Something about the music we hear in summertime seems to embed in our memory banks, indelibly linked to long days, intoxicating heat and an increase in idle time. There may also be a seasonal uptick in interest for the music of the past. This weekend and next, two blast-from-the-past shows are within range of Vero and good for a few hours of throw-back.
If you went to college in the 1970s anywhere near Florida, you probably belong at Melbourne’s King Center Saturday night, where the music of Jacksonville’s Allman Brothers Band will be performed by Classic Albums Live, a group of musicians committed to replicating great albums note for note – minus the hokey impersonation aspect. The concert starts at 8 p.m., but you can enjoy the levity of like-minded fans gathering outside for the Picnic on the Patio starting at 6 p.m.
In West Palm Beach next Friday and Saturday, July 22 and 23, there’s a different sort of show that forgoes the “tribute” aspect altogether and instead does medleys with a 14-piece band. Called Decades Rewind, the concert of music from the 1960, ’70s and ’80s takes place in the Kravis Center’s smaller Rinker Playhouse. There’s even a matinee on Saturday if you want to make it a multi-generational outing.
Riverside’s Comedy Zone this weekend features Paul Lyons, an actor whose claims to fame include appearances on “Everybody Loves Raymond” and writings published in Details and TV Guide. Also on the bill is Ray Haber. Friday night’s live band on the circle is Soul Jam; Saturday, it’s salsa with the band Swingsation. In the lobby it’s Vegas Nights this month, which means casino tables, funny-money and prizes.
It was a well-deserved packed house last Wednesday for the faculty performance of the Vero Beach International Music Festival at First Presbyterian Church. This Friday marks the final performance in the festival. It features the faculty and students of the more advanced-level extension week of the Mike Block String Camp.
The concert promises to be a full-throated celebration of the music made and connections furthered at this seventh session of the camp. The faculty includes some of the best bluegrass, Celtic and jazz string players in the country. Among them: fiddlers Darol Anger and Jeremy Kittel, both of whom were part of the Grammy award-winning Turtle Island String Quartet. Darol Anger is considered a driving force in the modern bluegrass movement; there is probably not one big-name player in the genre that hasn’t jammed with him at some point. Kittel plays regularly with the likes of My Morning Jacket and Abigail Washburn.
Another one to watch for Friday night: Alex Hargreaves, who has toured with Béla Fleck and David Grisman, and played with Mumford and Sons and Sam Bush. The famous mandolinist Mike Marshall called him “arguably one of the greatest improvising violinists in the country.”
And there’s Kimber Ludiker, two-time Grand National Fiddle Champion, who has fiddling in her blood: Her parents met at a fiddling contest. She’s a member of the all-“girl” (quote marks are hers) bluegrass supergroup Della Mae. From Canada, banjoist Jayme Stone, whose world music has won him two Juno awards, Canada’s equivalent of a Grammy. The Boston Globe wrote of his latest album, “The Lomax Project,” nominated for a 2016 Juno, that it was “a marvelous expression of Stone’s collaborative distillation of the folk process.”
Bluegrass mandolinist Joe Walsh will also perform. Profiled in last week’s 32963, Walsh spent many years with the much-celebrated Gibson Brothers. He now directs the American Roots Music Program at Berklee College of Music. And, of course, Mike Block and Hanneke Cassel, the First Couple of Fiddle Camp.
Next Friday, July 22, at the Vero Beach Museum of Art is “Let Go,” a production billed as Vero’s first-ever dance theater production. Staged by Amanda Cox, a talented modern dancer and graduate of the dance program of the University of South Florida who spent 2015 in Vero as artist-in-residence at Indian River Charter High School’s Visual and Performing Arts Center, the performance involves movement set to a poetry reading. The hour-long performance begins at 7 p.m. Tickets are $10.
