Culture

Vocalist Sofia Reí is everywhere these days: This fall season alone she will tour to Colombia, Panama, Ecuador and Florida, she’ll drop in at the Vermont Jazz Center on October 30th at 8:00 PM, make music in her adopted city of New York and then travel to Austria and Germany to play with her trio. This Argentinian singer is making a splash everywhere she travels. Her versatility and brilliance have the New York Times claiming: “the passion and clarity with which she assayed a tricky mix of South American rhythms and jazz-inflected harmonies made clear why she has been embraced by New York City audiences from Carnegie Hall to the hippest downtown haunts.”

On Friday, October 30th at 8:00 PM, Sofia Rei’s concert will mark the first collaboration between the Vermont Jazz Center and Next Stage Arts. Their managing teams agree that Rei’s complex yet accessible music fits both of their individual programming goals while supporting their shared vision. Rei’s repertoire is comprised of rich original compositions set over a well-spring of rhythms from Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Peru. Her music is naturally diverse and inherently beautiful and it thrives on grooving rhythms illuminated by carefully crafted arrangements and uncompromising musicianship.

Those around Brattleboro who remembeer the Chelsea House will remember Sparky Rucker from his many visits there in the ‘70s. The Chelsea House may be gone, but Sparly and his wife, Rhonda, are back for a house concert on Nov. 5.

Sparky and Rhonda’s music includes a variety of old-time blues, Appalachian music, slave songs, and spirituals as well as originals, and they accompany themselves with fingerstyle picking and bottleneck blues guitar, blues harmonica, old-time banjo, piano, spoons, and bones.

The Ruckers also weave American history, traditional storytelling, and humor into their concerts, and they have been featured tellers at the International Storytelling Center and Festival.

The Estey Organ Museum will host an “Organ Spooktacular with the Phantom” on Friday, October 30, at 7:00 PM at the First Baptist Church, 190 Main Street, Brattleboro. The event will feature two shortened silent films, “The Phantom of the Opera” and “Nosferatu”. The “Phantom” features Lon Chaney, and “Nosferatu” includes Max Schreck in the lead roles. Both will receive appropriate accompaniment on the church’s Estey pipe organ.

In addition there will be live performances of songs from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical “The Phantom of the Opera” as well as appropriate spooky music played on the organ.

Organist for the event will be Mark Andersen from Lumberton, NC. Mark began his education at East Carolina University in North Carolina where he studied organ, harp, voice and carillon. His graduate studies carried him to Chicago and the American Conservatory and then on to a full scholarship at the Paris Conservatory where he studied organ with Marcel Dupre and composition with Nadia Boulanger.

Renowned folk musicians Tony Barrand and Keith Murphy will perform a benefit concert in the Main Reading Room of Brooks Memorial Library, 224 Main St., Brattleboro, on Friday, November 6 at 7PM.

Barrand and Murphy will feature songs and ballads composed by James Atwood and family members during the mid19^th century in West Dover, Vermont.

The Atwood collection includes dramatic ballads, romantic and funny songs about domestic life and marriage, and children’s songs.  Tony and Keith will sing “Jubilee Jim Fisk,” a song about Brattleboro’s own Jim Fisk, notorious Robber Baron of the Gilded Age.

Over the years the Estey Organ Museum in Brattleboro, VT has received a number of reed organs which are no longer needed for the museum’s permanent collection. As a way to free up storage space as well as pass some of these instruments on to those who would have a use for them, the museum is holding a Reed Organ Re-Homing Weekend on October 24 & 25, 10 AM to 4 PM, at the museum, 108 Birge Street, Brattleboro, VT.

These instruments range in condition from just dusty to requiring complete re-building or re-purposing. Also available are parts for reed organs, pipe organs, and early electronic organs.