Sunday, April 29
Come to the Glen Park Festival!
An all-day frolic al fresco on Diamond Street from Bosworth to Chenery. Crafts booths, food vendors, your occasional politician and a stage full of terrific musicians entertaining you & your 1,000 close personal friends-to-be!
Music on the Fest stage starts at 10:00 a.m. when our honorary Glen Park mayor & major domo Misisipi Mike introduces the kick off act, Gayle Schmitt and the Toodalla Ramblers doing a special set for the stroller set. At 11:30, Misisip’s own Midnight Gamblers flower in the noon-day sun with a good-natured honky tonk set to get the grown-ups up & hollerin’. Neighborhood politico-musico’s District 8 follow at 1:00; and then Jinx Jones & KingTones take the stage at 1:45 for a coronation rave-up. World emperors Pangea play at 3:15, globalizing the whole deal.
The cosmos in a microcosm, on the best block in the best neighborhood in the bestest little city in the whole wide universe!
Even if the sun don’t shine anywhere else this Sunday, it’ll shine right here! C’mon out!
And! Since the sun’s likely too be just too hot to stand all day long, you’re invited into the cool environs of the bookshop for our own festivities!
2:30 pm – Walker talks! Mythic Musings
Our amazing resident tale spinner will take you on a lovely ride through some of the epic myths that have taken up permanent residence in our collective consciousness. Good for kids, sure– but even better for the rest of us! All welcome!
(By the way, Walker will tell tales specifically for the kids on the Wilder Street offshoot of Festival thoroughfare early in the day– check the Festival website for the schedule.)
4:30-6:30 pm – Bengal & Beyond
“jazz curry, no hurry”
Bird & Beckett’s which way west?
Sunday concert series
As the afternoon mellows out, a more contemplative mood naturally sets in– and there could be no better way to capture that mood than with two sets of jazz infused with a Kolkata sensibility.
Bassist Bishu Chatterjee leads the marvelous quartet, “Bengal & Beyond,” which features vocalist Sharmila Guha as well as the saxophonist Prasant Radhakrishnan and drummer Bryan Bowman.
Bengal & Beyond’s music draws on classic jazz (think Horace Silver’s classic “Calcutta Cutie,” for instance), but also on Bengali-language lyrics and melodies that have their roots in the 1970s music scene in West Bengal’s Kolkata (called Calcutta at the time) when Bishu was a founding member of the groundbreaking band called “Mohiner Ghoraguli.”
Unprecedented in the Kolkata music scene of the early 1970s, Mohiner Ghoraguli (led by Bishu’s elder brother, the now-legendary Gautam Chattopadhyay) took elements of Bengali folk forms and western folk and rock to build the musical structure underlying Gautam’s lyrically innovative “songs of daily life.” MG was way ahead of its time, and today is considered a cornerstone of the music played by many bands that are at the top of the Kolkata music scene.
The musicians that make up “Bengal & Beyond” are among the top echelon of creative musicians currently plying their trade on the San Francisco jazz and improvisatory music scene.
