Sara and I attended a lot of great events this last quarter, and not all of them were music-related. I don’t have as much time as I’d like to describe everything in excruciating detail, but July is already almost over, so I’m just going to bang this one out.

April 5 – Spring Awakening

We went to our first show at Tallahassee Community College and it was so absurdly good. We recognized people from Theatre Tallahassee, so it was pretty clear this was not limited to just TCC students. This is the first time we saw the show, and while the subject matter is dark, the music was really entertaining, and I can’t say enough good things about the performances of each of the actors. I always enjoy a visible band at a musical too. We really enjoyed sitting in the center of the front row. A great start to the quarter.

April 11 – Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play

This was a surprise treat put on by the Florida State theatre department. It was a play/semi-musical that covers the aftermath of an unspecified apocalyptic event immediately, seven years, and 70 years after the disaster, with a focus on how pop culture (primarily The Simpsons) has impacted us and might impact us long after it is gone. Summarizing the play would in some ways be roughly a performance of it; just go see it if you ever get the chance.

April 20 – Gadsden Reggae and Blues Fest

We have made it a tradition to attend this event with our son, and some times have gone better than others. It was cool was that they added a second stage for blues music (it used to be a reggae festival only), and it was cool was that they put a bounce house out for the kids, but it was uncool that they placed it near neither of the two stages. That meant we mostly battled with our son’s desire to play versus our desire to watch some music.

April 20 – Ian Karmel

We rushed out of the reggae festival before it was over, because we had another event to attend. I don’t often get to see my favorite things in Tallahassee, Florida. Most bands skip it as a stop on their tour, the theater and comedy scenes are local – we have some good stuff, but it’s not usually my favorite stuff. So having Ian Karmel come to town and do a standup set was as unexpected as it was amazing!

You see, I’ve become a huge fan of this guy after listening to his podcast All Fantasy Everything for the past three years. The podcast is centered around comedians drafting various things in a serpentine-style fantasy draft. This provides a loose structure for a couple of hours of jokes and fun conversation, and it’s become an absolute staple of my week.

Karmel is also the co-head writer of The Late Late Show with James Corden and is behind some of the current best sketch comedy in late-night TV, including conceiving of the fantastic “Crosswalk the Musical” segment. He’s been nominated for multiple Emmys and is up for two more this year, so the fact that Florida State brought him out to do a show was insane to me.

As for the show itself, I’d heard a fair amount but not all of the material before, but it just goes to show how good the guy is that I was dying laughing the whole time. He did an unexpected Q&A session afterward, and while most of the questions were about his TV work, I managed to get a question in on the podcast, and he seemed excited to talk about it. Such a fun evening.

April 26 – of Montreal w/ Yip Deciever

This was a great show by one of my favorite bands (one of the very few that actually do come through Tallahassee). This is the third time I’ve seen them in the last two years, and I don’t plan to stop if they continue coming near where I am. I posted a concert film I made of it back in April, so check that out if you want.

April 27 – Jazz and Blues Festival

This was at the outdoor Tallahassee Museum, right next to the playground where our son likes to play. We have an annual membership there, making admission to this event free. Having a free music festival happening right next to you while going about your normal business is, in my opinion, pretty cool. They have these types of events a few times a year and we always try to spend an hour or two, even if we don’t ever really sit down to watch for more than a couple minutes at a time.

May 3 – Sister Act

This was another very fun performance by the people at Theatre Tallahassee, who are rapidly becoming local celebrities to us. I have in fact never seen the Sister Act movie, so I got to experience the story completely fresh. We were able to grab another set of front-row tickets, which always intensifies the theater-going experience.

May 4 – British Festival with Beatles Cover Band

The next day we took our son to some church’s British festival that Sara discovered on Facebook that morning. There was unexpectedly a The Beatles cover band, and while it’s hard to really stand out as this type of group, they certainly weren’t butchering the tunes. They mentioned playing at Disney World for a while, so they clearly had some chops. A very nice setting to have lunch and let our young man play while we listened to some classic British Invasion songs.

May 11 – Southern Shakespeare Festival

Honestly, we didn’t see much of this, because we brought our son and it’s hard to keep him sitting for long. But this was a pretty picture, I thought (I’m going to credit Sara for it, even though I don’t know for sure).

May 18 – Futurebirds w/ JB’s Zydeco Zoo

From May to November (!), Tallahassee is having the Summer Concert Series, where they will have two bands play once a month on a Saturday night from 7:00 to 10:00 p.m., for free, in the beautiful Cascades Park Amphitheatre (see the Southern Shakespeare Festival photo above). Regardless of who is playing, this is just too much value to pass up.

This time, it was a very entertaining zydeco band playing followed by Athens-based southern indie rock group Futurebirds, who we saw and enjoyed last November. They put on another great show with nice guitar work and beautiful harmonized vocals. Hopefully they’ll be back to Tallahassee again soon.

 

June 7 – Peter Karp

I felt like it had been too long since we’d been to a show, so I encouraged Sara to pick out something at the Bradfordville Blues Club. She expertly selected Peter Karp, a bluesman/storyteller who played a really nice guitar but who totally blew me away on the keys. We cut out early on our first trip together to the BBC, but this night we stayed until the bitter end – the show went from 9:00 p.m. until 12:40 a.m., really giving us our money’s worth. I was dozing in my seat by the final few songs, but there are less pleasant ways to spend a tired evening.

June 14 – Seussical, Jr.: The Musical

We took our son to his first musical, and despite his usual inability to sit still, having children close to his age in colorful costumes doing dances and singing songs kept him at least somewhat controlled throughout the length of the show. We’ll call that a success! We also enjoyed our first trip to the historic Monticello Opera House, about a 30-minute drive from Tallahassee.

June 15 – The Blue Begonias

Another Tallahassee Summer Concert Series show, this time featuring a The Grateful Dead cover band that happens to be fronted by a guy I used to work with. I’ve never really gotten into The Grateful Dead, but jams like this are perfect for live performance. Our son did eventually convince us to let him go play, but we caught more than an hour of solid jams.

June 28 – Falsettos

My parents took our son on a trip, giving us the weekend to go to Jacksonville and Saint Augustine without juvenile interference. We got to catch a performance of the 1992 musical Falsettos put on by the Five and Dime Theatre Company. The script calls for the seven-person cast to perform the 2.5-hour musical while singing the ambitious and darkly hilarious score throughout. And despite this being a tiny blackbox theater, this was honestly one of the best performances of any show we have ever seen.  We were again right in the front row, and this made the very emotional performance all the more powerful for us. It really hit us hard, and we’ve been talking about it ever since. Wonderful.

June 29 – Saint Augustine Music Festival Chamber Orchestra

For our last show of the quarter, we were pleased to catch the final evening of the two-week Saint Augustine Music Festival, which features a free classical music performance each night. We enjoyed the Saint Augustine Music Festival Chamber Orchestra in the historic Cathedral Basilica, playing Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” and Shostakovich’s “Chamber Symphony for Strings in C Minor”, along with two other nice but lesser-known pieces. It’s been a while since either of us has attended a classical music concert, but it was a nice reprieve from our usual pop-and-musical fare.

We’ve already attended a number of great shows in July – but that’s not part of quarter two. Later.