In case you didn't know, I live in the middle of nowhere.

A beatiful, wonderful, intellectually engaging middle of nowhere, but a middle of nowhere nonetheless.

The upshot of all of this is that good concerts here at Bard are rather rare, kind of like Sasquatch or a rookie Sandy Koufax baseball card and, when we get good ones, its usually a band no one has ever heard of. In that vein, I saw two musicians over the last couple weeks that I feel the need to share with you out there in internetland. The first, who I saw open for Clues and Elfin Saddle, is a pretty wonderful guy from somewhere around here named Ramona Cordova.

Ramona played at SMOG (which is where bands usually play on campus. It also has this horrible habit of making good bands sound shitty and shitty bands sound worse), but he played on the porch rather than in the building itself and so not only could we hear him clearly but the autumn night in Annandale provided a perfect background for his falsetto folk. He told us that he hadn't played in awhile, but he played a brilliant set anyway, at one point mimicking a tuba with his voice because the song, as he put it, just needed a tuba.

He was right.

On Friday, I saw an even more unexpectedly brilliant show in the form of singer/songwriter Gabriel Kahane with his sideman Rob Moose. Playing without horns or percussion (the small music room in the main academic building, where they played, probably couldn't have fit anyone else) Gabriel and Rob led the small crowd through a set of enrapturing and surprisingly danceable folk. The lyrics and melodies were, like Ramona's, autumnal and they trasnported me to Brooklyn when the leaves of the city are changing color and the fall wind turns cheeks pink and blows copies of the Times down the street. When it was almost over he had the audience take a vote, and he ended up playing the entirety of suite he had written called Craigslistlieder (the lyrics of which were taken entirely from ads he found on craigslist), an unexpected he gave to an audience he seemed to appreciate.

You can find Ramona's music here and Gabriel's here