Sunday, Sept. 1: Upstate Reggae is equally about the preservation of the reggae tradition and the curation of the up-and-coming. Now that the Bearsville Theater is ominously dark, Upstate Reggae has taken to the water. This sunset cruise features music by Vybz Eurostar Lord and DJ Kevin, as well as Jamaican food.
Sunday, Sept. 1: As is well-known among musicians, the Military Academy bands tend to be red-hot and stacked with serious players. The arts of war and brass, in particular, have always been closely allied. Although perhaps necessarily conservative in repertoire, the West Point Band never fails to bring the articulate thunder.
Saturday, Aug. 31: The Texas-bred Pentatonix have sold nearly 10 million albums worldwide, in an age when 100,000 is a lot, and boast new media stats on the order of 15.5 million YouTube subscribers and views in the literal billions. And they are really good, too!
Saturday, Aug. 31: Rapturous, borderline-messianic praise for hip-hop auteur Flying Lotus flows as freely as it once did for his great-aunt and -uncle, Alice and John Coltrane, and for many of the same reasons.
Sunday, September 1: The New Yorker declared Trio Solisti “the most exciting piano trio in America,” and this writer regards their 2005 recording of Brahms’ three trios to be among the most sensitive he has heard, thanks largely to pianist Fabio Bidini’s grace under pressure (Brahms is murder on pianists).
Saturday, Sept. 7: Even by the Falcon’s lofty standards, this is a big one: The region’s premiere jazz-and-more venue presents MoodSwing Reunion, saxophonist Joshua Redman revisiting his landmark 1994 album with the quartet who made it, all of whom – to a man – a have gone on to become legitimate jazz superstars and generation-defining musicians and composers: drummer Brian Blade, bassist Christian McBride and pianist Brad Mehldau.
This weekend: The octet features world-class young jazz talent, such as vocalist Shenel Johns, whom the Boston Globe called “history in the making,” tap dance percussionist Michela Marino Lerman and a fleet of ace players: Patrick Bartley, Jr. on saxophone, Russell Hall on bass, Mathis Picard on piano, Kyle Poole on drums and Christian Tamburr on percussion.
Friday-Sunday, Aug. 23-25: Set at the Ashokan Center – a venerable leader in environmentalist education, folk music curation and the preservation of a variety of traditional arts – the Hoot effortlessly combines live music with traditional dances, juggling workshops, crafts, film, locally sourced consumables and some serious talks about pressing issues and solutions. Why, it’s as if they have been doing it for years or something.
Lee’s paintings were exhibited in the first Whitney Biennial exhibition in 1932, but her widest early fame came when she won when her painting Thanksgiving won the Art Institute of Chicago’s prestigious Logan Medal of the Arts in 1935, four years after she moved to Woodstock. Ironically, the donor of the prize disliked the painting, and was so incensed that she founded a group called the Society for Sanity in Art in protest of the Art Institute’s decision.
Starting at 5:07 p.m. on Friday, August 16 with Richie Havens and ending Monday morning with Jimi Hendrix, Radio Woodstock will play a near-complete reconstruction of Woodstock, with every performance from the festival included in chronological order.