Hey everyone, we’re baaaack!

Our concert series will be on hold for a while, along with much of the rest of everything. We wish you joy, comfort and health in these challenging times.

 

John Coster is our guest artist on the first Friday in March – one of America’s most eloquent songwriters and a longtime contributor to the revival of traditional music. He is a distinctive singer and guitarist and a true pioneer among Celtic harmonica players. And he’s a local musical treasure that you may not yet know about.

“A songwriter of unusual eloquence and sensitivity who could become a national figure.”

— Boston Globe

His earliest performing experiences included a tour across Canada in an old time music and magic show featuring Walt Koken of the legendary Highwoods Band and Ricky Jay the magician. During time spent In Canada, he was influenced greatly by Cape Breton’s fiddlers and the guitar playing of John Allen Cameron, the “Godfather of Canadian Celtic music”. As a songwriter and bandleader, he has recorded seven albums and regularly performed  with some some of America’s best folk and roots rock musicians, including veterans who’ve worked with Dylan, Leonard Cohen, the Allman Brothers and Crosby Stills and Nash.  John’s music blends an edgy but refined song writing style with deep roots in traditional music. 

John is currently performing solo and with Jim Matus, master of the laoutar, an eight stringed deeply resonant instrument similar to a  mandocello. The two achieve a rich powerful sound, often blending Jim’s laoutar with John’s 12 string guitar and harmonicas. This enables them to create rich textures for John’s songs and explore traditional music  with an instrumental combination not heard before. The video below of Old Stones and Broken Bones was taken at the first gig John did with Jim.

We’re looking forward to this concert, and hope you’ll join us!

Friday Feb 14th, Special Second Friday Concert/Valentine’s Day Dance! 

7-8 Swing/Lindy Hop Dance Lesson (price included in concert admission) 8-10 Concert/Dance

On Feb 7th, First Friday Concerts at Coho presents trailblazing cellist and award-winning composer Stephen Katz! Besides being a world-class musician, Steven is also a friend of a number of us here at cohousing, and we’re glad to share what will no doubt be an intimate, inspiring, and certainly unusual solo concert with you!

More about Steven below this announcement about our concert/dance one week later:

Friday Feb 14th, Special Second Friday Concert/Valentine’s Day Dance! 7-8 Swing/Lindy Hop Dance Lesson (price included in concert admission) 8-10 Concert/Dance

 

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Stephen has charted new territory for the rhythmic potential of the cello with the groundbreaking approach he calls Flying Pizzicato. His compositions juggle two or three voices at a time, making music that simultaneously lays grooves, weaves tunes, and lifts spirits.

He has premiered his cello compositions at Carnegie Recital Hall and performed internationally as a soloist, and with the Paul Winter Consort, Rachael Sage, the Essex String Quartet and Susan Werner.
He is a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient through the SUNY/Buffalo Arts in Healthcare Initiative. As a film composer, his score for The Rich Have Their Own Photographers won the Jury Prize Gold Medal for Best Impact of Music in a Documentary at the Park City Film Music Festival. He also scored Two Square Miles which has been broadcast nationally on PBS/Independent Lens. Stephen’s performances have been broadcast on PRI’s Performance Today.

An improviser and composer in the Dance and Theater worlds, Stephen has collaborated and performed with Andrew Harwood, Chris Aiken, members of Pilobolus and Beverly Blossom dance companies, and has been a Visiting Artist at Amherst College (MA).  He has made music for hundreds of “movement jams” using digital looping hardware to weave dynamic tapestries of sound.  As a co-founder of the movement/theater company Seen & Heard with the late dancer and monologist BJ Goodwin, he literally danced with the cello while accompanying the dramas they played out on stage.

As a teacher, Stephen has been a regular workshop presenter at the New Directions Cello Festival since it’s inception in 1994. He also has the distinction of being the most frequent guest performer at the Fest.

New York Times:
With a bow and fingers as light as feathers Stephen Katz makes a cello bring out meanings you might not have suspected were there.

Paul Winter:
– Winner of 6 Grammy Awards
Stephen Katz makes some remarkably innovative music with the cello. While revering its traditions, he is on the cutting edge of liberating the instrument from the printed page… His composition Eight Days of Eve is the most beautiful piece of ‘looped’ music I have ever heard.

Chris White, Director, New Directions Cello Association:
A cellist whose name is almost synonymous with our festival, Stephen Katz has revolutionized pizzicato technique for the cello. In addition, his use of looping to layer multiple tracks of cello in performance is breathtaking. All of this is in the service of his beautiful and imaginative, original music.

Eugene Friesen, cellist, composer, Grammy winner:
Stephen’s musical talents are formidable! He has a distinctive harmonic language, lovely sense of phrasing, chops, and a beautiful voice.

Jody Elff, Sound artist, technician (Laurie Anderson, Paul Simon):
Of all the live looping performers I’ve heard, Stephen Katz has not only mastered his instrument, reinvented its technique, but also integrated the potential of electronics into his compositions.

by James Heflin, Valley Advocate:
When Stephen Katz breaks out his cello to illustrate a musical point, he often wears an expression somewhere between concentration and delight. He’s having a very good time. That’s probably why he’s in such demand—Katz plays solo shows (often using looping), backs up dancers at area shindigs, plays with the Paul Winter Consort, and is musical director of Wire Monkey Dance. He also regularly plays at the New Directions Cello Festival, where he teaches some of the techniques he’s developed for the instrument.

In a recent interview, Katz revealed that he began his musical life wanting to be a drummer. “I loved rhythm in pop,” says Katz. “I played drums with a pillow and a box.” But his mother talked him out of such a loud, non-melodic instrument. That led to the cello, says Katz: “I started playing chamber music before I really knew what anything else was.”

Later, he discovered guitar, and found a lot to like. “When I got a guitar I could play rhythms, which is what I loved about music,” he says. Even so, Katz says, he eventually decided to study classical cello in college, rather than focus on guitar.

Katz, originally from San Francisco, got an invite to audition for a quartet at UMass-Amherst, and came to New England to join the group in 1986. When that group disbanded, Katz taught at a school in northwest Connecticut. His time there offered him a chance to return to composing, and his cello playing went in some quite new directions.

“I started composing things on the cello that were a lot like what I liked on the guitar. I’d done a lot of contemporary music and I knew a lot about making sounds on the cello… music that was close to my heart, but without a lot of heart in it. I wanted to write music that was more basic, rhythmic music, but on the cello.”

When Katz picks up his instrument, it’s quickly apparent that the strictures of classical methods aren’t enough to encompass his imaginings. He doesn’t seem to need a bow, and his rhythmic approach has helped him discover new ways to get the sounds he wants. The result of his experimentation was a rhythmic sort of finger-striking that resembles electric bass methods more than traditional cello playing.

Katz explains that, groundbreaking though such styles might have been when he first started using them, the context of contemporary music and the desires of cellists to play in new settings have conspired to make the unusual usual: “Folks like me, listening to contemporary music, pop music, want to make rhythmic music with the cello, and sing with it, and play in bands, put it through a distortion pedal, through an echo or a looping pedal.”

At the most recent installment of the New Directions Cello Festival, now in its 14th year, Katz shared one of his methods—a finger-and-thumb near-strum using a big arm motion to sweep across the strings—with other cellists. “I gave a workshop in the technique I call ‘flying pizzicato.’ When Katz demonstrates “flying pizzicato,” it looks much like a guitar player’s strumming. But the result is a quick kind of string hit that is downright funky, evoking African rhythmic complexities and even the guitar stylings of players like Habib Koite or Oliver Mtukudzi.

“What I love about drumming, especially native, indigenous African drumming less influenced by contemporary media, [is that the] rhythms are more inherent to the way the body moves. I’m doing it through my arm. That’s part of why this approach works for me. Because it’s a continuous flow. It’s very simple, the premise. The limitations are great. There are only four strings, one hand to tune them while I’m playing, and a thumb and a finger. What are the possibilities? How much music can be made?”

Rather than simply learning how one is supposed to play the cello, he has made the instrument his own with his adventurous style. When he speaks about his playing, Katz often sounds more like a philosopher than a classical musician, and it is his well-thought-out approach that has led him both to new discoveries and to an unusual, engaging style that is a joy to watch in action.

“This instrument was not made for rhythm—it was made for melody in particular, for the bow, which I still use occasionally,” says Katz. “But I have wanted to bring those things together. It’s what I love to do.”

Happy New Year everyone! Start it out right with a new concert by favorites Claudia Schmidt and Sally Rogers at Coho! Claudia and Sally are each capable of giving your goosebumps goosebumps. An evening listening to either of their performances is enough to bring you out of your deepest slumps and back into the world of healthy passions and love of life in general. To have these two women together on the same bill is almost overwhelming in so many deeply delightful ways. About Sally and Claudia Claudia Schmidt and Sally Rogers have been weaving their voices, dulcimers, and guitars together for decades, creating an atmosphere of joy and musical lushness that audiences find so irresistible, they frequently join right in.

Starting with their soaring harmonies – “blood harmony” was how one fan described it – fascinating double dulcimer work, the mix of 6 and 12 string guitars, then brought together with a wide choice of material encompassing their originals, traditional, and choice compositions of contemporary songwriters, a concert by these two masters of their craft is an immensely satisfying and restorative experience. Time has only deepened and enriched the music they create together.

CLAUDIA SCHMIDT

“If it were the intention of the creator or creators of this universe to perfectly blend together the night sky with moon and stars, it might have been their intention as well to deliver Claudia Schmidt as their messenger of reminder. To say that Schmidt is simply a performer with a talent to entertain would be a miscarriage of understatement. Schmidt takes her audiences into her world as easily as the child who discovers the endless universes that exist in a cardboard box. Schmidt weaves her way through her concert in much the same manner as a jester. Interwoven anecdotes, revealing her past and present, bring people to expect a relationship between themselves and memories driven deep with the passage of time. The concert is an endless display of self-realization through humor and longing, leaving audience members yearning to become an integral part of her world. Having performed on stages across the country, Schmidt has developed the ability to remain fresh. She enjoys her talent to entertain as much as the audience enjoys being entertained.”

SALLY ROGERS

Sally Rogers performs an evening of traditional, contemporary and original ballads and song, interwoven with stories taken from her life as a performer, a wife, and a mother. Throughout her concerts, she accompanies herself on guitar and Appalachian dulcimer, or performs without accompaniment in a voice that needs no further enhancement.  Reviewers have described her voice in superlatives ranging from “remarkable” to “mesmerizing.”  As one critic summarized, “…it’s really next to impossible to do justice to a voice of that quality.”  Much of the material performed by Sally includes compositions of her own, many of which are considered classics of the folk and popular genre. Here’s the facebook event:  – let us know you’re coming!