In the summer of 1963, America was on the brink of being split apart by the tumult of the Viet Nam War, the Civil Rights movement and Bob Dylan going electric.
The folk music revival was in full swing and was making a big impact in the popular culture. Martha’s Vineyard got caught up in the folk music movement that summer when David Lyman, the manager of a coffeehouse in Boston, and Philip Metcalf, a college student with a car and knowledge of the Vineyard, opened a coffeehouse called the Moon-Cusser.
Singer-songwriter Michele Zaccone and drummer/keyboardist J.B. Lamont of the band Tethered are tied together by a host of similarities. They were born on the same day three years apart, they are Geminis, and they have both been burned; Mr. Lamont by the music business, Ms. Zaccone by love.
Recently the Martha’s Vineyard Chamber Music Society chose singer Emily Lowe as the recipient of its annual Caroline Worthington Scholarship. Emily graduated from the regional high school this past June and is the daughter of Cheryl and Erik Lowe of West Tisbury, and the granddaughter of Ernest Mendenhall and Kathy Logue.
The audience is the boss. Performance is a seduction. Never give up something for nothing. Livingston Taylor eagerly passes along all this and more to his students at the Berklee College of Music, and now to readers who pick up a copy of the new edition of his book, Stage Performance.
Young in Years, Old in Talent
Check out sibling rivalry at its most harmonic when Liz and Yvonne Kane take the stage on Wednesday, July 27 at 7 p.m. at the Katharine Cornell Theatre in Vineyard Haven.
The Kane sisters both play the fiddle and they play it extraordinarily well. They cut their chops with their grandfather, Jimmy Mullen, a local fiddle player from Letterfrack, Ireland. For the American equivalent, think of it as being schooled by his majesty Robert Johnson down at the crossroads.
Sidra Dumont of West Tisbury, a 2011 graduate of Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School, is currently touring Europe with the Sound of America Honor Band and Chorus. The tour began July 1 and wraps tomorrow, July 23. It has included St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice, Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Luxembourg.
She was chosen to join other select student musicians from across the nation after auditioning and passing a rigid character and musical evaluation. Sidra has been selected to sing two solos during the performances.