Musicians with “an intangible spark”: John, left, and Joe Dady. Gelfand-Piper Photography A concert at the HochsteinMusicSchool on Sunday, February 20, will pay tribute to one of the Rochester area’s best known folk musicians, Joe Dady — and will help him pay for treatment as he recovers from the serious medical problems that hit him […]
Bill Chaisson
Posted inMusic
Old is new again
“I’m a chance taker, you might say,” says Geno Delafose from his ranch in Eunice, Louisiana. “Traditional tunes are what I do best and nobody else was doing them. I play the music that I love. I believe in myself.” Delafose is talking about a decision that he made in 1994 when he took over […]
Posted inMusic
The pipes are calling
Jim Malcolm, the singer and guitarist with the Scottish band Old Blind Dogs, is going to church before he plays at one of our local watering holes. In his online tour diary, Malcolm describes himself as being too ‘Presbyterianized’ to feel comfortable in the red-light districts of German cities where he plays, but it isn’t […]
Posted inMusic
And they’re big in Japan
Over the last two years the Sim Redmond Band has become increasingly popular in Rochester… and in Japan. At its initial Milestones appearances, audiences were mostly out-of-towners, fans that had followed the band from its hometown of Ithaca or from some jam-band haven like Geneseo. But lately what I think of as the “Dave Matthews […]
Posted inMusic
Out standing in their field
The Finger Lakes Grassroots Festival of Music and Dance began 14 years ago in the Puryear kitchen. Jordan and Jeb Puryear had been friends with two other musicians, Richie Stearns and Shane Lamphier, since they were all kids playing together in the Bubba George String Band. A friend recently had been diagnosed with AIDS, […]
Posted inMusic
They’ve got fiddle rhythm
The new album by Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys, Bon Rêve, has been called “the Sgt. Pepper of Cajun music.” After beginning as a traditional Cajun band 15 years ago, Riley and the Playboys veered into experimentation. Riley acknowledges that the previous two albums “jumped all over the place, but this one is pretty […]
Posted inMusic
Heartland regathers the folkies
Last year Ralph Hunt and Judy Gradford spent a lot of time talking on the phone with Glenn Drinkwater, one of the organizers of the former 12 Corners Coffeehouse. For years it brought A-list folk music acts to the Twelve Corners Presbyterian Church. After moving briefly to RIT, it disappeared. Hunt and Gradford were […]
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Swinging more than the Swedish
When the Danish band Phønix (pronounced, roughly, “FooER-nicks”) takes the stage at Milestones next week, it will be the second Scandinavian group to play Rochester in a year. Yggdrasil, whose members hail from Norway and the Faroe Islands, was featured at last summer’s Rochester International Jazz Festival. But while that incarnation of Yggdrasil (there have […]
Posted inNews & Opinion
Fast ferry, past and future
The Rochester-Toronto fast ferry has faced its fair share of controversy. But if fast-ferry service between Toronto and Rochester starts in May 2004, something sweeter may fill the air. And it won’t be the smell of Pennsylvania coal. It’ll be nostalgia. In March of 1954, four years after the last voyage of the car […]
Posted inMusic
Making music out of barroom funks
A recent phone call to West London finds David Cousins, the leader of the Strawbs, in a good mood. A new album, Blue Angel, has just been released and Cousins, Dave Lambert, and Brian Willoughby are set to depart the next day to begin their second US tour this year. Since they were here this […]
