While Devo demos its famous choreography and Oingo Boingo and XTC hiccup through their skittish numbers, Ubu’s David Thomas commands your…concern. He doesn’t seem quite right. He’s dressed for a business meeting — suit and tie, his clean shaven and pudgy baby face scrubbed raw behind the ears. He gesticulates wildly, the purpose inscrutable.
The book is positioned as a celebration of nature’s fragile ecosystems and of the David v. Goliath community members (for David’s tactics, in this case, were largely litigatory) banded together to protect them. But in the moment-to-moment of the prose and in the very consciously balanced, 360-degree management of his facts, Mabee reveals himself mostly as a fastidious historian and no polemicist at all.
Saturday, Oct. 28: Julian Lage & Chris Eldridge headline Woodstock Luthiers’ Showcase.
Sunday, Oct. 22: A living legend of electronic and ambient music, Roedelius puts the “pro” in process and in prolific. More than 50 years into his career, the releases are steady and diversified.
Saturday, Oct. 14: Named for a river that runs through the northwestern region of Tuva, Alash is an ensemble comprised entirely of master Tuvan throat singers. The singers learned the traditional technique from their families, and later banded together under the name Changy-Xaya as students at Kyzyl Arts College.
Saturday, Oct. 14: The telling and receiving of personal truths – not spiel, characters or joke setups – is the heartbeat of Gethard’s comedy, even when he is doing conventional standup. He seems driven by the impulse to divulge, to articulate a self and to connect.
Friday through Sunday, Oct. 6 to 8: There will always be more holes than badges in your quilt of cultural literacy. Don’t let that deter you from new explorations and acquisitions. San Francisco cult darlings Deerhoof headline this musically diverse festival.
Saturday, September 30: “Thompson,” the sur- in Teddy Thompson’s name, is not a bad music industry handle – especially if you have any interest whatsoever in the great school of British progressive folk and all of its downhill streams. In that tradition, Teddy’s father Richard Thompson is a royal among royals.
Wednesday, October 4: This is indisputably a supergroup. It finds the great and epochal jazz guitarist John Scofield reuniting with the Jazz Rushmore drummer and Woodstock icon Jack DeJohnette, as well as John Medeski (whose primacy in the reclamation and reinvention of fusion simply cannot be overstated) and Larry Grenadier on bass.
Friday, Sept. 29: Most of the players here, many of whom you’ve heard if not heard of, earned their musical stripes elsewhere but live and work here now, forming a kind of new model collective for the post-industry music world, where you might as well live and play in the Catskills, for all anyone cares. Few, however, take on the Catskills as subject and as inspiration as directly as Koester, the Bard of Pakatakan Mountain.