SantaFe-Magazine.org

James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” navigates two sides of the African-American experience: assimilation versus life as a perpetual outcast.

The Bay Area’s Word for Word Performing Arts Company is bringing one of the author’s finest early works to Santa Fe. The performance opens at the Lensic Performing Arts Center at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 12.

Da’Mon Vann plays the title role in “Sonny’s Blues,” a tormented jazz pianist who has rejected a conventional life.

Sonny’s brother, a schoolteacher and family man, is the nameless narrator who provides the stage direction through the original...

One of the better compliments bass player Travis Book heard recently came from a barista inside a hotel lobby.

Book, his band mates from The Infamous Stringdusters and other musicians were jamming inside a Tacoma, Wash., hotel’s hallways in preparation for a bluegrass festival there when their music caught the ear of a 27-year-old working behind a coffee bar.

He told the band that he dug the sounds that filled the lobby that day — quite a compliment from a young man who up until that point only had ears for hip-hop.

“He said that’s all he listened to,” said Book during a recent phone...

The Santa Fe Desert Chorale has named Don Scott Carpenter its first general director.

Carpenter will be responsible for managing the artistic activities as well as the administrative, financial, fundraising and marketing activities of the organization. The 25-year-old professional choral ensemble hired Carpenter as executive director in July.

Carpenter's job description includes collaborating with the group's music director to establish the general direction and theme of future artistic endeavors.

"Having a full-time person with Don Scott's administrative and artistic background allows us...

Under the influence of an opening night full moon, everyone is in his or her own private operatic drama.

As the Bird Ladies of the Parking Lot flutter into view, all covered in feathers and not much else, the true nature of opera and opening night at the Santa Fe Opera becomes vividly clear. It is what is commonly called, I believe, “the tipping point”—that moment when things begin to unfold, or simply fall apart, depending. In this case it is the instant when you realize, if you didn’t already know, that the real cultural experience is actually going on here beneath the operatic...

Celebrated native son, lanky Alex Maryol, at 26, enjoys region-wide popularity as a rocker and blues man. With that and his foodie-family background, the soulful singer, by Santa Fe standards, has got every finger that’s not plucking a guitar string plugged into our town’s preeminent cultural sockets.

The self-effacing local success story, who draws crowds with his accomplished guitar riffs, songwriting skill, sincere smile, and long golden locks, actually thought I wanted to interview him about his family’s lauded restaurants, which include Tia Sophia’s, Tomasita’s, Diego’s, and at one...

Finish this analogy: Santa Fe is to the Santa Fe Opera as Albuquerque is to ___? If you can’t think of anything to fill in the blank, consider this. The Santa Fe Opera is a place where devotees of the arts, and general lovers of a good time, gather to worship on the altar of New Mexico’s glorious summers. They picnic and strut in their finery, then experience world class singing, staging and music in a spectacular venue.

What would be the corresponding answer for Albuquerqueans? The Albuquerque Museum’s new outdoor amphitheater, of course. Now we Duke City denizens have a place comparable...