Rounding ’Em Up

by Sharon Nichols, March 18, 2009

 

Rumor has it that the acoustic Café Siné was once upon a time the most happening haunt in New York City. The artistic breeders who frequented the place were pretty rattled when it closed its doors in the mid-’90s, but luckily the popular venue morphed into The Living Room, another club which blossomed into a haven for artists looking to be signed. Norah Jones’s career gestated there. So did October Project’s. Today, local recording artist Rebecca Martin, who also found her vehicle there, has a new mission in mind: to dangle a carrot before some of those Living Room artists and lure them up to the Hudson Valley. Finding the perfect upstate milieu to reel in the singer/songwriter has been a dubious task for Martin, but she’s confident that she’s finally unearthed her carrot: the Stone Ridge Center for Performing Arts, with its exciting new expansion strategy.

Martin, who lived in the Big Apple for 10 years, describes the city scene and its musicians as stellar. “Just about everyone who is doing something now is someone who was probably part of the scene down at the Living Room and Café Siné,” she says. “It was the place to play. My group, Once Blue, got signed out of there. So did Jeff Buckley, Katell Keineg, Jesse Harris, Richard Julian...we all played there in New York and still do. No matter where these artists currently are, it is still everyone’s old haunt. There are many different worlds at work here musically, but everyone’s worlds eventually collide if they stay in the city long enough.”

Martin finally moved Upstate and found a niche; she connected with the Benmarl Winery in Marlborough and began curating a monthly music scene for an intimate crowd. The venture lasted for almost a year and a half, but ultimately the lack of promotion sent her in search of another venue.

“There aren’t a lot of places to play around here if you’re a singer/songwriter,” she explains. “It’s been a very frustrating search. We want to get people out of the city and up here, to share.” Stone Ridge Center for the Performing Arts is the location she chanced upon, and now she’s working there part time as their production coordinator when her own gigs aren’t sending her elsewhere. “I believe in this place so much,” she says. “It’s local, it’s community, it’s all the things I feel strongly about. They’re planning a major renovation to turn the downstairs into a state-of-the-art performance space, an up-to-300-seat venue that would provide a location for people to come and play all kinds of music. But it’s still in the infancy of its planning stages. There’s such a need for places to play and good rooms that sound great in the Hudson Valley, where the audience has a great experience and the artists can do their best work. It’ll be an incredible resource for the area. But it’s a not-for-profit, which is always a challenge.”

For Martin’s upcoming “An Evening of Songs in the Round,” which will take place Saturday, April 17, at 8pm, six artists from that old Manhattan lair will shift their talents around, doing four or five songs a piece, but only playing one or two at a time. Taking turns. In the round, as they say. “This will give the audience a really intimate look into the songs,” says Martin. “I know these rounds exist everywhere, but this is quite a special group.”

Heading off this special group is Martin herself, whose work is described by Pat Metheny as “feeling and soul, with fantastic intonation,” and “interesting and beautifully conceived instrumentation.” She’s a beguiling, faultless jazz singer set loose in folk-pop territory—her stirring work heralds early Joni Mitchell—yet her bold, urgent material defies category. Martin began her professional career with a cluster of musicians that came out of that coveted Manhattan space—Once Blue. She toured with Shawn Colvin, Emmy Lou Harris, and Lilith Fair after releasing her first solo effort, Thoroughfare, in 1998. Her second release, Middlehope, was touted as one of the top 10 records of the year by the New York Times, and her third release, People Behave Like Ballads, will be released this summer.