Author: Michael Witthaus

The Music Roundup 26/08/13

• Free green: Enjoy traditional Celtic music in a bucolic setting as On The Lash performs a show courtesy of the Capitol Center for the Arts. The Michigan-based band has been praised by critics for blending “classical dexterity with the nuance and excitement of traditional music” while staying rooted in the Irish heritage sound. The quartet released Fireside, a debut EP, in April 2025. Thursday, Aug. 13, 6:30 p.m., Riverfront Park, 11 Canal St., Penacook, ontheleashband.com.

• Phattened up: Expanding his hip-hop catalog into full band, Cody Pope & The Keyholders perform a downtown show. The recently formed group includes DJ Myth on turntables, Axile Beighley and Ian Smith on bass and drums, along with Fredo Benevides playing guitar and keys, interpolating Pope’s songs. The night opens and closes with ceremonial “drum machine vibes.” Friday, Aug. 14, 8 p.m., Shaskeen Pub, 909 Elm St., Manchester, $5 at the door, 21+, keyholdersband.com.

• Sister act: After playing music together in their childhood home, Natalie & Brittany Haas made names for themselves in the trad music world — Natalie as a go-to cellist and collaborator with Alasdair Fraser, and Brittany an acclaimed fiddle player working with Darol Anger, Steve Martin and with breakout bluegrass stalwarts Crooked Still. The two join forces as HAAS. Saturday, Aug. 15, 7 p.m., Word Barn Meadow, 66 Newfields Road, Exeter, $63 and up, thewordbarnnh.com.

• Parrot power: Carrying on Jimmy Buffett’s brand of trop rock, Changes In Latitudes is a tribute act led by Steve Kareta, who found the role accidentally in 2000 at a wedding afterparty in Hawaii. Friends urged him to do it full-time, and 25 years later Kareta still bops on stage barefoot and smiling to sing “Margaritaville,” “Fins” and “Cheeseburger in Paradise” for Buffett fans. Saturday, Aug. 15, 8 p.m., Palace Theatre, 80 Hanover St., Manchester, $30, palacetheatre.org.

• Join together: Named after the host band, the Folksoul Music Festival is an all-day event with a New Orleans flavor, hosted by musicians Fred Simmons and Leslie Vogel on their own grounds. This year’s lineup includes gospel flavored Long Journey, Back O’ Town, a Cajun trio led by Pete and Linda Simoneaux, Low Lily, and Ivychum Trio — Pati and Ken Cloutier and Richard Doherty. Sunday, Aug. 16, 10:30 a.m., Mountain and Driscoll roads, Greenfield, $20, folksoul.com.

Painting poems

Words inspire art at Kimball Jenkins

An upcoming exhibition at the Kimball Jenkins Estate will pair works of art with poetry but flip the traditional ekphrastic approach. Since time immemorial, poets have written about paintings, but “Dwelling Places” instead has painters responding to poems.

The effort, which opened Aug. 7, unites Kimball Jenkins-affiliated artists with a Concord-based poetry group.

The idea traces back to last year, when Kimball Jenkins Executive Director Martha Lemire attended the Percheron Poets’ annual Poetry & Pie event for the first time. “I was so inspired by the poets and their original writing,” she recalled. “I said, wouldn’t it be cool if next summer we did an exhibition around poetry, and have artists respond to your words?”

Art in Bloom, floral arrangements coupled with artwork, is a January tradition at Kimball Jenkins, and Lemire wondered if poets could inspire a mirror image of that. “We did it backwards,” she said. “I thought it would be an interesting concept to see what they could come up with.”

The Percheron Poets enthusiastically endorsed the idea.

The mechanics of the pairing varied. Some poets already had artist collaborators and had been working alongside them for months, while others didn’t. Lemire put roughly five or six unmatched poems out to the wider community of artists who exhibit at or teach for Kimball Jenkins, who then chose the ones that spoke to them.

The show’s evocative title came from the poets themselves. “This is your show,” Lemire told them. “We were hoping to have the poems shine in this whole collaborative exhibition that we’re doing together. So I gave them the opportunity to come up with their title, and they did.”

In a Zoom call, Percheron Poets member Brenda Wilbert explained the title’s meaning.

“It reflects a positive feeling associated with writing from the seat of one’s own heart and mind — the inner life where the soul dwells,” she said. “Dwelling places are bright enough to encompass the poems and artwork. It’s a fun way of thinking of them dwelling for a while in the old, elegant mansion.”

Wilbert is also an artist, one of the exhibition’s many hyphenates. She works in wearable and digital art, built around her Heart Full of Color unisex clothing collection. One of her pieces was recently featured in a Montreal Clothing Co. marketing campaign. She recently had a solo show of her artwork at Kimball Jenkins.

“I was so blessed and honored,” she said of the five-week exhibition of her paintings alongside a room of mannequins dressed in her clothing line, including one posed at a piano. Wilbert is also a playwright and once ran her own theater company, following in the footsteps of her late husband, also a playwright.

For “Dwelling Places,” Wilbert contributed two poems. She created the artwork for one herself. For the other, “How They Grew,” about her father’s tomatoes, she recruited Susan Huppe, a retired art teacher. “Susan doesn’t really show her work, and now I encouraged her to do it,” she said. Huppe’s painting is being used to promote the exhibition.

The Percheron Poets origin story traces back to a workshop Adele Sanborn ran in Boscawen at the now-shuttered Twiggs Gallery. “Right outside Twiggs, there were Percheron horses,” Wilbert said. “We were looking at the horses when we’re in this meeting, and this is how it all started.” The group has met monthly ever since.

Wilbert spent her earlier career in mental health services. She’s written often about grief but came to poetry late in life.

“I decided I wanted to do it,” she said, pointing out an overlap between that kind of writing and visual art. “Writing poetry or expressing art is often very healing.”

What is Wilbert most looking forward to at the event? “People being present with both the poems and artwork,” she said simply. “Like to really go through them, the mansion, and just sit with us. Really look at the poem, read the poem, look at the artwork, and just be present there.”

She’s also eager for another year of the gathering that inspired “Dwelling Places.” However, she’s quick to clarify one thing: for Poetry & Pie on Aug. 23, Wilbert will only read — she does not bake. “I’m not a cook, forget it,” she said. “I go to the Co-Op; I get a lot of great pies over there.”

Art & Poetry: Dwelling Places
Where: Kimball Jenkins Estate, 266 N. Main St., Concord
When: Through Saturday, Sept. 5, various days and hours. Public opening reception Aug. 13, 5:30-7:30 p.m. in the Kimball Jenkins Mansion.
More: kimballjenkins.com

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

Smoking Hot Comedy

A talk with comedians Jody Sloane and Jimmy Dunn plus a look at upcoming shows

Last summer, the official story was that Jimmy Dunn skipped his own comedy festival due to a dream-come-true gig headlining at Casino Ballroom. That much was true. What didn’t make press reports was the bigger reason he was missing. Two days after that big show, Dunn checked into Massachusetts General Hospital to have his spine rebuilt.

“I was essentially laid up waiting to do the Casino, and then they wanted to do the surgery like two days before, and I said I can’t do that because I have to be able to stand on stage,” Dunn recalled by phone from his home in Hampton Beach recently.

He made it, walking out under the lights the way he’d visualized since he was a kid who’d sit on the venue’s back stairs to listen to Buddy Hackett and George Carlin. Then after what Dunn calls as a career highlight, surgeons were putting $30,000 worth of titanium into his back.

“That was just the parts,” he said with a wry laugh. “It’s a bad joke, but I was a stand-up comedian who couldn’t stand up, so that’s not good.” A year later, Jimmy Dunn is back, and by his own account, firing on all cylinders in a way that he hasn’t in two decades.

“I feel great, man. I haven’t felt this good in 20 years. I’m open ocean swimming and walking every day,” he said. The Hampton Beach Comedy Festival, the institution he built from scratch 19 years ago, returns with Dunn fully mobile again after a stretch where the injury quietly reshaped what he could do on stage.

“It was really tough to be on stage for about a year because of this back injury, and it limited my movement and just what I could do creatively,” he said. “But now I can fly around on stage again, and I love it.” The Casino Ballroom night itself, he admits, ran largely on adrenaline and painkillers.

“I would have done that show with one leg,” he said. “I’ve been waiting 30 years to do that show, and to be a headliner at the Casino Ballroom was just a dream come true.” Local radio helped fill the room, and while Dunn won’t swear it was a total sellout, “it was packed.”

This year’s festival — the 17th edition, missing two along the way to Covid and an earlier back surgery — comes with a lineup change Dunn is clearly proud of. In past years, he says, the show ran long because organizers kept squeezing in new comics eager for stage time, which meant rushing seasoned headliners off before they got going.

This year, the roster is smaller and the sets are longer for the veteran Boston comics who don’t just tell good jokes. “Any good comic can get a laugh, but the ones that can just hammer laugh after laugh, that’s what Boston has always been known for; that’s what Boston comics do best.”

Dunn is also handing off hosting duties so he can do a 20-minute set each night, which allows him to actually hang out with his friends instead of running the show.

“I just don’t like breaking up my thoughts,” he said of hosting. “I’m going to go in there and have fun with my friends … just tell some jokes and hang with the gang like I used to.”

Among this year’s hammers: Will Noonan, whom Dunn remembers showing up to the festival’s earliest years at the old Ashworth venue “in a suit … looking like a young Elvis Costello,” and who’s since become, in Dunn’s words, a true Boston headliner.

There’s also Andrew Della Volpe, Karen Morgan — fresh off a viral run on social media and a national touring schedule — Ken Rogerson, Mike Donovan, Brian Glowacki and Paul D’Angelo.

A notable thread running through this year’s bill: two father-son comedy pairs. Tony V, Dunn’s best friend and longtime collaborator — the man who helped him pick material for his Letterman audition — shares the stage with his son Gus, who started doing stand-up at Emerson College before moving to Los Angeles.

“They look alike and they sound alike, but they’re talking about completely different things,” Dunn said. “It’s really fun.” The second pairing features Ethan Printz, son of veteran comic Robbie Printz, a friend of Dunn’s for three decades.

“Robbie called and asked, ‘Hey, can you get my son on the festival?’ With a friend like that, that’s all I need,” Dunn said. New comics get one shot to prove themselves in front of an audience that, in Dunn’s words, isn’t a young comedy-club crowd — it’s real Hampton Beach tourists who “will let you know real quickly if you’re not funny.”

Festival lore runs deep for Dunn: cash Pachinko games at Playland with Tony V, Danny Miller, Gus, Dave Rattigan and Steve Bjork; a homemade ice cream sundae bar on his back deck; a banner plane he hired to fly over the beach reading “Hampton Beach Comedy Festival Tonight.”

Marketing, even now, stays defiantly old-school — hand-to-hand flyers on the sand, because half the audience is tourists who won’t see a Facebook ad. “The only way to market to the beach is to be on the beach,” he said.

Dunn is also branching out this fall in a new direction: teaching. Starting Sept. 23, he’ll lead a four-week stand-up comedy course in the Cantin Room of Concord’s BNH Stage. He’ll walk students through finding their comedic voice, writing jokes that land and performing them with confidence, capped by a mainstage graduation set Oct. 15.

It’s the first time Dunn has put together anything like it, and he says the idea had been around for a while waiting for a good moment.

“People have been asking me forever to teach a class,” he said. “It seemed like the right time and the perfect venue.”

Off stage, Dunn is also finishing a book about his comedy career, aiming for a Thanksgiving release alongside a show at Portsmouth’s Music Hall Lounge, and still looks back fondly on his two seasons on Frasier, including one surreal week trading lines with Kelsey Grammer and Bebe Neuwirth.

The combination of surgery and weather nearly ended the festival for him. Last year, lying in a hospital bed listening to pouring rain and wondering whether to cancel a night of the festival, Dunn wondered if he should carry on. Then his back healed, and his head cleared like a summer thunder buster.

“Of course I want to keep it going,” he said.

Holding the field (and the crowd)

Comedy veteran writes her own advice book

As a standup comic, Jody Sloane is adept at reading a room — it’s a means to survival. Recently she wrote a book that places that and other life skills in the context of mental well-being. It’s called Hold the Field — A Practice for Staying Present Without Disappearing.

The book grew out of her own lifelong habit of feeling responsible for defusing tense situations, even if her help was never requested, a form of social diplomacy that quickly becomes conscription. It’s a reflex, she believes, that most people recognize in themselves if they’re honest.

“Everybody who does it thinks they’re coming from a helpful place, and often they are,” she said in a recent Zoom meeting. The trap, as she describes it, is that they end up fully responsible for the problem, absorbing a job that was never theirs to begin with, often at the cost of their own presence. It’s its own kind of vanishing act.

To deal with it, Sloane created the APART™ framework: Awareness, Permission, Attunement, Restraint, and Trust. In a classic self-help format, she describes the toxic behavior and ways to address it. Real life examples, many that are deeply personal, illustrate corrective work.

It all begins with a bad tattoo.

Sloane stresses that she isn’t writing as a professional or offering a therapy substitute. Rather, she’s someone who’s “read all the books,” but didn’t find one that spoke to her. She’s there for people who “need a way to notice tension without absorbing it,” and avoid vanishing into a fog of good intentions.

She spent years in therapy herself to deal with PTSD, every modality from IFS to cognitive behavioral and EMDR. All valuable, she said, but not definitive.

“What it did was tell me why I am the way I am, and not necessarily how to be in the world with these things I was dealing with,” she said. “I didn’t really find a book like that.”

So Sloane wrote it herself, believing she wasn’t alone in knowing that compulsively trying to lower everyone’s emotional temperature was fruitless. “The most important takeaway is, you do it at the expense of yourself,” she said. “You’re not helping yourself … and that’s the opposite of what you were hoping for.”

What, then, is this … Field?

It’s not the room, but rather what happens inside it, specifically its collective energy and tension. In comedy, it gives Sloane cues for things like dealing with a heckler, owning a joke when it triggers one audience member but makes everyone else laugh — or introducing a slate of comics.

That’s something she’ll do when she returns to the Hampton Beach Comedy Festival to host its final night on Aug. 23. It’s a job she describes, only half-joking, as one she doesn’t even like.

“I hate hosting, too,” she said, echoing fellow comic Jimmy Dunn, who said the same thing in an interview to preview the festival he launched in 2010.

Her job as host is to gauge the temperature of the room and follow its flow, comedian by comedian. If a high-energy act is coming up, she’ll ramp up the crowd’s energy up to meet them. If it shifts down — for example, with a Stephen Wright type following Bobcat Goldthwait — her task then is to ride it, so the next comic lands on their own terms.

A few days prior to HBCF, Sloane will be at Beans & Greens Farm in Gilford, this time not as the person running the whole show but as part of Frank Santorelli & Friends. There she’ll perform an extended set, longer than the 20 minutes she’ll lead with at McGuirk’s Ocean View before yielding to six more comics, including closer Dunn.

Sloane’s 29-year-old daughter is woven into the act these days, a way to examine the friction between Gen X and Gen Z sensibilities. It’s a reluctant choice.

“I normally hadn’t brought her in,” she said. “I was worried she’d be sensitive about what I’d say about her, but what I say is fun and sweet. And it’s true.”

Now that Hold The Field is out — it’s on sale at Sloane’s shows, by the way — she’s exhaling, happily.

“The experience of doing it, and fulfilling it, has been huge,” she said. “There are a lot of people who are willing to support me in this endeavor, and that’s been the most heartening thing, I think — that people are like, ‘go, go, go!’ It’s been awesome.”

Night after night

The Hampton Beach Comedy Festival runs six nights at McGuirk’s Ocean View, in their outdoor Post 8 bar and restaurant. Festival creator Jimmy Dunn will do a 20-minute set to close each show, with Dave Rattigan also telling jokes nightly.

A big change from previous years is fewer comics with more stage time. Dunn wants The Hammers — his name for the veteran comics who’ve anchored the festival since it began 19 years ago — to have room to stretch out. In past years, packed lineups precluded that.

“Mike Donovan would get up there and just start murdering the crowd, and I’m like, I don’t want to give him the light, I want him to keep going,” Dunn said. “So some of the bigger names, or the more experienced comics, or my friends that I just find funnier, we’re going to let them go a little bit longer.”

All shows are scheduled to start at 7:30 p.m. (doors 5:30 p.m.) weather permitting, with rainouts announced 2 p.m. day of show. Shows are 21+ and include adult content. “No, your kids can’t come even if they’ve heard it all,” reads the festival website, hampton-beach-comedy-festival.weebly.com, where you can purchase tickets. “Send your child to Playland with a handful of quarters like a good parent.”

Tickets remain $20 per show, something Dunn is quite proud of. “Most of these comics you can’t see on their own for $20,” he said. “I’ve been working hard with my management [to] lower those ticket prices. People are feeling it, and I want them to be able to come out and have a good time.”

Tuesday, Aug. 18

Paul D’Angelo

Once an assistant district attorney and criminal-defense trial lawyer, D’Angelo is a comedy veteran with nearly four decades of standup under his belt. He’s the author of six books and appeared in the Showtime standup concert film The Godfathers of Comedy. He’s performed at venues ranging from New York’s Friars Club to the Waldorf Astoria ballroom, as well as Harrah’s and Caesars Palace.

Paul Nardizzi

A winner of both the HBO U.S. Comedy Arts Festival and the Boston Comedy Festival, Nardizzi has appeared on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Comedy Central, NESN and Fox Sports’ Best Damn Sports Show Period. He offers observational humor about his family life, sports, and more, and is touring New England through 2026 with a parenting-focused show, including a September date at Cary Hall in Lexington, Mass.

Mike Hanley

He’s opened for Jay Mohr, Tom Arnold, David Koechner and Jessica Kirson. One of his best bits is about being the father of an infant girl and accidentally brushing his teeth with Desitin and calling for emergency medical assistance. He became the funniest thing the help line encountered that evening. He’s been on the Today show and Good Morning America, and his 2014 daddy/daughter dance YouTube clip topped 24 million views.

Wednesday, Aug. 19

Mark Riley

He was once a professional ice hockey referee (with a very short stint in the NHL) who also ran a Gymboree. He headlines in Boston as well as playing in Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Atlantic City, and he’s a former first runner-up at the Boston Comedy Festival. Also a school teacher, he co-authored a movie script, Penalty Box, drawn from his hockey-reffing days, and is finishing his first book, Not Every Kid Should Get a Trophy.

Mike Donovan

A mainstay in the Boston comedy world who’s also written several books, including one on U.S. history that began as a manuscript twice as long as the Bible. “He’s not a normal guy,” comic Steven Wright once said of Donovan. “His head is not a casual head. He’s got like 18 Harvards up there.” His writing has appeared in the Boston Globe, the Boston Herald and Sports Illustrated as he continues to headline New England rooms in 2026.

Mitch Stinson

Ex-Navy jet pilot with more than 200 carrier landings during his career, he’s now a comedian. Stinson’s material frequently touches on the transition from military to civilian life. He appears at comedy clubs all over New England. He’s the winner of Rhode Island’s Funniest Stand-Up and a Boston/Rhode Island Comedy Festival performer. Still a fixture on the New England club circuit in 2026, including dates at Nick’s Comedy Stop.

Ethan Printz

16-year-old comic turning his teen years into laughs, frequently performing with his father, a multi-decade standup veteran. He frequently tours with his comedian father Robbie in their joint A Night with the Printzes shows, while building a following on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube for his insights into coping with his voice and body changing, while entertaining crowds in rooms he won’t be able to drink in until five years from now.

Robbie Printz

When he shares the stage with his son Ethan, it will be a rare gig on land for the seasoned comic, as he’s spending most of August and September telling jokes on cruise ships. He’s been a headliner aboard Princess Cruises since 2004, and in 2016 he earned the line’s Entertainer of the Year. He still splits his year between cruise ship gigs and land dates with son Ethan.

Thursday, Aug. 20

Ken Rogerson

A veteran of Rescue Me and When Standup Stood Out, the superb documentary about Boston’s comedy heyday in the 1980s. “I legitimately find him one of the funniest people on the planet,” Dunn said of Rogerson. “I would put his Zookeeper bit up there in the top five or 10 comedy bits of all time.” Other TV credits include “Pat the Cop” on It’s All Relative, plus Conan O’Brien, Letterman and Comics Come Home.

Paul Gilligan

This perennial Boston headliner likes to riff on family life and his pale Irish heritage. “On summer vacations,” goes one joke, “I hide under the deck in a ski mask with 68 sunblock, wrapped in a towel.” Gilligan is a solid draw throughout New England clubs. He’s also a licensed electrician who emcees the Boston Construction Awards, as well as a regular on NESN’s Charlie Moore Outdoors and Dirty Water TV.

Harrison Stebbins

Observational comic who created his persona following a family tragedy when his teen brother was disabled in a car accident. He’s shared the stage with Lewis Black, Mitch Hedberg and Bill Burr, and is a winner of the Sam Adams Best of Boston Comedy Festival. Other credits for the New England funny man include Comedy Central and Comcast Comedy Spotlight.

Friday, Aug. 21

Brian Glowacki

He’s headlined Boston’s Wilbur and the Cape Cod Melody Tent. Glowacki has a secret weapon: a face that telegraphs mischief. When he pauses with a sly smirk during a joke setup, it’s like watching a Mento dropped into a bottle of Coke; audience laughter builds, then explodes. A few years ago, he was the first independent local comic to headline Boston’s Wilbur Theatre.

Andrew Della Volpe

A Boston Comedy Festival finalist and a regular all over New England for the past six years, Volpe has appeared at Boston’s Comedy Attic as well as Manchester’s Shaskeen and Rex Theatre. From 2021 to 2023, he co-hosted a podcast, The Soft Boys, with HBCF favorite Will Noonan. Recently named a Boston Globe “Comedian on the Rise.” Now newly married, with 2026 dates at the Spire Center and Music Hall Lounge.

Kristy Kielbasinski

Boston-based stand-up comedian and author, drawing inspiration from her life as a stay-at-home mom and housewife. Her children’s book, I Don’t Know, combines her comedic sensibilities with a love of reading. Won the 2025 Mohegan Sun Comix Contest (Feature Division) and has opened for Bobcat Goldthwait, Matt Rife and Natasha Leggero. Continues touring New England clubs through 2026.

Jeff Koen

He regularly supports Juston McKinney at his shows, and performs throughout New England. Koen’s self-deprecating humor lands well with audiences, and some may remember him from his role as Uncle Rick in the 2011 cult film Heavy Times. Won $10,000 on America’s Funniest Home Videos in 2015 and co-starred with Juston McKinney in the short film “Suck It Up.” Still a frequent support act for McKinney’s shows.

Saturday, Aug. 22

P.J. Thibodeau

Comedian, basketball coach, sports official and New England comedy circuit veteran known for blue-collar charm, easy stage presence, and observational storytelling frequently drawn from family life, aging and athletics. He’s now among the Northeast’s upper-tier headliners, having grown from the college circuit into opening for major national acts and headlining clubs throughout the region in 2026.

Karen Morgan

Former trial attorney who got her start as a finalist on Nickelodeon’s Search for the Funniest Mom in America. “Fortunately she’s a dear friend who’s right up the street; otherwise I wouldn’t be able to get her at something like this,” Dunn said. In 2024, her third album, Shiny Happy People Laughing, arrived. Her two Dry Bar Comedy specials, Go Dawgs! and Rub Some Dirt On It, have millions of online views, with her third due soon.

Dan Miller

According to his bio, Boston native Miller was “born a comedian but made it official in 1992.” He’s shared stages with local and national headliners including Lenny Clarke, Dane Cook and Dave Attel. Dunn calls catching up with Miller one of his favorite things about the HBCF. He remains a regular headliner at Nick’s Comedy Stop and Giggles Comedy Club at Prince Pizzeria.

​Sunday, Aug. 23

Tony V.

A Boston comedy legend and Dunn’s best friend. “Tony V. and I will probably be walking through the gates of Hell together at some point,” Dunn said. Voted “The Funniest Man in Massachusetts” by Showtime back in 1986, he’s a national headliner who’s been on late night television and shared stages with everyone from Steven Wright to Adam Sandler.

Jody Sloane

Doing a sit-down shtick as a cheeky “conducktor” named Penny Wise on more than 4,000 Boston Duck Tours was the perfect tee-up to becoming a stand-up comic for Sloane, who now tours regularly from New York to Maine. Sloane also authored Hold The Field, a self-help book. “It was something I needed that no one else wrote,” she said. She’s been invited back to host and perform at HBCF multiple times.

Will Noonan

Noonan self-released his Live in Boston special on YouTube rather than waiting on a streaming deal, part of a wave of Boston comics producing their own specials. He made an impression on the festival organizer at his initial HBCF appearance, and now he’s a regular. “The first time Will came up, he was wearing a suit,” Dunn recalled. “I was like, ‘Oh, I like this kid’s style already.’”

Carolyn Plummer

She appeared at Denis Leary’s annual Comics Come Home benefit in 2022, along with the far-flung Burbank Comedy Festival on the West Coast. A New Hampshire native — she grew in Wolfeboro, a minister’s daughter — Plummer got into comedy after responding to an ad. Now 25 years into her comedy career, Plummer’s also a Woody Herman Jazz Award-winning trumpet player.

Gus V.

Comedian, writer, playwright and a graduate of Emerson College in Boston, he’s now based in Los Angeles. Gus has worked on Jimmy Kimmel Live, Cobra Kai, and When Stand Up Stood Up. In addition to his writing credits, he runs a monthly show in L.A. called Bughouse with Ben Zieper at the Yard Theater. His appearance with dad Tony V. is one of two father-son HBCF combos.

Upcoming comedy shows

Averill House Vineyard 21 Averill Road, Brookline, mikedupcomedy.com
Saturday, Aug. 15 – Carolyn Plummer

Beans & Greens Farm (Notch Biergarten) 245 Intervale Road, Gilford, strideevents.com
Thursday, Aug. 13 – Lenny Clarke
Saturday, Aug. 15 – Frank Santorelli & Friends w/ Jody Sloane

BNH Stage 16 S. Main St., Concord, ccanh.com
Friday, Aug. 28 – NightOUT with Bunny Butchers Broadway
Saturday, Aug. 29 – Dulcé Sloan
Wednesday, Sept. 23 – Jimmy Dunn Comedy 101

Capitol Center for the Arts – Chubb Theatre 44 S. Main St., Concord, ccanh.com
Saturday, Aug. 22 – GenX Takeover Comedy Tour
Thursday, Sept. 3 – Jerry Seinfeld
Friday, Sept. 11 – Maria Bamford
Saturday, Sept. 26 – Jessica Kirson

Chunky’s 707 Huse Road, Manchester, chunkys.com
Friday, Sept. 11 – Tom Cotter

Colonial Theatre 609 Main St., Laconia, etix.com
Saturday, Aug. 15 – Juston McKinney

Earth Eagle Tavern 350 Route 108, Somersworth, eventbrite.com
Saturday, Aug. 22 – Anders J Nielsen, Katy Coughlin, Zach Valencia
Friday, Sept. 11 – Emily Ruskowski

The Flying Monkey 39 Main St., Plymouth, etix.com
Friday, Aug. 14 – Peter Antoniou
Saturday, Sept. 19 – Bob Marley

Hampton Beach Casino Ballroom 169 Ocean Blvd., Hampton Beach, ticketmaster.com
Sunday, Sept. 27 – Terry Fator
Friday, Oct. 16 – Kathleen Madigan

Headliners Comedy Club 700 Elm St., Manchester, ovationtix.com
Saturday, Sept. 19 – Tim McKeever
Saturday, Sept. 26 – Rob Steen
Saturday, Oct. 3 – Jody Sloane
Saturday, Oct. 10 – Steve Bjork
Saturday, Oct. 17 – James Dorsey

McCue’s Comedy Club 580 Portsmouth Traffic Circle, Portsmouth, eventbrite.com
Saturday, Aug. 15 – Rodney Norman

Moka Pot 8 Hanover St., Manchester, eventbrite.com
Friday, Aug. 21 – Robby Slowik
Saturday, Sept. 19 – Sarah Tollemache, hosted by Ethan Cannon and featuring Dan Doherty
Saturday, Sept. 26 – Josh Day & Friends

The Music Hall Lounge 131 Congress St., Portsmouth, themusichall.org
Sunday, Aug. 30 – Dulcé Sloan
Saturday, Oct. 3 – Heather Shaw

Nashua Center for the Arts 201 Main St., Nashua, nashuacenterforthearts.com
Thursday, Sept. 24 – Natalie Cuomo
Monday, Oct. 5 – Nurse Blake

Newmarket Millspace 55 Main St., Newmarket, portsmouthnhtickets.com
Friday, Aug. 21 – Lamprey River Comedy Competition

Palace Theatre 80 Hanover St., Manchester, palacetheatre.org
Thursday, Oct. 1 – Colin Mochrie & Brad Sherwood
Friday, Oct. 9 – Juston McKinney

Players’ Ring 15 Marcy St., Portsmouth, portsmouthnhtickets.com
Friday, Aug. 14 – Stranger Than Fiction Improv

Queen City Center 215 Canal St., Manchester, wickedjoyful.com
Saturday, Sept. 19 – Jay Chanoine, Matt Barry, Brienna Woodward (comic-con event)

Rex Theatre 23 Amherst St., Manchester, palacetheatre.org
Friday, Sept. 18 – David Nihill
Saturday, Oct. 3 – Frank Santos, Jr.

Rockingham Ballroom 22 Ash Swamp Road, Newmarket, portsmouthnhtickets.com
Saturday, Sept. 5 – Jim Colliton

Sunstone Brewing Co. 298 Rockingham Road, Londonderry, eventbrite.com
Saturday, Aug. 22 – Amy Tee, Matt Barry, Alex Giampapa

Tupelo Music Hall 10 A St., Derry, tickets.tupelohall.com
Friday, Aug. 14 – Orlando Baxter, Kristy Kielbasinski and Ethan Printz
Saturday, Sept. 12 – Pete Correale

Zorvino Vineyards 226 Main St., Sandown, eventbrite.com
Thursday, Aug. 13 – Steve Bjork & Friends, Tim McKeever and Pat Napoli

Featured photo: Jody Sloan. Courtesy photo.

One more run

Senie Hunt plays through pain before surgery

Well-known for getting a lot from his guitar, by picking and strumming while also tapping out djembe-like rhythms on its surface, around a year and a half ago Senie Hunt learned his instrument was taking its own toll. As Hunt held a bag of groceries in his left hand, he reached for the doorknob with his right, and felt a sharp, wrist-to-elbow pain.

“I couldn’t even open my door,” he recalled. “I had to use my left hand.”

The source was an old injury, likely dating back to his college rugby and football days, aggravated for years by the demands of his playing. Tissue had been tearing and self-repairing, building up scar tissue that doctors now need to remove and seal back into place.

“It was either that or let it develop into chronic arthritis,” Hunt said. “I’d rather lose a little bit of motion and not have pain than not lose motion and have pain.”

The surgery will happen in Nashville, Hunt’s home for the past five years, right after he does a run of local shows. That means the guitarist is, for now, playing through it, shortening sets and adding breaks as needed. A recent gig finished with his hand wrapped in gauze.

“I just had to play a little differently through certain songs that were maybe a little less percussive,” he said. “The pain leveled down and helped me keep doing all the shows without having to cancel one because of it.”

There’s no paid time off for it, either. “I have insurance, but I can’t give myself that,” Hunt said. “So I recoup — I try to save as much as I can, especially during the tours, like any musician finds ways to.”

That makes this month’s homecoming swing, which ends Aug. 22 at Concord’s Barley House, something like a last stand before he heads South. His trio includes drummer Rory Walsh and bassist Tom Martin, who he’s built a tight chemistry with, and he’ll play several shows solo.

One big night is Aug. 14, when his trio is at the Concord basement bar where he often played before leaving New Hampshire to build a career in Music City.

“Penuche’s is one of those spots where anytime I come back, it’s like home for me,” he said. “It’s the family crowd, everyone we know.”

Hunt is plugged in for the trio shows, playing a Fender Stratocaster he repainted himself in the colors of the flag of Sierra Leone, the country he emigrated from as a young child before settling in New Hampshire.

“I wanted to pay homage to that in any way I could,” he said.

Surgery will align with another milestone for Hunt. He recently finished mixing and mastering his first full-length album, tentatively called The Journey. It’s been in the works since before the pandemic, and the plan is to release it during his recovery, to fill the gap in live shows.

Its title is a reflection of Hunt’s path in leaving his war-torn home country for the U.S., and his life in music.

“The songs try to tell a story of that,” he said. They include a reworked version of “Songbird,” one of the first songs he ever released, that now leans harder into the percussive, West African side of his playing. There’s also “Farewell, New Hampshire,” written when he first left for Nashville.

His new home has been good to him, Hunt said, primarily because he did his homework ahead of moving there.

“It could be a total train wreck if you’re trying to just jump in,” he said, adding he’s found a community beyond the country-leaning masses on the mile-long stretch of Broadway. “You’ve got hip-hop, hardcore metal, blues, jazz … I think the town is slowly starting to recognize all the other scenes.”

One thing missing from the current swing is the Concord Multicultural Festival. Hunt has played it multiple times, but surgery scheduling and September shows with his band back in Nashville mean he’ll bow out from this one. “I really had to focus on planning around my hand surgery this year,” he said.

He won’t have to miss out on seeing family. Nieces, nephews, his brother and sister-in-law, an older sister visiting from Massachusetts, and his twin sister are all in town during what’s also the family’s birthday month.

“Family first,” Hunt said. “Then, boom, all these friends from the years come out to the shows to hang out.”

Senie Hunt Trio at First Fridays: Dog Days of Summer
When: Friday, Aug. 7, at 6:15 p.m.
Where: Bicentennial Square, Concord
More: seniehunt.com
Solo in Concord at Rollins Park (33 Bow St.) on Saturday, Aug. 8, at 10 a.m. and at Sunfox Farm (Gully Hill Road) on Sunday, Aug. 9, at 5:45 p.m. Senie Hunt Trio at Penuche’s (Bicentennial Square) on Friday, Aug. 14, at 9 p.m. (21+)

Featured photo: Senie Hunt. Courtesy photo.

The Music Roundup 26/08/06

• Tribute era: The backstory of tribute act Kanin Wren’s Taylor Swift Experience sounds a lot like that of the recently hitched über-star, albeit sans sold-out stadium shows. Wren first picked up a guitar at age 5 and has performed since her teens. The award-nominated concert stops at Swift’s every era, from country hits to pop songs that have been quoted in Congress — costumes and all. Thursday, Aug. 6, at 7 p.m., LaBelle Winery, 14 Route 111, Derry, $45, labellewinery.com.

• And company: The Allman Brothers Band’s longest-serving bassist and Dead & Company member, Oteil Burbridge is jam band royalty as a sideman, but an upcoming show has his center stage. Earlier this year Burbridge released an album with singer Lamar Williams Jr., who joins him along with Melvin Seals, Steve Kimock, Jason Crosby, Johnny Kimock and Tom Guarna. Friday, Aug. 7, at 7:30 p.m., Nashua Center for the Arts, 201 Main St., Nashua, $57 and up, etix.com.

• Local hero: Saturday Night Live veteran and Late Night host Seth Meyers returns to his hometown for an evening of standup comedy to benefit a pair of New Hampshire charities. He also did fundraisers for CASA of NH and Granite State Children’s Alliance in 2018 and 2023, and told WMUR recently that a return every few years also prods him into writing a bunch of new jokes to tell. Friday, Aug. 7, at 8 p.m., SNHU Arena, 555 Elm St., Manchester, $63 and up, ticketmaster.com.

• Nineties night: A pair of hard-edged tribute acts perform in Concord. Opiate brings Tool’s dense, prog-metal alchemy to the stage, from early Undertow cuts to sprawling later epics. Frontman Rick Kinsella channels Maynard James Keenan’s brooding low register, while the band eschews note-perfect mimicry for hypnotic time signatures and heavy atmospherics. Alice, a tribute to Alice In Chains, opens. Saturday, Aug. 8, at 8 p.m., BNH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord, $31, ccanh.com.

• Roots outdoors: From the early ’90s through an amicable split in 2003, Say ZuZu toured hard and constantly, crossing the country in a converted school bus. In 2019 the Seacoast band reunited to play a few shows and got a label deal that led to 2023’s No Time To Lose, their first studio LP in 21 years. They hit the stage only in bursts, like an al fresco show at one of their favorite old venues. Sunday, Aug. 9, at 7 p.m., Stone Church, 5 Granite St., Newmarket, stonechurchrocks.com.

With the machine

Making peace, and art, with AI

When Elsie Kagan talks about painting, it sounds like a jazz player’s memory of hearing a standard for the first time.

“I’m full of influences from other artists and from the history of the medium I work in,” she said by phone from Chicago, mid-residency with the artist collective Tiger Strikes Asteroid. “So I don’t feel like I take full ownership for whatever I’m making. There’s this kind of porous relationship I have to all of my resources and influences.”

That porousness now includes a surprising collaborator: generative AI. Kagan’s solo exhibition, “the drop falls,” opens Aug. 7 at 3S Artspace in Portsmouth. The next day, she’ll demonstrate her process, which includes using an agent to transform her paintings, then join her husband, Carl Robichaud, for a public conversation about art and machine intelligence.

Robichaud has spent 25 years working on nuclear risk and now leads AI-related grantmaking at Longview Philanthropy, an organization Kagan describes as “concerned with the long-term protection of humanity.” Longview, she continued, considers AI “a real threat to our future.”

Paradoxically, this belief led Kagan to first engage with AI in her painting.

Such alarmism “was so difficult to wrap my imagination around,” she said. Then she realized there are visual AI models as well. “So I started to bring AI into the studio, thinking that it would be a very alien experience, but I actually had a kind of opposite reaction to them.”

Specifically, she found the models’ human-like characteristics soothing.

“The way that they operate visually seemed to kind of rhyme with what I’m interested in as a painter,” she said. “There are these visual cues they come up with as a response to prompts, but there are all these glitches, confusions and inventions … you’re sort of fighting between an experience of illusion and creating space and story and depth.”

Her method is simple to describe and harder to categorize. She paints, photographs the painting, feeds the image into an AI model, and lets whatever comes back seed the next canvas. Early on, she said, a model would take an unadorned photo of her canvas and abstract it, unprompted.

“It had kind of an innate understanding of my visual vocabulary as painting,” she said, calling the discovery “an absolute delight.” Crucially, she resists the idea that this is fundamentally different from how she’s always worked.

“It seemed very natural to kind of move from art historical references to AI,” she said, “because what is this AI? It’s just a kind of card catalog of all of our own making. It is us.” But she’s also watched the tool change under her, and not for the better, in her telling.

Outputs that once felt rough and painterly now come back “smoothed out,” closer to what she calls “faux reality” than to the glitchy abstraction she originally found useful. An early transformation of an impressionistic pool of water she called “long time gone” felt natural, while a later one seemed a bit Thomas Kinkade-y.

The model seemed to be correcting her, she said. “It’s decided that you’re a little too abstract here.”

The different systems she’s used have also converged in behavior: “They all used to kind of have their own characteristics and impulses, and they all behave more similarly now,” she believes. That convergence is a sign of where the technology’s heading. “Out into the stratosphere on its own, and kind of away from our own control and humanness.”

She’s aware this doesn’t square easily with the climate concerns running through some of her paintings, or the resource costs of massive data centers powering the models she uses.

“There’s no real good answers to any of this,” she said. “It’s coming for us, good and for bad. We should try to engage with it just as a human who’s experiencing the world as it is.”

That tension of engagement without illusion is likely to be present during the conversation with Robichaud, whom Kagan describes as her temperamental opposite on the subject. He evaluates AI risk “from a very high bird’s-eye point,” she said, mindful of its threat but having “an ability to sort of remove an anxious emotional reaction to the moment.”

Kagan calls herself granular and anxious by comparison. On stage, she plans to do something the gallery walls don’t: show her source material directly; “pull the curtain back” on which paintings prompted which AI responses, and introduce other artists grappling with the same tools — many of whom want nothing to do with it.

“A lot of my painter peers,” she said, “won’t touch this stuff with a 10-foot pole.

In the Meantime: Art Making Alongside Machine Intelligence – Artist Talk with Elsie Kagan + Carl Robichaud
When: Saturday, Aug. 8, 1 p.m. presentation, 2 p.m. conversation
Where: 3S Artspace, 319 Vaughan St., Portsmouth
Tickets: Free (Suggested donation $5), reserve spot at eventbrite.com
Elsie Kagan exhibit, ‘the drop falls,’ runs through Sept. 27 alongside Mina Kim’s exhibit, Between Lines and Breath

Featured photo: “long time gone” by Elsie Kagan (at left) and the AI interpretation of the work (at right). Courtesy images.

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