August is national Woodstock month, time for hundreds of flower power-themed parties recalling the Summer of ’69. The music festival on the now legendary farm in upstate New York gets a tropical translation Saturday afternoon at our Florida facsimile right up the road: the Endless Summer Winery, a wonderfully relaxing weekend music venue in the palm-studded plains between Fort Pierce and Vero.
Landscape nursery owner-turned-vintner Gary Roberts hosts the annual Winestock event, situated among trellises of his muscadine grapes. The surfer-themed open-air tasting room is featuring the Tampa-based tribute band Peace of Woodstock along with its house-made muscadine wine, which, for those of us whose virgin buzz was off Boone’s Farm Apple Wine, deserves a degree of reverence.
Sunday afternoon, jazz lovers get their summer fix when the Space Coast Symphony Jazz Band delivers its summer concert. This year, along with the usual roster of excellent Central Florida-based professional jazz musicians, the concert features vocalist Lisanne Lyons, Ph.D., a jazz vocal professor at Florida International University in Miami and director of the recently formed FIU Jazz Vocal Ensemble.
Lyons, a native of Sarasota, started singing straight out of high school when she became featured vocalist for the Air Force Bands. She went on to earn graduate degrees from the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami; while she was there, she won two Down Beat awards for Best Jazz Vocalist and Best Jazz Arrangement. She also performed with Joel Grey on the television 1991 Orange Bowl half-time show of Cole Porter music. She’s gone to perform with some of the biggest names in jazz.
The Space Coast group is led by Patrick Hennessey, another jazz veteran who has played with the greats. He leads the Stetson University Jazz Ensemble. The 3 p.m. concert is only $20, and free for those 18 and under.
The “Star Trek” franchise is aging well. At 50, it’s reaching a whole new universe of viewers than it did back in the 1960s – considering the original TV series was canceled in 1969 due to poor ratings. But like the geek in high school who turns into a brainiac billionaire, the reruns became wildly successful and spawned not only a resurrected series for TV but the long list of films including the latest this summer.
Florida Institute of Technology is celebrating that landmark birthday with a free public lecture Friday by engineering professor Scott Tilley, who’s going to take apart the science-based fantasy of “Star Trek” and see what stuck.
Tilley is a life-long Trekkie who spent his boyhood summers on the beach in Maine reading paperbacks of the original series and making hand-written summaries of each one.
After his talk, if the skies are clear, the Student Astronomical Society is going to open up the 32-inch Ortega telescope for everyone to look through. Three smaller telescopes will also be available. The Trek-fest takes place at the Olin Engineering Complex on West University Blvd. The lecture starts at 8 p.m.; the telescopes come into play about 9.
