Tibetan musician Tenzin Choegyal, who performed at The Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs in October 2023 and returned to play the Zankel Theater in November 2024 has released his latest full-length album.  

The collaborative work – showcasing Choegyal, multi-instrumentalists Matt Corby and Rohin Jones, and songwriter Alex Henriksson – is titled “Snow Flower.” 

“In a world that constantly urges us to do more, we often lose touch with the quieter, more sacred parts of ourselves,” Choegyal writes. “’Snow Flower’ invites you to slow down, turn inward, to pause amidst the rush and rediscover the stillness that lies within.”

“Snow Flower” was recorded amidst the rush of the Tibetan musician’s own career which recently saw him performing alongside Michael Stipe, Laurie Anderson and Patti Smith at Carnegie Hall.   

For more information about Choegyal’s visit to Saratoga Springs, go to: https://saratogatodaynewspaper.com/whispering-sky-tenzin-choegyalwith-new-album-performance-in-saratoga-springs/. Information about his latest release may be found via his public social media platforms and website, listed under “Tenzin Choegyal.”  

SARATOGA SPRINGS — The legendary Alice Cooper, along with heavy metal trailblazers Judas Priest will share the stage for a co-headlining tour across North America. 

Produced by Live Nation, the 22-city run includes a stop at Broadview Stage at Saratoga Performing Arts Center, on Saturday, Sept. 27. 

Alice Cooper wraps up his “Too Close for Comfort” tour in late August, promoting his most recent “Road” album.

Alice will have an as-yet-unnamed all-new show for the fall tour, which kicks off Sept. 16 in Biloxi, Mississippi.  

The Alice Cooper Group formed in the late 1960’s and consisted of Vincent Furnier, Glen Buxton, Michael Bruce, Dennis Dunaway, and Neal Smith. Through the early ‘70s the band delivered a string of highly acclaimed and successful albums – “Love It to Death,” “Killer,” “School’s Out,” and “Billion Dollar Babies,” among them. 

Adopting the stage name Alice Cooper, Furnier has experienced a successful career as a solo artist following the original band’s split in 1974.   

Judas Priest, coming off the second leg of their “Invincible Shield” Tour will co-headline the show.

SARATOGA SPRINGS — Joan Osborne kicked off her U.S. tour in Saratoga Springs on April 10, performing a 100-minute set in front of a packed house at Universal Preservation Hall.

The theater-in-the-round performance, which served as the first show of a national tour that will extend through October, largely showcased Osborne’s rendition of tunes culled from the Bob Dylan songbook. Some initially appeared in Osborne’s 2017 collection “Songs of Bob Dylan.” Her new collection – titled “Dylanology Live” – is slated for release later this month.

“When I cover someone else’s song, I never try to repeat what they did,” Osborne told this reporter, during an interview in advance of her Saratoga Springs show. “What I’m always looking for is trying to find the place where that song and my voice can come together in a way that some aspect of the song can be new, refreshed, where this song can live through me in a way that’s unique.” 

Her appearance at UPH, accompanied by guitarist Jack Petruzzelli and keyboard player Will Bryant, consisted of an 11-song set honoring the great American musical poet – some of which Osborne had not previously performed before – and concluded with a three-song encore of works better associated with her own career as an artist. 

Running a line through the Dylan songbook that traced back 60 years, the band offered funkified renditions of “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” and “Highway 61” – the latter featuring Osborne spewing out lyrics to a musical accompaniment that rollicked like a jazz carnival in an open-air tent rolling across a Native American reservation; “Leopard-Skin-Pillbox-Hat“ offered an up-tempo swinging jazz feel, and the set time-checked nearly every decade of Dylan’s work, most recently with a tender, emotion-filled performance of 2020’s “I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You,” delivered with the presence of the Steinway grand piano filling UPH’s Great Hall, while the band’s vocalized harmonies majestically swirled about the space.

“We’re taking some liberties with the songs,” Osborne told the audience. “And you wouldn’t want us to play them like the record because that wouldn’t work and anyway Dylan himself plays halfway through the song before you even realize what it is,” she said, referring to the songwriter’s history of alternating arrangements when playing his own songs.

Osborne performed a pair of Dylan tunes released a quarter century apart – “She Belongs To Me” and “Everything Is Broken” while informing the audience: “We never recorded these, you people are the first in the world to hear them,” and later introducing the song “Shooting Star” as “another that we’ve never recorded or played live anywhere, but it’s just a favorite of mine.” 

Standing stage left, Petruzzelli – co-producer Joan Osborne’s album “Bring It on Home,” alternated between electric and acoustic guitars, while Bryant – co-founder of Hudson Valley recording studio The Building – sat stage right moving between an electric keyboard and a grand piano. 

Osborne added rhythmic accompaniment throughout with the use of a small blue tambourine she danced off her hip, amplified finger-snaps, and brush patterns graced atop a snare drum, gravitating gestures between the time-keeping beats as each situation warranted. 

With her performance of “Man in the Long Black Coat,” Osborne swayed with crossed arms in sync with the solemnity of the piece, showcasing the breadth of her vocal range. 

It was in the night’s encore segment that Osborne delivered three songs she is known for in her own right. These included the global sensation “One of Us,” the 2023 title tune “Nobody Owns You” from her 2023 release (which marked the one time she strapped on her own acoustic guitar) and revisited her 1995 debut album with the song “St. Teresa” delivering a rendition with a sultry groove vibe that resonated as nothing short of stunning. 

Setlist: Joan Osborne Live at UPH, Saratoga Springs, April 10, 2025.

She Belongs to Me

Everything Is Broken

Man In the Long Black Coat

Highway 61

Shooting Star

High Water (For Charley Patton)

Tryin’ To Get to Heaven (before they close the door)

Rainy Day Women #12 & 35

Leopard-Skin-Pillbox-Hat

I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You

Tangled Up in Blue

Encore:

St. Teresa

(What If God Was) One of Us

Nobody Owns You

SARATOGA SPRINGS — Legendary performance artist Penny Arcade will serve as the visiting artist showcased in the Tang Museum’s final Dunkerley Dialogue of the 2024-25 season. 

The event – Penny Arcade in conversation with Skidmore professor Joseph Cermatori – will take place at 6 p.m. Thursday, April 24 at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College.  

Penny Arcade, aka Susana Ventura, was a teenage superstar for Andy Warhol’s Factory, featured in the film Women in Revolt. She is an international icon of artistic resistance whose social practice is focused on the support of other artists and on the preservation of artist legacies, including the work of Sheyla Baykal (1944-1997) whose photographs are part of the Tang Museum’s monumental exhibition of 100 years of queer art, a field of bloom and hum. 

She has co-helmed The Lower East Side Biography Project, a video oral history of downtown New York that broadcasts and streams every Monday at 11 p.m., and is the author of 16 full-length works, hundreds of performances pieces, lectures, and interviews, all available online. 

She last visited Saratoga Springs in June 2018 during a 10-day residency in Saratoga Springs organized by the Orchard Project. An interview conducted with this reporter during her stay at a Spring Street apartment may be read at: https://www.punkglobe.com/pennyarcade1218.php.  

The dialogue April 24 will take place in the exhibition, a field of bloom and hum, which fills the Museum’s two floors with work by more than 160 artists in a celebration of queer identities and communities. The Tang’s upstairs gallery, the Malloy Wing, features two stages created for exhibition-related events like the Dunkerley Dialogues. Dunkerley Dialogues pair Skidmore professors with artists in a conversational format. 

Admission to the museum and to the events is free. For more information, contact the Tang Visitors Services Desk at 518-580-8080 or visit https://tang.skidmore.edu.

HUDSON FALLS — The band EXTC – featuring the music of XTC and the band’s drummer Terry Chambers – will perform at 8 p.m. on Saturday April 12 at the Strand Theatre.

Terry Chambers with his band EXTC was named and approved by XTC frontman, Andy Partridge.

XTC experienced global success after their emergence in the late ‘70s and toured with the likes of The Police and Talking Heads. 

In 1982 XTC stopped touring to become a studio-based entity. Born in early 2019, EXTC set out to achieve its goals of performing to audiences who had waited so long to hear the XTC back catalogue performed live.

Alongside Chambers, the EXTC line-up features frontman Steve Hampton (lead vocals & guitar – Joe Jackson, The Vapors and Dead Crow Road) and Terry Lines (bass & vocals – The Rams and Dead Crow Road). 

Tickets are $30 general admission and available at the Strand Box Office; cash or check only or online at Brown Paper Tickets. Doors into the lobby, coffee shop and box office open at 6:30 p.m. For the ticketing link, visit www.mystrandtheatre.org. The Strand Theatre is located at 210 Main St, Hudson Falls. 

SARATOGA SPRINGS — A new public fixture in Congress Park celebrates the memory of David Cassidy. Saturday marks what would have been his 75th birthday.  

Cassidy was born April 12, 1950, and was a longtime Saratoga Springs visitor and eventual resident.  The popular singer and horseman died in November 2017 at the age of 67. 

Cassidy charted more than one dozen Top 100 hits in the early 1970s, both as a solo artist and in his role as a member of The Partridge Family – whose TV series aired on ABC from 1970 to 1974. 

For several decades, Cassidy was a frequent summer visitor to Saratoga Springs – the city in general and the racecourse specifically, purchasing his first yearling at Fasig-Tipton in 1974. Cassidy eventually purchased a house in the Spa City in 2001.

“This is my favorite place in the world, I played here in ‘72, ‘73, ‘74,” Cassidy said about the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, during a 2008 fundraising gala at the adjacent Hall of Springs. 

The bench fixed with a plaque honoring Cassidy stands in Congress Park just behind the Canfield Casino.  It was recently commissioned by Shelley Murphy and installed and reads, in part: In Loving Memory of David Bruce Cassidy.