Calendar

Nick Lowe
NickLowe has made his mark as a producer (Elvis Costello-GrahamParker-Pretenders-The Damned), songwriter of at least three songs you know byheart,short-lived career as a pop star, and a lengthy term as a musicians’musician. But in his current ‘second act’ as a silver-haired, tender-heartedbut sharp-tonguedsinger-songwriter, he has no equal.Starting with 1995′s ‘The ImpossibleBird’ through to 2011′s ‘The Old Magic,’Nick has turned out a fantastic string of albums, each one devised in his WestLondon home, and recorded with a core of musicians who possess the same veteransavvy. Lowe brings wit and understated excellence to every performance,leadingBen Ratliff of the New York Times to describe his live show as “elegant andnearly devastating.”In 2024 he released his latest record ‘Indoor Safari,’ a collaboration with Los Straitjackets

Los Straitjackets
LosStraitjackets are the leading practitioners of the lost art of the guitarinstrumental. Using the music of the Ventures, The Shadows, and with Link WrayandDick Dale as a jumping off point, the band has taken their unique, highenergy brand of original rock & roll around the world. Clad in their trademarkLucha LibreMexican wrestling masks, the “Jackets” have delivered theirtrademark guitar licks to 16 albums, thousands of concerts and dozens of filmsand TV shows.Their latest album ‘Somos Los Straitjackets’ was released in 2025. "The quartet's time-warped expertise shines through on track after track" -Shindig! Magazine,★★★★

All About the Bones

The sound and imagery of the 20th release by Chris Smither, All About the Bones, (release date: May 3, 2024 on Signature Sounds/Mighty Albert, distributed by Redeye) is as elemental as the inky black shadows cast by a shockingly bright moon. The listener is welcomed into some gothic mansion on an imaginary New Orleans street, and there in the lamplit parlor confronts the band, a minimalist skeleton crew: Smither’s inimitable propulsive guitar and rumbling baritone are joined seamlessly to producer David Goodrich’s carpetbag of instruments, Zak Trojano’s rock-steady, primal drumming, BettySoo’s diaphanous harmony vocals, and the flat, mournful flood of Jazz legend Chris Cheek’s saxophone.

Recorded at Sonelab Studios in Easthampton MA by Justin Pizzoferrato (Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., the Hold Steady) All About the Bones has a feel that is somehow baroque and austere at once. Smither and his longtime producer David Goodrich have been refining their musical conversation for decades, both in the studio and onstage, and by now, their bond verges on the telepathic. Goodrich plays on nearly every track. His sound is by now so translucent that it seems to function as a swath of silence, allowing the songs to burn like ciphers in the crackling air.

And oh, the songs on All About the Bones. Chris Smither, after six decades of sharpening his knife as a songwriter, can at this point open damn near anything with a flick of his wrist. God and the Devil are opened here. Mortality is too. Politics, consciousness, renewal, family, vulnerability, surrender… Smither has sat with these topics like so many Zen koans, for so long, that every line is a pearl. The title track, “All About the Bones,” kicks the record off with “Consider your high station/ think about your fame. All of your creation depended on your frame.” Irony, wit, the double meaning of “depended”… each verse is a master class in songwriting.

Yet the stark, elemental sage always has a twinkle in his eye, a light touch at your elbow as he guides you along. From the wickedly funny defense of the Adversary in “If Not for the Devil” to the unsentimental open-heartedness of “Still Believe in You,” he is as human as we all long to be. The disjointed imagery of “In the Bardo” and the dystopian mirror of “Close the Deal” find Smither unflinchingly staring down the mortality of both individuals and republics, and yet he is at peace, among loved ones in his cover of Eliza Gilkyson’s “Calm Before the Storm,” and turning his gaze to the future in “Completion”. He sends us on our merry way, startled, dazzled, unsettled and then comforted, with Tom Petty’s “Time to Move On.”

As noted by the New York Times, Rolling Stone, MOJO, NPR, and others, in the decades of travels to All About the Bones, Chris Smither has gone from up-and-comer to journeyman to veteran to icon, and yet the whole time his path has more closely resembled Joseph Campbell’s “Hero with a Thousand Faces”- an unblinking, fearless trek into the depths of struggle and revelation, and a return back to the land of the living, to share the hard-won treasures found along the way. His restlessness is long gone, and his eyes are fixed “where the moonlight falls on some never-to-be-seen horizon” (“Still Believe in You”). The light given off from his music casts our own lives into a sublime and welcome clarity.

“An introspective, homespun philosopher” -New York Times

Steve Forbert is a true American musical treasure, underscored by the new album, Daylight Savings Time. Like all his albums, it's saturated with what venerated rock journalist Robert Christgau discerned as his "omnivorously observant" songwriting, marked by Steve's gift for finding the more profound meaning and magic within everyday moments, as well as his abundant melodic and poetic enchantment"

Like Warren Zevon, Gram Parsons, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, and Bruce Springsteen, Steve Forbert has left his unmistakable imprint on the landscape of American music," says American Songwriter. As with other esteemed creative souls, his work is marked by his own distinctive qualities, and he speaks genuinely to his listeners.

As Forbert approaches the milestone of his 70th birthday, Daylight Savings Time contemplates and celebrates the proverbial 'extra hour of daylight' that comes with the time change. "Yeah, to chirping crickets and to daylight savings time!" he sings on the album's first single, "Sound Existence," "The best ain't yet to come, but you could still get by just fine.

Since forming in 1988 in Southern California, Big Sandy and His Fly Rite Boys have become one of the worlds most beloved Americana/Roots acts, drawing from the deep musical waters that flow just beneath the surface of Rock & Rolls fertile soil. A childhood passion for Country, Doo Wop, and Rhythm & Blues 45s led Sandy (born Robert Williams) to pursue a singing career as a teenager, beginning a life in music that continues decades later. And as his personal record collection continues to grow (75,000 and counting), so does the depth of the musical influences that stream through his songwriting and singing style. A critically acclaimed tribute to Tex Mex hero Freddy Fender, released at the beginning of the 2020 lockdown, points the way forward for Big Sandy and his Fly Rite Boys as they continue on a path of musical growth. After nearly 35 years on the road, and more than two dozen releases to their credit, they remain key figures on the ever changing Americana circuit, both on record and in live appearances.

Travel back in time to the 1960’s for a fabulous evening of music and entertainment, reminiscent of a Frank Sinatra performance at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. Song stylist Jack Garrett and the amazing Atomic Wise Guys perform Sinatra’s classic hits, including “Fly Me to the Moon,” “My Way,” “One for My Baby (One More for the Road),” “Summer Wind,”“Nice N Easy,” “New York, New York” and many more. As a bonus, Jack and his ten-piece band perform hits from some of Frank Sinatra’s friends such as Tony Bennett, Frankie Valli, Dean Martin and Bobby Darin.

Guest vocalist Teresa Carey contributes hits from artists including Sarah Vaughan, Nancy Wilson, Aretha Franklin, and Etta James.

Featuring custom-written, deeply authentic band arrangements to reproduce the original Sinatra recordings, Let Me Be Frank is a fast paced, high-energy show including audience interaction and interesting information about Frank, both the man and his music.

The Atomic Wise Guys
Brian Cashwell – Pianist – Keyboard
Michael Sharfe – Bassist
Jim Leslie – Drummer – Music Director
Bill Dixon – Trombone – Trumpet – Music Arranger
Hank Mauntner – Lead Trumpet
Christopher Jeffery – Jazz Trumpet
Grant “King” Koeller – Tenor Sax
Jeff Spurlock – Alto Sax
Terry Staten – Baritone Sax
Jack Garrett – Vocalist
Teresa Carey – Guest Vocalist

Richard Shindell lives as both an immigrant and emigrant, crossing thresholds, that informs his illumination of the human experience through narrative song. Shindell has inhabited a Zen Buddhist monastery and busked in the streets of Paris.

Originally from New York, now living in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Shindell is a writer whose songs paint pictures, tell stories, juxtapose ideas and images, inhabit characters, vividly evoking entire worlds along the way and expanding our sense of just what it is a song may be. Meticulously recorded over three years in New York and Buenos Aires, his most recent release, Careless, offered an ambitious, luxurious, full- length statement. Shindell immersed himself in the studio, allowing the time and latitude to explore, experiment, take risks—to play—as each of these eleven songs was given form and substance. While his signature acoustic guitar style is used to good effect, Careless also found Shindell plugging in more. “The wider sonic and dynamic range of the electric has been a real inspiration. Rejuvenating.”

During the pandemic, Shindell stayed in Argentina, out on the wide open Pampa, reading, writing, taking walks, doing a little experimental recording, and tending the garden. He now returns to the road for a limited number of performances. Innovative, original and occasionally spiritual, Shindell’s songs weave tales that interchangeably champion the downtrodden, exalt the disaffected or wax empathetic to those lost to society’s fringes. From lighthearted ballads and adulterous love songs, to dirges and diatribes that skillfully skewer politics, prejudice, war and religion, to the comic point-of-view of a cow stuck in a barbed wire fence, he has a unique ability to morph into the soul of the many and varied personalities he casts as narrators in certain songs—veritable novellas framed in haunting acoustic melodies.

An astute storyteller, poetic and literate, with a stellar stage presence…

Ellis Paul is one of those gifted singer/songwriters. Though some may refer to him as a folk singer, he is more, for lack of a better word, a singular storyteller, a musician whose words reach out from inside and yet also express the feelings, thoughts and sensibilities that most people can relate to in one way or another, regardless of age or upbringing. The exhilaration of the open road. A celebration of heroes. The hope for redemption. Descriptions of those things that are both near and dear. The sharing of love…, intimate, passionate and enduring.

Teddy Thompson
Never Be The Same
 
Beloved London-born, Brooklyn-based singer/songwriter Teddy Thompson has returned with the exquisitely crafted Never Be The Same, his first collection of original material since 2020. Across ten tracks, Thompson refines his craft via an exploration of music’s enduring preoccupations — love, longing, and the uneasy passage of time.
This album wasn’t built upon a grand narrative. There was no self-imposed exile, no forced reinvention. Instead, it is centered around an exhortation that is threaded through the songs like a refrain: “Never Be The Same,” its title only revealing itself to Thompson after he’d completed the recording.
“It’s a phrase that, unconsciously, I used twice. And when I saw it on the page, I realized, this is the message of this album,” says Thompson. “Don’t ever be the same. Change. Grow! Even when the sentiment is, woe is me, I’ll never recover after that love or loss. The message is still, change. Don’t get too comfortable. Everything is temporary, so evolve or perish!”
This pull and tension between comfort and change runs quietly throughout Never Be The Same, Thompson’s 11th album, which was produced by renowned Grammy Award–winning musician/producer David Mansfield. At the core is Thompson’s longstanding commitment to songwriting as a form, inspired by early influences like Chuck Berry, Hank Williams, and Crowded House, as well as the towering figures of the craft — Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, The Beatles, and, certainly, his parents, British folk icons Richard and Linda Thompson.