The Hudson Valley’s own premier symphonic musicians will come together as smaller chamber ensembles for an up-close view. The musicians are your local teachers at private studios, schools, and universities. They are all active performers throughout the Hudson Valley and NYC area. They are committed to the mission of bringing people together and presenting beautiful, inspiring classical music to audiences of all ages.
Peyton Pleninger is an emerging tenor saxophonist, improviser, bandleader and conceptualist, forging a personal path that challenges the boundaries of what it means to be a musician. Pleninger’s experience involves a variety of disciplines centered around music, which also includes astrology, painting and sculpture, botany, construction, massage and medical inquiry.
Pleninger worked as a mentee of Milford Graves, from spring 2019 until Graves’ passing in early 2021, assisting daily in multi-disciplinary efforts. Summer 2019 focused on botany and garden work, which evolved into constructing a greenhouse in the winter that year. 2020 began with focus around conducting and documenting various scientific experiments around sound, vibration and cardiology, which led to constructing sculptures demonstrating some of the concepts discovered. Pleninger played an integral role in helping Graves prepare artwork and archival materials for his retrospective exhibit Milford Graves: A Mind Body Deal at the ICA Philadelphia, as well as for the post-humous exhibits Heart Harmonics: Sound, Energy and Natural Healing Phenomena at the Fridman Gallery and Milford Graves: Fundamental Frequency at Artist’s Space.
Born on April 7, 1996 just outside of Philadelphia, Pleninger began playing piano at age 4. A gifted a hand-me-down tenor saxophone, along with hearing recordings of John Coltrane, set Pleninger on a lifelong journey to improvise at the highest level. In his last 2 years of high school, Pleninger studied with Anthony Tidd through the Kimmel Center Creative Music Program. During this time he also met Steve Coleman, who Pleninger followed relentlessly, attending performances and workshops in Philadelphia, NYC, and Detroit.
Upon his arrival in New York City in 2015, Pleninger formed the first iteration of his band Biotonic. In its infancy, Biotonic explored the relationship of sound on the human experience and physiology through original compositions, and later evolved to explore moment music by juggling spontaneous and predetermined material. Biotonic has performed throughout NYC at such venues as The 55 Bar, The Jazz Gallery and Seeds Brooklyn, and has released a live album: alive (2019), and two EP’s: intro::extro (2016) and Heartbeat Music (2017).
In 2020, Pleninger collaborated with Brooklyn based photographer and sustainability specialist Alison Schuettinger to build 5 Sets of Solos and Duos, an outdoor series of music and movement performances with emphasis on community building in balance with nature.
In 2021, Pleninger traveled to Long Beach Washington to record his first solo album, Post Human Folk Dances, to be released 2022. The album was recorded remote, in various locations around Long Beach, and explores different imagined dance styles through Pleninger’s signature setup of saxophone augmented with bells.
Pleninger also works as a dedicated side-person with multiple music projects. He has performed with Henry Threadgill as part of the multimedia works “One” and “The Other One.” He plays in John Benitez’ Latin-Bop, a modern latin-jazz group, performing weekly at Terraza 7 in Queens and monthly at Fat Cat in Manhattan. He plays with Roy Ben Yosef’s Moringa trio, an Israel-based group focused on improvisation, which released its debut record Moringa and the Watershed in February 2021. Pleninger plays in drummer/composer Colin Hinton’s Glassbath, an electric band straddling post rock and free jazz, which released its self-titled inaugural album February 2018. Pleninger performs with drummer/composer Michel Maurer’s Meridian, a forward-thinking jazz-rooted quartet, which released its debut record The Shape of Noon in 2019. In summer 2017, Pleninger toured Canada for 5 weeks with guitarist Quinn Bachand’s Brishen, an acoustic band honoring the tradition of gypsy jazz and the roots of rock n roll. Highlight performances include the Toronto Jazz Festival, Montreal International Jazz Festival, and CBC Canada.
https://peytonpleninger.com/index.html
https://ppleninger.bandcamp.com/releases
Paul McMahon is a legendary singer-songwriter from Woodstock. His sometimes mindblowing lyrics weave the tale of a Goddess in all worshipper’s journey through time. Rarely venturing far from Woodstock, he completed his first tour of 4 cities just before Covid’s appearance in 2020. It was organized by GoodFlavor tapes who also recorded an album slated for release in the near future. A survivor of the No Wave scene, he played in Daily Life with Barbara Ess and Glenn Branca. He has released ten albums and played at the Metropolitan Museum, CBGB’s, Knitting Factory, Tinker Street Cafe, the Lake, BSP, the Colony, Zadocks, SXSW and the Kitchen. He was the first to book the Knitting Factory in the 80s, started the Dharmaware Cafe, an acoustic music venue in the 90s and since 2007 runs the Mothership, an ‘Everything Center’ in Woodstock.
McMahon performs solo with an acoustic guitar. He also often performs with Eva Bublick. In addition he performs as the Rock’n’Roll Therapist, making up instant songs to cure people’s problems.
Morgan O’Kane plays the banjo as if his life depended on it, (as it has on many occasion) with an intensity that evokes a redeeming kind of sadness that will resonate with anyone ready to give it the space. Songs of heart break, hard traveling, and the love of friends, songs about the on going war humans wage against themselves and the earth. Originally from Virginia Morgan fell in love with playing music while living in nyc as a means to channel and express long years of travel and loss, fine tuning his unique style on the streets and subways. Ezekiel Healy (the bogs) joined Morgan whilst making his first album 9 lives in 2009, bringing his unique style of slide guitar to accompany and enrich the one man band sound. Healy, also from Virginia, self tought with a history of street performing, plays a national slide guitar more akin to Indian ragas then to blues, but with no less soul, adding an other world quality to the already out of this world sound of O’kane’s banjo, howling, and drum. Currently Morgan O’Kane performs most often solo or with Ezekiel Healy, and on occasion with Mississippi fiddler Ferd Moyes ( hackensaw boys, Ferd band) who has accompanied him from the beginning, recording on all three albums. The trio have toured extensively around the world over the past decade, at times joined by J.R. Hankins on flugelhorn, Liam Crill on spoons, Hayden Cummings on base, and Leyla McCalla on cello.
Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she works as a song writer, performer, producer and mom. In a constant dedication to expanding her tender repertoire of American folk songs into a larger context, her recordings seek to find the magical amity between explorative percussion, orchestral sounds and elements of rock and popular music.
Since starting out in the late 1990’s, she has released over a dozen solo and collaborative recordings on various independent labels including K Records, Kill Rock Stars, Absolute Magnitude Recordings, Double Double Whammy and 7e.p., and toured solo and with countless iterations of her own band in concert halls, music clubs and punk basements all across North America, Japan and Europe.
Recent releases include 2018’s ‘Understanding’ and 2020’s 20th anniversary reissue of her first full length record ‘You Think It’s Like This But Really It’s Like This’. The deluxe double LP features a full covers record with contributions from over 20 artists including Y La Bamba, Palehound, Mount Eerie and Flock of Dimes.
Mirah has dedicated her creative process to investigating the complicated intersections within communities large and small, believing that with deeper understanding of each other, the seeds of a more generous and less violent world are planted.
“Mirah propels her magical, three-dimensional spaces with her clear beacon of a voice and instrumentation that slips from whisper-in-your-ear intimacy to rushing, tumbling aural avalanches.” -New York Press
The full-length debut from Miles Francis, Good Man is a work of gorgeous paradox: a nuanced exploration of masculinity and all its trappings, presented in a sound that’s joyfully unfettered. As the New York City-bred singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist reveals, the album’s endless complexity emerged from a period of unexpected and life-changing transformation. “Over the last few years I’d written all these songs interrogating manhood and male nature, but it took quarantine to really focus on what the songs were saying altogether,” Francis recalls. “The album became about showing a man going through a complete unraveling of their conditioning, and by the time I’d finished working on it I’d started to identify as non-binary.”
Produced by Francis and recorded in their longtime studio (located in the basement of the Greenwich Village building they grew up in), Good Man arrives as the most visionary and elaborately realized output yet from a polymathic artist known for collaborating with the likes of Angélique Kidjo, Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, and Arcade Fire’s Will Butler. In dreaming up the album’s kaleidoscopic sound, Francis embraced an experimental process that involved elegantly merging their most formative influences. “I grew up with boy-band posters from floor to ceiling in my bedroom, and that music very much dominated my life when I was young,” they point out. “Later on I studied Afrobeat music and started playing with different groups in that world, which helped me to get to a place where I could be totally free in my musical expression. With this album I finally got to the point of bringing together these two worlds that made me who I am, even though they may seem unrelated.” Also naming shapeshifters like Prince and David Bowie among their essential touchstones, Francis ultimately alchemized those inspirations into a highly percussive form of art-pop, both lavishly orchestrated and visceral in impact.
Mainly recorded in solitude but featuring several guest musicians on strings, shekeres, background vocals, and horns, Good Man takes its title from a spellbinding piece of avant-pop encompassing many of the album’s central themes (e.g., prototypically male impulses and anxieties, the gulf between one’s true nature and meticulously curated presentation). “That song came from conversations I’d had with men in my life who identify as progressive-minded, but who seemed to have some blind spots around the #MeToo movement,” says Francis. “I heard people bemoaning cancel culture or saying things like ‘You can’t even put your arm around a woman anymore’—which is so ridiculously shortsighted. The genesis of all these songs was that question of what it truly means to be a good man.”
Throughout Good Man, Francis matches their incisive observation with a direct outpouring of feeling and, in many cases, fantastically offbeat humor. On the album’s effervescent lead single “Service,” they deliver a groove-heavy and pitch-perfect send-up of the over-the-top obsequiousness that pervades countless classic boy-band songs (“There’s this very impulsive offering of help and support, in a way that makes you wonder if there’s some other motive that’s not named in the lyrics,” Francis notes). Another track examining what they refer to as “the male anxious impulse,” “Popular” unfolds in frenetic rhythms and radiant background vocals courtesy of Lizzie Loveless and Lou Tides (aka Lizzie and Teeny Lieberson, formerly of TEEN). “Everyone indulges in having an ego and wanting to be recognized, but men seem particularly bent on the power element—whether it’s taking up space in a room or leading a country,” says Francis.
An album rooted in intense self-reflection, Good Man also includes such moments as “Let Me Cry,” a deeply personal number illuminating Francis’s poetic sensibilities as a lyricist (“Indoctrinated against moving his hips/For fear that it could attract another man’s lips”). “As a kid I was really out there and just fully myself, but over time there was this boxing-in that started happening from all different directions,” says Francis. “‘Let Me Cry’ is about asking, ‘Can you break out of this box, and find your way back to that inner child again?’” One of Good Man’s most confessional tracks, “Rainjacket” channels the quiet anguish and subtle power in accepting your own vulnerability. “It’s about dealing with your life in a real way, instead of just pushing forward and telling yourself everything’s fine,” says Francis. “It’s that moment of admitting, ‘No, you’re not fine—go see a therapist, work some shit out.’” And on “Don’t Fight Anymore,” Good Man closes out with a raw and revelatory expression of surrender. “That song still pulls at me whenever I listen to it,” says Francis. “It’s about breaking down and begging for some sort of answer to all these questions, and then finally releasing the baggage and really looking at yourself for the first time. It’s incredibly sad in a lot of ways, but it’s also hopeful—like an awakening, or the ultimate letting go.”
As an artist indelibly informed by the kinetic energy and eclecticism of New York City, Francis drew immense inspiration from their hometown in the making of Good Man. “The 2020 protest movement renewed my focus on what I stand for as a white, male-passing person, artist, and New Yorker. The most direct way I could be of help was to get a drum and go out to marches to keep a beat for protest leaders,” says Francis, who assisted a friend in the founding of Musicians United, a New York-based collective that supplies musicians for organizers. “In the beginning, the goal was to incorporate anti-racist work into my life, but the experiences I had and the people I met—particularly through the Black Trans Liberation/Stonewall Protests movement, led by Qween Jean and Joel Rivera—ended up giving me a new mirror to see myself in, to help me work to break free of my conditioning and truly find myself under the umbrellas of queerness and nonbinaryness.”
In bringing Good Man to life, Francis worked in close collaboration with filmmaker/photographer Charles Billot to create such striking visuals as the album’s surreal cover art (a wonderfully warped photo that features their mother and father alongside their own doubled image). “The cover is what made me realize what this album’s really about,” says Francis. “It’s the idea of one person embodying all different types of people, and the idea that we don’t exist in a vacuum: we’re created by our families and our trauma and the whole world around us.” Equal parts playful and unsettling, that photo also echoes the palpable sense of abandon that Francis brought to every element of Good Man. “When I’m in my studio, it feels like being completely free of the outside world, free of gender, free of everything except me,” says Francis. “I feel like I’m finally figuring out how to take that freedom beyond my musical expression and bring it into every aspect of my life. That’s what led me to nonbinaryness, and now I want to share that feeling with everybody.”
Magic Sandwich it’s a mental creation developed by renowned and respected artist Guido Colzani. Colzani’s alter-ego melts humor, technology and fantasy with songs, manufacturing a unique live performance. Created in 2020, Magic Sandwich released 5 (five) singles. Spanish, English & Italian, installed by factory default, are the languages that M-S uses to communicate. Future plans for M-S are coming, closing his first period; a last single is going to be released by the end of April 2022. Now M-S is working on a new record with an estimated release date for 2022 Christmas Eve.
Mac $ Cheeze Balkan Power Trio is an acoustic group specializing in traditional and modern village and urban folk music from the southern Balkans.
Their repertoire features music from Macedonia, Serbia, Albania, Bulgaria, Greek, and Turkey and is strongly influenced by Roma and Ottoman cultures and traditions. This music is typically performed for social-cultural occasions such as weddings, holidays and annual village festivals celebrating the seasons.
Tim Allen (saxophone), Matthew “Max” Fass (accordion) and Johanna Dun (percussion) bring an ancient-modern musical synthesis from the regions where East and West overlap and present it in their own style to audiences throughout the Hudson Valley and beyond.
Kendra McKinley is a singer-songwriter whose music bursts with vibrance, sensuality and wit. Her lush blend of chamber pop, jazz, and soul draws from a deep well of inspiration. Whether she’s performing solo with a guitar and loop pedal or dancing with a full live band Kendra’s confident, honeyed voice indulges all who hear it.
