The late singer-songwriter Jason Molina loved playing Charlottesville, says his friend Jason Groth. Groth spent his formative years in Indiana and did a stint in North Carolina before moving to town. Along the way, he played guitar in a number of groups, including The Coke Dares and Magnolia Electric Co.—the latter being Molina’s main concern […]
Sharel Cassity says she knows at least 500 jazz tunes. Decades of experience performing across the globe brought her to that place. And it’s likely among the reasons she now leads jazz performance in the University of Virginia’s music department. “I do think any reputable musician should know as many harmonies as possible,” says Cassity […]
Filmmaker Adamu Chan sees the current fractured landscape of American life and says it doesn’t make sense to hope that his work will change anyone’s mind. Instead, Chan makes films for and about people that he has a shared experience with. What These Walls Won’t Hold—a documentary exploring Chan’s time at California’s San Quentin State […]
Ripley Johnson’s created such a specific body of work, his name’s been used as a song title to signify a sound. For more than two decades, the Portland guitarist has investigated various forms of psychedelia, ranging from metronomic minimalism to fuzzy freakouts. So when he started releasing country music a few years back under the […]
In “Joan Mitchell: Uncovering 100 Years” at The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, there’s a 1960 photo of the painter emphatically gesturing while standing in front of a large-scale canvas by Adolph Gottlieb. Mitchell seems comfortable in conversation with her art-world friends, hinting at the relationship she had with mid-20th-century galleries […]
There’s a Portuguese word, saudade, that doesn’t translate exactly to English. Maybe it works out to something like “a mournful longing?” But composer and multi-instrumentalist Adrian Younge describes its meaning perfectly in trying to pinpoint his own particular brand of emotive music. “It’s the vortex of where dark music meets romantic music,” he says on […]
Jenny Scheinman doesn’t peg her parents as hippies. Despite the pair’s collective worldview being catalyzed by a mixture of 1960s politics and a desire to go back to the land, “They’re not very far out,” says bandleader and violinist Scheinman. After her parents decamped from New York and began homesteading near Eureka, California, Scheinman says […]
Nicole Mitchell has sown the seeds of inventive music across the country through time in Chicago’s jazz scene, teaching in southern California and Pittsburgh, and now as a member of the University of Virginia’s music faculty. She splits time between Charlottesville and rural North Carolina, but harbors a desire to enliven central Virginia’s creative music […]