Author: Michael Witthaus

Arts exchange

Colby-Sawyer showcases Italian program

By Michael Witthaus

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Every year for more than two decades, students from Colby-Sawyer College in New London head to Italy for a semester at the Florence School of Fine Arts. The city serves as the study abroad program’s laboratory and studio. For the first time, an upcoming exhibition will show some of their works, along with those of the artists who run the school.

“Florence is filled with antiquities, art objects, museums and cathedrals; it’s very inspiring,” Jon Keenan, a professor who also runs the Davidow Fine Art Gallery at Colby-Sawyer, said in a recent phone interview. “These students are translating their experience of their studies there, and we’re able to exhibit it.”

Keenan got the idea during a visit last year with Florence School of Fine Arts founder Melania Lanzini, and photographer Charles Loverme, Lanzini’s husband, who runs the school with her. “I’ve been working with them pretty much since they started up,” he said. “We were saying, ‘We should have an exhibition, to highlight and celebrate our relationship.’”

Lanzini and Loverme will both display works.

A young man takes pictures of pictures on display in an art gallery.
Art by Colby-Sawyer students. Courtesy photo.

“Melania does a lot of lithography and collage work,” Keenan said. “She’s combining both traditional and contemporary approaches, working with some found objects, as well as depicting scenes in and around Florence and the area that they live in.”

In an artist statement, Loverme described the work he’ll bring to the exhibit: “For the past two decades, Italy has been both my home and my muse. Living in the historic center of Florence for 20 years, and now amidst the rolling hills of Chianti, I’ve found inspiration in the juxtaposition of city and countryside. This series explores these contrasting worlds.”

His black and white images primarily capture what Loverme calls “the timeless geometry of urban life, the interplay of light and shadow [that] highlights the city’s elegance,” while his color work focuses on rural subjects that “draw the eye to the small, overlooked details of the natural world — fallen leaves, scattered fruit, and the quiet poetry of decay.”

Representing Colby-Sawyer are Brian Cal-Mallo, who’s both a painter and photographer, printmaker Alex Jenkins, and Sota Morishita, a photographer. All are studio art and graphic design majors who studied in Florence during the summer program in 2024.

“Though varied in their chosen media, each artist shares common ground in finding inspiration in the contrasts of beauty in Florence, the birthplace of the Italian Renaissance, and the Tuscan region,” Keenan said. “This exhibition reminds us not only that art is a joy to experience but also a universal language and a vibrant expression of our shared humanity.”

The exhibit will open on Jan. 30 with the three student artists in attendance.

“We always do a nice reception to celebrate the audience and create community through the arts,” Keenan said. “We’re going to have lots of great food and beverages.”

It runs through April 2, and Loverme will visit on the final day for a meet and greet, and to discuss his work.

Funded by William H. and Sonja Carlson Davidow, the latter a 1956 Colby-Sawyer graduate, the gallery opened six years ago. Keenan was involved in the conception and execution of the state-of-the-art facility where it resides, which also has a black box theater and multiple facilities for students to create in.

It sits amidst natural beauty, with Mt. Kearsarge in view, and Keenan hosts six events a year in the gallery.

“My goal is to create community, bring people together through the arts,” he said. “This venue is the ideal place to do that — to provide learning for the public, and to support the arts. Whatever we can do to keep it happening is our privilege.”

Opening Reception: The Florence School of Fine Arts & Colby-Sawyer College Art Project

When: Thursday, Jan. 30, 4-6 p.m.
Where: Davidow Fine Art Gallery, 541 Main St., New London
More: colby-sawyer.edu

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

Music meld

Co-bill promises collaboration

By Michael Witthaus

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An upcoming show at Exeter’s Word Barn features a pair of unique performers both collaborating and performing their own music. Nate Sabat is an upright bass player who transforms his rhythm instrument into something all-encompassing. Rakish, the duo of Conor Hearn and Maura Shawn Scanlin, weds traditional Celtic music to modernity for a fresh sound.

The show is part of a four-date mini tour. “We’re really excited about it,” Hearn said, along with Scanlin, in a recent Zoom interview. “Nate’s going to play, and then we’ll play with Nate on his music, and Nate will play with us on our music…. it’s sort of this integrated thing that we’re trying to pull off.”

Rakish released their second-full length album, Now, O Now, in October. It’s a rich and varied work that kicks off with “Lonely Hotel Room,” a buoyant yet bittersweet ode to road weariness. The title track follows, one of two James Joyce poems set to music by Hearn, something he also did with W.B. Yeats’ “The Stolen Child” on their eponymous debut EP.

Hearn, a literature major at Tufts, delights in detecting song patterns in poetry. “Joyce was very interested in music, but we don’t necessarily hear the music that they had going on in their head when we read their poems except to the extent that we have their rhyme schemes and their meters and such,” he said. “To take a text like that and infer what a new melody could be lets us use some of our compositional muscles.”

The two took artistic risks on the new disc, like the Jamie Oshima-produced “765,” which echoes Natalie MacMaster’s 1999 crossover hit “In My Hands” with its fiddle electronica dance beat. It’s also the only track not helmed by Hearn and Scanlin, who elected to self-produce after working with Solas’s Seamus Egan on 2022’s Counting Down the Hours.

In addition to being lyrically compelling, with standout songs like “Island in the Sea” and “Lightly Come or Lightly Go,” Now, O Now stands out for another reason, Scanlin pointed out.

“The entirety of the album is all original musically, even excluding those two James Joyce poetry pieces,” she said, adding that she’s pleased to have it as a unifier, “instead of trying to come up with a thread about how JS Bach relates to this other old Irish tune relates to a tune that I wrote yesterday or something, which was the case on the previous album.”

Scanlin hails from Boone, North Carolina. Despite growing up in the Appalachian region, she initially studied classical music, but repeated trips to folk festivals with her parents got her interested in fiddlers like MacMaster, Hanneke Cassel and Liz Carroll. Hearn grew up in Washington, D.C., and got into Celtic music at summer camps and other places.

The pair met while both were attending different colleges, Hearn at Tufts and Scanlin at the New England Conservatory. Mutual friends and shared interests brought them together. They’d jam at Irish sessions at clubs like The Burren and The Druid; later they were in a band called Pumpkin Bread, before pairing up to focus on their shared favorite music.

One of the duo’s earliest supporters was Brian O’Donovan, a major force in New England’s Celtic music community and beyond before his death in 2023. “Brian was definitely the first to really elevate us and what we were doing and give us a platform and throw gigs at us,” Hearn said. Scanlin concurred, saying, “in a more tangible sense Brian literally did give us our very first gig together as Rakish, so our relationship as a band goes back all the way.”

Recently Rakish was named as the inaugural Brian O’Donovan Legacy Artist, part of an effort to memorialize the man who, here in New Hampshire, regularly hosted events like Celtic Christmas at Derry’s Pinkerton Academy. The weekend after this interview they served as resident artists at the Boston Celtic Music Festival, which featured a musical tribute to O’Donovan along with the awarding of six $2,500 grants in his name, with Rakish being among the recipients.

“Brian brought so much to Celtic music,” Scanlin said, from connecting people Stateside to folks back in Ireland as well as bringing the Northeast community and the rest of the U.S. together. “We’re really grateful to him, and also honored … to be stepping foot into this Brian O’Donovan Legacy role for its very first year. We’re so excited to see where that fund goes, and just totally excited to be the first in that role.”

Rakish and Nate Sabat

When: Thursday, Jan. 23, 7 p.m.
Where: Word Barn, 66 Newfields Road, Exeter
Tickets: $16 and up at portsmouthnhtickets.com

Featured Photo: Rakish. Photo by Sasha Pedro.

The Music Roundup 25/01/23

By Michael Witthaus

[email protected]

• B.I.G. Dead: Preposterous though it may look on paper, the sound of Grateful for Biggie makes sense. A melding of the Dead and the late Notorious B.I.G. interjects songs like “West L.A. Fadeaway” and “Eyes of the World” with lyrical flow from the late rapper, as jam band chops meet urban poetry. Watch two very different eras join together for a singular sonic experience. Thursday, Jan. 23, 8 p.m., Stone Church, 5 Granite St., Newmarket, $20 at portsmouthnhtickets.com.

• Blues return: In the middle of the 2010s Delanie Pickering made a mark on the Concord music scene with incendiary guitar playing and inspired singing. Now that she’s relocated to the Cape, it’s been too long since she’s done an area show, but that changes when Johnny Hoy & the Bluefish hit town. Pickering joined the popular Martha’s Vineyard band after laying low for a bit following her arrival. Friday, Jan. 24, 7:30 p.m., BNH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord, $28 at ccanh.com.

• Metal ladies: Three female-fronted Granite State bands appear at an event dubbed Metal Queens & Burgers. Under the Horizon is a power trio led by singer/bassist Izzy McIntyre that opened for Great White at Tupelo last summer. The Saturn Cycle, the duo of Ariana Doccola and Jordan Leonard, use looping for a big sound and have a new album due next month. Vermilion recently appeared at Pizzastock. Saturday, Jan. 25, 8 p.m., BAD BRGR, 1015 Elm St., Manchester, $10 at the door.

• Comedy tonight: Steve Scarfo will deliver the laughs at Chunky’s this weekend. A native Mainer, Scarfo came up in the Boston club scene and once took part in a mashup of Survivor and Last Comic Standing that’s worth a look on YouTube. Saturday, Jan. 25, 8 p.m., Chunky’s, 707 Huse Road, Manchester, $20 at chunkys.com.

• Southern accent: After attending a weekly cumbia night in San Francisco, Chuck Prophet became fascinated with the rhythmic Colombia-based music. During treatments for a stage 4 lymphoma diagnosis, he marinated in it, which led to the making of Wake the Dead, a life-affirming live in the studio album made with his band and two members of cumbia combo ¿Qiensave? Wednesday, Jan. 29, 8 p.m., 3S Artspace, 319 Vaughan St., Portsmouth, $22 and up at 3sarts.org.

Community gathering

Music school series begins with contradance

By Michael Witthaus

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An evening devoted to a centuries-long American folk music tradition will launch a series of public events from Concord Community Music School dubbed New England Roots & Branches. Contradance Music: The New England Contradance Repertoire will include a community jam session followed by a contradance called by a veteran and scholar of the style.

David Millstone began attending contradances soon after moving to New Hampshire’s Upper Valley in the early 1970s. Within a couple of years he was regularly attending dances led by Dudley Laufman. Millstone called Laufman the most influential figure in spreading contradancing across America and especially in New England.

“People would refer to Dudley dances,” Millstone said by phone recently. “He was a charismatic individual, and he was calling essentially every night from Maine to Connecticut back in the day. Other callers got interested, other musicians started playing, and the whole scene … really took off.”

Millstone was one of those inspired by Laufman; he began calling in the mid-’70s, and 50 years on he’s doing it still, in addition to writing books and album liner notes and making movies about contradance. As a caller he becomes an integral part of the band, and at the Jan. 25 event he’ll be working with four leading lights of New England acoustic music.

Guitarist Dan Faiella will accompany fiddlers Jordan Tirrell-Wysocki, Audrey Budington and Liz Faiella, who organized the series. She’s excited to have Millstone calling.

“My brother and I’ve worked with him through the years, and I used to go to his country dances,” Liz Faiella recalled in a recent phone interview. “He’s great at working with absolute beginners and really advanced dancers, getting everyone on the floor dancing comfortably and enjoying themselves.”

In 2015 Liz received a New Hampshire Arts Council grant to explore contradancing across the state. “I got to bop around, visit all of these different contradances, talk to the people who organized them and get a sense of the history,” she said. “I came away with a sense of how central it was to people’s lives here.”

As a musician she’s also impressed by the many tributaries joined together to make New England’s contradancing scene unique. “There’s stuff from Ireland, England, coming from Cape Breton, and we’ve got Quebecois music coming down here,” she said. “We’ve also got music from Appalachia, that sort of thing, and it’s all been integrated into this really rich contradance music tradition.”

All the band members are part of Concord Community Music School’s folk department.

“It really is a dream team; I can’t believe I get to work with these guys,” Liz said. “We all have been immersed in this scene and yet have our own takes on it. So it was kind of an opportunity to do some of what we do best, in sort of disentangling some of the genres.”

Beginning with a dance was the logical way to kick off the series, she continued. “We’re sort of starting out with ‘OK, here’s what we experience … this convergence of all of these different styles.’ Then, let’s pick that apart a little bit, and in the next few concerts, we’re going to celebrate different places that that music comes from.”

On Saturday, April 5, Transatlantic Tunes: Celtic & British Isles Folk Tunes celebrates music from the United Kingdom that became part of New England’s folk repertoire, and Music From North & South: Canadian & Appalachian Folk Tunes finishes the series on Friday, June 13.

Don’t fret about fitting in at the upcoming event, cautions David Millstone.

“If you can walk, you can do these dances,” he said, and welcoming newbies is a hallmark. “Experienced dancers will go up, say hello and invite people to dance, because that’s how we all learned how to do this. You don’t go to class for eight or 10 weeks … you learn it on the fly.”

Contradance Music: The New England Contradance Repertoire
When: Saturday, Jan. 25, 6 p.m.
Where: City Wide Community Center, 14 Canterbury Road, Concord
More: ccmusicschool.org/event/ne-roots-and-branches-1

Featured photo: Liz & Dan Faiella. Photo by Elizabeth Frantz.

Honky tonk highway

Modern Fools take a country turn

By Michael Witthaus

[email protected]

The idea for Clearly Country, the new EP from Modern Fools, came from a sign spotted by songwriter Josh Blair at a yard sale in Peterborough. He couldn’t shake it from his mind, so he returned to make an offer. “I didn’t know why I bought it,” he said by phone recently. “Then it just kind of dawned on me that it was going to be the cover of a honky-tonk album.”

The result is a gem, born as much from Blair’s love of purists like Hank Williams and Buck Owens as from his affinity for cosmic cowboys such as Gram Parsons and the Byrds album on which he served as a guiding light, Sweetheart of the Radio, an effort many point to as key in launching country rock as a genre.

Standout tracks on Clearly Country include “Ballroom Bender Blues,” a song about a guy whose drunkenness doubles for dancing; it rollicks like The Band with a pickup pedal steel player. “On My Mind” has guest vocals from Rachel Sumner and could be a cut from John Prine’s In Spite of Ourselves, while the high lonesome ballad “Eastern Standard” evokes the Everly Brothers, another big influence. Its supple harmonies are complemented by Braught’s spare, elegant soloing.

The Keene/Peterborough band — Blair, drummer Justin Gregory, Jon Braught on guitar, keyboard player Nick Hayes and Ian Galipeau on bass — will celebrate the seven-song collection at a release show in Concord on Jan. 18. The BNH Stage date includes support from indie rockers Slim Volume and singer/songwriter Rachel Berlin.

The group began over a decade ago with a different lineup and sound.

“We played a lot of local shows and kind of fizzled out around 2016,” Blair said. During the pandemic he and Gregory began working on ideas, later recruiting Braught, and Galipeau a while after that. The band released the introspective LP Seer in 2020 and Strange Offering in 2023.

Neither of those efforts bears much resemblance to Clearly Country.

“It’s a bit of a tangent … a departure from our normal sound,” Blair said of the new EP. “This is a concept album of sorts.” He’d kicked around ideas for a twang-forward effort soon after releasing their last album, including teaming with their friend Sumner.

“I wanted that old country duet sort of thing, like Johnny Cash and June Carter sort of thing; we all unanimously thought about Rachel,” Blair said. “She really liked the song and absolutely delivered … she sent us a quick demo back, and she just nailed it.”

Blair has significant roots in the Concord music scene dating back to playing psychedelic blues at Penuche’s with Ghost Dinner Band, and later in the supergroup Band Band. He immediately thought of the BNH Stage for the concert, reaching out to John McArthur at New Hampshire Music Collective, which books a lot of original bands there.

With NHMC on board, they began looking for bands to share the stage.

“Slim Volume was the first pick for everybody in the band; we just love their sound, it’s very complementary,” Blair said. “Then we thought of Rachel Berlin, she’s from the Concord area and just a great singer/songwriter with a great voice. It’s a really solid lineup and a really solid venue.”

The show is a solid reflection of the Capitol City’s continuous support for local artists. Even though Blair isn’t a resident, he feels an affinity from his years playing in the city, with so many different musical projects.

“Concord always felt like home in the music scene,” he said, “and it’s always kind of felt like a home away from home for me.”

Modern Fools with Slim Volume and Rachel Berlin
When: Friday, Jan. 17, 8 p.m.
Where: BNH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord
Tickets: $18.75 at ccanh.com

Featured Image: Courtesy photo.

The Music Roundup 25/01/16

By Michael Witthaus

[email protected]

• Get laughing: A solid lineup of standup talent is on hand at the monthly Comedy On Purpose showcase. Musical comedian Dave Andrews mixes self-deprecating humor with seasoned guitar skills to crowd-pleasing effect. Other comics include Ren Marquis, Jeremy Cangiano, Anthony Eugenio and host Alana Foden, who also books the show and has a fun side hustle. Thursday, Jan. 16, 7:30 p.m., Soho Asian Restaurant, 49 Lowell Road, Hudson, $18 in advance (320-5393), $20 at the door.

• Have yachts: Though Steely Dan is considered a significant yacht rocker band by Boat House Row, a subgenre tribute act making an upcoming area appearance, Donald Fagen had a curt, unprintable response to the notion when interviewed for a documentary. Whatever, it’s still entertaining, and this group’s sax player sparks a yearning for “Caribbean Queen” and “Baker Street.” Friday, Jan. 17, 8 p.m., Nashua Center for the Arts, 201 Main St., Nashua, $29 and up at etix.com.

• Fab three: Taking an inventive turn off the well-trod path of Beatles tributes, While My Guitar Gently Weeps is a trio, reimagining the harder-rocking side of the legendary band. Fans of Abbey Road’s second side (if you know, you know) will delight in versions of “The End,” along with Yellow Submarine’s oft-neglected gem “Hey Bulldog,” while marveling at their economy. Saturday, Jan. 18, 8 p.m., Shaskeen Pub, 909 Elm St., Manchester; whilemyguitargentlyweeps.band.

• Well-rounded: Few New England musicians are as beloved as Dan Blakeslee, who performs an afternoon set at an area barbecue joint. The seemingly always smiling singer, songwriter and guitarist honed his craft busking in MBTA stations. His charming folk songs like “Wizard Nor a King” have led to bigger stages like the Newport Folk Festival (he also drew the event’s poster). Sunday, Jan. 19, 3 p.m., MrSippy BBQ, 184 S. Main St., Rochester. See danblakeslee.com.

• Scene support: Celebrating a year since forming, New Hampshire Underground hosts a grand re-opening party with live acoustic rock from Jesse Rutstein and Quincy Lord, along with art from cofounder Andre Dumont (Dead Harrison), fashion illustrator and painter Brenda Drew and artistic polymath MyArtbyKF, all in support of the Nashua underground scene. Tuesday, Jan. 21, 4 p.m., Terminus Underground, 134 Haines St., Nashua. See newhampshireunderground.org.

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