Cara Lieurance

On Earth Day, April 22 at 7 pm, musicians Dede Alder and Josh Holcomb will perform live at La Luna Studios for online viewers who visit the Connecting Chords Music Festival website or a Facebook Live link. They bring a combination of talents to their original music, with Alder on marimba, piano and other percussion, and Holcomb playing a 5-string violin with effects.  They spoke with Cara Lieurance for a preview.

At 7 pm on Wednesday, April 21, the Kalamazoo Film Society will continue its series of Virtual Lobby Discussions, which were created during the COVID-19 pandemic to allow people to continue to engage in film chats. Rather than choosing a specific film as a topic, president Dhera Strauss says the Society decided to focus on the Academy Awards, which will be broadcast on Sunday, April 26. The Kalamazoo Film Society sponsored local showings of nearly all of the Best Picture nominees.

First Forrenland (2018), then My Thoughts Are (2019), then Vibrations (2021). That was the 3-album musical arch in Jordan Hamilton's mind over several years, as the cellist/songwriter continued gigging, writing, soloing, collaborating, and producing. In a conversation with Cara Lieurance, Hamilton talks about why he wanted to make an all-instrumental album, and shares stories on how the new pieces on Vibrations came together, as they listen to "Diatomic," "Radiation," "Reflection," "Circuits" and "Tidal." 

David Faber is the cellist of the Dudok Quartet. Based in the Netherlands, the young group first set itself apart by choosing to call themselves after an architect, not a composer (or instrument builder). In an interview with Cara Lieurance, Faber says Willem Marinus Dudok was a modernist who never forgot the past. In their preview of the Dudok's livestreamed concert for Fontana at 7:30 pm on Saturday, April 17, Faber draws parallels between Brahms and Bartok and how the quartet has adapted their instruments to work with gut and steel strings to match both.

Driving up from his former hometown of Columbus, OH (he now lives in Brooklyn), the top-flight jazz pianist Aaron Diehl will present a livestreamed concert from the Epic Center in Kalamazoo at 7:30 Friday, Apr 9, with bassist John Webber and drummer Aaron Kimmel. In a conversation with Cara Lieurance, Diehl talks about his adjustment to a pandemic year which hit just has his latest album, The Vagabond, was released. It's given him time to reflect on life's priorities. Tonight's concert for The Gilmore was rescheduled from a planned appearance at the 2020 Gilmore Keyboard Festival. To access the concert online, visit thegilmore.org.