling, immersive live shows. A multi-disciplinary artist of Haitian and Jewish descent, Fox embodies what it means to be mixed, taking virtuosic dance turns in an eclectic range of styles from rhythm tap and West African to pop-modern contemporary. With dance performances at the Metropolitan Opera (“Eurydice” and “Lucia di Lammermoor”) and numerous European TV ad campaigns to her credit, Fox brings a potent, incendiary presence to the stage that Arts Council of Greater New Haven described as “…airborne…half-vocalist, half-bird.”
Gentleman Brawlers has two distinct musical incarnations – live and in studio – that elevate and inform each other. Through a sonic blend of disco-based horn lines, sticky highlife guitar, and polyrhythms from West Africa, Trinidad, and Brazil, Gentleman Brawlers’ live shows ignite a community-based, improvisational energy; audience engagement is integral to the band’s identity. In studio, the band will often reimagine their songs through an experimental EDM lens. Whether the audience is on the dance floor or pressing play, Gentleman Brawlers always delivers an exuberant, celebratory experience.
