Date: Sat, Nov 19, 2022. Show Time: 7:30pm/door opens at 7pm
Cincinnati, OH 45202 United States + Google Map
An improbable, impossible night of words and music.
Concerts for Turbulent Times they surely are. We aren’t poets, maybe, but the evenings are poetic. They are musical and grave and raucous and stilling, which probably means they are theatrical. They are nights in which love letters to life are written and read aloud. There’s some boldness in them. They have that tone. These nights have the mark of our time upon them, and they’re timely, urgent, alert, steeped in mortal mystery. They’re quixotic. They have swagger. What would you call such a thing? We called it “Nights of Grief & Mystery.“
A Night of Grief & Mystery combines stories and observations from Stephen Jenkinson drawn from his work in palliative care with original songs/sonics from Canadian recording artist Gregory Hoskins.The two artists have been exploring the intersection of their work for seven years, across 3 continents, through 3 recordings and 2 short films.
There are three challenges that face every musician. The first is writing new music that’s worth listening to. The second is creating a new live show that’s worth attending. Both of those have their shares of inspiration and perspiration, joys and their struggles. Both are largely in the hands of luck and fortune. But there is a third thing that is so difficult most musicians don’t even attempt it: coming up with a new genre of performance. And yet, that’s what these Canadians storyteller/singer/songwriter/ musicians seem to have done. So what is this new genre exactly? And is it “new” or is it an older kind of thing that is just unrecognisable to our part of the world? Video clip: https://youtu.be/bAkTk_
Whatever it is, Hoskins has combined forces with author, teacher, storyteller, and cultural activist Stephen Jenkinson to create it and finding words for it isn’t easy. It’s not a book reading - though books might be read from. It’s not spoken word, though much of Stephen’s speaking is poetic in nature. It’s not scripted theatre. It’s not a lecture.
As their write up has it, “It is a storyteller. A singer. An evening of mongrel sorrow, dappled by magic and wonder, fringed with regard for the gift of the tongue, harkening and hortatory and bardic and greying, steeped in mortal mystery. They are nights devoted to the ragged mysteries of being human, and so grief and endings of all kinds appear.
“We do so when the current appetite is for either distraction or distress, and we seem to be in neither business.” SJ…Find out more »