Long time no newsletter! Well, not that long.
Hope you're enjoying your summer... and that you escaped getting hammered by that weather. Ugh. Makes complaining about the heat seem pretty small.
We've been taking the summer off too. But not really. Most of you probably aren't either.Thanks so much for the good and helpful feedback about the proof-of-concept long-form broadcast test-run! We took everything to heart, did some tweaking, then started working up a couple more to hone the format and workflow some more. We'll post all three after a bit of polishing for further comment and suggestion.But that's not what this newsletter's about.
There's a very cool — and atypical for us — show coming up on Saturday, July 27. Loud, crunchy, half-punkity metal leading into a blowout set of hard-driving vintage-synth-and-big-drums something-or-other. Good stuff for the young and the young at heart.
Bad Smell is mad-professor Ray Fork and drum powerhouse Jane Boxall serving up electro-ambient trance / dance Latin ’70s Europop. Rockers Tinkerbullet will also be featured, and Ezra Holloway’s new band will open. It will be loud. Dancing will be encouraged. Show starts at 7:00 PM on Saturday, July 27. Tickets are $20 in advance through stage33live.com or at the door. Advance tickets guarantee entry. All ticket proceeds go to the performers. As always, seating is limited and the event will be recorded and filmed.
Bad Smell with Tinkerbullet and Ezra Holloway at Stage 33 Live
BELLOWS FALLS — Bad Smell finds popster chameleon Mr. Ray Fork cooking with drum powerhouse Jane Boxall to serve up generous portions of trance / dance / stripeypants excitement, whipped-cream ’70s Europop, ass-head jazz, Casio Latin boogie, and electro-ambient drum’n’bass. Mr. Fork wires up a mad-professor rig of antique beat-machines, Korg and Casio synthesizers, and sundry sequencers while Jane augments the sloptronic insanity with live drum kit.
It will be loud. It will be fun. Dancing will be encouraged.
The ferocious hard-rock-with-gay-sprinkles trio Tinkerbullet will also be featured, and Ezra Holloway will open with his crunchy new band.
or at the door. Advance tickets guarantee entry. All ticket proceeds go to the performers. This is a 7:00 PM show on Saturday, July 27, 2024. Stage 33 Live is located at 33 Bridge Street in Bellows Falls VT. Admission is limited to 40; the event will be recorded and filmed.
We've got a couple shows in August too while we're "taking the summer off." They're practically back-to-back (we're gonna die!), but they're completely different from each other.
On
. If you're familiar with The Weisstronauts, there's some overlap between those two bands. And if you remember the '80s underground psych-pop band The Dead Monkeys, there's overlap there too. The Boston Globe described Sool as one of “the cleverest and most idiosyncratic bands” around. They don't play out hardly ever anymore, so this is a rarie. And the band's gonna do a live radio interview in the next room on WOOL at 5:00, ticket holders are invited to come early and heckle them on the air. Serious. Show's at 6:00.
.
Then on
. They take different paths to the same destination. Literally in this case, but also figuratively. This is a heavily pedigreed show,
. August 18, 6:00 PM,
or at the door. Reasonably fine artist (and excellent 33 Bridge Street neighbor) Charlie Hunter is helping this one to happen. Thank you, Charlie!
Unexpected things happen here a lot more often than one might expect (which, as you'd expect, is the nature of unexpected things). David Becker’s been selling out proper theaters in Japan, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, and America... but also relishes an intimate audience now and then, and that’s where we come in.
He's shared stages with Miles Davis, Chick Corea, and Michael Brecker to name a few, and collaborated with Pat Metheney, John Abercrombie, Mike Stern, and more. Heritage guitars has a David Becker signature model, Homestead Guitars has a David Becker signature acoustic, Sheptone produces David Becker signature strings. He plays international festivals like Monterey Jazz, Buenos Aires Jazz, and Attila Zoller Festival, and has performed at prestigious venues like London’s Barbican Centre, Rotterdam’s De Doelen, Madison Square Garden and Birdland in New York. Pretty soon he'll get to add Stage 33 Live to that list.
David Becker will perform his solo show Planets here on November 23, 2024 — "a captivating audiovisual expedition with projections of the cosmos enhancing his compositions and improvisations… a celestial odyssey aboard a transcendent spacecraft through the sounds, energy, and mystery of the planets of our solar system."
or at the door; advance tickets guarantee entry. Seating is limited. The event will be recorded and filmed.
Dude is one of the most highly-regarded jazz musicians working today. This whole thing is just so improbable.
“A poet on the Jazz Guitar.” — Downbeat
“A virtuoso.” — Gitarre & Bass
“One of the best jazz guitarists ever.” — Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen Television
Check out the collective us! Fourth most arts-vibrant rural county in the country!
Some of 'em are vibrant because they're big tourist destinations and the tourists do a lot of the heavy lifting, or they've got a lot of rich people, or they have locally-based major foundations to pump 'em up, or they have one über arts institution that carries all the load.
Others, like our county, have a big whack of little arts organizations — "Examples include Windham County, VT (with more than a dozen arts and cultural organizations with budgets below $50,000)."
We're not sure if we were actually counted in their research or not, but we feel seen anyway.
Southern Vermont gets pretty routinely overlooked and outright dismissed by a lot of the northwestern part of the state, where most of the people and money are. Stuff like this:
Sheesh.
Underdogs are cool.
