When your grandfather is Grammy-winning Cuban pianist and composer Bebo Valdez and your father famed Cuban pianist, bandleader, composer and arranger Chucho Valdez, naturally you decide to be a baseball player.
So it was with Chuchito Valdez, the now-renowned pianist who will be playing on Thursday, July 16, at 7 and 9 p.m. at the Whaling Church in Edgartown.
The Vineyard Playhouse continues its popular summer series of new work, the Monday Night Special, with a reading and singing of a new play by Frank Higgins entitled Black Pearl Sings onMonday, August 24at 7 p.m. at the Vineyard Playhouse.
Rebekah Nivala, an 18-year-old pianist from Vineyard Haven, will be presenting two piano concerts this Memorial Day weekend, and both are open to the public.
The first performance is at 4 p.m. on May 23 at Grace Episcopal Church in Vineyard Haven, with a reception to follow. Donations accepted. The second is at 4 p.m. on Sunday, May 24, at the Old Whaling Church in Edgartown.
Music featured in the concerts will include works by Beethoven, Schumann, Bach, Messaien and Corigliano.
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.
