Rogovoy Report For 3/25/16

The cultural highlights in our region this weekend include a tribute to the spirituality inherent in John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme”; a fusion of cutting-edge spoken work and cutting-edge new music; the debut album of a novelist who is best known as a singer-songwriter and therefore who wrote a soundtrack to go along his novel; a one-woman show; and a rare intimate gig with one of the avatars of indie-rock.

It’s a generally quiet weekend, culturally speaking, given the Easter holiday, but there are a handful of events worth looking into.

Slam poetry meets new music when poet Roger Bonair-Agard joins forces with Kronos Quartet cellist Jeffrey Zeigler, composer and steel-pan player Andy Akiho, and composer/percussionist Sean Dixon, in “M Is Black Enough,” a work-in-progress program in the Hunter Center at MASS MoCA in North Adams on Saturday at 8pm.

Author and singer-songwriter Robert Burke Warren will read and play original songs from his debut novel, “Perfectly Broken,” at Spotty Dog Books & Ale in Hudson tonight at 7pm. “Perfectly Broken” follows former rock star, now stay-at-home dad Grant Kelly, who after 9/11 has traded a New York City apartment for a Catskills farmhouse with his wife and their four-year-old son. Ghosts from the past, worries for the future, and temptations in the present converge to bring about drastic changes in their marriage, their friendships, and their family. Warren formerly lived in New York City, and now calls the Hudson Valley home.

Bonita Jackson will perform a reading of her new, one-woman show, “Empty Valuables,” at Bridge Street Theatre in Catskill, N.Y., on Saturday, at 2pm, in the BST Speakeasy. Jackson describes her new work as “A journey of a mother and three of her daughters who all never meet. All four dig through their separate journeys, but are linked in their struggle for self-value from the adversities they face.”

On the 50th anniversary of “A Love Supreme” by John Coltrane, an interfaith jazz ensemble join the First Church singers Between the Banks to pay tribute to Coltrane’s groundbreaking composition in the 9th annual Good Friday experiment in music and meditation at First Church in Pittsfield, Mass., tonight at 7pm.  Musicians include Carlton Maaia II, Charlie Tokarz, John Haddad, Jon Grenoble, Dianne de Mott, Eva Perri, Elizabeth McCarthy, Brian Staubach, David McDermott, and James Lumsden, who serves as pastor at the church and who is sometimes referred to as the “jazz pastor.”

And finally, tomorrow night at Club Helsinki Hudson, indie-rock pioneers Yo La Tengo perform an intimate gig which comes on the heels of the release of its second covers album, “Stuff Like That There,” on the 25^th anniversary of its first such effort, “Fakebook.” The evening of music will feature two sets – one acoustic and one modified acoustic-electric.

Formed in Hoboken, N.J., in 1984, by husband-and-wife Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley, Yo La Tengo were alternative before that was even a thing. The group connects the dots between jangle-pop and the drone-rock and urban cool of the Velvet Underground. (Indeed, they even portrayed the legendary art-rockers in the 1996 film, “I Shot Andy Warhol.”) The group’s new covers album includes songs by the Parliaments, Hank Williams, Sun Ra, the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Cure, and Yo La Tengo itself.