Author: NYS Music Staff

Jay Saint G was born in Syracuse, NY, and his first taste of working in music was taking the radio program at SUNY Onondaga where he wound up launching the first all metal college radio show “Monday Night Massacre” which ultimately landed him with Cumulus Media in Syracuse with 95X (WAQX) working behind the scenes in promotions and board oping.

After a couple years there, he took a stab at radio advertising sales at other local radio stations before eventually landing a job as a Stage Hand Tech at Turning Stone Casino and Resort.  During that time, he met NYS Music on the way to a festival in Columbus, Ohio which led him to join the team.

Jay Saint G is a life long metal fan,  and is also really into old school Hip-Hop he is just as passionate about his favorite music as his sports.  His favorite teams are the NY Giants, NY Knicks, NY Rangers, NY Yankees, and  also a proud SU Sports fan. He also enjoys watching boxing, playing football, volleyball, and travels across the state and country to different shows.

Julia Wolfe joined the NYS Music bandwagon in the fall of 2014, entering her senior year of college. Now graduating from Syracuse University in May, she hopes to continue her career in writing her own music as well as live show reviews. Throughout her studies of the Music and Entertainment Industries at SU, she has participated in a number of internships, both in London, Syracuse and New York City. She has also done live sound for a variety of college campus events, and has performed her original music to venues all over Syracuse and her home state of Connecticut.

When she’s not playing or listening to music, she serves as an Event Chair for the Syracuse University Relay For Life Committee, which organizes year-round campus fundraising events that raise upwards of $100,000/yr for the American Cancer Society. After graduation, she hopes to stay involved in the development of campus and community Relay events around Connecticut and New York.

She is a frequent concert and festival attendee, but her greatest passion is interviewing artists. Though her musical bucketlist is pretty scattered across genre, some tops include: The Monkees, Fleetwood Mac, The Civil Wars, Atreyu, Motion City Soundtrack, Blink-182, Incubus, Rodrigo y Gabriela, The Barr Brothers, Gary Clark Jr., Atmosphere, Kendrick Lamar, The 1975, MGMT, Snarky Puppy, Mayer Hawthorne, Nine Inch Nails, Led Zeppelin, Dixie Chicks, Raphael Saadiq, Moby, David Gray, and Glass Animals.

Garrett Montgomery joined the NYSMusic staff in 2014, covering The Mad Tea Party Jam. During the summer of 2014, he tag-teamed many shows with long-time friend Chris Cleary, covering MTPJ, Umphrey’s McGee, Luna Light Festival, Catskill Chill, and other festivals together. Contributing to NYSMusic gives Montgomery the opportunity to combine his love for music and writing; he has enjoyed interviewing bands such as Consider the Source and TAUK and writing features on venues such as The Bardavon 1869 Opera House.

Highlights in Montgomery’s career since joining NYSMusic include covering and photographing Umphrey’s McGee on New Year’s Eve in Atlanta, getting to know folks in the scene, and exploring many beautiful venues in New York. Sharing his musical experiences through the NYSMusic medium has been a great privilege and Montgomery only hopes to improve in 2015 and beyond.

Montgomery grew up heavily influenced by his parents’ love of classic rock and is a huge Led Zeppelin, Allman Brothers, and Queen fan. He attended Mountain Jam as a high school senior in 2007 and was awestruck by the entire experience and one act in particular– Umphrey’s McGee. He has been to 39 subsequent UM shows and identifies as an Umphreak.

When not attending concerts, Montgomery is an avid Mets and Rangers fan. He also enjoys hiking, kayaking, and hanging out with his yellow lab, Ajax. He has lived in Montana and New Zealand but his heart is in the Hudson Valley.

His musical bucket list includes attending an Eminem show and partying together after, going on a date with Taylor Swift, and raging at an Umphrey’s concert with at least three generations of Montgomerys one day. When asked about his taste in music, Montgomery says, “I used to be all about the blues but now, I usually say ‘funk it.’”

Kim Neaton has been lucky enough to find a career in the music world, where her obsession and over analyzing of it has a purpose, instead of just making her friends and family wish she’d just shut up about it once in awhile. Born and raised in Cohoes, NY, about ten miles north of Albany, being the only child in the house led to a lot of time being alone with music. Between sitting in front of a radio and scanning through stations and genres, and obsessively watching ‘Behind The Music’ type programs on VH1, she not only gained an interest in the music itself, but also the industry behind it.

The pressure to go into a more “normal” field lead her to attending SUNY Albany where she received a BA in psychology and sociology. However, while working in group homes for at-risk youth for several years, and spending the majority of her paychecks on concerts and festivals she thought “There’s people out there that make a living being involved with concerts and festivals, why not me?” After a couple years of internships, and part time work at several small local festivals and radio stations she is now Music Director and midday host at WEQX 102.7fm based in Manchester, VT. When she’s not at the station or attending shows throughout NY’s capital region, she’s likely sitting on the couch at home in the hills of Valley Falls, NY listening to records with her cat and boyfriend Chris, who also, thankfully, can’t shut up about music. Whether it’s good music, terrible music or bizarre music, the research, debate and conversation is never-ending.

While radio is one way to share music with people, Kim wanted to branch out in new ways that may allow her to help others discover and fall in love with new music, this is what led her to becoming involved as a contributing writer with NYS Music. She is very supportive of Albany’s local music scene and appreciates the community aspect it has along with the wide range of genres and truly amazing talent. You’ll find her at shows ranging from metal to jam and from punk to bluegrass, and she feels fortunate that Albany is home to excellent examples of each.

Her longtime addiction of seeing live music has led her to being able to cross off many acts from her live music bucketlist, including: Beck, Beastie Boys, and Rage Against the Machine. Bands she wishes she could see if time travel were an option: The Band, R.E.M, and Talking Heads.

Zack Luckin has been writing for NYS Music since his freshman year of college. He has covered shows in the Ithaca area and music festivals such as Grassroots, Sterling Stage, and Summer Camp. Starting at the age of five, Zack began taking piano lessons and later took up percussion in the fourth grade. He continued drumming, taking lessons at The Hochstein School of Music in Rochester and was the principal percussionist and jazz drummer of his band and jazz band in high school for three years. He participated in solo festival and all county band every year since the sixth grade and was selected for the Area All-State ensemble as a senior in high school.

Now Zack is a sophomore Environmental Studies major at Ithaca College and minors in German. He is 92 WICB Ithaca College Radio’s Local Music Director and DJ’s their local music show Homebrew. When not interviewing bands or having them in for live performance in the studio, Zack partakes jazz and funk jam sessions and constantly searches for new funk influences as inspiration for his drumming. Though spending most of the year in Ithaca, at his home in Wolcott, NY, he works at Rose Valley Organic Farm and cooks at a local restaurant, Skipper’s Landing.

Zack’s first real exposure to to the live music scene was at the age of 16, when he attended Sterling Stage, a hidden gem in the upstate festival circuit. This life changing experience consisted of live acts such as Sophistafunk, Audioinflux, and Subsoil, leaving a lasting impression and becoming some of his favorite musical acts. Since then his taste for music has constantly evolved, building a love for jazz and funk such at Lettuce, Soulive, Medeski Scofield Martin & Wood, Orgone, and Spare Parts. Zack also has a fondness for many other types of music, including bands like Dave Grisman, Jatoba, The Roots, A Tribe Called Quest, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, and Gramatik. He strives to expand his music library and knowledge, but always comes back to unbeatable sounds of the upstate New York music scene.

Zack’s music bucketlist consists of John Scofield, The Roots, The Motet, Santana, and Swoop Unit.

Meet Steve. Steve is your ordinary 20-something career-driven civil engineer with degrees from RPI and Cornell, solving problems to better the public good. He attends meetings, drinks coffee out of one of a vast collection of mugs, keeps a pyramid of perfectly sharpened pencils and a pad of graph paper soon to be devoured in a flurry of concrete and steel design. Steve, however, takes a rare form after the sun recedes behind the mountainous wall of the Hudson Highlands. Meet Steve Malinski: NYS Music Staff Writer; gormandizer of music.

Music has always been a part of his life, beginning in the fourth grade at Poestenkill Elementary School when he picked up the sax against a field of other instruments laid out in front of him. However it wasn’t until his college radio years when he got exposed to a wider world of music. Through many on-air shifts at WRPI he basked in the soothing sounds of a vast collection of vinyl and CDs across several genres and decades. This is where he may have picked up the journalistic knack he carries on now at NYS Music, having interviewed the likes of Johnny Winter, Commander Cody, Country Joe McDonald (amongst others), many Albany-area musicians, and interacting with others in the music industry such as Bela Fleck and Eric Burdon.

Steve’s exposure to live music has been a sort of luck-of-chance. He’s tallied at least 140 concerts since 2005 including 19 Dave Matthews Band shows, 11 Phish shows, and 9 Rush shows. At least half of those have been thanks to working as an EMT at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. His eclectic taste in music has led him to enjoy a range of live performances from the Philadelphia Orchestra and jazz festivals to jam bands and shows like Crüefest and the Warped Tour.

Having moved slightly more than a skip away from Troy dampened an almost daily involvement with radio to a few visits a month. So naturally, Steve’s journey as a writer with NYSMusic began in 2013 after an itch to regain a regularly active involvement in the music scene. He had written a few guest articles and photographed a few concerts and contributed some music reviews and sports articles for The Rensselaer Polytechnic in his undergraduate college years. NYSMusic has opened the door again to writing about music.

Aside from NYSMusic, Steve maintains active roles at WRPI in Troy as their local music director and WVBR in Ithaca as host of “Shakedown Street,” a weekly Grateful Dead program which airs on Saturdays. He also performs regularly with the RPI Pep Band on sax (and sometimes the Cornell Pep Band) and the Hudson Highlands Pipe Band on drums and occasionally finger-picks some tunes on guitar.

Steve’s bucket list dwindled rapidly over the past few years as he has had many great opportunities for shows. He has yet to cross David Gilmour, Dweezil Zappa, Paul McCartney, and The Rolling Stones off that list. His top 5 favorite bands are Rush, Black 47, Phish, The Grateful Dead, and Pink Floyd.