2023-2024 Series Subscriptions on Sale Now!

“One of the most important musical minds currently walking the planet.”

Americana series

3 events - Save 20%

Nickel Creek with special guest Hawktail

Sun, Oct 8 / 7 PM / Granada Theatre

Mountain Stage with Kathy Mattea

Featuring special guests

Sun, Feb 4 / 6:30 PM / Granada Theatre

Rhiannon Giddens

You’re the One

Tue, Apr 23 / 8 PM / Granada Theatre club is famously mentioned in Kerouac’s novel, On the Road. It has two stages with live performances all evening. The ground floor is devoted to jazz with 200 table seats and bar to the right; the downstairs is a 100-seat theater for non-jazz music, and other acts from comedy to burlesque. The $20 minimum per person spend is easily done with the delicious menu.

There I listened to the Ravi Coltrane Quartet – Coltrane (sax), David Virelles (piano), Dezron Douglas (bass), and Johnathan Blake (drums). The group was formed in 2012 and played this year for the first time since 2020. Coltrane, son of John and Alice, is named after Ravi Shankar. Talking with him after the gig, he told me he grew up and went to high school in Woodland Hills and studied sax at California Institute for the Arts. He is now living in Long Island, his birthplace.

For this gig, Ravi paired his saxophones with tech – a wireless mic used as a preamp for his pedal board (like rock guitarists), where he went from dry (no pedal) to a chorus pedal for improv and phrase emphasis, a harmonizer pedal to expand scale runs for a big band sound and experimented with a harmonic plus pedal to pick off chord notes he played and then improvised to. He used a “nod” for a fuller sound and did body level changes, bending down for lows and up for highs. He worked it and was not alone.

Blake was a force to behold using all manner of sticks, brushes, and well-worn white felt mallets for his distinctively direct approach to rhythm, and extra-high-speed dexterity for compositional impact. Douglas played his gamut nesting his bass into the Yamaha baby grand piano’s curve, eyes closed and smiling the notes into existence. Virelles’ dreamy piano approach created the space for full octave runs, holding the line in one hand while the other spun top notes – those contra-harmonies to the main riff lines played by Coltrane. The set list was “Intervals,” Alice Coltrane’s 1976 work “Illuminations,” Wayne Shorter’s “Nefertiti,” Ornette Coleman’s “Happy House”, a Virelles composition, and a 16-minute version of John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps.” Ravi stayed for fans to say hi and take photos. I highly recommend getting tickets to this ear candy. Society toasts Lydia Liebman of Promotions NYC for the press tickets.

A Feast for the Eyes

Exploring the visual arts scene is NYC at its best. I started with the Museum of Modern Art. The sixth-floor exhibition, Signals: How Video Transformed the World, covers a 60-year span of the medium on walls, screens, monitors, inside domes and