Sometimes a ticket purchase is not just a ticket purchase.
When you buy a ticket at The Sinclair, it’s also a charitable donation. Read the boilerplate verbiage embedded in the middle of its event pages and you’ll discover that, for the majority of events at the Cambridge venue, 25 cents from each ticket purchase goes to The Shout Syndicate, a fundraising outfit for Boston-area creative youth development organizations. That’s CYDs to you, bub.
Okay, cool, what do CYDs do? In a nutshell, they provide the resources, safe spaces and positive support in which kids can drive the development of their own creative talents.
The Cambridge Community Center is a good example of what that kind of targeted financial support can accomplish. The center provides CYD through a number of programs, including the year-round Hip-Hop Transformation program, which connects kids with the resources to write, record, perform and distribute their own hip-hop music.
“Wait just a second, Mike,” you interrupt, taking a big sloppy bite out of a Philly cheesesteak sub, as the juices drip down the front of your Hooters T-shirt, “What’s the point? These kids aren’t becoming hip-hop stars.”
Maybe so, maybe not. What does it really matter?
Years ago a concerned father reached out to me after a favorable review I had written about a debut album by his daughter’s indie rock band, Great Wave. He was worried his daughter was going to, I don’t know, quit school, start smoking more pot than usual and give up on his dream for her, dental school or something. He asked me in earnest whether he thought his daughter had a chance to “make it” in music.
I didn’t have a great response. I think I was mostly perplexed that anyone would reach out to me as an authority on anything, music or otherwise. But here’s what I should’ve said (and this goes doubly to the guy with the stained Hooters T-shirt).
“Look, no one ‘makes it’ in music. There’s a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction at the very top (like in most industries) who are making a killing, and everyone else trying to be like them is just slaving away to prop up a system built to funnel money upward. Not sideways, least of all downward. You’d be better off buying Mega Millions tickets and trying to ‘make it’ in the lottery.”
“But if it gives your daughter’s life meaning to slave away in pursuit of impossible dreams, let her do it. As long as she’s not degrading and dehumanizing herself any more than the average workaday schmuck to pay the bills until her fantasy ship comes into port, who’s to tell her to live otherwise?”
The happy truth, though, is young musicians learn quickly enough whether being a performing artist is their one and only dream. They’re not idiots! And they learn some invaluable lessons running themselves through the wringer of writing, recording, promoting and distributing their own music. It’s a crash course that’s more eye-opening than a lot of three-credit college courses, chock full of translatable skills that will help young adults navigate an increasingly complex world.
Shout out to the Cambridge Community Center for providing a safe space for kids to develop their creative skills. Shout out to the Shout Syndicate for seeing a need and fundraising for it. And shout out to The Sinclair for making it a normal, everyday sort of thing to give to a worthy cause.
Hit this
Friday and Saturday: Blue Heron (First Church Cambridge, Cambridge)
Q4 can be a strange time of year to recommend shows. On the one hand, the calendar is full of opportunities to hear music because people love a good soundtrack for getting spooky, giving thanks and exchanging season’s greetings. On the other hand, seasonal events can turn music into sonic wallpaper, a mere backdrop for whatever the event is really celebrating. Nothing wrong with that: Music can wear all sorts of hats at the same time, like the Blue Heron Renaissance Choir, which is a nice fit for Yuletide but can stand on their own any time of year. Join them this weekend, while the Monsters are still Mashing, to celebrate their 25th birthday on Saturday, or sneak in for a freebie practice session on Friday.
Monday: The Fringe (Lilypad, Cambridge)
The late-night, free jazz residency at Lilypad on Mondays never steers you wrong. George Garzone is the remaining original member of the trio that formed in 1971. One member left to chair the bass department at Berklee College of Music. Another member passed into the great beyond in 2020. Each time the cupboard gets restocked, and there are enough special guests to keep the pot stirred. Expect The Fringe to turn the lights down real low and get straight to the business of improvisational music, like decades of following their slippery muse taught them how.
Oct. 24: Otis Shanty, Small Pond, Lost Film, Night Moth (Crystal Ballroom, Somerville)
It’s an album release party in Davis Square for Otis Shanty, whose LP “Up on the Hill” (available via Relief Map Records) has been earning praise from bloggos, journos and yuckos alike. Even writer Michael Chabon gave the band a shout out, which deserves an excerpt in full: “I see new signs almost every day that rock music, played by humans with guitars, drums and voices, is having a fresh flowering amongst the youth of the nation, which does my old rock ’n’ roll heart good. Latest evidence, Otis Shanty. Swirly, hints of Real Estate and Fleetwood Mac, great guitar support.” Sure, he linked the old EP instead of the new LP, but it’s Michael Chabon! Small Pond, Lost Film and Night Moth open.
Live preview: Fuzzstival
Let’s sink our teeth deeper into Fuzzstival, presented Friday and Saturday by Illegally Blind, with a few sneak previews of the performing acts. A mere event listing can’t do justice to this two-day shindig at Arts at the Armory in Somerville, which is a breath of fresh air for a local indie rock scene that sometimes feels protected from the rain by a single umbrella. No extra points awarded for guessing who’s holding that umbrella.
The festival has been happening every year since 2013, barring a timeout for Covid, at venues strewn across the local music landscape from The Middle East, Lilypad, dearly departed Once and more.
Explore the Fuzzstival archive for a trip in time to the Indie Rock Past. Check out the gorgeous poster art that’s been giving the event its signature look for a decade. Scan the bills of yore to see how many names you recognize.
There are a decent number of artists who have returned to perform at the festival throughout the years. And a decent number of new faces. Which is a kind of mix that speaks to building real community. It’s not just the music fans buying tickets that keep enterprises like Fuzzstival afloat. It’s the artists themselves, often playing for pennies (buy some merch), whose participation make the annual event into a local cultural happening worth marking on your calendar.
Any Fuzzstival veterans this year? Sure enough.
Doug Tuttle scored a hat trick in 2016 after performing in 2014 and 2015. He’s got deep psych roots in New England, reaching back at least as far back as the superlative New Hampshire outfit MMOSS. His solo work crafts a breezy type of West Coast psych that enjoys a perfect pop melody just as much as getting noisy, weird and lifted. Now he joins the four-timer club in 2024.
Babybaby_explores returns after playing Fuzzstival for the first time in 2023. Guitar, vocals, sampler. The Providence, Rhode Island, band is more than the sum of its parts, spinning out rich tapestries of dance punk within what feels like a zone of constant experimentation. Like the best punk, artcore or No Wave, babybaby_explores seems like a band that doesn’t know what a band is supposed to sound like. Or what a band name is supposed to look like. Sounds and looks just right.
Other veterans returning in 2024: Paper Lady (2023), Bong Wish (2018, 2015) and … that might be it? Look for plenty of fresh faces on stage, and familiar faces in the crowd, as the mysterious three-eyed cat crosses your path this weekend at everyone’s favorite army barracks.
A stronger
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