Actress Lili Taylor, director Tony Gilroy and screenwriter Andrew Osborne will take part in the 16th annual Williamstown Film Festival, which began this past Wednesday and runs through Saturday, featuring 31 films, several parties, and events at Images Cinema and MASS MoCA. Director-screenwriter Tony Gilroy, best known for his Oscar-winning thriller “Michael Clayton” as well as the Bourne movies, will pull back the curtain on the art of cinematic suspense in a multimedia presentation in the Hunter Center at MASS MoCA tonight at 8pm, as part of the Williamstown Film Festival’s proceedings. And on Saturday at noon at the Williams Inn, Lili Taylor and her husband, writer Nick Flynn, talk about the art of turning books into movies.
Trombonist and composer Craig Harris will lead an ensemble to perform the music of the late Sun Ra, one of the most original voices and visionaries in jazz, at MCLA in the Church Street Center on Saturday at 7:30pm. For this concert, Harris will bring together a group of musicians, including the Dartmouth Barbary Coast Jazz Ensemble, to perform the complex music of Sun Ra, in celebration of the centennial anniversary of Sun Ra’s birth. Sun Ra, was a peer of the greats of the 1950s, like Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie, although he was a little bit left of center – so much so that he claimed to have been born and raised on the planet Saturn.
Singer and trombonist Glen David Andrews brings his jazzy, horn-laced New Orleans funk and soul band back to Club Helsinki Hudson on Saturday, at 9pm. Andrews combines a voice and stage presence worthy of Louis Armstrong, updated for the hip-hop era. A typical Glen David Andrews set offers a mix of traditional jazz, rock, gospel, funk and even a little zydeco. And Helsinki executive chef Hugh Horner, himself a native of New Orleans, will be preparing the proper gustatory delights to go along with Andrews’ Creole funk.
“Landscapes & Bodyscapes,” an exhibition of new works by three artists whose studies of landscapes and bodyscapes have catapulted them to national and international recognition, opens this weekend at Carrie Haddad Gallery and will remain on view through December 14. There will be an opening reception for the show, featuring works by Jane Bloodgood-Abrams, Mark Beard and Dan Rupe, on Saturday, from 6 to 8pm.
Acoustic trio Quiet In The Head, the ongoing musical project of guitarist Seamus Maynard, violinist Jonathan Talbott and cellist Jonah Thomas, performs at Spotty Dog Books & Ale on Saturday, at 8pm.
Simi Stone, Amy Helm, and two-time Grammy Award-nominee Elizabeth Mitchell headline “Ladies of the Valley,” an intimate evening with some of the Hudson Valley's best women singers and songwriters, at the Bearsville Theater in Woodstock on Sunday at 7pm. The concert, which also includes performances by Sarah Fimm, Lindsey Webster, Donna Lewis and Lisa Green, is a benefit for Family of Woodstock’s Crisis Hotline and Walk-In Center.
Seth Rogovoy is editor of Berkshire Daily and the Rogovoy Report, available online at rogovoyreport.com
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