Musical Mondays at Featherstone Center for the Arts in Oak Bluffs start this Monday, June 29, at 6:30 p.m. with renowned guitarist Jon Zeeman and Friends. The rolling hills at the Featherstone campus create a natural amphitheatre, an ideal environment to enjoy a picnic while absorbing the sounds of Mr. Zeeman’s funk, jazz and blues guitar.
Mr. Zeeman came of age listening to the music of Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. He has worked with Janis Ian, the Allman Brothers and Susan Tedeschi, and for two decades has performed his own music.
Russian-born violinist maestro Yuval Waldman (heralded as “spectacular” by the New York Times) will be performing an evening of “lost” Jewish music, accompanied by the artistic director of the Martha’s Vineyard Chamber Music Society, Delores Stevens, on Thursday, August 13, at 7:30 p.m. The performance is the final event in the Summer Institute series at the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center.
Eight Island kids participated in a dance competition Tuesday morning at the Hard Rock Cafe in Times Square in New York city as a part of the Pimple Blocker Battle, hosted by Clearasil. The competitions pits five dance crews against each other to become the first Clearasil Dance Crew.
Longtime friends of the Yard, Gus Solomons Jr and Carmen de Lavallade, return with Paradigm, their company of fellow luminaries, for a weekend of performances in the Yard’s intimate Patricia N. Nanon Theater. Island audiences may remember Carmen de Lavallade and Gus Solomons from last summer’s tribute to Patricia Nanon at the Martha’s Vineyard Performing Arts Center, in which they performed Three Scenes from Archy & Mehitabel.
Two of the Yard’s residencies culminate this weekend, both performances consisting entirely of new work.
On Saturday, the New England Choreographers Project presents Disappearing Woman, an informal showing by Nell Breyer, Alissa Cardone, and Lorraine Chapman. This work addresses the anxieties of three women in an increasingly dispersed, high-speed, distributed culture. The artists use the metaphor of digital media as an enveloping, inescapable extension of the body itself. There is a free family matinee (donations accepted) at 4 p.m.
Unusual sounds are coming out of the normally sedate Up-Island Senior Center at Howes House this Monday afternoon in May. Shortly after a barefoot man jumps out of a van to unload a set of conga drums, the rhythms from palms and sticks start to reverberate throughout the building.
Vineyard-born world-rock band Entrain will present Drums for Peace, a theatre production combining elements of a rock concert, an epic drum circle, projected imagery and audience participation at the Tabernacle on Saturday, July 25 at 8 p.m. Bring your clapping hands and dancing feet. Tickets to the performance are $10 in advance at www.entrainshop.stores.yahoo.net, or $15 at the door, and kids under 12 are free.
That proud twinkle in John Alaimo’s eye on the cover of his latest solo album does not deceive.
Called Songs for Three Seasons, the disc delivers a rich and textured display of a master mood painter on an enchanting and enriching spree. Mr. Alaimo affably invites us to share his whimsy, his nostalgia, an occasional flirtation with regret, all on a splendidly harmonic solo pianistic tour of nature’s three warmer seasons.
