Art
Katie Mayhew sang twice at Symphony Hall in Boston yesterday, first in rehearsal and second as part of a competition for the Boston Pops High School Sing-Off.
Katie, 15, is one of 22 contestants in a statewide competition to be a singer with the Boston Pops this summer. They came from all over the state, from as far east as the Vineyard and as far west as Stockbridge. Each singer, aged from 15 to 18, was aspiring to be a winner. The grand winner will perform with conductor Keith Lockhart and the Boston Pops as part of the Fourth of July concert and fireworks.
Music will not be the only thing sizzling this summer at Outerland, the nightclub and live music venue at the Martha’s Vineyard Airport: Smoke’n’Bones Restaurant, opposite Tony’s Market in Oak Bluffs, is coming to Outerland for the summer season starting tonight.
This will be Smoke’n’Bones’s third location on Martha’s Vineyard. Their new locale at Outerland will be known as Smoke’n’Bones Up-Island.
Summer may still be weeks away, but the music is already hot and spicy at Che’s Lounge in Vineyard Haven. Singer-songwriter Bella and her musical partner Daniel Waters have created a show of bossa nova and samba that opens Tuesday night, June 3, at 7 p.m., and will return (with musical friends and variations of repertoire) every Tuesday throughout the summer.
Folksinger, storyteller and all-around funny guy Rabbi David Shneyer gave a coffeehouse performance Monday evening at the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center. Fingerpicking his Guild guitar, accompanying his tunes on harmonica too, donning different hats — literally a cowboy hat or yarmulke or Greek sailor’s cap as the song demanded — the rabbi demonstrated for Islanders just how he has drawn a following within and well beyond the Jewish community.
The lines sprang into Jemima James’ head, complete with melody, sometime in the 1970s: “Raised in a home, his back got no bone.” The rest of the song, Billy Baloo, soon followed.
“I just liked the way it sounded,” she said, sitting in the wind outside the Scottish Bakehouse in Vineyard Haven this week. Though the story didn’t pair with reality, she found that changing the words messed with the tune. And she trusts the songs that arrive this way.
This serialized, real-time Vineyard novel, Moby Rich, began in last Friday’s Gazette and will continue every Friday, here on page two-A, for a year. For those of you who, in the happy hubbub of Memorial Day weekend, missed chapter one of Moby Rich, here is a synopsis: Our narrator (“Call me Becca”), a 40-something Vineyard native, has just returned home after decades in Manhattan.