Tag: NYSMusic STAFF

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.

Kevin McCallum, a Music History and Art History major and Writing minor at Syracuse University, began writing for UpstateLIVE last year as a sophomore, and he has since joined with NYS Music staff to continue covering live music. He was first introduced to music through the painstaking finger exercises his piano teacher made him do as an inattentive nine-year-old but developed a different understanding of all that music could be through the albums his older sisters shared with him as a kid. In high school Kevin played saxophone in the Jazz band and bass in bands with friends in their free time outside of school. During his senior year, he and a friend completed a senior project that consisted of writing and recording an album using their own equipment at their homes.

Now Kevin is a Junior at Syracuse University, spending his spring semester studying abroad in London. At SU, Kevin has a radio show on the college station, WERW Real College Radio. He’s also involved with the local music scene by booking bands for shows and playing guitar in a rock n roll Rocket Power style band on the weekends, called Conroy Blanc. Back home in the Boston area Kevin plays in a band called Midriffs. Over the past 2014 summer, they recorded their first album Subtle Luxuries in their steamy hot third floor Boston apartment. The experience is something that shaped Kevin’s appreciation and outlook on a new level of the intense work that goes into DIY music.

Kevin’s musical bucketlist, both alive and deceased, would consist of Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, Bob Marley, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, Tame Impala, Ty Segall, and Fidlar.