By Dan Goff arts@c-ville.com It’s a Friday afternoon at Grit Coffee on Elliewood Avenue. Jenny Wales sits at an outdoor table, one of the few open seats. Finals are fast approaching and the shop is swarming with students. Wales doesn’t seem to mind, and, in fact, seems perfectly at ease—she’s home. “This is my 20-year […]
By Dan Goff arts@c-ville.com It’s a Friday afternoon at Grit Coffee on Elliewood Avenue. Jenny Wales sits at an outdoor table, one of the few open seats. Finals are fast approaching and the shop is swarming with students. Wales doesn’t seem to mind, and, in fact, seems perfectly at ease—she’s home. “This is my 20-year […]
Domenico Lancellotti The Good is a Big God (Luaka Bop) One of the most creative interpreters of traditional Brazilian pop, Lancellotti puts an odd foot forward on The Good is a Big God with the plodding incantation “Voltar Se” before correcting course and finding a groove on the title track, a clavinet-laden postcard from some […]
The solid accolades directed at The Gina Clowes Project are the result of the singer-songwriter’s years spent at competitions and gigging with other pros. Well-known in the world of bluegrass, banjoist Clowes’ modern approach reaches to crossover as she pushes mood and emotion through the frets, complemented by her thoughtfully constructed songwriting. Friday, May 11. […]
Ani DiFranco feels most comfortable when she’s pushing boundaries. After some downtime following her daughter’s birth, the singer-songwriter/activist/poet/DIY feminist is ready to be back onstage, connecting with like minds and “kicking ass and taking names.” DiFranco’s album Binary was released a year ago, but written before the 2016 election, and its themes are eerily clairvoyant. “I’m […]
In 2009, James Keogh was a promising player in Australia’s Victorian Football League. He also played music, and, taking an alias from a Peter Carey novel he was reading, put himself into rotation in the Melbourne open mic scene as Vance Joy. He released his indie debut EP, God Loves You When You’re Dancing, in […]
If it’s your goal to keep mama happy this Mother’s Day weekend—and it better be—then comedian Antoine Scott has you covered. Scott built a reputation for delivering beyond expectations in comedy clubs around the country. Fans say he leaves them gasping from laughter and they call him one of the funniest raw comics of all […]
Perched on a wooden stool inside her McGuffey Art Center studio, Megan Elizabeth “Mae” Read looks around the room at her sketches—a roughly defined nude male figure, a sequence of grayscale charcoal portraits including one of a little girl with butterfly face paint—clustered together near the floor. “You know,” she says before taking a pause, […]
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? This is something that Jeff Gregerson has thought a lot about as he’s made music throughout his life. Gregerson, 33, played first in high school rock and jam bands, and more recently as one half […]
It’s easy to reduce your identity to before and after you have children when your whole life feels like one long haze of sleepless nights and diaper changes. But what happened to the person who came before? Do they cease to be? How do you reconcile who you’ve become with who you were when your […]
In a world where the touch of a finger delivers a meal, a song or a new pair of shoes, the passing down of traditions to make these things from scratch sounds quaint. But when experts and students come together for the Virginia Folklife Apprenticeship Showcase, crafters, makers and legions of DIY hipsters find plenty […]