On Thursday, October 13, Jeff Beck and Johnny Depp brought their collective talents to the Ulster Performing Arts Center. Musical compadres dating back to 2017, this stop was part of a North American tour offering support for their recently released collaborative album, 18.
Rhonda Smith, Jeff Beck, Anika Nilles
Even though this event was promoted as Beck/Depp, the night belonged to the guitar mastery of Jeff Beck. At 78, this fifty-year musical veteran backed his Rolling Stone magazine ranking of fifth in the list of the “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time” with his performance.
The multiplicity of tones poured freely from Beck’s guitar. Was it with a whammy bar, created by a hammer on, maybe the use of a slide? It did not matter. Each style illuminated this master’s extraordinary style and ability.
Jeff Beck, Johnny Depp
Supporting Jeff in the rhythm section were bassist Rhonda Smith and drummer Anika Nilles. The power behind their playing could be felt as it hit you in your seats. Keyboardist Robert Stevenson added accents to the music in all the right places and completed the trio behind Beck.
Approximately two thirds of the way into the show, Jeff Beck turn to the side of the stage, put his hands in the air, and started bowing. Out from the shadows strutted Johnny Depp. With his rock ‘n roll swagger and electric guitar strapped on you knew he was ready to rock.
Johnny Depp
With Beck being rooted in instrumentals, Depp’s vocals added another dimension to finish out the night. The two collaborated on a mix of tunes including covers of the Beatles and The Velvet Underground. The night wrapped up with a powerful rendition of Killing Joke’s “The Death and Resurrection Show.”
Legendary guitarist Jeff Beck will be playing at UPAC in Kingston on Oct. 13 at 7:30 P.M.
Presented by the Bardavon, the guitarist returns to the region as part of his fall tour. Jeff Beck’s tour will begin at the end of Sept. in Austin, Texas, and end on Nov. 8 in Anaheim, California. The guitarist is fresh off a recent collaboration with actor Johnny Depp on their 13-track album, 18.
UPAC is located on Broadway in Kingston in the heart of the city. Originally known as The Broadway or Community Theatre, the venue hosts a variety of musical acts and is home to the Hudson Valley Philharmonic.
Beck has long established himself as one of the most influential lead guitarists in the rock genre. Over the course of 50 years, he has played in multiple groups including The Yardbirds, and collaborated with talents such as Stevie Wonder, Mick Jagger, Tina Turner, Jon Bon Jovi, Stanley Clarke, and Joss Stone.
Beck is known for his aggressive style as a guitarist and his releases have spanned across genres. The Rock and Roll Hall of Famer has earned immense critical acclaim throughout his career. In 2011, Beck won Grammy awards for Best Rock Instrumental Performance for “Hammerhead” and Best Pop Instrumental Performance for “Nessun Dorma”, off of his studio album, Emotion & Commotion.
Tickets for the Jeff Beck concert in October at UPAC range from $85-$125 with members getting $5 off. For more information, visit the Bardavon website.
Bardavon will present performances from Resistance Revival Chorus and Imani Perry to celebrate Juneteenth at the Old Dutch Church in Kingston and the Bardavon Opera House in Poughkeepsie.
The Old Dutch Church was often referred to as “The Cathedral of Kingston,” which was originally built in 1660 in the colony of New Netherland. While the Bardavon 1869 Opera Houseowns and operates a 944-seat historic theater in Poughkeepsie and it is operated by the Bardavon.
The Resistance Revival Chorus (RRC) is a collective of more than 60 womxn, and non-binary singers who enjoy singing and express themselves with the music. The singers are in various occupations including not only professional singer and Broadway performers, but also political activists, educators, and more. They aim to be intersectional in our feminism and reveal that all social justice issues overlap heavily with woman’s issues. Tickets start at $20
The Princeton University African American Studies professor and author Imani Perry will speak on her new book South to America, followed by a Q & A and a book signing in the Bardavon lobby. She also wrote 6 other books, including Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem, Breathe: A Letter to My Sons, etc., which are renowned for the prizes they won.
Free tickets available at Poughkeepsie’s Adriance Memorial Library & Bardavon or UPAC box offices.
Albany Symphony has announced their 2022 American Music Festival: TrailBlaze NY, a “celebration of New York State’s glorious new Empire State Trail.” The festival will feature various events from the beginning of June to the first week of July running from Kingston all the way up to Saratoga County.
“We wanted to amplify the amazing story of the incredible 750-mile walking and cycling rail trail that now connects all residents of New York State to one another,” said David Alan Miller, Music Director of Albany Symphony and Grammy-winning conductor.
David Alan Miller, Music Director of Albany Symphony and Grammy-winning conductor.
The Empire State Trail, completed in 2020, is composed of the Hudson Valley Greenway Trail which connects New York City to Albany, the Erie Canalway Trail which connects Albany to Buffalo, and the Champlain Valley Trail which connects Albany to the Canadian border.
TrailBlaze NY isn’t the first Albany Symphony production of its kind; during 2017’s Water Music NY, the Symphony travelled along the Erie Canal, performing free concerts at seven different canal communities along the way. During 2019’s Sing Out! New York, they performed free outdoor concerts at several different locations from Columbia to Saratoga County.
The festival will open with a “Troy & Cohoes New Music Week” from June 2 to June 5. One feature event of the four-day span includes a performance from the company’s new-art chamber orchestra, Dogs of Desire on the 3rd at the Cohoes Music Hall. The show will feature world premiers by Natalie Draper, Jack Frerer, Bobby Ge, Loren Loiacono, and Andre Myers.
There is also Albany Symphony’s keynote performance of “Trailblaze!” at Troy Savings Bank Music Hall on the 4th. During the concert, the Symphony will play John Williams’ “Prelude and Scherzo (American Premiere)” featuring pianist Gloria Cheng, John Corigliano’s “Triathalon for Saxophone and Orchestra” featuring saxophonist Timothy McAllister, and Steven Stuckey’s “Radical Light.”
Other events include a piano recital from Gloria Chang at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall on the 2nd, a “Late Night Lounge experience” with Jordan Taylor Hill at Table 41 Brewing Co. in Cohoes on the 3rd, a chamber performance titled “Endangered” at St. Paul’s in Troy on the 4th, and “Inuksuit,” a group percussion performance at Troy Riverfront Park on the 5th, among others. Admission costs for the week’s events range anywhere from free to $62, with tickets available for purchase on Albany Symphony’s website.
As for the other part of TrailBlaze NY, “Albany Symphony On The Trail!” will feature musical and trail-related event programs at Hudson Crossing Park in Schuylerville on the 11th, Hutton Brickyards in Kingston on the 19th, Basilica Hudson in Hudson on the 24th and around the city on the 25th, as well as Mohawk Harbor in Schenectady on July 1st, Jennings Landing in Albany on the 2nd, and Riverlink Park in Amsterdam on the 3rd.
TrailBlaze NY is a unique opportunity for people from all over the Northeastern US and Canada to discover some of the most extraordinary towns in New York State and the glorious nature that surrounds them. I hope all our friends and supporters will also join us to celebrate New York State in all its wonder and natural beauty, as well as our resilient communities and the things that connect us and bring us together, all the trails we explore, real and imagined.
David Alan Miller
The program involves free Albany Symphony concerts at each stop, featuring music from Natalie Draper, Aaron Copland, Viet Cuong, John Williams, and John Philip Sousa. Additionally, every day of the program will feature activities such as bike rides and hikes on local trails, refreshment from local vendors, and historical & museum tours among many others. Full information about “Albany Symphony On The Trail!” can also be found on their website.
With The Punches has dropped a new single “Stoneham Blues.” This single comes following their signing with Mutant League Records, an independent record label based in Chicago. Their new EP, Discontent, is set to drop on May 27th.
With The Punches was initially formed in 2008 out of Newburgh. The band released two consecutive EPs, one in 2009 and one in 2011. In 2012, the band released their first and only full-length studio album titled, Seams and Stitches. Now, after nine years of silence, the band is ready to make a big return.
Their newest release takes the listener back to the height of skater-influenced pop-punk. The opening of the track powerfully draws you in as a bright guitar gloss fully floats over bulldozing percussion. The lyrics, contrarily, take on a more mature theme.
Capturing the feeling of emptiness may be the hardest emotion to replicate in art. Death, addiction, and everything in between are experiences that everyone has dealt with in their life. With The Punches do not hold back in discussing these feelings and they manage to beautifully capture these emotions through excellently constructed metaphors with a slight Midwest emo twist.
Multidisciplinary arts center Basilica Hudson has announced their 2022 season, and this season is loaded with tons of film, music, art, environmental, and community programs.
For those unfamiliar, Basilica Hudson is an arts and performance venue built inside an old factory in the city of Hudson, NY. The factory produced railroad car wheels in the 1880s and was later converted into a glue factory. It closed in the 1980s but was rebought to be used as a cultural arts center. It lies alongside the east of the Hudson River and has been serving its community as an epicenter for cultural arts for over twenty years now.
Since then, the venue has been renovated and is now solar-powered. An extension of Basilica Hudson, BASILICA GREEN, works hard to develop public programs, push for green initiatives, and promote environmental stewardship in the Hudson Valley community. Notably, on April 24th, BASILICA GREEN will host an Earth Day event on their campus. Here, there will be tons of educational opportunities as well as live music and advocacy letter-writing campaign opportunities.
Basilica Gallery will open on May 5th. This will be a weekly series, dubbed Jupiter Nights, and will be an opportunity for local creatives to showcase their music, poetry, or other art. Those interested in performing or displaying their work in the gallery should contact info@basilicahudson.org.
For six years, acclaimed bassist Michael Bisio and his artist wife Dawn have been bringing some of the jazz world’s finest to Lace Mill, the 55-unit affordable artist housing, gallery and performance space in Kingston that is also their home. On Thursday, March 24, the Bisios presented yet another astounding hour of improvisational invention in their long-running performance series, when the bassist was joined by guitar great Nels Cline, pianist Thollem and drummer Michael Wimberly.
Bisio has been called “a poet, a wonder and one of the most virtuosic and imaginative performers” on the double bass. He has over a one hundred thirty recordings in his discography, more than two dozen as leader or co-leader as well, as a dozen more documenting his extraordinary association with piano icon Matthew Shipp. His newest release which dropped a few days back, MBefore (Tao Forms), is an already critically-raved about work that finds Bisio in the company of another Hudson Valley great, world-renowned vibraphonist and Creative Music Studio founder Karl Berger, along with Mat Maneri (viola) and Whit Dickey (drums). Guitarist Nels Cline has been featured on over 200 recordings over the past few decades in every conceivable genre. But Cline is best known for his 17-years and counting stint as lead guitarist for Wilco. Drummer Wimberly has propelled greats like Charles Gayle, Henry Rollins, David Murray and Steve Coleman’s always excellent 5 Elements ensemble, while the perpetually globe-trotting Thollem has recently completed a 25-album cycle, one that found him collaborating with over 70 musicians worldwide.
The 40 or so attendees who packed the small performance space at Lace Mill included quite a few of Bisio’s fellow musicians and collaborators including the aforementioned Berger and Juma Sultan, the forever young percussionist best known for his appearance with Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock.
Bisio and company collectively conjured two, 30-minute improvisations during the concert. These were really ever-evolving examples of spontaneous composition, ones that demonstrated both their individual instrumental mastery and the resources in seemingly shortest supply among musicians – the arts of listening and injecting silence to give oxygen to the music.
The first improvisation kicked-off with Bisio moving from resonant chording to drone-like bowing, then to rubbing the strings behind the bridge and even punching his double bass. Pianist Thollem alternated between machine gun runs a la Cecil Taylor and tapping, plucking and even drumming the insides of his instrument. A master of stomp box f*ckery, Cline kept a clean and relatively untreated sound on both improvisations, crafting new harmonic avenues for exploration with his spare but richly intelligent chord structures and his darting leads. It was a place where subtlety and cacophony co-existed, all within an arresting, ever-spiraling musical architecture, one that seemed to evolve into whole new nations of sound every four or five minutes. The piece concluded with a thundering solo by drummer Wimberly, who used sticks, brushes, mallets and his bare hands to wrestle unique sounds from the world’s oldest instrument.
The second improv commenced with Thollem singing and whistling into his piano. He was soon joined on the vocalese by drummer Wimberly, who together created a sound resembling the chanting of monks, a Cambodian temple music of sorts. Cline added to the drama by getting percussive on his Fender Jazzmaster guitar, now outfitted with two sticks to mute its strings. The whistle of a passing freight train on the tracks adjacent to Lace Mill only added to the otherworldly ambience. In this latter musical adventure, Bisio took a masterful 5-minute solo. It concluded with his bowed bass generating high-pitched overtones that sounded like a Shehnai, a double-reeded Indian wind instrument heard on tracks like The Beatles’ “Inner Light,” or a flock of seagulls caught up in a typhoon! There was a wonderful guitar solo from Cline propelled by Thollem’s thunderous chordal comps and Wimberly’s circular drum rolls and shouts.
Bottomline? Dissonance never sounded so luscious!
Bisio will be back at Lace Mill on Sunday, April 10 at 4 pm for a performance with the quartet featured on his new release, MBefore (featuring wonderful cover art by his wife Dawn). Hudson Valley guitar aficionados can catch Nels Cline on Saturday, April 2 at 8 pm at Colony Woodstock.
Bisio, Berger, Sultan and many more of the Hudson Valley’s most creative jazz and electronic improvisers are being featured at a new concert series at the Kingston Library curated by another Lace Mill resident, Daniel Rhiner of the Kingston Artist Collective. More excellent improvisational ensembles are being presented regularly, both live and via concurrent livestreams curated by owner D.b. Schnell at Green Kill, his long-running art and performance space at 229 Greenkill Avenue in Kingston.
Levon Helm Studios is proud to welcome back the Dirt Farmer Festival at Arrowood Farms in Accord, NY on Saturday, May 21, 2022. Artists will perform on two stages in addition to great local food vendors, craft beer, and other activities.
The initial lineup for The Dirt Farmer Festival includes the Midnight Ramble Band and Friends, Mavis Staples (Duo) and Amy Helm. Newly announced artists include Sam Evian, Oliver Wood, Conner Kennedy & The Onestar Band, Glen David Andrews, Owl & Crow, and Rock Academy with special guests Grahame Lesh, Sister Sparrow (Arleigh and Jackson Kinchloe), and Cindy Cashdollar with more to be announced.
Arrowood Farms is the Hudson Valley’s premier farm brewery located at 236 Lower Whitfield Rd, Accord, NY – 20 minutes west of New Paltz and 30 minutes southwest of Kingston.
There will be limited on-site parking available for $10 per car, with carpooling strongly encouraged. Gates open at noon and the evening of music ends at 9:30pm. Empty reusable water bottles are encouraged to refill water, as are low-backed chairs. The Dirt Farmer Festival will be held rain or shine. VIP Tickets will include access to VIP hangout area with exclusive viewing in front of the Main Stage, access to indoor flushable bathroom, complimentary hors d’oeuvres and VIP-only beer specials.
Watch Amy Helm perform “This Too Shall Light” in 2018.
SAVAK have shared their newest track “Empathy” from their upcoming fifth album, Human Error / Human Delight, which releases on April 15, 2022. “Empathy” debuted via New Noise Magazine, who contemplated “SAVAK’s fascination with the balanced, and sometimes polarizing, nature of being alive.”
Human Error / Human Delight
The Brooklyn Post-Punk Quartet have also added to their upcoming run of U.S. 2022 tour dates, visiting places in Boston, Philadelphia, Washington DC and more. In addition, performing with the band Jawbox, see below for the full list of currently announced dates. The band wrote and recorded Human Error / Human Delight completely over Zoom, having crafted an honest album on living in our present moment.
Photo credit: Taylor Sesselman
SAVAK consists of Sohrab Habibion and Michael Jaworski, with Matt Schulz on drums. Additionally, Habibion and Jaworrski both share singing and songwriting duties since the band’s creation in 2015. Though SAVAK’s members have done time in bands like Obits, Edsel, Holy Fuck and more, their current position is the best in which they have been.
Upcoming Tour Dates:
Fri. Mar. 4 – Providence, RI – Union Station Brewery – with Jets Can’t Land & DJ Ted Leo
Sat. Mar. 5 – Northampton, MA – Bishop’s Lounge – with Zwei Null Zwei
Wed. Mar. 16 – SXSW – The Side Bar – 1:55PM (Outdoor Stage)
Thu. Mar. 17 – SXSW – Breakaway Records – 3:15PM
Thu. Mar. 17 – SXSW – Austin Beer Garden Brewing Company – 6PM
Thu. Mar. 17 – SXSW – The Green Jay – 10PM
Fri. Mar. 18 – SXSW – The Side Bar – 2:30PM
Fri. Mar. 18 – SXSW – Soundspace at Captain Quack’s – 9:15PM
Thu. Apr. 7 – Brooklyn, NY – Littlefield – with Chris Brokaw & Upper Wilds
Fri. Apr. 8 – Kingston, NY – Tubby’s – with Chris Brokaw & Cathedral Ceilings
Sat. Apr. 9 (early show) – Lowell, MA – The Town and the City Festival – The Worthen House – with Colleen Green
Sat. Apr. 9 (late show) – Boston, MA – Midway Cafe – with Chris Brokaw & Lupa Citta
Fri. May 13 – Pittsburgh, PA – The Government Center – with Upper Wilds & Gotobeds
Sat. May 14 – Washington, DC – Quarry House Tavern – with Upper Wilds & Bed Maker
Wed. Jul. 20 – New York, NY – Le Poisson Rouge – with Jawbox
Fri. Oct. 21 – New York, NY – Le Poisson Rouge – with June of 44
Singer-songwriter Sam Kogon released a music video for his single “Barbed Wire” today. The track is the first single from his upcoming EP “Sam Kogon” releasing on April 1.
The music video for “Barbed Wire” was shot in Kingston at Kogon’s family’s pawn shop, “Sam’s Swap Shot.” In the video, a middle-aged man see’s a guitar on sale at the pawn shop that reminds him of fond memories from his youth. The video then alternates between a current and past timeline as the guitar causes the main character to reminisce.
My grandpa Lonnie gave me my first guitar from the store, so naturally I wanted the story to focus around a guitar, in this case it’s a 1963 Danelectro Convertible that came from Sam’s. The guitar represents lost love, regret, but also a fresh start.
Sam Kogon
Director Jeff Mertz said the decision to shoot in Kogon’s pawn shop was intentional and part of the narrative he wanted to tell with “Barbed Wire”.
The shop itself was also charged with nostalgia,” Mertz said. “So the story kind of naturally evolved into being about an older Sam Kogon (played by Lou, Sam’s dad) who’s reflecting on missed opportunities and regret, but is ultimately given a second chance, which he proudly takes.”
To add another personal touch to the video Kogon’s father plays the music video’s main character. Who is supposed to be a semi-fictional version of Kogon (the songwriter) himself.
