Arts & Entertainment
After weeks of stifling heat, Dave Brubeck brought relief to Edgartown society types on Sunday night with his eminently cool brand of jazz in a performance at the Field Club. One of the pioneers of West Coast jazz in the 1950s, Mr. Brubeck led his quartet through an evening of stylish standards and thrilling improvisation to help raise money for the new YMCA.
“This guy doesn’t just play music, he is music,” said Kate Taylor in her introduction.
A tranquil summer evening in Vineyard Haven may have seemed a strange place for a spine-chilling appraisal of the nation’s security gaps, but on Thursday night at the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff sounded a bleak and vigilant tone, warning that we have entered into a new world and our concept of security must change accordingly.
Emma Goldman was a woman who championed women’s rights to contraception, workers’ rights, homosexual rights, and who spoke against militarism, capitalism and religion.
These days, much of what she stood for is mainstream, or at least within the ambit of mainstream debate. But back in 1919, her views and her philosophy, anarchism, were enough to have her repeatedly jailed and, ultimately, deported from the United States to where she was born in Lithuania, then part of the Russian empire.
Like many fourth graders, Ben Taylor was not a fan of school. But after he graduated from the Steiner School in New York and worked on a biodynamic farm in New Mexico, he began to appreciate and fully understand the Waldorf method of teaching.
To that end, on Wednesday this week Mr. Taylor will perform at the Island Theatre in Oak Bluffs to raise money to support the Plum Hill preschool. Money raised at the event will go to the school’s Together We Build capital campaign to help expand the school’s facilities.
In connection with the Martha’s Vineyard Museum’s current exhibit From Concept to Canvas: Selected Works of Stanley Murphy, noted Island artists and friends including Kib Bramhall, Tess Bramhall, Bob Doran, Allen Whiting and Rez Wiliams are coming together to discuss the painter’s life, work and influence at Thursday, August 5 at 5:30 p.m. at the Federated Church in Edgartown.
Led by the museum’s chief curator, Bonnie Stacy, the panel will give the audience an insight into the life of the Vineyard artist.
When artist Nancy Blank was 16 years old, she gave watercolor lessons to Vineyard Haven resident Millie Briggs, who had asked to learn the technique behind the misty, ethereal nature of the medium.
