Coming up: Outdoor concerts, gallery strolls take center-stage
BY MICHELLE GENZ
Staff Writer
With the season’s arts and lecture series finally expired, outdoor concerts and gallery strolls are the stalwarts of summer. This weekend, they coincide with a nearly full moon: no RSVP required.
Sadly, the May Day stroll is going to be minus-one in terms of galleries. Barry Shapiro, longtime owner of Lighthouse Frame and Art Studio, officially closed this week. Shapiro is a talented artist and major supporter of the district. His informal, wine-infused evenings of painting and conversation will be very much missed.
Meanwhile, nearby Gallery 14 celebrates two of its artist-founders, Dorothy Napp Schindel and Barbara du Pont, in this month’s show of their works. Schindel’s collages are inspired by laundry scenes here and abroad; du Pont, known for her nature photography, this time gives us images of inanimate objects: relics and structures.
A call-out to photographers: The way to get your plus-one into the opening reception of A.E. Backus Museum’s “Through the Eye of a Camera” juried photography show next weekend is to submit a photograph to the annual event – and the last day to do that is Saturday, in person. The museum is in Fort Pierce’s downtown; it’s only open until 3 p.m., but you can always tie it in to the Saturday morning Farmer’s Market and maybe shrimp and grits for lunch at 12-A Buoy.
The photography exhibition runs through mid-July.
Also in Fort Pierce, this is the weekend for the monthly Friday Fest street fair in the city’s downtown area. Live music includes Hurricane Five and the Storm Horns and a mariachi band. People start arriving around 5:30 p.m. and the party lasts until 9 p.m.
No place prettier than the ocean to watch that almost-full moon rise. Saturday night, the sound track will be bluegrass at Sebastian Inlet State Park as the park’s Night Sounds concert series hosts the Atlantic Bluegrass band on Coconut Point alongside the inlet on its south side.
The five-piece Brevard-based band plays traditional bluegrass. Leo Underwood heads up the band; he’s played mandolin for over 30 years; his older brother David sings and plays guitar and upright bass.
In the 1970s, the brothers’ uncle, Bob Underwood, used to run a “pickin’ parlor” in Satellite Beach, where Atlantic Bluegrass’s banjo player John Apfelthaler learned to play and eventually taught.
Ed Kuntz of Indialantic is the fiddle player, and he once recorded with James Monroe, Bill’s son. Ken Parker plays bass and sings; a retired electrical engineer from Palm Bay, he played on a Grammy-nominated album with Todd Taylor, reputed to be the world’s fastest banjo player.
And yes, the tradition of Bluegrass reaches down to Florida; the national anthem of fiddle players, “Orange Blossom Special,” was written and copyrighted in 1939 not by Chubby Wise, the Jacksonville fiddler who made it a hit, but by Ervin Rouse, an alcoholic schizophrenic who lived in a shack in the Everglades.
If you’ve got the urge for a cultural getaway, there are two terrific acts this weekend at Plaza Live, a great little theater in between Winter Park and Orlando’s downtown.
Friday, the Robert Cray Band performs. Saturday night, Joan Armatrading stops in on a tour she is calling her last. It’s all Armatrading, no back-up band, just her own electric guitar and electrifying voice that ranges from falsetto to rough-house rock. The Village Voice review of her New York appearance last week said her songs stood up well to the bare-bones performance. The only adornment on the stage were slides of the singer through 40 years of history, including shots with the late Nelson Mandela.
Armatrading, now in her mid-60s, was born in St. Kitts and raised in a working class neighborhood in Birmingham, England. In the last decade or so, she has been named to the Order of the British Empire, produced a blues album in 2007 that debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Blues Chart, and another album, “This Charming Life,” that peaked at No. 4 on the Billboard Folk Chart.
Blues artist Robert Cray hails from the same era as Armatrading, and critics say his music has never been better. His virtuoso talents span all his points of focus: guitar-playing, singing and song-writing. He delivers to the backdrop of an excellent band in a concert likely to draw largely from his latest album, “In My Soul.”
Born in Columbus, GA, raised in Virginia and later relocated to Eugene, OR, where he formed his band, Cray’s blues have won him five Grammies. He’s played with rock and blues royalty including Eric Clapton, Buddy Guy, John Lee Hooker and Chuck Berry and played with Stevie Ray Vaughan the night Vaughan was killed in a helicopter crash.
While those two concerts take some scrambling to get to this weekend, this would be a good time to buy tickets for Steve Earle who appears at Plaza Live May 23 with his band the Dukes. The tour is supporting his newest album, Terraplane, a Texas and Chicago blues album. It follows Townes, a collection of covers by his late friend Townes Van Zandt; and before that, Washington Square Serenade, which won a Grammy.