Quilting the Duchess
The Out! For Reel LGBT Film Festival kicks off its third season with a Victorian bang this autumn at Northampton’s Academy of Music Theater. This season’s opener is the BBC-produced film The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister, about an early 19th-century woman who had a number of lesbian affairs and recorded all the sexually explicit parts in her diaries—in algebraic code. Two hundred years later the diaries were translated, and the BBC adapted the story into a steamy period piece that ruffled a few bloomers.
The annual film series has, not surprisingly, been a big success in Northampton, and has shepherded a steady stream of quality, gay-themed cinema to the Valley, bringing with it yet another reason to visit one of Northampton’s most venerable venues. Visit the organization’s website for a full schedule of films. —Tom Sturm
Oct 23, 7:30 p.m., $10/students with ID, $11.50/advance, $14.50/door, Academy of Music Theatre, 274 Main St., Northampton, (413) 584-9032 ext. 105, www.OutForReel.org. After-party at the Clarion Hotel.
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El Dorado
Andrew Lawrence, founder of Northampton’s Django in June festival, says that the guitar-playing abilities of the fest’s performers are often stunning, yet those performers represent the younger, second-tier players in the world of Gypsy jazz. It’s all the more remarkable, then, that Northampton gets a visit this fall from one of the true top-tier giants, French “jazz manouche” master Dorado Schmitt. The occasion is the 100th anniversary of Django Reinhardt’s birth.
Schmitt penned a modern Gypsy jazz classic, “Bossa Dorado,” a suave, James Bond-esque rollick that’s become a standard piece of the repertoire, and he plays both guitar and violin. He pursued pop music early on, then switched to the Django-inspired Gypsy tradition in part thanks to his family’s influence. He’s been playing jazz manouche ever since.
He visits the Calvin Oct. 30 with the Django New York Festival All Stars, including Schmitt on lead guitar and vocals, Hono Winterstein on rhythm guitar, Xavier Nikq on bass, Pierre Blanchard on violin, and Peter Beets on piano.—James Heflin
Oct. 30, 8 p.m., $25-35, Calvin Theatre, 19 King St., Northampton, (413) 586-8686.
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Skylab Redux
According to a reuse study done in 1978 for NASA, Skylab, the United States’ first space station, was one stylin’ crib. It was the first spacecraft on which astronauts could shower, play darts, listen to records, read books and watch movies. But in 1979, after six years, over 2,000 hours of scientific experiments and hundreds of thousands of orbits, the United State’s first space station was allowed to crash back to Earth. Large chunks fell on southeastern Australia; a San Francisco newspaper awarded $10,000 to a 17-year-old Aussie who was the first to bring in a hunk of the hull.
This fall, mission control at Mass MoCA plans a similar impact for the modern art museum in North Adams. Instead of debris, though, a fully realized art installation will “crash” onto the former mill building’s rooftops, and, amid the crumpled and twisted parachutes, there will appear a gleaming space capsule (actually a modified Airstream trailer) visitors can climb up and into.
In addition to the spacecraft itself, artist Michael Oatman’s installation, All Utopias Fell, includes a tricked-out interior he calls “The Library of the Sun,” which recalls Skylab’s mixture of living space, laboratory and library, and “Codex Solis,” a massive field of solar panels, which will supply seven percent of the museum’s electricity. — Mark Roessler
Opens Oct. 23 (ongoing and open seasonally), Mass MoCA, 1040 Mass MoCA Way, North Adams, (413) MoCA-111, www.massmoca.org.
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Valley Funny
Paul Venier, purveyor of weird, often-musical comedy like Little Dyslexic Elvis (“My wait won’t love”), visits Springfield this November. Expect puns aplenty, loads of props and high silliness.
While Venier is the main attraction, the show features another dose of comedic coolness: recently, local comedians took the stage to compete for opening slots at Citystage. The winners include Marty Caproni, Boney T and Chris Tabb. For Venier’s Nov. 6 appearance, Caproni gets the opening nod. —James Heflin
Nov. 6, $32.75, 8 p.m., Citystage, One Columbus Center, Springfield, (413) 788-7033.
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Straight-up Acrobatics
For the past couple of decades, North Americans have been hungrily devouring the acrobatics performed by troops such as Cirque Du Soleil. As amazing and talent-filled as these performances can be, many productions feature music, lighting, props, staging and costumes that are so elaborate they sometimes threaten to smother the act’s main ingredient: the acrobat. Offering more twists and turns than a bowl of ramen, the Shangri-La Chinese Acrobats eschew artifice and present largely unadorned displays of physical daring, balance and symmetry. The troop, led by the members of the Hai family, has been performing for more than 30 years, drawing from artistic traditions that have been developing over centuries. Instead of relying on a narrative or in-your-face production design, these performers create visual poetry with their tightly synchronized movements and the use of simple props and humor. —Mark Roessler
Nov. 5, 8 p.m., $20-$30, Fine Arts Center Concert Hall, UMass-Amherst, (800) 999-UMAS, www.fineartscenter.com.
Number 764
Chandler Travis has a persistent habit of creating infectious, melodious pop songs that reside in their own distinctive end of the music world. His Chandler Travis Philharmonic includes a big horn section and a healthy dose of rocking rhythms. It’s a mobile Mardi Gras, complete with over-the-top costumes and Travis leading the proceedings with his bombastic Telecaster and achy vocalizing.
The Cape Cod-based crew has been keeping more to the eastward end of the state, but they come to town in November in support of two recent releases, Travis’ solo work After She Left, and the Philharmonic CD Soul Brother #764. —James Heflin
Nov. 19, 10 p.m., $10/advance, $13/door, Iron Horse Music Hall, 20 Center St., Northampton, (413) 586-8686, www.iheg.com.
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Mellow Yellowgold
Gustafer Yellowgold is a bright yellow character dreamed up by musician/artist/storyteller Morgan Taylor (named best kids’ performer by New York Magazine). Yellowgold is a former resident of the sun, who now hangs out with his pals and enjoys activities like jumping on cake and punching cheese.
Taylor has been at work for a couple of years on a new multimedia incarnation of his yellow friend, and Valley fans get the chance to see some of the new work, Gustafer Yellowgold’s Infinity Sock, this fall, well in advance of its February 2011 release date. In this installment, Yellowgold looks for the end of the longest sock in the known universe.
Taylor’s music is intriguing enough that it won’t only prove interesting for the young set. —James Heflin
Oct. 23, 1 p.m., $6, Eric Carle Museum, 125 West Bay Rd., Amherst, (413) 658-1100, www.carlemuseum.com.
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Alive and Brel
Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, announces the musical revue celebrating his songs. When the show premiered at a Greenwich Village jazz club in 1968, the title’s implication was ironic: You’ve probably never heard of him, but he’s the greatest songwriter in Europe, and you should. That feast of over two dozen Brel numbers has since been performed worldwide—and his songs, in the show’s English versions by Mort Shuman and Eric Blau, have been covered by artists from Sinatra to Bowie—ensuring that Brel and his dazzling body of work remain emphatically alive and well.
Brel, who died in 1978, was an artist in the European smoky-cabaret tradition, his jazz- and folk-flavored songs suffused with sly humor, unsentimental melancholy, satirical jabs at cruelty and pomposity, and oceans of heart. This weekend the revue gets an outing from First Park Productions, a newly formed Springfield-based theater group. It’s performed by Frank Aronson, Amanda Davis, Matthew Jaquith and Vickie Phillips. The framing concept for director Dick Volcker’s production is that we’re watching the dress rehearsal of a show scheduled to open that night—which is appropriate, as Brel was always a work in progress. —Chris Rohmann
Oct. 8-9, 8 p.m.; Oct. 10, 3 p.m., $14-16, Franklin Hall, First Park Baptist Church, 4 Garfield St., Springfield, (413) 654-9111.
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Dirty Projectors
In a town that, in many ways, seems to be in the midst of a substantial renovation, things naturally have a feel of slight imbalance—as much of the world around you shifts and changes, you become, for better or worse, immersed in the unfamiliar. Some find such a feeling exhilarating, others become uncomfortable, but either way, people are affected.
The Brick and Mortar International Video Art Festival has made a move to capitalize on this feeling of transition and geographical vertigo in Greenfield; its participating artists have commandeered some downtown buildings and made them into staging areas for various projections and mounted display monitors with which to share their visons. Sometimes static and sometimes dynamic, the images provide a sense of place in combination with their somewhat deserted surroundings, and the juxtaposition of a medium as futuristic as digital video with, well, bricks and mortar, is really quite startling. —Tom Sturm
Oct. 9, 2-10 p.m., various locations, downtown Greenfield (maps available at a tent on the Greenfield Common), www.greefieldvideofest.org.
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Slam Jam
Rev up your Marshalls, purchase some fresh earplugs and touch up your lip gloss—it’s Slam time again. Twenty-plus bands are scheduled to perform at this year’s Valley Advocate Grand Band Slam, including Best New Band Disorderly Conduct, Best Hip-Hop Band The Problemaddicts, Best Punk Band Pallet, Best DJ Studebaker Hawk and many, many others (Primate Fiasco, Jeff Bujak, Aquanett, Ed Vadas, Ghost Quartet, etc., etc.).
Three simultaneous stages keep the music flowing. For the most part, bands with similar styles play around the same times—chances are you probably won’t see the best metal band right after the best singer/songwriter or country band, so you can choose to linger upstairs, downstairs or outside under this year’s massive tent at Chicopee’s Maximum Capacity depending on your preferred level of volume and/or rock. The event is co-sponsored by Lazer 99.3, Rock 102, Falcetti Music and Tapestry Health. —Tom Sturm
Oct. 9, 2 p.m.-2 a.m., rain or shine, free, Maximum Capacity, 116 School St., Chicopee, (413) 592-0719.
