About an hour and 45 minutes north of Manhattan sits the village of Millbrook, N.Y. In the 1960s, a sprawling American Queen Anne mansion just outside the village became something of a counterculture landmark. Built in 1912, the house and the 2,500-acre estate was acquired at the start of the 1960s by the twin sons of the wealthy Mellon-Hitchcock family....

At the 2023 edition of the Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville, all the talk was about the future of the festival after founding artistic director Michel Levasseur announced that he was stepping down after 40 years and 39 editions of the event. Who would take over as artistic director? Who was even qualified to direct such an eclectic, forward-looking festival, given that one of the requirements would be having a strong local presence in a small city of 50,000 two hours from jny: Montreal? How would the programming of the festival change under a new director? When the festival announced that the new artistic director would be Scott Thomson, who had taken over the direction of the Guelph Jazz Festival in 2017, the pleasant surprise was a full-circle moment for the two festivals, as founding artistic director of the Guelph festival, Ajay Heble, was originally inspired by FIMAV when he started that festival in the early '90s... [ read more ]

Dan Rosenboom - b. 1982