A Hotel of Many Lives: Gabriel Kahane and Roomful of Teeth in Elevator Songs
Fresh from their GRAMMY-winning album Rough Magic, Roomful of Teeth opens the evening with Caroline Shaw’s The Isle—a spellbinding work that blurs ancient myth with modern vocal invention. Gabriel Kahane follows with an intimate solo set, setting the stage for the centerpiece: Elevator Songs.
Written and performed by Kahane, Elevator Songs is a poignant 35-minute tapestry of interwoven lives set in a hotel suspended across space and time. With Roomful of Teeth cast as the kaleidoscopic inhabitants, and contributions from Caroline Shaw/Eliza Bagg on violin and Jodie Landau on vibraphone, this work brims with wit, pathos, and sonic brilliance. A deeply human journey—comic, tragic, and wholly transporting—Elevator Songs is the culmination of years of collaboration between Kahane and Teeth, showcasing both the ensemble’s expressive range and Kahane’s singular narrative voice. A new album of the piece is currently in development, promising to bring this richly imagined world to listeners everywhere.
Hailed as “one of the finest songwriters of the day” by The New Yorker, Gabriel Kahane is a musician and storyteller whose work spans the theater, club, and concert hall. Gabriel’s discography includes five LPs as a singer-songwriter; The Fiction Issue, an album of chamber music with string quartet Brooklyn Rider; as well as emergency shelter intake form, which was heard last season in San Francisco and London, having been commissioned and recorded by the Oregon Symphony, for whom Kahane is now in his second term as Creative Chair. Upcoming recordings include Heirloom, a piano concerto written for his father, the noted pianist and conductor Jeffrey Kahane; as well as the debut album from Council, an ongoing project with violinist, composer, and conductor Pekka Kuusisto.
Roomful of Teeth is a Grammy-winning vocal band dedicated to reimagining the expressive potential of the human voice. By engaging collaboratively with artists, thinkers, and community leaders from around the world, the group seeks to uplift and amplify voices old and new while creating and performing meaningful and adventurous music.
Founded in 2009 by Brad Wells, the band was incubated at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) in North Adams, Massachusetts, where members studied with some of the world’s most extraordinary singers and teachers. Through experimentation, exploration, and plenty of failures, the group learned that the boundaries of the human voice are never what they seem, that rules can be bent, even broken, and perhaps they should be.
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We invite you to contact us now about finding a date to bring Elevator Songs to your series in the 2026/27 season.