The 100 voices that make up the Island Community Chorus will fill the warming spring air of Edgartown with two performances this Saturday and Sunday, April 17 and 18, at the Old Whaling Church.
The spirit of the human voice and its capacity to bring people together with melody and rhythmic movement is a big part of Jim Thomas and his spirituals choir. They perform tomorrow night at the Union Chapel in Oak Bluffs. The program is called Songs from the Field: the Mystery of Spirituals, and it includes songs and stories going back to the Civil War era.
As in the past, the 28-member choir will have the audience swaying and clapping along. The choir sings slave songs that carry a message and tell a story crossing the generations.
The musical play Bears Beware — Goldilocks Is in Your Town answers the question “What kind of world is it were little girls break into houses that bears own?”
James (Jim) Thomas, president of the U.S. Slave Song Project Inc., will direct the Spirituals Choir in performance on Wednesday, June 9 at 7 p.m. at the Vineyard Haven Public Library.
Mr. Thomas has earned the American Red Cross’s National Diversity Award and President’s Award for Leadership.
The Spirituals Choir was created in 2005 as a diverse and educational choir who sing examples of the tunes presented by the narrator.
After weeks of stifling heat, Dave Brubeck brought relief to Edgartown society types on Sunday night with his eminently cool brand of jazz in a performance at the Field Club. One of the pioneers of West Coast jazz in the 1950s, Mr. Brubeck led his quartet through an evening of stylish standards and thrilling improvisation to help raise money for the new YMCA.
“This guy doesn’t just play music, he is music,” said Kate Taylor in her introduction.
The crowd at Che’s Lounge sang along Saturday night, as brothers Dave and Rob Myers brought a cornucopia of music and nostalgia to the underground coffee shop in the alley off Main street in Vineyard Haven.
Many of the Island’s seasoned musicians showed up at Che’s; for them, it was a step back to the 1990s and a time when the Island was home to a number of vibrant live bands that played regularly enough that audiences became fans, buying locally-produced albums and memorizing lyrics.
The popular Vineyard band Kahoots will headline a summer music festival at Featherstone Center for the Arts on Saturday, July 3 on the center’s outdoor stage in Oak Bluffs. Titled The Best Festival, there will also be performances by Apollo Sunshine, Pierre, Belle and the Bees, Dukes County Love Affair and Colin Ruel.
The sound of 101 trained voices lifted to meet the acoustical splendors of the Whaling Church is one of those pleasures that come along only twice each year — during the Christmas holidays and over a weekend each spring. Last Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon, hundreds of Vineyarders took advantage of this offering.
The Martha’s Vineyard Chamber Music concerts on Monday at the Whaling Church in Edgartown and at the Chilmark Community Center on Tuesday will feature Stephanie Chase and Joanne Kurkowicz, violins, violist Lila Brown, cellist Matthias Naegele and pianist Delores Stevens.
In celebration of Robert Schumann’s 200th anniversary, the ensemble will play Schumann’s Piano Quintet in E-flat, opus 44. Also on the program are Ludwig van Beethoven’s familiar String Trio in G, opus 9, #1, and Joaquin Turina’s Quator, opus 67.
There are many iconic Vineyard lifestyles available for the dreaming, but Kevin Keady is living what might be the most romantic of them all: he is a singer-songwriter (his band, the Cattle Drivers, has a cult following here) whose dayjob is a farmhand on Chappaquidick. Yes, really.
