PUTNEY — Next Stage Arts Project and Twilight Music present Julie Ness, Dave Wysocki, and Tristan Bellerive performing Joni Mitchell's legendary album Blue at Next Stage on Saturday, Nov. 13, at 7:30 pm.
As described in a news release, the trio will celebrate the 50-year anniversary “of this groundbreaking album that defined a generation with a 10-song cycle, weaving a journey of hope, yearning, love, loss, and heartbreak.”
A graduate of Oberlin Conservatory with a background in concert and operatic work, Ness (vocals, piano, dulcimer) has devoted herself to the intersection of bluegrass, folk, and classical music, and has performed internationally as a soloist.
After studying jazz, classical, and world music at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Bellerive (guitar) has performed, recorded, and taught music throughout New England and in Nashville. He and Ness perform their unique brand of “chambergrass” as Watson's Cabin, their old-time and classical mashup band.
With a degree in double bass performance from the Boston University School of Music, Wysocki (double bass) has performed with the Vermont Symphony, Dartmouth Symphony, and Hanover Chamber orchestras, as well as the Upper Valley Mozart Project and the Abendmusik Chamber Players.
Recorded in Los Angeles in 1970 and released in 1971, Blue represents one of the “turning points and pinnacles in 20th-century popular music” represented on a list of such albums by The New York Times in 2000.
It also has been rated the third-best album ever made in Rolling Stone's revisited list of the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time,” the highest entry by a female artist, rising from its 30th-place ranking when the list was first compiled in 2012. And in 2017, Blue was chosen by NPR as the greatest album of all time, topping the list of “The 150 Greatest Albums Made by Women.”
In 1979, Mitchell reflected that, in Blue, “there's hardly a dishonest note in the vocals. At that period of my life, I had no personal defenses. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes. I felt like I had absolutely no secrets from the world and I couldn't pretend in my life to be strong. Or to be happy. But the advantage of it in the music was that there were no defenses there either.”