Friday, June 21: The New Paltz-headquartered original acoustic roots band In the Kitchen is the kind of earthy ensemble who might justifiably decide to make a studio album gathered around one omnidirectional microphone in a nice-sounding, woody room and cut it directly to tape.
Saturday, June 29: The imperial nature of fusion usually starts with a modern world perspective and toolset trained on something old, something remote, something weird. When they broke onto the charts, the Gipsy Kings reversed the direction of cultural conquest and appropriation, scoring a massive hit with their fiery reworking of “Hotel California” and backing it with year after year of substantive, serious music.
Tuesday, June 25: Le Bon’s work has always evinced a strange balance of absolute “new quiet” do-it-yourself Minimalism and an experimental willingness regarding sonic elements and ensemble arrangements.
Located at the site of the former Enderly family sawmill, down along the almost painfully picturesque Clove Road, Split Rock has long been one of the Shawangunks’ most popular and even iconic swimming holes – if indeed it can be called a hole. It’s really more of a split. In a rock. It is, you see, fiercely accurate in its name, if unpoetic.
You don’t need to be patient to enjoy an Alison Gaylin novel, but you need to be alert AF.
Tuesday, June 11: Her own “journey of faith” begins more with Lucas’ Jedis and the Force than with her beloved clergyman father. Spiritual Rebel: A Positively Addictive Guide to Finding Deeper Perspective & Higher Purpose should be taken as a book of big ideas and not dismissed as another hyperbolic non-Western panacea for Western anxiety and emptiness.
Saturday-Sunday, June 15-16: The folkcentric-but-adventurous-and-inclusive Clearwater Festival takes to scenic Croton Point
Thursday-Sunday, June 13-16: Warren Haynes is back on the scene, both as organizer and for two sets with the festival’s flagship band, Gov’t Mule. Willie Nelson & Family and Phil Lesh & Friends represent the old guard of progressive American musical movements, while relative youngsters like the Avett Brothers bring more reverence for tradition to their roots.
June 7-9: Taste of Country will rather quietly assemble more than 65,000 people on the hills of Hunter for what is accurately called the biggest country music festival in the Northeast.
Sunday, May 19: It’s the blessed relief from the dictates of “cool” and the straitjacket of “relevance” that can make good kids’ music so, well, cool and relevant.