Fall 2018 - Spring 2019

Location: Various venues

Price: $350 Catamount Arts members, $437.50 non-members
* plus 6% Vermont sales tax

Purchase your 2018-19 SEASON PASS to KCP Presents to:
* Save more than $200 on your tickets!
* Get prime seats to 13 season shows
* Avoid disappointment on sold-out shows
* Help us save marketing dollars
* Give unused tickets to friends and family
* Support the KCP Presents series

2018-19 shows include (more to be announced):

• Rodney Crowell, two-time Grammy-winning “new country” singer/ songwriter and longtime collaborator with Emmylou Harris. (September 21 at Fuller Hall, St. Johnsbury Academy)
• Neko Case – Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter known for her powerful voice, penetrating and poetic lyrics and musical worlds (September 27 at Fuller Hall)
• Bettye Lavette – American blues/soul pioneer and collaborator with Otis Redding and James Brown, singing songs from Bob Dylan. With Very Special Guest James Blood Ulmer, guitar master of blues, jazz, and free funk. (October 26 at Fuller Hall).
• The New Chinese Acrobats performing award-winning acts from the Monte Carlo Circus Festival and World Circus Festivals (November 15 at LSC Alumni Gym).
• Sara Juli in her comic one-woman performance about her post-partum blues: Tense Vagina: An Actual Diagnosis. “Unforgettably hilarious” – London Independent. (November 16 at LSC Twilight Theater).
• Holiday Concert w/ The Boston Children’s Chorus w/ special guests: The Hilltones. (December 1 at United Community Church)
• Holiday Brass by 11-piece Rodney Marsalis Philadelphia Big Brass (December 21 at Fuller Hall)
• Asere! A Fiesta Cubana featuring musicians and dancers of the Havana, Cuba All-Stars (January 29 at Fuller Hall).
• The Shanghai Opera Symphony Orchestra – 75 musicians onstage! (February 13 at Lyndon Institute Alumni Auditorium)
• Frankenstein – Mary Shelly’s science fiction classic performed by the acclaimed Aquila Theater. (March 27 at Fuller Hall)
• Ballet Hispanico – 15 dazzling dancers performing work by Latino choreographers from all over the world. “Fluid and personal…tender-hearted and playful.” – NY Times. (April 26 at Lyndon Institute)
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More information, tickets and season passes at KCPpresents.org

Friday, September 21, 7:00 pm

Location:
Fuller Hall
St. Johnsbury Academy
1000 Main St.
St. Johnsbury, VT

Tickets: $48, $38, $28, $15

Save 20% when you buy by August 22. Discount is automatically reflected when you choose your seats.

Seniors and Catamount Arts members save $3.00 when ordering in person with id at the box office.

Combining careers as a country songwriter, producer and artist, two-time Grammy winner Rodney Crowell rose to fame during the 1980s as an influential figure in Nashville’s new breed of country traditionalists, along with Emmylou Harris, in whose Hot Band he worked for three years, playing rhythm guitar and singing harmony and duet vocals.

Crowell has maintained a prolific output well into the 200’s, with his most recent Grammy coming in 2014. He has performed and collaborated with his former wife, Rosanne Cash and with musicians including Ry Cooder, Jim Keltner, Willie Nelson. and fellow songwriters like Guy Clark. Crowell’s songs have been performed by Bob Seger, Waylon Jennings, George Jones, Emmylou Harris, Johnny Cash, Keith Urban, Tim McGraw, Crystal Gayle, Alan Jackson, The Oak Ridge Boys, Jewel, Kris Kristofferson, Sheryl Crow, and others. Crowell was admitted to the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2003.

As he moves into elder-statesman territory, Crowell continues to extend the path carved out by the top-tier songwriters who preceded him. "All are so important," he said. "Bob Dylan would of course be an archetype, as would Neil Young, Johnny Cash, John Lennon. Every time they release work I find something in it." He would add a name to the pantheon. "Kris Kristofferson belongs in there, too. He personifies all that intelligence and emotional vulnerability and magnetism.”

Fifty years after Crowell first started playing as a teen in Houston garage bands, he still believes in the power of songs, and the responsibility of singing them. "The interesting thing about that garage band back then is that we would go from ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ by the Beatles to ‘Honky Tonkin’’ by Hank Williams. In southeast Texas those songs fit side by side.

"Recently, I think—I hope—that my study of the blues is starting to show up in my music. Those artists, whether it’s Lightnin’ Hopkins or John Lee Hooker or the acoustic Delta players, connected to something fundamental. With that in mind, I’m trying to move forward but also get back there."

“His sharpest, strongest, funniest music in years—perhaps ever. A bounty of weathered emotion and hard-won wisdom” — Slant Magazine

With opening act Thao (of the Get Down Stay Down)

Thursday, September 27, 7:00 pm
(Doors open at 6:00 pm)

Tickets on-sale via Spotify on April 18th
General on-sale on April 20th

Location:
Fuller Hall
St. Johnsbury Academy
1000 Main St.
St. Johnsbury, VT

Tickets: $20, $32, $44, $62, students are free (plus $1 per ticket fee for Peer Solutions*)

Save 20% when you buy by August 28. Discount is automatically reflected when you choose your seats.

Seniors and Catamount Arts members save $3.00 when ordering in person with id at the box office.

*Neko Case has partnered with PLUS1 so that $1 from every ticket will go to Peer Solutions and support their positive youth leadership and development program designed to prevent harm before it begins and engage lifetime ambassadors of positive change (www.peersolutions.org).

KCP Presents is very pleased to present three-time Grammy Award nominee Neko Case in a special concert to showcase the singer/songwriter’s newest work.

Five years have passed since Case's last solo project, The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You. In the interim, she sang on Whiteout Conditions, the 2017 release from longtime band mates the New Pornographers. The year before that, she released a vinyl box set of her solo work and joined country/pop singer/songwriter k.d. Lang and alternative/folk artist Laura Veirs on the case/lang/veirs project.

Recording that record was a revelation, from Veirs' innovative guitar tunings to Lang's skills in studio. "I learned so much experiencing the work ethic of those two," Case says. She considers Lang "probably the most natural producer I've ever seen. Watching her work was awe-inspiring."

After their national tour together, Case found similar transcendence in October 2016 sitting on a panel at the first-of-its-kind "Woman Producer" summit in Brooklyn, NY. Between discussions and performances from a diverse group of women who produce music from around the world, she wondered how it had taken such a long time to get to that moment, and why so many female pioneers had been forgotten.

"The George Martins and Quincy Joneses of the recording pantheon deserve every drop of praise and every project they have received," Case says. "But we can't keep telling the same stories over and over. We need more stories, more inspiration, more flavors."

She set to work on her next record looking for not just new stories but also new sounds. This time, she wanted to put herself in a setting far away from everything she knew. So she teamed up with Swedish producer Björn Yttling and went to Sweden to record during the fall of 2017. Case had already written songs with longtime collaborator Paul Rigby, laid down vocal and guitar tracks at WaveLab Studio in Tucson, and built Carnacial Singing, her recording space here in Vermont.

But in the middle of her stint in Stockholm, with the finish line in sight, she received a surreal 3am call telling her that her Northeast Kingdom house was burning and would likely be completely destroyed. She felt panicked and helpless.

The fire had started in the barn, where she kept an assortment of belongings, from artwork to old pianos. A friend had managed to get the dogs to safety. After the flames jumped to the house, her home was engulfed, too.

A few hours later, she went into a Stockholm studio and laid down the vocals for "Bad Luck," singing the lines she had written long before she realized they would land on her.

Case is now stoic about the fire. "If somebody burned your house down on purpose, you'd feel so violated. But when nature burns your house down, you can't take it personally." The month before the blaze, Hurricane Harvey had slammed into Texas and flooded Houston. Her home burned just as Puerto Rico was plunged into a nightmare by Hurricane Maria and wildfires incinerated California. "In the big picture, my house burning was so unimportant," she says. "So many people lost so much more: lives and lives and lives."

Case’s new record, Hell-On, came out of all of this reckoning with lost stories. It delivers both familiar Neko Case and something different. Death, extinction, exploitation, tides, animals, and adoration all blend recognizably. Case's trademark narrative gaps, just large enough for listeners to enter each song, likewise remain. As with Fox Confessor Brings the Flood and Middle Cyclone, Hell-On spins away from conventions of story, slipping into real life, with its fierce mess and blind catastrophes.

"I'm writing fairy tales, and I hear my life story in them, but they're not about me," Case says. "I still can't figure out how to describe it. But I think that's why we make music or write things. You've got to invent a new language."

And as for those fairy tales she's writing and the history she's remembering: "We need them now more than ever. We need stories from all sectors. Stories without endings. Stories with multiple endings. Stories that don't end happily, cautionary tales, everything. We don't need Disneyfied stories anymore."

A force of nature, an act of a mercurial, forgotten god, Hell-On is a record sealed by fire, filled with love and rage and dangers that might lay waste to everything at any moment. So if you wake up dazed in a smoking landscape, walking through the detritus of your own lost civilization with the smell of ash in your hair, your favorite sweater gone and a new song in your head, don't say you weren't warned.

About Thao:

Thao & The Get Down Stay Down-the San Francisco-based band fronted by singer and songwriter Thao Nguyen-releases their fourth album, A Man Alive, on March 4, 2016. Following the critical success of We The Common (2013), which was largely inspired by Thao's volunteer work with the California Coalition for Women's Prisoners, A Man Alive is an evolution in both subject matter and sound. Thao says: "I wanted A Man Alive to be beat- and bass-driven-rather than guitar-based-extending and elaborating upon the hip-hop influences of the previous record. A Man Alive is more instrumental, more riff- and loop-centric, and has more manipulated sounds." The Get Down Stay Down are at their best on this record, and Thao herself experimented with programming drumbeats for several tracks, although live drums are also played on every song.

Mostly recorded at Tiny Telephone Studios in San Francisco, A Man Alive was produced by Merrill Garbus of Tune-Yards. Collaborating with Garbus, who is a close personal friend, allowed Thao to achieve the sound she had been striving for on previous releases. "Looking back," she says, "I was less sure of what I wanted. With this record I had clearer vision and aspirations. I wanted emotion. I wanted power. I wanted beats. Merrill's priority was that I take songs and ideas and run with them; she pushed us all over the place. She carved out time and space for us to experiment at will and fostered a very supportive, creative environment. Everyone was compelled to go beyond what they were comfortable doing. Musician-wise we kept it tight knit because the songs were so personal and vulnerable, and it was such an intense process, I only wanted those who know me well."

A Man Alive finds Thao exploring darker and more personal territory than in her earlier songwriting. She grew up in Northern Virginia, on the outskirts of Washington, DC. When Thao was young, her father left the family. She helped out in her mother's laundromat as a teenager, sitting at the counter with a guitar, making change for customers, working on her first songs, and playing at open mics in the evenings. Her father drifted in and out of their lives.

"The record is essentially about my relationship with my dad, its trajectory. It's a document of my life in conjunction with his, even though we've always been leading our lives away from each other. Some are optimistic and forgiving, some are the opposite. There are songs from his perspective: I imagined what it would be like to have kids and choose to exist without them, or feel like you have to save them from yourself. I realized there was this relationship that I never really talk about, realized it's defined so much of me. So it was a point of reckoning. The record wrote itself. Painstakingly, of course."

The emotional center of A Man Alive is the gorgeous, plaintive "Millionaire," a song about a wayward father. While the song could have ended up as a folk ballad, its instrumentation and atmosphere is of a piece with the rest of the album, pushed along by heavily reverbed synthesizer, a simple guitar riff, and subdued drums and bass. "That's a sad fucking song," Thao said. "I remember walking out of the vocal booth, and I saw Merrill tearing up. It's uncompromisingly sad, which I don't traffic well in. It took a lot."

Much of A Man Alive is vibrant and danceable-including standout tracks such as "Astonished Man," "Slash/Burn," "Nobody Dies," and "Meticulous Bird"-and the juxtaposition of that exuberance with the dark themes explored in the lyrics is one of the album's great achievements. The songs are often punctuated by handclaps, sing-along choruses, and ass-shaking beats. While these songs come from a deeply personal origin, they have such an accessible quality that it is easy to imagine an engaged and participatory live audience. "I suspect that's always been my motive," Thao says, "but this is the most actualized that it's ever been. I wanted to make a record that was very introspective and personal, but it would also seek to communicate. And we would have fun performing it-not just fun, but I wanted a kind of crazy, rabid, animal energy. That's my favorite thing about performing-you can tap into this frenzy. We want people to dance and feel. And I want to do that every night, too."

A Man Alive is undoubtedly a new career highlight for Thao & The Get Down Stay Down. The album presents a fiercely original group sound that is rife with experimentation and playfulness. It demonstrates Thao's development as a songwriter. And it achieves that most elusive quality in music-to create an album of songs that are dark yet buoyant, tragic yet redemptive, personal yet inclusive.

performing songs by Bob Dylan

with special guest James Blood Ulmer

Friday, October 26, 7:00 pm

Location:
Fuller Hall
St. Johnsbury Academy
1000 Main St.
St. Johnsbury, VT

Tickets: $52, $42, $32, $15. Students are free

Save 20% when you buy by September 26th. Discount is automatically reflected when you choose your seats.

Seniors and Catamount Arts members save $3.00 when ordering in person with id at the box office.

“Soul singing doesn’t get any better.” -- New York Times

Three-time Grammy nominee Bettye LaVette is no mere singer. She is not a songwriter, nor is she a "cover" artist. She is an interpreter of the highest order. Bettye was performing during the birth of soul music in the 60s and she’s still creating vital recordings today. To quote the late, great George Jones: "Bettye is truly a 'singer's singer'."

Soul diva Bettye LaVette recorded her first hit at 15 (Let Me Down Easy) and toured with soul pioneers Otis Redding, Ben E. King and James Brown. Although the recording industry proved fickle, LaVette has performed consistently during the past half-century, gaining cult followings in Europe and across the U.S.

During the 1990’s and 2000’s, Bettye began to gain wider appeal, performing Love Reign O'er Me at The Kennedy Center Honors in a tribute to The Who. She brought the house down and suddenly found a whole new audience for her unparalleled style of blues and soul singing. In 2009 she performed a show-stopping rendition of Sam Cooke’s A Change Is Gonna Come with Jon Bon Jovi for President-elect Obama’s kick-off Inaugural concert. In April of that year she shared the stage with Paul McCartney & Ringo Starr at Radio City Music Hall.

And in late 2016, her friend, photographer Carol Friedman, pitched Bettye the idea of doing an album of all Bob Dylan songs, with Grammy Award-winning producer, Steve Jordan. The resulting Verve Records album “Things Have Changed” was born. Bettye LaVette’s interpretations of these Bob Dylan songs will be featured in our concert.

LaVette has received the Blues Music Award for Best Soul Blues Female Artist from The Blues Foundation. She has appeared on National Public Radio's World Cafe, All Things Considered, Weekend Edition, and performed a Tiny Desk Concert. She has also appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Late Night with David Letterman, Late Night With Conan O'Brien, Austin City Limits, A Prairie Home Companion, and more.

With a voice that critics today compare to the early Tina Turner, Bettye LaVette continues to break new ground.

FROM ROLLING STONE:

“On the title track of this remarkable collection of Bob Dylan covers, Betty LaVette wraps her voice – full of grit, brass and soul when she started recording at 16 in 1962; worn and sharpened by experience now at 72 – around a lyric about sitting on the lap of strange man with pale skin and an assassin's eye. The way she tells it, that man could be the song's author or a villain in an epic of intrigue, or maybe there's no difference between the two. She makes the song so alive with consequence and possibility, it's able to transform into whatever she or the listener needs it to be in the moment: a spy movie, a romance novel, a Biblical parable of reckoning, a bittersweet memory of a time when caring mattered or a way of drinking away the pain of that memory.”

“This (Dylan songs) album is more hers – more personal and reflective of her wicked ways, sly humor and battle-tested wisdom – than any she's made. Consider Dylan a jumping off point for LaVette – a way of drawing power and focusing attention until she can take the time she needs to describe the world the way it feels to her: a tangle of longing, lust, struggle and hard-won satisfaction.”

WITH SPECIAL GUEST, JAMES BLOOD ULMER

Mighty jazz, blues, free funk guitarist James 'Blood' Ulmer will perform an opening set for Bettye LaVette. Ulmer is best known for his defining collaboration with jazz saxophone pioneer, Ornette Coleman. But his raucous guitar and leathery vocals take audiences back to his deep southern roots in the blues.

“With jangling, chiming chords and a strident delivery with trembling vocals, Ulmer evoked the blues of despair and desperation, the rolling blues of the itinerant, and directly, the electric blues of Muddy Waters and Howling Wolf. Powered, trippery runs drifted into harmolodic abstract with creeping riffs rising up with the force of a hot, bubbling, volcanic spring. Then a grizzled edge to the slurred vocals cut through until the guitar took on a soft, hurdy-gurdy tone for Ulmer to bow out with humble grace after a spellbinding set.” – Geoff Winston, London Jazz News (UK)

“Mr. Ulmer's guitar tone, a gasping, metallic cry, expresses everything from out-in-the-woods loneliness to nail-chewing, urban anxiety. He performed brilliantly. And by organically mixing Chuck Berry and country licks, be-bop and blues ideas, he seemed to be saying that all these things are connected, and that the music and its original makers are our common inheritance.” – Peter Watrous, NY Times.

Thursday, November 15, 7:00 pm

Location:
Lyndon State College Alumni Gym
1001 College Road
Lyndonville, VT

Tickets: $36 general admission, students are free

Save 20% when you buy by October 16th. Discount is automatically reflected when you choose your seats.

Seniors and Catamount Arts members save $3.00 when ordering in person with id at the box office.

Created in association with the world-famous Cirque Eloize company, The New Chinese Acrobats represent the next step in the evolution of acrobatic companies from the East. Mixing new techniques and acts with ancient traditions, The New Chinese Acrobats present the opportunity to view the best of China’s ancient folk art, mixed with the style and virtuosity of today’s generation. With performers selected from across China for their high-level acrobatic skills and innovative staging, the show includes award-winning acts from prestigious world-class events including Monte Carlo Circus Festival and World Circus Festival of Paris.