What’s the next best thing to owning incomparable musical talent and impeccable performance élan? Starting a music-promotion business that specializes in “the finest authentic music in intimate local atmospheres like small halls, parlors and farmers’ fields” might be close to second-best. This is what former marketing director and amateur fiddler Nancy Austin and Dave Doud, a WDST deejay, have done. Their new venture, Studio Woodstock, is based in Red Hook, but bills itself as a movable feast of booking opportunities, reaching out to the larger Hudson Valley community to bring top-notch entertainment to interesting – perhaps even obscure – venues. And Austin is thrilled to announce the Irish fiddle/guitar duo Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill as Studio Woodstock’s inaugural concert, to be held on Saturday, November 14 at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church Hall in Red Hook.
Born in Ireland, Martin Hayes was raised in a family of renowned traditional musicians. An All-Ireland Fiddle Champion six times over and recipient of the National Entertainment Award (the Irish equivalent of the Grammy), he was named the BBC Folk Instrumentalist of the Year and Man of the Year by the American Irish Historical Society. Hayes also won the prestigious Gradam Ceoil Musician of the Year award last year, conferred by Ireland’s TG4 Irish language television.
Master guitarist Dennis Cahill is a second-generation Irish Chicagoan who has studied jazz and classical guitar and has performed with some of Irish music’s top artists. It is said that his innovative accompaniment is a major breakthrough for guitar in the Irish tradition, and it intensifies Hayes’s adventurous fiddling. Beyond that, the duo’s international press accolades comprise a long list of superlatives – like “ravishing virtuoso,” “rare musical kinship” and on and on – which only indicate the difficulty of adequately describing such a phenomenon.
Hayes and Cahill have worked with artists as varied as jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, New Acoustic duo Mike Marshall and Darol Anger and Irish rocker Sinead O’Connor. They’ve garnered international renown for taking traditional music in new and surprising directions, as excerpted by Hayes on their CD liner notes: “In Irish music today there is much debate and division on the issues of continuity versus change and tradition versus innovation…Tradition in music is not frozen at a point in time, but is a process in motion that is undergoing constant change and refinement. It is a reflection of people’s lives.” Visit www.martinhayes.com to sample this exquisite talent.
Austin is a longtime member of the Hudson Valley music scene, and Doud has over 30 years of experience in radio. So in addition to booking musicians, Studio Woodstock is developing its own radio program that will feature Woodstock genre music – that is, music either recorded by or influenced by artists of the Woodstock Generation. Don’t expect to hear Muzak renditions of “Yesterday.” Do look forward to work that honors the era, and in-depth interviews with artists like Steve Winwood and Peter Rowan as well.
Meanwhile, catch “An Evening with Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill” this Saturday at 7 p.m. St. Paul’s Lutheran Church is on Broadway in Red Hook. Tickets are $30 and can be reserved online at www.studiowoodstock.net. For further information call (845) 802-6515.