My nightmare dream job
Our music critic discusses the ambivalence that comes with being a musician writing about music. “This is not a job for people who like to feel necessary.”
All posts by John Burdick
Judy Collins to play “Holidays and Hits” at Bearsville this Thursday
The preponderance of revivalist folk music in the new millennium has been scruffy and idiosyncratic by design, some of it
My Top Ten albums of all time, sort of
The album covers whirled into psychedelic mandalas and looped action sequences like an Eadweard Muybridge zoopraxiscope, transforming centrifugally into something rife with a post-verbal Jungian symbolism… Some records were legendary for what happened visually when they were spun animate, a living design, intent assumed. Grateful Dead: intent assumed; Led Zeppelin: intent assumed; Pink Floyd: intent assured.
The inspired Nellie McKay plays Beacon’s Towne Crier this Friday
Nellie McKay, with special guest Timothy Dark, performs at the Towne Crier Café in Beacon on Friday, December 9 at 8:30 p.m. Tickets cost $30. The Towne Crier is located at 379 Main Street in Beacon. For tickets and additional information, visit www.townecrier.com.
Pauline Oliveros: An appreciation
Pauline Oliveros died in her home in Kingston on Thanksgiving Day, at the age of 84. If many of the big names of musical experimentalism preferred a contentious, noisy, heterogenous and randomized sound, most of Oliveros’ best-known work embodies the other approach: meditative, dwelling, concordant and, in its own earthy way, lush. She was every bit as revolutionary as Cage in her efforts to strip serious music of its elitism, its many centuries of accumulated manners and expressive devices and its deeply ingrained gender inequality.
Norah Jones plays UPAC in Kingston on Monday
Supporting the brand-new, overtly jazzy outing Day Breaks, Norah Jones makes a trip upstate to perform at the Ulster Performing Arts Center (UPAC) in Kingston on Monday, November 28 at 8 p.m.
Felice Brothers play Bearsville on Friday
The Brothers are still touring in support of their poignant and elegiac 2016 release “Life in the Dark.” A concise collection of surreal Americana, the record finds the band assured and in complete command of their idiom, waltzing, swinging, boogieing and stumbling with the lyrical grace of some serious road dogs. The Catskills’ leading musical export of the last decade will be accompanied by singer/songwriter Wyndham at Grossman’s venerable barn theater.
In the Kitchen debuts new LP at BSP
The record by the New Paltz-based group is an unassuming winner: unfailingly sturdy and openhearted songs, rock-energized bluegrass propulsion in a no-fuss setting, sweet licks and a gang-chant communal approach to singing by some dudes who maybe didn’t pass the choir audition in high school.
Conversation with composer Hannah Lash at Hudson Opera House this Sunday
About as decorated as a young, serious composer can be anymore, Yale’s Hannah Lash is featured in the next “Conversations with” series presented by Close Encounters with Music at the Hudson Opera House.
Roswell Rudd’s 81st birthday jam at Falcon
The legendary jazz trombonist and composer (and longtime local resident) Roswell Rudd has helmed some of the most outrageous and daring jazz ever recorded, but a certain sweetness, playfulness and accessible humanity have also characterized everything that he has done – not just his more user-friendly, song-oriented recent work. At 80, he’s going strong, and he has elected to celebrate his 81st birthday at the Falcon in Marlboro on Saturday, November 19 at 7 p.m.