Saturday, May 25: While the eccentric musical visionary Dave Longstreth had been making experimental pop records for years, a pair of major releases – 2009’s Bitte Orca and 2012’s Swing Lo Magellan – firmly established the then-Brooklyn-based ensemble as one of the most formidable voices in the conservatory wing of indie-pop. Everything the man does is challenging, and worth it.
May 10 to October 31: Harvey Fite, one of the founders of the Fine Arts Department at Bard College, spent time restoring Mayan ruins at Copán in Honduras while studying Mesoamerican indigenous sculpture, and in the process learned how to do dry-key stone masonry, a technique that uses gravity to create stable stone structures without mortar. In 1938 he purchased an abandoned quarry in High Woods as a source for bluestone to sculpt, and began to position some of his larger pieces in that outdoor setting.
Sunday, May 5: “[You] would think they’d been playing together for centuries,” wrote the Boston Globe of the pair’s profound and intuitive rapport.
Saturday, May 4: The singer/songwriter has earned four Grammy Awards, as well as 21 Top 40 hits, including 11 No. 1 singles. She is also an author whose four books include the best-selling memoir Composed, which the Chicago Tribune called “one of the best accounts of an American life you’ll likely ever read.”
Friday, May 17: Known at home as Dominque Jones, Lil Baby rose rapidly to fame on the strength of his 2017 mixtape Perfect Timing. Best-known for his hit singles “My Dawg,” “Freestyle,” “Yes Indeed” and “Drip Too Hard,” Lil Baby has been on the upper reaches of the charts ever since.
Legendary Woodstock Festival producer Michael Lang was laughing Tuesday afternoon as he reviewed the previous 30 hours’ work on a 50th commemoration event in Watkins Glen. He said he was amused by the similarities he was finding to all that had gone down as he was putting together that first mega-festival in the Summer of 1969.
Sunday, Apr. 28: Over two nights in January 1972, the late Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin, recorded a live album of music reflecting her gospel roots at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. Joining her on the program were Rev. James Cleveland, Cornell Dupree, Rev. C. L. Franklin, Ken Lupper, Pancho Morales, Bernard Purdie, Chuck Rainey and the Southern California Community Choir. The two-record set, Amazing Grace, went double-platinum and became the biggest-selling live gospel music album of all time.
Saturday, Apr. 27: The triple-threat pianist, songwriter and vocalist later went on to replace the late Brent Mydland in the Grateful Dead, demonstrating a willingness to get down with the Dead’s free-running electric counterpoint that might have surprised a lot of his FM fans.
Sunday, Apr. 28: The long-running, brilliantly curated Ulster Chamber Music Series switches it up a bit in April with an April 28 performance by Litvakus, a unique klezmer collective, founded and led by the clarinetist, vocalist and composer Zisl Slepovitch.
Saturday, Apr. 27: A collaboration between the Hudson multidisciplinary arts center Basilica Hudson and the Netherlands’ acclaimed festival of new music Le Guess Who, the festival features sitar and singing bowls, overtone singing and accordion – not just self-perpetuating electronica.