And as of today, the cultural/business initiative known as BluePrint is, materially, just a series of Covid-safe summer events on a makeshift stage in the parking lot on the former IBM campus. But BluePrint is a vision of, and a proposal for, something much more: a kind of making good on the defaulted promise this building represents.
Your guide to New York State’s marijuana legalization law.
The songwriter Laura Stevenson has called the region home for the better part of a decade now, but her career has remained focused elsewhere. That is changing.
Saturday, June 5: It is a special show for at least three reasons. First, the great Dylan is 80 and still at it. Second, the concert falls in this liminal, uncertain period as we transition back to limited-capacity indoor culture, testing the waters in a lavishly remodeled Bearsville Theater that was dark throughout its first year of new ownership. Finally, the show features an incomparable lineup of performers, including Happy Traum, Cindy Cashdollar, Dave Mansfield; and Marshall Crenshaw.
Jonathan Taplin will discuss his rockn-roll memoir, The Magic Years, with Woodstock’s folk music legend Happy Traum at the Golden Notebook Bookstore May 3.
A guide to what’s happening in the live music world this spring. Some selections are shows; others are entirely new venues on the scene. Some are outside, some are inside, and some are, sigh, livestream, and that still doesn’t mean live and next to a stream.
For some venues, particularly those without outdoor space, the question of returning may be if, not when.
For the sixth installment of the Making Records, I spoke with Scott Petito, the area native who, as a bassist and a producer, is well into the fifth decade of his prolific career. Scott has done it at all: he’s played with everybody, and he’s recorded everybody else. Space is tight, so I encourage you to check his website if you want his almost absurd bona fides. Otherwise, just take my word.
On For the Record, his first release in nearly two decades, the guitarist/songwriter, writer/journalist, and Woodstock historian Tad Wise presents a fully realized set of nine substantive, lyrically elaborative tunes, topical art songs disguised as sleek soul pop with an anchor in the sounds and dialects of ‘80s rock — the shimmery guitar, the super crisp and tight rhythm section. An elegant electric guitarist with a command of idiomatic harmony, texture and guitar arrangement, Wise did well to recruit these supra-A-list sidemen (as, I suppose, would we all), and also did well not to festoon too much else on top of this lithe and crisp trio sound — a harmonica here, a keyboard there, some vocal beds and not much else.
On the region’s ever-changing restaurant landscape, we mourn the passing of old favorites; we welcome new arrivals with a hearty good-luck-you’ll-need-it. It is not necessarily newsworthy when some dreamers throw their hat into this long-hours, tight-margins ring. But when said restaurant emerges from the gate with live music as an integral, explicit component of its mission and its design, not just an afterthought, it is big news indeed.