Peter Aaron

Well, last week was a hard week. And the road ahead will be long. But we will get through this. Helping along the way will be happenings that celebrate the counterculture and by extension foster diverse, creative, and progressive modes of thinking—while bringing some much-needed lightness and relief. One such event is “Granny Takes a Trip” an exhibition of pop-culture collectibles at the Kingston Pop Museum that will open on November 16.

Now this sounds like a solid bet for a night of great music in a cozy venue. Steve Forbert and his trio will make their way to the Towne Crier on November 24 in support of the Daylight Savings Time, the singer-songwriter’s 21st(!) album.

Bryan Zellmer will take over for outgoing director Chris Silva.

A scene from When My Sleeping Dragon Woke, directed by Chuck Schultz.

Members of Bang Group from left: Emily Tschiffeley, Amber Sloan, and Jeffrey Kazin

Ready to rock it up after spending last weekend cooped up with your family? Well, if you are, one option to consider might be the ace bill of garage rock by Virginia quartet the Ar-Kaics and Beacon-based Benny Trokan augmented with a reading by author Lucy Sante that will take over Tubby’s on December 7.

Named for a parodic 2005 web series, yacht rock is the retroactively applied catchall term for the saccharine sounds that soaked the airwaves in the late 1970s and early 1980s—performatively earnest hits by carefree, soft-rocking elites with trimmed beards, puka-shell necklaces, and Hawaiian shirts. Stuff that precocious punkers of a certain age (ahem) loathed like a trip to the dentist. But there could be no denying that, as annoying as so many of those AM-golden tunes seemed back then, they could also be addictive earworms. Ditties that were hummed under the breath when no one else was around, mulled in the mind as archetypal guilty pleasures. And in many of them lurk layers of surreptitious subversiveness and emotional complexity that bely their pastel presentations. On Apple Eye, Margaretville duo Droney Rose (Patricia and Damian Catera) peels back the maudlin macrame to expose the hidden strangeness and unwittingly unsound hearts of some of these not-so-shallow-after-all oldies.

A wonderful development on the small-club music landscape lately has been the wave of interest in cumbia, the heady, exotic, danceable Latin American folk music that can be traced to Afro-Colombian traditions. Among the US West Coast’s leading practitioners of the form is the trio LA LOM, which will stir things up at the Colony on December 10.

Through its ongoing free film series, UPAC aka the Ulster Performing Arts Center has been offering a delightful family entertainment option to the Kingston-area community. This week, for the holiday season the historic theater is offering two classics for all-ages viewing: The Wizard of Oz (December 19) and Dr. Suess’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas (December 21).

There’s a lot going on the Hudson Valley this New Year’s Eve. On the live music front, we’ve put together this list of the area performances happening on 2024’s final night that jumped out at us. See venue websites for ticket pricing/purchases and other information. Happy new year!