Category: Nightlife

Jay Chanoine headlines Queen City Center afterparty

As his comedy special Chanoinigans hit YouTube on Halloween Day last year, Jay Chanoine already had enough new material for a follow-up. A week later he flew south to do a half hour of it at the Altercation Comedy Festival in Austin. His headlining set got a standing ovation.

Chanoine will debut the full special Sept. 19 at Queen City Center.

“I think this is the strongest hour of material that I’ve ever written,” he said as he prepared to do a quick set for a food pantry benefit at Manchester’s Shaskeen Pub recently. “I am so proud of this new batch.”

The show is the latest in a series harkening back to a weekly comedy night at the Shaskeen, where Chanoine did his first open mic in 2009. Matt Barry, another comic who also started there, though a bit later, also appears, with Brienna Woodward rounding out the bill.

Future shows in the QCC series, booked by Nick Lavallee’s Wicked Joyful, include Kendall Ferrall on Oct. 3, Sam Jay (HBO, SNL, Netflix) on Oct. 21, Alex Giampapa on Nov. 21, and two nights from Tina Friml (Comedy Central) on Dec. 11 and Dec. 12. A New Year’s Eve bash is also slated, with a lineup still being finalized.

Chanoine’s show is also part of Granite State Comicon, and telling jokes is only part of what the confirmed pop culture nerd will be doing at the event. He’ll also moderate a few celebrity panels, including one with Felicia Day, whose movie spinoff from her gamer-themed series The Guild just broke a Kickstarter record.

Additionally, he’ll run panels with voice actors from Teen Titans and the Grand Theft Auto 5 video game.

“My personality has two sides; take a comic book and a comedy stage and put them together,” he said. “I’ve wanted to do a comedy show to tie into Granitecon for years — because that’s me, man, and those are my people. Get them in a room where I can do jokes for them.”

The show starts promptly at 6:30, with doors at 6, and there’s a reason for the early start.

“They always do an after party at Shaskeen on Saturday night at 8,” Chanoine said. “Comicon stuff ends at 5, so there’s this gap in the middle of your nerdy Saturday. I was like, let’s give them a nerdy thing to come do in between.”

It caps a big year that included a trip to Alaska for the Before You Die Festival.

“The people that run it are friends of friends; we’ve been connected online,” Chanoine said. “It’s been a destination thing that I wanted to do eventually, and this year they were saying it might be the last one. I was like, well, I need to go, to cross it off the list.”

He’s not surprised to be one of a few Shaskeen comics — Barry’s another — to still be around many years later.

“I definitely knew I’d still be doing it at this point,” he said. “I mean, the first time I did stand-up, I was 12 years old. It was something I’d been in love with since I was about 6 or 7. I always wanted to be the funny friend, I was always cracking jokes and trying them out on different groups of friends.”

By the time he stopped playing in punk bands and walked on stage at Shaskeen for the first time, he was more than ready.

“I was already in that writing process. I was already doing it, and turns out part of it was just that I was an undiagnosed autistic kid, and I was trying to kind of formulate this practiced personality.” When he was diagnosed in 2024, it was more confirmation than revelation, and his doctor said he might not want to make it official. Nope, Chanoine replied. “I’m going to need there to be a piece of paper for me to talk about this on stage as much as I plan to,” he told her. “I’m going to need us to be 100% sure before I make fun of this disability.”

Even with that medical stamp, his new special is consistent with Chanoine’s 17 years as a standup.

“It’s always been, just take this,” he said, with a smile stuck between amused and incredulous, waving at his oversized glasses, worn-in Misfits T-shirt and red plaid pants, “and put it into a microphone. And it’s definitely more of that.”

Jay Chanoine, Matt Barry & Brienna Woodward
When: Saturday, Sept. 19, 6:30 p.m.
Where: Queen City Center, 215 Canal St., Manchester
Tickets: $20 at wickedjoyful.com

Featured photo: Jay Chanoine. Courtesy photo.

Din Check performs for India rural school charity

Many members of the Boston-based Bollywood band Din Check come from a generation born around 1947, India’s first year of independence from the British Empire. Rebuilding the country from scratch, they looked to education as the best gift to give their children. Their bet paid off.

“That was our ticket to come to America,” Din Check co-founder and singer Jolly Bhatia said in a recent Zoom chat. Bhatia moved to the U.S. and earned a master’s degree at St. John’s University. He and the band’s members all have careers; he serves as VP of Quality at a clinical-stage biotech company in Watertown, Mass.

With that in mind, the group is giving back. Its 100th show, happening Sept. 13 at Nashua High School North, will be the inaugural fundraiser for the local chapter of Ekal Vidyalaya Foundation, an international charity that funds schools for underprivileged children in rural India.

It’s the kind of helping hand that Bhatia’s parents’ generation strove to bestow upon their children.

“Just like [they] invested in us to give us that path to a better life,” he said, “we want to enable that opportunity to the people who may not get that access ever.”

Arti Khurana and Manisha Jain head up Ekal Vidyalaya’s New Hampshire chapter, the Sept. 13 show’s beneficiary. They had seen Din Check perform at the organization’s Massachusetts and national events, and reached out directly to bring the band north.

“New Hampshire,” Bhatia joked, “is the little brother of Massachusetts.”

The concert’s musical theme is Assi Nabbe Poore Sau. “It means 80, 90 and the hundreds after that,” Bhatia said, a nod to a setlist spanning four to five decades of Bollywood music. It also underscores the 100-show milestone of a band hatched in a basement in 2010 and still playing for a love of music and fun.

The band’s origin is “a series of coincidences,” Bhatia said. He and future bandmate Sameer Bhambhani met at a Halloween party for their elementary school-age kids in 2010. A mutual friend introduced them, mentioning the two had attended the same engineering college in India, 20 years apart, without ever crossing paths.

They bonded over their shared love of music and, with percussionist Sam Rao, officially formed Din Check in April 2011. Anandini Sekhar joined in August. The American-born keyboard player and singer had found the band online and was drawn in by memories of her mixtapes from India.

A year later, singer Meenakshi Kulshreshtha, who’s also Bhatia’s wife, joined the group. Unlike her husband, who learned music by ear and a passion for Bollywood, she’s classically trained. “A phenomenal musician,” Bhatia said. “She’s the person who kind of kicks me and teaches me technically and makes me a better musician every day.”

A rhythm section of drummer Kamal Dasu and Mike Grover on bass solidified five years in.

“It completed the band like perfect-fit puzzle pieces,” Meenakshi told online magazine Women Who Win in 2021, adding, “The foundation of Din Check is a bunch of good human beings who are also great friends, full of passion, fun, talent; the spirit of our band is sharing joy and happiness with everyone through music.”

The band’s biggest turning point, Bhatia said, came after Din Check played a party in Rhode Island to honor doctors and nurses. The host was a big fan. Fortuitously, he was also the owner of the nearby Park Theatre. “One of the top sound systems in the country,” Bhatia recalled. He offered it to them gratis, and they played a successful show there.

“That was a major stepping stone that brought us to the Boston limelight,” he said. They then began leaning into a model that keeps them busy and playing shows across the country: a locally grown, yet authentically Bollywood band doing galas for organizations that otherwise might fly in performers from India at a higher cost.

“They end up saving more money for their noble causes, and we get to go share our message of joy,” Bhatia said.

Din Check also writes and records its own music, releasing a song a year for the past three years. The latest single, released in May, is “Tumhein Roz.”

Their shows sprawl across Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Gujarati music, carried by members fluent in several different languages. There are occasional detours into rock and pop mashups. “There’s going to be a lot of color and energy and songs people will want to sing along with,” Bhatia said. “Come be a part of the show.”

Din Check – A Benefit for Ekal Vidyalaya of New Hampshire
When: Sunday, Sept. 13, at 2 p.m.
Where: Nashua High School North, 8 Titan Way, Nashua
Tickets: $40 and up at ekal.org

Featured photo: Din Check. Courtesy photo.

Peter Asher tells stories ahead of The Fixx and Zombies singer Blunstone

From lending Paul McCartney his family’s piano to write “I Want To Hold Your Hand” to discovering James Taylor and later staking his career on the future star, to later producing Linda Ronstadt and helping turn Laurel Canyon into a sound as well as a place, Peter Asher has earned a nickname in rock history: Everywhere Man.

Gratefully, the 82-year-old Asher loves to talk about his time as a performer, producer, manager, record company executive and A&R man. At an upcoming Tupelo Music Hall appearance he’ll tell stories and play songs he made with Peter & Gordon like “World Without Love” and “I Go To Pieces,” along with others he helped bring to life.

The Sept. 8 show touches on three separate rock eras: the 1960s British Invasion that Asher helped launch, and the rush of acts that came after, which included The Zombies; their lead singer, Colin Blunstone, is on the bill. Finally, New Wave is represented by The Fixx, who had hits like “Red Sky At Night” and “One Thing Leads To Another.”

As to how the trio of acts ended up touring together, Asher doesn’t have a tidy answer.

“We hope it fits,” he said. “It wasn’t my idea … by the time it reached me, someone was saying, ‘What do you think about this?’ and I went, ‘That sounds pretty cool — and odd.’” Rehearsals were due to start a few days after the interview.

Blunstone will play a solo set drawing on “She’s Not There,” “Time of the Season” and his early ’70s solo album One Year. The Fixx headlines, with the Reach the Beach catalog that made them MTV stars. Asher hasn’t seen them live until now. “I remember the records, and obviously the hits most of all,” he said. “I’m very excited about it.”

He and Blunstone have crossed paths, appearing on the same British television shows when both had hits in the ’60s, but this 19-date tour is their first together.

“I was a big fan of the Zombies,” Asher said. “Their songs are great, but also [Blunstone’s] voice is spectacularly good. I heard him sing not that long ago, and he sounded amazing.”

Asher’s set is divided between music and stories, the latter with plenty of sidebars.

“I often apologize for digressing too much on stage,” he said, but he receives the deference due to his vaunted history. “When I talk to the audience, they always kind of go, no, go ahead, digress — we’re interested.”

Some stories are never too old to tell, like the one about “You’ve Got a Friend,” famously poached from Carole King by James Taylor for Sweet Baby James after he saw her do it at L.A.’s Troubadour. Recently the story got an update, when King revealed that she’d written it in response to Taylor’s “Fire and Rain.”

“We had no idea,” Asher said, recalling the lyric that sparked King. “‘I’ve seen lonely times when I could not find a friend’ … Carole was basically saying, ‘No, you can find one. I’m here.’ Which changes the song immensely. When things like that happen, you go, ‘Wow, that’s a key improvement on the original story.’”

Peter & Gordon’s initial smash also makes for a fun yarn. McCartney wrote “World Without Love” solo and Lennon hated it. “John thought the opening line ‘Please lock me away’ was a ridiculous way to start a song, so I asked Paul if we could have it, and he said yes,” Asher recalled. “The Beatles were never going to record it.”

McCartney lived in the Asher family home at the time and was engaged to Peter’s sister Jane. Asher dismissed the idea that songs were a form of rent on his London room.

“They were fans of Lieber & Stoller, Mann & Weil, Goffin & King,” he said. “They didn’t think it was giving away songs … [it was] one of the roles they wanted to play.”

When Peter & Gordon’s first hit bumped “Can’t Buy Me Love” from the top of the charts, it delighted McCartney. “Eventually someone’s going to replace you at No. 1 because it’s an inevitable fact,” he told a journalist who’d asked if he was annoyed at being displaced. “It might as well be a song that you wrote. You’re still making money.”

Asher talks about moving to the U.S. solely based on his belief in an unknown Taylor — “I bet my career on James entirely with confidence” — and insisting, against the norms of the era, that Ronstadt’s own ideas about her music be taken seriously, rather than managed around.

The latter notion set Asher apart almost as much as his golden ear, and it helped give the world Heart Like A Wheel.

“She was allegedly ‘difficult’ for an artist, which only meant that she kind of insisted on things, or at least that her point of view and her ideas for a song be considered,” he said. “Some people thought it was their job to make those decisions for her … my instinct was that it was my job to make her decisions work.”

The Fixx, Colin Blunstone of The Zombies, and Peter Asher’s Songs & Stories
When: Tuesday, Sept. 8, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Tupelo Music Hall, 10 A St., Derry
Tickets: $75 and up at tupelohall.com

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

Singer-songwriter John Gorka performs in Manchester

Even if he’s performed since the late 1970s, winning the prestigious Kerrville New Folk Award in 1984 and coming up in the Greenwich Village Fast Folk Scene during that decade, John Gorka still feels a touch of nervousness every time he walks on stage.

“The only time I don’t … is if I’ve done a bunch of shows in a row and I’m too tired to be nervous,” Gorka said in a Zoom interview from his home in Minnesota. It means it still matters, he added. “Frank Sinatra said something about having nerves, he said that’s just a sign that you care.”

He’s still working the muscle he began to hone when the late Jack Hardy told him in 1979 that success comes from a schedule. “I told him, ‘I basically wait for inspiration to strike,’ and he said, ‘that’s a copout — you’ll come up with more songs quicker if you put the time in, even if you throw out three quarters of what you come up with.’”

On “Favorite Place,” a song that leads off his most recent album unentitled, Gorka mused on a process that’s “still mysterious and still calls me.” It’s about the joy he finds in the middle of writing, when he knows it’s going to be a song and it’s just a matter of getting all the details right. Throughout, Hardy’s admonition echoes.

“Hope follows action … you start out with showing up and going to work,” he said. “Hopefully, during the working on stuff, a spark of inspiration will come along that’ll fuel you for the rest of the time. These days, despair is not an option, so I’ve got to do something … then the hope will come.”

Gorka deftly manifests that feeling on a standout track from unentitled called “Particle & Wave.”

The song came in response to the 2018 March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C.

“Watching the coverage on CNN, a still small voice in my head said, ‘never stop believing there’s goodness in the world,’” Gorka recalled. “It was like, ‘OK, that sounds like the language of a song.’”

With lines like “Though justice seems to hesitate / It’s not too late,” he introduces it at concerts with a background story. More often, though, Gorka prefers to let audiences infer the meaning of his songs. Sometimes he’s surprised, like the time a woman told him “I Saw a Stranger With Your Hair” reminded her of a son she’d lost.

“I’d thought of it mainly as a romantic song, but that’s the way it hit her, and that’s why it meant something to her,” he said. “People will figure out what the song is about to them … you don’t want to put blinders on the listener by describing what it’s about too much or where it came from.”

The new record, his 10th for Red House Records, is Gorka’s first release in seven years, with some songs that date even further back.

“There were some things from a while ago that I started to record but never finished, some were new and some were old,” he said. “It was over a fairly long period of time.”

He hosts virtual songwriting workshops multiple times a year with Eliza Gilkyson — the next is in October — and one piece of advice he shares is that modest ambitions are best. “So you’re not trying to write a song for all mankind,” he said. “Set some limits and then work within those limits — and there’s an infinity even within those.”

Hardy and the habit of writing as a bedrock guide him.

“Clear a physical space, as well as your mind, then monitor the thoughts and images coming through,” he said. “For me, morning brain is the most productive. Before going to bed, that’s also a good time — because the song will keep playing through the day.”

As he sings on another great song from unentitled, “Stay until the night’s gone / Stay till you can dream again.”

John Gorka
When: Saturday, Aug. 29, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Rex Theatre, 23 Amherst St., Manchester
Tickets: $40 at palacetheatre.org

Featured photo: John Gorka. Photo by Robert Hakalski.

Wildflower Festival returns with a louder sound and a bigger garden

When Griff Comtois and two friends threw the first Wildflower Festival in 2023, it was three bands and a few dozen art vendors packed around the amphitheater at Milford’s Keyes Memorial Park. Four years later, the environmentally centered event is established enough that Comtois barely recalls the scramble of those early days.

“It feels a lot easier,” he said recently. “People know about us now, so that’s generally good.”

The fourth annual Wildflower Festival returns to Keyes Field Stage on Saturday, Aug. 22, running from noon to 9 p.m. This year brings a notable shift in sound, more art vendors and new education partners, and, for the first time, bands on the bill will be paid for their performances.

Every act this year hails from Massachusetts or New Hampshire, with a musical shift from the more folk- and jam-oriented acts of 2025, like headliner Nova One, toward punk, indie and shoegaze.

“There’s still some folk going on, but we switched styles a little bit,” Comtois said.

“We’ve all kind of just been really into this type of music lately, a lot more punk stuff,” he continued. “It kind of felt natural for us to gather all of our friends and the people we know within the area that play music, instead of trying to find a big name to get a draw.”

7-11 Jesus headlines, with Gollylagging, Tysk Tysk Tysk (replacing originally booked Main Era), Capo / Regime, Parachute Club, Cozy Throne, Thoughtsick, Time Eater, Milk Street, Five Feet and Star Family Singers. Returning for a third appearance is Darth Brandon; its frontman Andrew West, books much of the festival’s music.

The Wildflower Fest art market keeps growing as well. There are 60 vendors this year, up from roughly 50 in 2025. Comtois said organizers are intentionally keeping the number in that range. “It’s a good sweet spot for the amount of vendors to the amount of shoppers we have,” he said.

Expect the usual mix of stickers, prints, original paintings, brass sculptures, pottery, woodworking and crocheted items, plus what Comtois described as a strong showing of plant-inspired art and upcycled clothing this year.

“I always like to see them because I just feel like they fit the vibe of the festival,” he said.

New for 2026 is a slate of education-focused exhibitors. The Caterpillar Lab is bringing live caterpillars and butterflies for hands-on demonstrations, New Hampshire Audubon will have a table, and Queerlective is setting up a pressed-flower button-making station.

Partners underscore the festival’s growth as well, with Triangle Credit Union, Bangor Savings Bank and Fieldstone signing on this year.

“That’s a really nice part,” Comtois said. “Now that we’re more known as a running institution, it’s easier to get sponsors by showing them the things that we’ve done in the past.”

The festival’s original mission of funding pollinator habitat at Keyes Field keeps expanding. A bed of packed dirt in year one, the gazebo garden is now well established, though a few spots are still finding their footing. The meadow strip added last year has taken off: plugs once the size of a fist are now 5 to 6 feet tall and 2 to 3 feet wide.

This spring the group planted a redbud tree and a chokeberry, with more trees planned for fall. Groundbreaking for a planting area near the park’s volleyball courts also began recently.

“That will be cool,” Comtois said. “I think we’re going to get some plants that are 10 to 12 feet tall for that.”

Though national debates about sustainability are a concern, the festival’s ambitions will stay local for now — with an eye toward the future.

“My dream is for us to have more of a national impact,” Comtois said. “A lot of rhetoric and policies are going around now that are not good for us or the environment. I’d like to change that mindset.”

Wildflower Festival
When: Saturday, Aug. 22, noon to 9 p.m.
Where: Keyes Field Stage, Keyes Park, 45 Elm St., Milford
Tickets: Sliding scale (suggested donation $10), eventbrite.com

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.