Friday, Jan. 10: Jon Pousette-Dart and company left their mark in the height of the singer/songwriter era with album after album of craft folk-leaning rock that makes sense in the world of Orleans and of Little Feat – which is another way of saying that people were better at guitar back then, and the Pousette-Dart Band was and remains a gifted and surprisingly exploratory two-guitar outfit with a boundless set of sweet songs.
Saturday, Jan. 11: The program features Concerto Competition winner cellist Christopher Santos performing Edward Elgar’s famous Cello Concerto, Brahms’ Second Symphony and Rip van Winkle, American composer George Chadwick’s most famous work.
Saturday, Jan. 4: Once the pop-culture musical quarry of Don Ho and Tiny Tim pretty much exclusively, the ukulele has enjoyed a run of popularity in recent years that has reached the status of a genuine renaissance.
I am sure that we could do better than decade-based history, but we probably won’t. Decades are too much fun, with their crazy dances and sweaters.
The best way to endure the affronts of cold and snow, in the opinion of this ardent winter walker, is to acclimate. Fear not the sub-freezing and let it have its salubrious way with your adaptive core systems. Get comfortable at 15 degrees and 30 will feel like SoCal.
According to a recent article in the journal Science, if you were alive in the year 1970, more than one in four birds in the US and Canada has disappeared within your lifetime. What’s happening, and which birds are most in danger?
We have met to talk about the unprecedented journalistic conditions of the Trump Age, in which the press finds itself demonized, discredited and (often literally) attacked. Meantime, digital media have created all kinds of new sources, opportunities and venues for journalists, who, in the podcast and oral history age, enjoy latitude for opinion and personal identity as never before. And no one really gets paid much for any of it. New media companies still appear to work in spacious, urban, open-plan offices, but it is a stock Getty image. Everyone’s actually holed up in a bedroom somewhere drinking Monster.
Friday, Dec. 20: The Marotta of course is the legendary drummer Jerry, who has played with pretty much everybody, but most pertinent to this discussion is his radical work as the featured percussionist on the first four Peter Gabriel solo albums – albums that defined a new way of arty ensemble playing (the third record in particular) and that established a musical dialect from which Sarah Perrotta has drawn across her entire career.
Sunday, Dec. 8: On her indie-folk debut I Need to Start a Garden, the startlingly mature Portland-based songwriter Haley Heynderickx positions herself squarely in the freak-folk tradition: able fingerpicking on nylon-string and gritty electric guitars; lyrical concerns that straddle bucolic imagism and deep symbolism; and rustic production values that occasionally sprout surprising and strange sonic developments.
Friday, Dec. 6: Do you prefer art when it knows it is art, or when it thinks it might still just be rock ‘n’ roll? Of course, there is a third road: Abbey Road, the Beatles’ second swing at a conceptual masterwork, and arguably the more successful one, even if they could never hope to duplicate the world-changing novelty of the first one. Abbey Road in fact sounds nothing like Sergeant Pepper’s. It is deeper, darker, more assured, more beautiful and more broken, showing all the wear and tear of the interceding years and all that they had learned. Consider: They are only separated by two years. Two years. “Year” must have meant something different back then.