Other Voices

Other Voices

By The Altamont Enterprise & Albany County PostSociety & CultureKids & Family
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Other Voices episodes

  • Joy Bennett — Old Songs takes on new life

    Joy Bennett says she felt like she was home when she discovered folk music. “The sharing of music touches part of you maybe you didn’t know existed,” Bennett says in this week’s podcast at AltamontEnterprise.com/podcasts. Bennett is the director of Old Songs Inc., taking the helm from founder Andy Spence in 2018.  The Old Songs Festival of Traditional Music and Dance, usually held annually at the Altamont fairgrounds, was audio-only last year because of the pandemic and this year will be held as a virtual event on June 25, 26, and 27 through Zoom. The evening concerts will be simulcast on Folk Music Notebook and on the Old Songs YouTube channel. Seventy artists from around the world will perform on five stages.

    One of the focuses is on The Generation Project — music passed down through families and community groups. Ustad Shafaart Khan, a classical Indian musician, for example, is a 16th-generation sitar player and the Great Gambian Griots play Mandinka kora music, passed from father to son for untold generations, making their own koras, 21-stringed harps, from calabash gourds, leather, wood, and fishing strings. “The direction is to push forward to inclusivity,” said Bennett.

    She has performed for 25 years with an a cappella, all-women group called The Johnson Girls. The name comes from one of the sea chanteys they sing: “The Johnson girls is mighty fine girls, walk around, honey, walk around,” sings Bennett on the podcast in a lusty voice.

    The group had to break through a glass ceiling while performing — “Those who thought a chantey singer had to be male, bearded, and with a beer gut, needed to think again,” wrote the Cornwall Guardian when The Johnson Girls performed in England, and Bennett recalls being told, “You girls sing like you have balls.”

    Bennett explains that the chanteys are work songs sung by crews on 19th-Century sailing ships as they raised anchors or pumped out water; the songs coordinated their efforts and oxygenated their bodies. The chanteys were the first world music, Bennett believes, and her group has left a mark with changes they’ve made, which they hear when audiences sing with them. She says, “It is just exhilarating.”


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    34 min
  • Aaron Mair of Guilderland, wilderness campaign for the Adirondacks
    Aaron Mair of Guilderland is the new director of a wilderness campaign for the Adirondack Council. Following the lead of President Joe Biden, Forever Adirondacks will focus on enhancing carbon sinks in forested land to slow climate change. Mair, who retires this month as a public-health epidemiologist working for the state, will combine his skills in data analysis with his passion for preserving the environment. He served as the first Black president of the Sierra Club, a commitment that sprang from his work as an urban environmental pioneer in the 1990s. When Mair lived in Albany’s Arbor Hill, the paint on his new house peeled and his children suffered from asthma; he discovered the root cause of both was the nearby garbage incinerator. “The next frontier,” Mair says in this week’s podcast, “is to save the planet.” First-world nations need to pay attention to their wilderness assets, says Mair, who believes the Adirondacks, properly managed, can be environmentally sound, with clean water, while also creating jobs and promoting eco-tourism. “We can absolutely love something to death,” Mair says of the over-used High Peaks region where crowding and trail erosion are problems. “What is old is new again,” said Mair, citing Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps that created jobs during the Great Depression, which Mair termed “an idea borne out of economic necessity.” Mair, a descendant of farmers, sees New York as being on the frontline in the fight to create a vibrant economy while preserving wilderness.

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    44 min
  • Frank Beretz — “escape the modern time" at the Gas Up
    Frank Beretz operates an antique machine once used to roll roads. It is one of hundreds of historic steam, gasoline, and oil engines that will be displayed along with antique trucks, cars, and military vehicles this weekend, June 12 and 13, and next weekend, June 19 and 20, each day from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission to the Gas Up, at 130 Murphy Road in Schoharie, is free. The annual event — back this year with safety precautions after a year on hiatus because of the pandemic — is run by the Hudson-Mohawk Pioneer Gasoline Association of which Beretz is president. “It’s like stepping back in time,” he says of the Gas Up in this week’s podcast. The Gas Up features live music as well as ice cream cranked by a hit-and-miss engine, a barbecue, and souvenirs for sale. At age 73, Beretz has a barn full of antique tractors he’s restored — 22 to be exact, ranging in age from 1937 to 1959. Every one is special to him — he brought each of them back to life. His passion began when a friend had a tractor “all in pieces” that he was going to take to the dump. Beretz paid him for the worth of the metal and put the tractor together so it would run again. People who used the old machines and repaired them for a living are gone, Beretz notes, so members of the association, which has about 200 members with about 50 active members, help each other. “We’re trying to preserve history,” said Beretz, noting members are eager to explain their machines to visitors. The Gas Up, he said, is a way to get out after COVID had “everyone boxed up” and is also a way to “escape the modern time.” He concluded, “It’s like it used to be before computers took over the world.”

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    30 min
  • Savanna Jiang and Maxine Alpart, Guilderland High School activists
    Activists Savanna Jiang, left, and Maxine Alpart, right, both Guilderland High School sophomores, organized a May 21 anti-hate rally at their school. In this week’s podcast, each reads the speech — powerful words about painful and true experiences — she gave at the rally and talks about the kind of change they believe is needed. “Our school likes to say stuff but doesn’t take action,” said Jiang. However, once they spoke out about their pain, they felt “so much love” in return from the 100 or so in the crowd on May 21 who applauded and cheered. Jiang’s French teacher hugged her and said she hadn’t known what Jiang had suffered until she heard her speech. Alpart named a long list of students and advisors who helped with the rally. During the pandemic, and the forced isolation that came with it, the activists said, separate people came together through social media, not just in Guilderland but from far-flung places, like New Zealand and Hawaii. “You can meet people and spread awareness,” said Jiang. Alpart said that silence can be worse than a negative response. “Allies need to be there,” she said, noting that, if someone shows up, that person can be shown how their opinions are harmful. Alpart said their motto has become, “This is just the beginning.” The two activists along with other students at Guilderland are now hoping to organize a larger rally with neighboring schools in Albany and Niskayuna. “The change is going to happen,” said Alpart, urging people to “be on the right side of history.”

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    40 min
  • Faith Borkowski and Georgia Burtt, ending a pandemic with a music festival
    Best friends: Faith Borkowski and Georgia Burtt play Jay Ungar’s “Ashokan Farewell” in this week’s podcast. Georgia has named her violin — made in Germany in the 1800s — Aphrodite and says it is her most prized possession. Faith’s violin originally belonged to her mother. Her father, too, is a violinist and she has enjoyed playing with him at nursing homes. The duo are Young Leaders in the Empire State Youth Orchestra and are organizing a Volunteer Music Festival that will be held on Sunday, June 13, at Altamont’s Orsini Park from 1:30 to 4:30 p.m. They have partnered with the Regional Food Bank of Northeastern New York and will be collecting monetary and food donations for the food bank during the festival. Both of them aspire to careers as musicians and will soon be submitting performance tapes to Julliard.

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    30 min
  • Jason Brinkman, Albany Dutchmen baseball


    Jason Brinkman, who grew up in Guilderland, is the general manager and vice president of the Albany Dutchmen, one of 16 teams throughout New York State in the Perfect Game Baseball League. After being closed out last summer by pandemic restrictions, the team is moving to Dutchmen Field at Roger Keenholts Park in Guilderland this season. Brinkman, in this week’s podcast, calls the ballpark, with lights for night games and new chair-back seating as well as picnic areas, “a hidden gem tucked away.” The Dutchmen’s home opener is Saturday, June 5. College players from across the country — including from Vanderbilt, Louisville and Old Miss — converge for a summer season “with the hopes and dreams of … being drafted by Major League Baseball,” said Brinkman. The team is looking for local families to host players — with information at dutchmenbaseball.com. All that’s needed is a spare bed, said Brinkman, and the bonds can last a lifetime. Brinkman thinks a sense of normalcy will return with the boys of summer. He said, “I’m thrilled to have baseball back.”







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    32 min
  • Phil Teumim, "contemporary folk" and Old Songs
    Phil Teumim of Delmar creates art from recycled objects and music by drawing on past traditions and on personal experiences. He describes it as “contemporary folk” or “acoustic Americana” in this week’s podcast. “The songs are the keepers of the stories of the day. They are the compass rose that help us find our way,” say the lyrics to “Old Songs,” which Teumim wrote to benefit the local group that holds concerts, dances, and festivals to keep traditional music alive. Teumim is president of Old Songs Inc. and worked with other musicians to build the organization a home in Voorheesville in what was once a church and later a library. — Photo from www.philibuck.com

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    40 min
  • Vaclav Sotola, from Czechoslovakia to Guilderland
    Vaclav Sotola left Prague, Czechoslovakia with his mother, fleeing a politically constrained communist country before the fall of the Berlin wall. He experienced a recurring dream when he first arrived in the United States, via Yugoslavia and Austria: he would go for an evening walk in the woods until he heard steps behind him and large men were following to capture him, he would run, they would pursue, and then he would wake up. Now, a teacher in Canajoharie and swim coach for Guilderland and Voorheesville, Sotola is ready to retire and still sometimes thinks and dreams in Czech. Listen to more of his story on the latest podcast.

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    36 min

About Other Voices

From the publisher's feed

Often, truth isn’t handed down from public officials but comes from listening to other voices. Once a week, you can hear a wide variety of views from people who shape our corner of the world in New…