Our first dynamic duo are a brother sister team whom are making huge waves in the Capital Region and points beyond. You can’t pick up a local music top 10 list in these parts without Jocelyn & Chris sitting on the top of it. With vocal comparisons to Janis Joplin and Grace Slick and guitar work likened to Jimi Hendrix and David Gilmour, Jocelyn & Chris and their band have charted three consecutive radio singles in the Billboard AAA Top 40, taken two records to #1 on the Jambands Top 30 Album Chart, and appeared nationally on NBC’s Today Show. The siblings, both recent graduates of Harvard University, have balanced college with performances coast to coast and recordings featuring special guests Cory Wong of Vulfpeck, G. Love, and Gov’t Mule’s Danny Louis. They’ve been featured at Sundance, Summerfest, SXSW, and on the main stage at Mountain Jam Music Festival, to name just a few, and garnered coverage from Baeble, Huffington Post, NowThis, Paste magazine, Daily Mail, Cheddar TV, People, Jam in the Van, Hollywood Reporter, and numerous others. Their performances are a perfect blend of high-energy AAA rock and incredible audience engagement anchored by Jocelyn’s astonishing vocals. This concert is from May 2016. Here are Jocelyn & Chris Arndt live at The Linda.
Our next perfectly pitched pair is The Cactus Blossoms. The Cactus Blossoms sound uncannily like a sibling harmony act who just stepped off the stage of the Grand Ole Opry or the Louisiana hayride in the 1940s or '50s, and there's a good reason for that -- guitarists and singers Page Burkum and Jack Torrey are brothers (jack adopted a stage name when he first stepped out as a singer/songwriter at the age of 19), and their voices fit together in a way that suggests a modern-day approximation of what The Everly Brothers and The Louvin Brothers could deliver. The Cactus Blossoms received a career boost after appearing in David Lynch's 2018 television series Twin Peaks: The Return. The duo's sound then crystallized on their 2019 album “Easy Way,” then expanded on one day, a 2022 sequel featuring a duet with Jenny Lewis. The Cactus Blossoms played WAMC’s Performing Arts Studio in 2018, here they are live at The Linda.
As the late, great Bobby Womack once sang, “you don’t know what you’ll do until you’re put under pressure.” You can have all your i’s dotted, your t’s crossed, and your ducks stacked neatly in a row… but when life throws you a knee-buckling curveball, none of that stuff is gonna help you knock it outta the park.
The musical partnership of guitarist Charlie Hunter and vocalist Lucy Woodward was forged under just such inauspicious, curveball-icious circumstances. In January 2018, shortly before he was scheduled to hit the road for a west coast tour with Mexican singer-songwriter Silvana Estrada, Hunter got word that Estrada’s visa had been denied by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Needing an emergency vocalist for the dates, Hunter reached out to Woodward, whom he knew through their mutual friends in the jazz/funk collective snarky puppy. Well let’s say they hit it off and the result is a perfect musical partnership. From May 2019 here is Charlie Hunter and Lucy Woodward live at The Linda.
Thanks for listening to Live At The Linda, recorded live at The Linda: WAMC’s Performing Arts Studio. Tune in next week for our broadcast of Holly Bowling, Gaelynn Lea, Kimberly Hawkey and Lucy Kaplansky 2017.
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