Tuesday, Dec. 31: Titled “We All Come from Somewhere,” the program celebrates the rich diversity of the American people via music from many genres, ranging from the African American spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” to Woody Guthrie’s protest song “Deportee” to “Gabriel’s Oboe” from Ennio Morricone’s sublime score to the movie The Mission.
Saturday afternoon, December 21: There will be a total of 140 instrumentalists and singers on the Bardavon stage, and in the time-honored Messiah tradition, audience members will be invited to sing along – especially when they get to the famous “Hallelujah Chorus.”
Saturday night, Dec. 21: Alexa Tarantino headlines Seasonal Bird tribute. She’s gathering a quintet of today’s top women in jazz to perform a program titled Seasonal Bird, highlighting the iconic bebop recordings and repertoire of the holiday season. Other greats of the genre, such as Ella Fitzgerald, Dexter Gordon and Dizzy Gillespie, will also get a Santa-hatted nod.
Monday, Dec. 23: Musical theater star and Newburgh native Lexi Lawson presents a selection of Christmas classics at the Falcon on Monday, December 23. The Newburgh Free Academy graduate is best-known for performing in the role of Eliza in the generational box-office smash Hamilton. She has also appeared on Broadway in Rent and In the Heights and is currently featured in the Lifetime Movie Original Always and Forever Christmas.
Friday, Dec. 20: The Marotta of course is the legendary drummer Jerry, who has played with pretty much everybody, but most pertinent to this discussion is his radical work as the featured percussionist on the first four Peter Gabriel solo albums – albums that defined a new way of arty ensemble playing (the third record in particular) and that established a musical dialect from which Sarah Perrotta has drawn across her entire career.
Saturday, Dec. 21: A total of 140 instrumentalists and singers on the Bardavon stage will join the Philharmonic to perform George Frideric Handel’s most popular choral work. Audience members will be invited to sing along.
Sunday, Dec. 8: On her indie-folk debut I Need to Start a Garden, the startlingly mature Portland-based songwriter Haley Heynderickx positions herself squarely in the freak-folk tradition: able fingerpicking on nylon-string and gritty electric guitars; lyrical concerns that straddle bucolic imagism and deep symbolism; and rustic production values that occasionally sprout surprising and strange sonic developments.
Friday, Dec. 6: Do you prefer art when it knows it is art, or when it thinks it might still just be rock ‘n’ roll? Of course, there is a third road: Abbey Road, the Beatles’ second swing at a conceptual masterwork, and arguably the more successful one, even if they could never hope to duplicate the world-changing novelty of the first one. Abbey Road in fact sounds nothing like Sergeant Pepper’s. It is deeper, darker, more assured, more beautiful and more broken, showing all the wear and tear of the interceding years and all that they had learned. Consider: They are only separated by two years. Two years. “Year” must have meant something different back then.
Saturday, Dec. 7: The jazz pianist’s inventive solo interpretations of Jobim (2009’s Fred Hersch Plays Jobim) reimagine the music of Antonio Carlos “Tom” Jobim as introspective and almost classical in its internal, contrapuntal complexity. Even by Jazzstock’s consistently lofty standards, this is a big get.
Sunday, December 15: The isolation and examination of Robert Hunter’s contribution to the Grateful Dead is long overdue, as is his appreciation as a prolific and seminal rock poet.