Bob Cilman has been directing the Young@Heart Chorus for over 35 years. But as he showed at a recent rehearsal with the acclaimed group of elderly singers, neither he nor the chorus members have lost a step.
Cilman moved with energy as he paced the floor at the Northampton Senior Center, making emphatic gestures with his arms and lifting his hands upwards — a signal to the 23-member chorus of men and women to raise their voices into the air during a rehearsal of Joe Cocker’s version of The Beatles’ “With A Little Help From My Friends.”
Following that cue, the group of age 75 and older singers melded their voices to create a soulful wall of sound that seemed to fill the community room of the senior center as Young@Heart members prepared for their newest performance.
Young@Heart is no stranger to songs of the 1960s. During the past three decades, the group has developed a repertoire of pop/rock material that eschews expectations, whether that’s a cover of “I Wanna Be Sedated” by 1970s punk band The Ramones or British alt-rock band Coldplay’s “Fix You.”
Now, the group is getting ready for its sixth annual mash-up show at the Academy of Music Theatre in Northampton. Next Sunday, Oct. 21, Y@H will blend the psychedelic rock n’ roll stylings of Woodstock with the vintage salsa tunes of San Juan, Puerto Rico in a collaboration with the Puerto Rican/New England-based Jesus Pagan Y Su Orquesta, a 12-member salsa band.
Cilman said audiences can expect to hear songs by Jimi Hendrix, The Who, and Crosby, Stills, & Nash in a way that they’ve probably never heard before.
“We’re redoing the music from the Woodstock album, which was so seminal during my period,” Cilman said. “It was a life-changing album for me. It turns out to be really good music for Young@Heart. We’re setting it as a late 1960s cocktail party with the parents of the children who would have gone to Woodstock — the parents now turning on the music that they told their kids to turn off.”
Young@Heart singers will look the part for the cocktail party, said Cilman, as they don wigs and costumes. They’ll be joined onstage by local folk/bluegrass/Celtic quartet The Green Sisters, who will play the part of singing waitresses during the cocktail party.
Steve Martin, an 89-year-old member of Young@Heart who has performed with the group for 18 years, said that when he auditioned for the chorus, he picked a song from Broadway and was surprised to the singers performed rock music.
“When I was listening to what my kids were listening to, I thought it was a lot of noise because the bands were loud at times and you couldn’t get the lyrics,” said Martin, who lives in Springfield. “Sometimes the singers would wail away and you didn’t know what the hell they were singing because they were so loud.
“But now,” Martin noted, “we got the words and there were nice storylines that I never knew existed and I said, ‘This is a whole new world of music to me.’ ”
Martin said one of the biggest takeaways from his experience performing with Young@Heart across the world in countries such as Germany, New Zealand, and Japan is that music is a universal language.
“People respond to the energy and they forget that our average age is 83,” he said. “I’ve had many a college student say, ‘Geez, you guys are cool.’ ”
Next Sunday’s show, which takes place at 3 p.m., is also the first time Young@Heart will perform the music of Woodstock. The group plans to tour the set next year to mark the 50th anniversary of the legendary 1969 concert in upstate New York.
“There’s a bit of salsa from that album of Woodstock, with Santana, and that’s where we’re mashing up with Jesus in the first part of the show,” Cilman said. “And then they’re going to play wonderful salsa music for the second part of the show, and we’ll come up and join them for the end.”
Mark Guglielmo, director of operations for Young@Heart, said he reached out to Pagan after being impressed by the salas band’s performance during a block party in Northampton and invited the group to take part in the mash-up show.
For his part, Pagan said he thinks once the Academy audience gets to hear the strains of his band’s salsa music, “they might want to get up and dance because the selections we’re going to perform … are going to put people on their feet.”
He said his band will be performing a medley of Santana songs and paying tribute to the legends in salsa music from the 1960s.
The show will also support Puerto Rican families in the Valley by hosting a donation drive for winter clothes and toys. In addition, 100 of the 800 concert tickets will be reserved for newly arrived families from Puerto Rico, following the devastation last year from Hurricane Maria.
“We just passed the year anniversary of the hurricane,” Cilman said. “We thought it would be an opportunity to use this performance to do something more than just provide entertainment: create consciousness about the fact that so many people have moved here from Puerto Rico.”
Many of those new arrivals, Cilman added, “are in need of winter clothing. They’re in need of toys for their kids. We felt that as an arts organization and an event that’s well attended, we could put some help into that drive.”
Beta Polanco of Easthampton is originally from Puerto Rico and moved to Massachusetts in the 1970s to become an opera singer with the Boston Opera House. She joined Young@Heart almost two years ago and will be singing a solo in Spanish during the Oct. 21 concert, with accompaniment from Pagan’s salsa orchestra.
Polanco said she’s grateful Young@Heart can play a role in helping out Puerto Rican families living in western Massachusetts.
“Some of these people came here with nothing,” she said. “They were given $100 to get a plane ticket, and their clothes and homes were devastated and in ruins.… I went back [this year] the day before Mother’s Day, and the island is still in shreds. Huge debris, with houses with the ceiling on the floor.”
Pagan said he’ll be playing a song during the performance that will pay tribute to San Juan called “Soñando con Puerto Rico” (“Dreaming of Puerto Rico)” by singer Bobby Capó, as well as an original upbeat song dedicated to Puerto Ricans longing for home.
“The story of the song is you’re in the United States, especially in the northern part where it starts getting cold in October, and you start feeling that in your heart — ‘I wish I was in Puerto Rico. I need the heat. I want to go back to the island.’ ”
Chris Goudreau can be reached at cgoudreau@gazettenet.com.
For tickets or additional information about Young@Heart’s Oct. 21 mash-up show at the Academy of Music, visit youngatheartchorus.com or aomtheatre.com.