The Renaldo The Ensemble with Aldo Perez

The Renaldo The Ensemble is a New York City based band/absurdist theater collective who perform their own existential pop, peppered with musical absurdism and virtuoso performance led by downtown impresario Aldo Perez and his cast of vaudeville misfits. They visit indie rock, jazz, tango, opera and country, all with equal aplomb, as flamenco guitar, percussion, clarinet, bass, and piano comprise the instrumentation for this virtuosic, unusual, yet irresistible group. Known for his infamously wacky, compelling live performance, Aldo Perez has held the much-coveted Saturday night residency at The Living Room in Manhattan for over ten years. He has studied privately with composer John Corigliano, and guitar masters Jorge Morel, Julio Prol and Tuck Andress. Perez has composed for theater and film, and his dada rock absurdist hallucinatory theater extravaganza “The Curse Of The Mystic Renaldo The” was a downtown hit!!

Jenny Lee Mitchell is Renaldo's opera singing, clarinet playing, ballad crooning, maid. She has performed all over the world as a singer, vaudevillian and musician. In New York, she wowed audiences as the wind-up maid in “The Curse Of The Mystic Renaldo The”. Critics have called Jenny “sexy and hilarious; she is like Frankstein’s creation from Lucy and Vampira in a maid’s uniform.” Matthew Talmage is on drums and performs in Priest garb. An ethnomusicologist who's pursuit of knowledge has taken him from private studies in Africa to big band arranger and composer in NYC. Johnathon Roberts as Gary from “The Crushed Velvets” on keyboards and vocals hilariously tries to take over the band with his “own” material. You might catch The Crushed Velvets playing an afternoon gig in Garfield New Jersey. The newest member of the band is Nick Tardif on bass who enjoys karaoke, weed and 80s pop ballads. His favorite scale is the octatonic blues.

In this band one can expect flutes being played through the nose, singing with razors, opera and cigarettes, and talking paintings and indie rock. One fan put it like this: “Renaldo The is one of NYC's secret treasures! You will laugh your pants off and hear some great indie rock, some standards and maybe some tango and opera played by a priest, a maid, some scientists and a front man who calls himself Renaldo The who happens to be one of the best guitarists in NYC!”

This Kurt Weill-esque, art-rock troupe has been called “wonderfully weird” by Backstage and “marvelously odd” by Time Out New York. Steven McElroy from the New York Times says:, “Renaldo’s The is free-associative monologues and a series of hallucinatory vignettes mix with rock music interludes, courtesy of Mr. Perez and members of his band.”

Will Forte puts it like this:

“There is a guy named Aldo Perez who does a show every couple of weeks at the Living Room. Me and my friends Leo and Demetri just happened to be there one night and saw his show and it was so awesome, our heads exploded. It’s so hard to explain what he does – it’s a mixture of full-commitment comedy and music that has to be seen to be believed. But I just recently went to see his new play (The Curse of the Mystic Renaldo The) at the 3LD Art and Technology Center and my head, which had finally regenerated, exploded all over again. Go see them at The Living Room!”

For more on Renaldo The please visit renaldothe.com