On their 2025 self-titled release, Inner Spaces, a musical project featuring Iraqi American multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Amir ElSaffar and Italian electronic sound artist Lorenzo Bianchi Hoesch, combine wistful Iraqi maqam music with atmospheric jazz and programmed orchestral sounds reminiscent of Miles Davis’ jazz classic Sketches of Spain (if Davis had emphasized Arabic music aspects, added occasional vocals and noisier instrumentation, and used modern music-making technology). The Illinois-raised, Brooklyn-based ElSaffar began playing trumpet as a teenager, studied classical music in college, and developed his love of jazz via his Iraqi American father’s record collection, which included Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. But 25 years ago, ElSaffar started learning more about his own Iraqi heritage and culture and visiting Iraq and various European countries to study with masters of Iraqi maqam music. Maqam uses certain microtones not heard in Western music, as well as particular melodies and lyrical themes. ElSaffar has learned a lot since then, including how to speak Arabic and how to play the Iraqi santur, a stringed hammered dulcimer instrument. On “Spirits,” ElSaffar opens with beautiful jazz trumpet notes supported by Hoesch’s ambient touches. Halfway through, ElSaffar begins singing traditional Iraqi style in a melancholy and melodic way using melisma to stretch out Arabic phrases. ElSaffar tells City Paper via email that Hoesch uses “live processing and samples from my voice, trumpet, and santur, which he manipulates with a wide palette of effects that he has invented.” ElSaffar adds, “Audiences should be prepared for an immersive and sonically rich experience.” Inner Spaces featuring Amir ElSaffar and Lorenzo Bianchi Hoesch starts at 7 p.m. on Oct. 22 at Hill Center, 921 Pennsylvania Ave. SE. hillcenterdc.org. $23. —Steve Kiviat
When On Background, a monthly improv comedy show from co-producers Shawn Westfall and Dan Kois, launched earlier this year, its premise was simple: have a journalist come by to talk about their career and turn their story into improv comedy. After the success of sold-out free shows featuring journalists including Tom Sietsema, Jonathan Capehart, and Sally Quinn, On Background is moving to the Keegan Theatre for its next show on Oct. 28 with special guest, City Paper alum Kara Swisher. With support from Nobody (the ad agency where the shows were initially held), On Background decided to look for a bigger space after watching their audience grow beyond the standard D.C. improv scene followers. “They said, ‘You need to take this somewhere else because this is bigger than us,’” Westfall tells City Paper. “We sort of knew that we had to grow too because there was an opportunity here. Some of the people who have purchased tickets, especially for this show, are names I don’t recognize and that’s always encouraging and gratifying to me.” On Background With Kara Swisher starts at 7:30 p.m. on Oct. 28 at Keegan Theatre, 1742 Church St. NW. instagram.com. $22.49. —Christina Smart
Carlotta Corpron (1901–1988) may not be a household name in photographic history, but she was quietly intertwined with some of its leading figures—including Alfred Stieglitz and László Moholy-Nagy—and her abstract works, mostly produced from the 1930s through the mid-1950s, engaged in dialogue with some of that era’s photographic frontiers. A comprehensive survey of Corpron’s works at the Hirshhorn begins in the ’30s with fairly conventional botanical studies, including venetian-blind lighting that echoes the late-1880s work of Stieglitz and a series of calla lilies that call to mind those then in vogue by Georgia O’Keeffe. Corpron later moved on to cameraless photograms like those of Man Ray; still lifes that suggest Edward Weston pepper images with more multifaceted lighting; and industrial-looking abstractions that call to mind those of Margaret Bourke-White. Corpron’s works get more interesting the more abstract they get. One work from the early 1940s uses cut paper to produce a futuristic vision of clean lines and curves; other cut paper works feature gently shaded, three-dimensional cylindrical and ribbon forms, while some use triangles and other shapes to create tableaux that look like a tumbling house of cards frozen in time. In other series, Corpron harnesses ambient light in creative ways, sometimes by moving the camera with long exposures to create arcing swishes and, in one image, by portraying a church in Havana purely through the outlines of string-light points along its architecture. Poor health cut Corpron’s work short seven decades ago, but her experimental approach is worth a belated return to the spotlight. Light Is a Plastic Medium: The Photography of Carlotta Corpron runs through March 14 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Independence Ave. and 7th St. SW. hirshhorn.si.edu. Free. —Louis Jacobson
Five decades ago, the National Endowment for the Arts sponsored some 200 photographers to participate in more than 70 regional documentary projects. Now, on the occasion of America’s 250th anniversary, the Smithsonian American Art Museum has not only resurrected these mostly forgotten projects but also situated them within a long tradition of federally funded photography—beginning with the 19th-century photographs of the West by Timothy O’Sullivan, William Henry Jackson, and Carleton Watkins and running through the Depression-era images of Farm Security Administration photographers Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and others. The earliest of the new documentary projects, focusing on Kansas in 1974, leaned heavily on landscape works, including some small-town facades that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Evans’ portfolio from decades earlier. The subsequent series, primarily undertaken between the bicentennial year of 1976 and 1981, covered most of the country’s interior. Some images documented workplaces, from Midwestern factory valleys to a Grumman manufacturing plant on Long Island; others focused on people, such as a series on Chicanos in Los Angeles; still others captured landscapes, such as the work of the Rephotographic Survey Project, which took modern-day images of sites chronicled by O’Sullivan, Jackson, and Watkins. The roster of participating photographers is impressive; works on view include those by Lee Friedlander, Stephen Shore, Bruce Davidson, Birney Imes, Frank Gohlke, Joel Meyerowitz, and Mark Klett. Images in the exhibit range from low-key black and white to vivid, large-format color; few of them are pathbreaking in a formal sense, save Robbert Flick’s 10-by-10 matrix of automatically timed images documenting Ocean Park, California. Strikingly, many of these projects were undertaken at a nadir in American history; far from polishing the nation’s image, the portrayals showcased Miami Beach before it became hip; urban decay-ridden St. Louis, Baltimore, and Memphis; and Son of Sam-era, graffiti-encrusted New York City subway cars. As hard as it is to imagine federally funded art happening today, it’s even harder to imagine art taking such a hard look at the nation’s warts. Much Here Is Beautiful: Photography Surveys of the U.S. Bicentennial runs through April 18 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 8th and G Streets NW. americanart.si.edu. Free. —Louis Jacobson
