BELLOWS FALLS — Patty Carpenter and Verandah Porche will perform at Stage 33 Live, 33 Bridge St., on Sunday, May 19. Special guest Jon Weeks will sit in on wind instruments and percussion, and Wheeler Laird will join on guitar for one or two songs. Doors open at 3 p.m., and the show starts at 4.
Carpenter and Porche are lifelong friends and collaborators and will play some of the songs they've written since the Dysfunctional Family Jazz Band's Come Over CD, which they also co-composed.
Carpenter studied with Archie Shepp and Max Roach, and her influences range from Joan Baez to Billie Holiday. In addition to the Brooklyn-based Jazz/Americana/Soul/Folk collective Dysfunctional Family Jazz Band, she plays in Patty and the Cakes and The Patty Carpenter Jazz Band.
Porche is a poet and an alt-lit creative collaborator. The Vermont Arts Council presented her with its Award of Merit; she received the first Ellen McCulloch-Lovell Award in Arts Education; and Marlboro College honored her with a Doctor of Humane Letters. Her poetry volumes include Sudden Eden (Verdant Books), The Body's Symmetry (Harper and Row), and Glancing Off (See Through Books).
Porche, who was featured with Carpenter in Freedom and Unity: The Vermont Movie, writes of their work together: “In the late '60s, we landed in the sticks a stone's throw from each other. Dreams, troubles, changes, crops, communards, kids and lovers; music and language saw us through our duet of abundance and loss. We took a guitar, the kids, and a pencil with an eraser down to the river. We've carved these songs out of our long friendship.”