Search Results

Keyword search: guitar

By STEVE PFARRER

If you go to a milonga, or social dance, to do tango dancing in Buenos Aires, you’ll likely be doing it to live music.In western Massachusetts? No so much.Now, though, Western Mass Tango, which has hosted tango lessons and dances in the region for...

By STEVE PFARRER

When Chris Smither found his live gigs shut down during the worst months of COVID-19, he figured it might at least be a good opportunity to write some new songs — something the veteran folk/blues singer and guitarist admits is not the easiest process...

By STEVE PFARRER

Madison Cunningham, who comes to Northampton’s Academy of Music April 19, won the 2023 Grammy Award for Best Folk Album, for her 2022 release, “Revealer.”In fact, Cunningham, who grew up in southern California and still lives there, also has won...

By STEVE PFARRER

Not so long ago, there was a general lament sometimes heard among Valley musicians: “There aren’t enough places to play around here.”That might have been true for professional players who wanted to be paid — and maybe, despite the opening of new local...

By STEVE PFARRER

Several years ago, Grayson Ty and Laura Buchanan first met as separate working musicians. That night, Ty, a singer-songwriter, was co-billed at the Iron Horse Musical Hall in Northampton with Eavesdrop, then an acoustic folk-pop trio that Buchanan was...

By STEVE PFARRER

Almost 40 years ago, a rock-pop band in Great Britain known as Lloyd Cole and the Commotions made their debut in fine fashion, releasing a single, “Perfect Skin,” that reached number 26 on the UK charts in 1984 and an album, “Rattlesnakes,” that...

By STEVE PFARRER

Get Gone by Dennis Crommett In the summer of 2021, Dennis Crommett and his bandmates in Valley indie rockers Spanish for Hitchhiking released their first album in several years, “Wild Love,” a hard-rocking collection of songs written and sung by...

By STEVE PFARRER

Like millions of other Americans, Matthew King spent much of 2020-2021 in lockdown after COVID-19 arrived on the scene.But like other artists, King, of Amherst, also used that downtime to keep busy with his music, writing a number of new songs and...

By STEVE PFARRER

He’s been hailed as one of the best songwriters around, a troubadour of small-town America and the hardscrabble lives of its citizens.But James McMurtry has always taken a low-key approach to his music, and he did it again last week when he played a...

By STEVE PFARRER

Who says you can’t merge a Ph.D. and rock and roll?    As Florence Dore explains, she spent a long time traveling on seemingly disparate tracks. On one hand she was the professor who’d devoted years to studying American literature and teaching...