Nnatalia Zukerman
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Kip Beacco
The second Down County Jump Music Festival will take place at Race Brook Lodge in Sheffield on June 28 and 29 and promises to be two days of jubilant, spirit-lifting, feet-tapping fun.
Musical worlds will collide, cultures will meet and merge, and roots that are tangled and intertwined will be unearthed in the most beautiful patchwork of sound. Imagine New Orleans Funk dancing cheek-to-cheek with Old Time Crooning, or early jazz forms sharing a secret with traditional Hawaiian music. It’s like finding a letter in a bottle that’s traveled the world before it reached your hands.
“The Jump is a patchwork quilt of musical styles that all have one thing in common; they are forms of culture-based music that are rooted in some kind of blending/evolutionary process,” said artistic programmer, Alex Harvey. “Sure, we call this all roots music, but the roots are all intermingled, often in ways that are shocking and revelatory.”
Racebrook will be partnering with Brooklyn’s historic Jalopy Theatre for this event, a venue known for its authentic approach to music programming. “Jalopy is a performance venue, record label and school that prizes the handmade, the analog, the authentic face to face experience of participatory musical traditions transmitted across generations,” said Harvey.
This year’s highlight includes a Sacred Harp Singing event led by Tim Eriksen, famed for his contributions to the “Cold Mountain” soundtrack. This antique form of open-throated singing, known as shape note singing, will be an open community sound installation under the pavilion on the river from 2 to 4 p.m. on June 29. Guests are invited to witness or participate in this unique musical experience.
The name “Down County Jump” has its own serendipitous story. Dave Rothstein, the original visionary of Racebrook Lodge, coined “Down County” to capture the essence of the area’s vibrant music scene. Matt Downing, Kip Beacco, and Alex Harvey, brought together by a shared love of dance music and a whimsical nod to Mark Twain’s celebrated jumping frog, knew “Jump” was the perfect fit. It’s a name that invites movement, joy, and a bit of whimsy.
So, pack your curiosity and your dancing shoes. Let yourself be swept away by Gypsy Waltz, Swamp-Pop, Son Jarocho, Olde Time Rags, Hawaiian Hapa Haole, post-war New Orleans R&B, and more. The Down County Jump Music Festival is where you’ll find some of the most danceable shuffles, where every beat tells a story, and every step is a leap into the unknown.
For a complete schedule and to purchase tickets, visit: https://www.viewcy.com/e/down_county_jump_2024
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For the last three years, in an old Cornwall farmhouse, Peter Gerakaris has been developing “Microcosms,” his show dedicated to endangered species and their habitats. His kaleidoscopic icons and mosaics, psychedelic “tondos” (paintings in the round), and vivid origami sculptures—“I love color,” he says, and you can tell—are on view at the Berkshire Botanical Society’s Leonhardt Galleries in Sheffield, Mass. through August 4.
It is the icons that are, perhaps, the most arresting. Traditional icons are venerated Christian images, typically paintings of Christ or the Madonna, that serve worshippers as an opening into the realm of the sacred unseen. Gerakaris began making icons of endangered species shortly after a 2017 trip to Rome delivered him to a Byzantine basilica in Trastevere, where he was struck by the power of the form.
A piece on display in Gerakaris' new exhibit.Provided
As an art student in Rome, he had learned the traditional technique, using egg tempera and gold leaf to paint a Madonna and Child icon, which his Greek grandmother later had consecrated. In 2017, he had recently begun to work with depictions of endangered species, he said, “and I thought of this crazy parallel—these ancient art forms of iconography are almost as endangered as these animals. What better way to reinforce the contemporary scarcity of these creatures than by using this very rare, sacred, time-honored but kind of endangered process?” The resulting paintings reframe these animals and their endangered habitats as windows into the sacred, and demand that we look these rare beings in the eyes.
“There’s a pygmy owl painting in the show. Pygmy owls are endangered and threatened in American southwest because their habitats are being destroyed, due to many reasons but mostly because of brush fires. The figure of the owl is a static silhouette, but in patterning the internal plumage, I allow myself to just kind of cut loose. I found myself painting—and this just kind of came out—if you were to crop that and forget about the rest of the painting, it could be an abstraction of fire and smoke,” Gerakaris said. “I’m deeply humbled by the natural world. For me personally, walking in the forest is my own version of going to a cathedral. I experience a sense of wonder that makes me realize there is some power out there far greater and transcendent than us mere mortals. For me painting is a matter of evoking that feeling.”
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