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instrumental chops, but its time-honored writing abilities, which are in top form here. Scenes and moods are evoked, established and subtly revisited, sometimes via timeless lyrics and sometimes with just the simple turn of a musical phrase or accent. What’s more surprising is these songs, despite their shared sensibilities, were not all written during the same period. Some have been kicking around the Cabinet catalog for some time, like “Home Now,” a live staple for the Americana outfit since its early days, which gets a relatively raucous reworking here. Others, like “Pine Billy” and “Red River,” are brand new. “Red River,” specifically, finds the band at its introspective best, a yearning, pretty tune that might pleasantly surprise some Cabinet fans. Those long-time fans will delight in the new material, and the uninitiated will be won over, too, thanks to the warm, inviting nature of the songs and the way they’re presented sonically. Themes of home and family abound, further welcoming the listener to gather around the proverbial campfire with the band as tales are told and songs are sung. It’s a good place to be, and you’ll be mighty glad you stopped by. Cabinet is a band with roots firmly planted in the Appalachian tradition. They wear their influences like badges, honoring the canon of roots, bluegrass, country, and folk, weaving these sounds into a patchwork Americana quilt. But this music isn’t romanticizing or rehashing the past. Cabinet makes it mark on today. The steady aim of their harmonies soar straight onto target each time, the soaring vocals giving voice to the story of each song. Their music takes the long way home, treating its listeners like passengers on a ride through scenic back roads. Their live shows are inclusive, celebratory, and community-building. Members Pappy Biondo (banjo, vocals), J.P. Biondo (mandolin, vocals), Mickey Coviello (acoustic guitar, vocals), Dylan Skursky (electric bass, double bass), Todd Kopec (fiddle, vocals), and Jami Novak (drums, percussion), all live and love music, and aren’t afraid to show it. Cabinet formed in 2006, bringing together players from various musical and personal backgrounds. Some of the members were barely old enough to drink legally, but their thirst for older music was unquenchable. Whether its rustic "American Beauty"-era Grateful Dead or old-timey bluegrass, Cabinet has digested it all. But that is not to say that Cabinet recreates older styles. No, this is music that might have its roots in the past, but it is current and vibrant, with a sense of celebrating the now. "The instrumentation may evoke the hills of Appalachia, but the vibe is more like the valleys of Neptune." -relix "Cabinet has their roots planted in the old-timey music of the past while existing in the present and fans of the bluegrass genre are pumped to have this band in the mix.” - Upstate Live "The songs are filled with luscious harmonies, grand and euphoric in scope and sound, the depth of which are accentuated with the powerful banjo picking by Pappy and finesse fiddle mastery by Kopec." - Glide Magazine "Like many forms, Bluegrass and folk are most understandable when there's harmony; Cabinet believes in the occasional pleasures of dissonance." - Highbrow Magazine

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Groundhog Comedy and Dan Smalls Presents:
Hacksaw Jim Duggan

WRESTLING FANS REJOICE!
Hacksaw Jim Duggan is coming to Ithaca and he's bringing tales and his 2x4 with him!

It's only $20 a head so bring yourself and some friends or else Jim's gonna hit you with his three-point-stance clothesline.

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Though known for its vibrant music scene, Ithaca NY is a relative fishbowl musically, often keeping its boundless talents within city limits for nobody outside the local scene’s elite to hear. Meet the fish that jumped out of the water. The New York Rock has been one of the city’s shining stars since its founding in February 2008 by Mike Brindisi (Guitars/Vocals) and John O’Leary (Keyboards). Began as a dream of Brindisi on the streets of Manhattan, the dream behind the New York Rock started with handfuls of change in the bottom of a guitar case following a brief stint on Saturday Night Live and a rough runaround in Nashville, when a trip down south after high school ended with “a broken heart, empty pockets and another tough lesson learned.” Though superficially a fruitless expedition, the trip yielded a demo that eventually became the foundations of the band. Inspired by the city’s local scene, Brindisi moved to Ithaca, NY, where his first single, “Crawl,” jumped to number 22 on the most-requested chart of local station WVBR. Attracted by its low-key atmosphere and exceptional music scene, it was an excellent place to begin a career, and where he would eventually meet fellow founder John O’Leary. Within the band’s first year, they had already opened for national touring act Gavin Degraw and off that first bit of momentum, saw the video for the band’s first single make it onto the playlist of Cool TV. Within two years, Brindisi was in Howard Stern’s studio promoting the band’s first record. In the time since, The New York Rock has begun to see their profile grow nationwide, from gigs at the notable Driven Music Conference in Atlanta to one-off gigs in places such as Nashville, Austin, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and a primetime gig at the legendary Bitter End rock club in Greenwich Village, NYC—a night the club was packed to capacity. The band has also appeared on the 2014 Vans Warped Tour, making a single-show appearance in Hartford, CT and in the documentary Passfire, for which they wrote the theme song subsequently performed at the PGI fireworks convention in Iowa, an international event for members of the pyrotechnics industry. Whether its for a stage of four fans like the early days or the 4,000 the band has played for at venues like Saranac Brewery, the band refuses to sell out, instead looking for a means to hone their craft to the point where nobody can deny their style as a powerful voice in today’s industry. “We have always stuck to our guns,” Brindisi said. “We have always played rock. That's it. Good melodies, loud guitars and great hooks. We have never wavered… we want to keep rock alive.”

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Judahites Productions and Dan Smalls Presents bring you "the Akae Beka" (Vaughn Benjamin the voice of MIDNITE) Featuring Vaughn Benjamin and full Band: Christian "Sly" Molina on Drums, Kenny Byron Lead Guitar, Edmund Fieulleteau on Rhythm Guitar, Ras L on Bass & Suren Fenton on Keyboards

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Now that every record is a “big event”, it’s hard to figure out what really matters. Sometimes the quieter moments are things you connect with, and Martin Courtney, the frontman of Real Estate, just made an album of intimate moments worth treasuring. After the 2014 release of Atlas, the third LP from Ridgewood, New Jersey’s Real Estate, Courtney started quietly chipping away at some new songs while he was waiting to head back on the road with his band. The idea was that they would be his songs. They’d be a little more compact and concise, a little less abstract. “I was trying to do a straightforward pop thing,” he says. It turns out that what Courtney actually means when he talks about straightforward pop is a collection of soft psychedelia that recalls the Kinks and Big Star even as it probes the depths of his own life as a family man, father, and touring musician. Many Moons is breezy, full of subtle introspection, an elliptical document of Courtney’s transition into family life and fatherhood, largely written while he was on the road. “My original goal for this record was to write songs about one specific idea and have that be that,” he says. “A lot of times with my songs in the past it was very abstract. A phrase would come into my head and I would have no idea what the song was about until months later.” You can hear the newfound clarity of his songwriting on “Airport Bar,” which finds Courtney wasting time waiting for his next flight, grappling with boredom and longing: “It’s half past two in the afternoon/ and I wish I could see your faces/ wondering where you are from an airport bar/ it’s a useless exercise but what’s time wasted.” It is a plain emotional sentiment, but it feels important and real. After writing a couple tracks, Courtney realized what he was working on was slowly turning into a full LP, so he enlisted the help of Jarvis Taveniere of Woods to produce and play on the bulk of the record. He also brought in Real Estate’s keyboard player Matt Kallman, longtime friend Julian Lynch, and a whole host of others. Over the next year-and-a-half, the pair recorded sporadically. The result is an album that feels lush and calm, but with a newfound sonic clarity, a brightness often rounded out with orchestral arrangements. The instrumental title track is a bucolic, string and flute number that wouldn’t be out of place on a prime-era Pentangle record. Courtney has long made a career of writing songs about what happens when your image of home is something you’re trying to hold on to, when the nostalgia that used to comfort you starts to feel unfamiliar, but on Many Moons, he’s moved through that. It doesn’t feel like a rejection of nostalgia, but an embrace of what’s ahead. It is an album-length meditation on his life right now, which is the type of exploration Courtney has become exceptional at. You can hear the change in his arrangements, which still retain the laconic, squinting-at-the-sun vibe of the best Real Estate songs. On the musically upbeat but lyrically conflicted “Northern Highway,” he sings, “life out here can make you weary/folks at home all wishing well/I just wish I had you near me/I don’t stand a chance in hell,” cloaking his jetlagged exhaustion in a track that expertly straddles the line of longing and contentment. Courtney’s always been an expert writer of restlessness and duality, with what it means to grow older with full awareness that he’s growing older. On “Vestiges,” his most lyrically dense piece of writing yet, he sings, “Black mold basements and fenced in yard/rhapsodizing in packed out cars/one can hope that it’s in the cards for you/ But this place is like a column of stone/many moons for it to grow/phases they will come and they will go.” Like the rest of the album, the sadness inherent in this kind of remembrance creeps up on you, and then it starts to feel a lot less like sadness, and a lot more like loving embrace of a specific time. “I like the idea of being a musician, but I’ve always really not liked the idea of putting too much of myself out there,” he says. “I like the idea of disappearing into a band.” Without a band to disappear into, Courtney made the kind of record that worms its way into your brain and becomes part of your life without you knowing it. “It’s always good to have some air in the room,” he says. Many Moons is the sound of Courtney looking at the life he’s built for himself, the success of his band, and taking a deep breath, letting all the pressure go and just working through the life that’s right in front of him.

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"The finest rock songwriter after Dylan and the best electric guitarist since Hendrix." -- Los Angeles Times “A folksinger who (shreds) like an arena-rock star... and still writes songs that sting and storm.” -- NPR Named by Rolling Stone Magazine as one of the Top 20 Guitarists of All Time, Richard Thompson is also one of the world’s most critically acclaimed and prolific songwriters. He has received Lifetime Achievement Awards for Songwriting on both sides of the Atlantic - from the Americana Music Association in Nashville to Britain’s BBC Awards and the prestigious Ivor Novello. In 2011, Thompson was the recipient of the OBE (Order of the British Empire) personally bestowed upon him by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace. Most recently, the Americana Music Honors & Awards nominated him for “Artist of the Year”. Having co-founded the groundbreaking group Fairport Convention as a teenager in the 60’s, Richard Thompson and his mates virtually invented British Folk Rock. By the age of 21 he left the band to pursue his own career, followed by a decade long musical partnership with his then-wife Linda, to over 30 years as a highly successful solo artist. A wide range of musicians have recorded Thompson’s music including Robert Plant, Elvis Costello, REM, Del McCoury, Bonnie Raitt, Los Lobos, David Byrne, Don Henley and many others. Thompson’s massive body of work includes over 40 albums, many Grammy nominations, as well as numerous soundtracks, including Werner Hertzog’s Grizzy Man. His most recent CD, Electric, was produced by the great Nashville musician Buddy Miller (Band of Joy, Patty Griffin.). Electric continues to receive positive praise with Rolling Stone declaring, “…the excellence is undeniable.” This year saw Richard Thompson headlining dates around the world as well as co-headlining shows with Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell. Thompson and his band joined the Americanarama Tour sharing the stage with Bob Dylan, Wilco, and My Morning Jacket culminating with Dylan himself covering RT’s classic song “’1952 Vincent Black Lightening”. Thompson’s genre defying mastery of both acoustic and electric guitar along with dizzying energy and onstage wit continue to earn Richard Thompson massive new fans and a place as one of the most distinctive virtuosos in folk rock history. “Genius appears early. Legends are earned. But history’s greatest never stand on their laurels. This is the artistic arc for Richard Thompson!”