I’m about to sell you on how cool and amazing event calendars are. Because it’s true. Buckle in.
Forget those Tech Giant Weirdos pushing “connectedness” via apps. The humble event calendar is the piece of technology you need to separate yourself from your couch and get out there.
Shout out to Monica Velgos, who puts together the Events Ahead listings for Cambridge Day every week. And don’t overlook the “Hit this” section in my columns either. We’re here to help you find the best of what’s happening locally.
How do event calendars get pieced together? It depends on which of two major types we’re talking about: the “curator” calendar or the “aggregator” calendar. I’m going to blow up this distinction later, but for now take the former as your traditional handpicked events listings, and the latter as an automated procedure that pulls events based on parameters designated by computer code.
I recently talked to Solon Gordon – a pianist, software engineer and creator of Boston Shows, one of my favorite local “aggregator” calendars – to learn how the sausage gets made.
Gordon created the online calendar (originally titled Cambridge Shows) in early 2023, motivated by the frustration he felt searching for local music.
“I found it surprisingly difficult to discover what was out there. Big touring acts were easy enough to find, but I have a soft spot for small, independent venues, which are typically ignored by sites like Songkick and Bandsintown. To learn about those shows, I had to visit each venue’s website and consult their individual calendars, which was tedious.”
Gordon is right. God bless the souls who individually update calendars at venue websites, but they’re tedious as hell to search, and only give you one venue’s worth of information at a time. What was needed for local music hounds was an aggregator that would pull event listings from the smaller venues, the places that often get overlooked, but are often the shortest distances from our front doorstep for live music.
These days the aggregating machine at Boston Shows chugs along smoothly, but there were a few hurdles to clear at the start.
“The main technical challenge early on was handling the enormous variety of formats that concert listings are published in. It’s easy enough to pull listings for big Ticketmaster venues, but small venue websites tend to be special snowflakes, lovingly maintained by the owner’s friend’s nephew. I love that side of the Internet, but it doesn’t make my job easy.”
Gordon’s code reads and compiles listings from other online sources. The less standardized the sources (like the “snowflake” venue websites), the more time is required to automate the feed correctly. But once it’s done, it’s done, and works on its own.
Aggregation is a powerful automated tool, and coders can tweak the event search parameters as wide as they like. But here’s what I’m saying. You might think you want a “big tent” kind of calendar with every type of event, from knitting jamborees to ax-throwing contests, listed in full. But when you are blanking on the best way to spend your free time, a “big tent” listing can drop you into a doomscroll paralysis.
Less is, frequently, more. Boston Shows offers less event types: It’s only music. Minimal visual ornament: The interface is clean, no frills and ad-free. Smaller geographic coverage: It’s only the Boston area. Narrower date range: Listings don’t hit the radar until three or four months out. Zero editorial insight: No event blurbs or descriptions. For simplicity’s sake, I love it.
When I reflect on the human choices built into the foundation of a calendar such as Boston Shows, the distinction between handpicked “curated” listings and automated “aggregated” listings loses some of its impact. The aggregating code that Gordon wrote is a form of curation. And there’s still a manual submission portal for events if you want to reach out the old-fashioned way.
It makes me feel better that there’s a human being steering the ship. Do I even need to explain why during our present-day AI gold rush? Thanks for what you do, Solon.
Hit this
Saturday: Freedy Johnston (Lilypad, Cambridge)
Pitchfork described Freedy Johnston as a “master of subtle songcraft, almost to a fault.” Really, Pitchfork? You couldn’t craft a complimentary sentence about this living legend without adding some weirdo qualifier? The singer-songwriter is a big name who’s played with big names, been produced by big names and signed to big labels. He’s been on the whole merry-go-round. It will be an immense pleasure to see him in such an intimate space, almost to a fault.
Saturday: Stereo MCs, Haasan Barclay (The Sinclair, Cambridge)
Love this bill. If you were wired into hip-hop during the ’90s, you recall how many of those acts positioned themselves as dancehall music. Sure, rapping was cool, but if you weren’t making music for Fly Girl Nation, the DJs weren’t spinning your record in the club or on the radio. Stereo MCs rode the wave of hip-hip-flavored club music to a few worldwide hits, and rapper Rob B. (born Rob Birch) absolutely crushed it with his all-denim ensemble in the music video for “Connected.” Genre-surfing Haasan Barclay brings the right energy in the opening slot.
Tuesday to Jan. 30: Ryan Montbleau, Brooks Forsyth (Club Passim, Cambridge)
The last time I covered Ryan Montbleau live in concert he was babysitting Keller Williams at the Paradise Rock Club. Montbleau’s rootsy Americana should have been a nice complement to Keller Williams’ virtuosic “one-man jam band” act. Instead, Williams was so inebriated that Montbleau had to get on stage and coax the headliner through something resembling a set. No such worries at this three-night Club Passim stint. North Carolina’s Brooks Forsyth picks a folk guitar in support.
Live: Boston Urban Ceilidh at Crystal Ballroom
The 22nd Annual Boston Celtic Music Festival concluded Sunday. Four days of music, drawing preeminently from the Irish and Scottish tradition, showcasing more than 35 performances at six stages across Cambridge and Somerville, plus a handful of workshops to teach you how to play these tunes yourself.
The festival is a sprawling orgy of sound, smiles and good cheer, and resists neat summary. One hallmark feature, though, is the standing invitation to become part of the action. If you want to attend, sit back and merely listen, you can do that. But the performances are engineered in various ways to draw you into the circle of participation in mind, body and spirit.
The event that loomed largest for me was the Urban Ceilidh, a traditional dancepalooza with contra dance and Scottish ceilidh components, in which I resolved to take a more active role after mostly remaining a weirdo wallflower with a smartphone last year. I told myself that I was covering the event for Cambridge Day and needed to keep a certain professional distance, right? Malarkey! I jumped right in the mix last Friday night. Sometimes you need to report events from the inside.
Here’s one thing that I never would have learned if I hadn’t danced myself: Traditional dancing holds within itself ingenious methods for building community. Of course, I already understood in a general and empty sort of way that dancing brings people together. But experiencing it up close, I was amazed at how effective the routines were at mixing and remixing the people that walked through the door.
If you had arrived with a dance partner, get ready to play the field as the “callers” on stage directed the swirling crowd to and fro into groups of three, four and more. If you came alone, be prepared to get lost in the throbbing mass of humanity. By the end of the night the old had danced with young, the short with tall, the thin with plump, the shy with bold. And when the last note sounded, a room full of strangers felt a lot less strange.
Michael Gutierrez is an author, educator, activist and editor-in-chief at Hump Day News.
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