City of Kingston Earth Fair

SAIL ABOARD THE CLEARWATER

Join us for one of two classic Public Sails from Kingston on Saturday, May 9! Join us for a 1:30pm or 5pm sail from the Hudson River Maritime Museum. While aboard, visit the fish tank to learn about your underwater neighbors, stop by the tiller to help steer, and take in the scenic beauty of the Hudson River.

The 5pm sail will be a Music Sail featurig singer-songwriter, Amber Rubarth.

ALESSANDRA GONZALEZ

Alessandra Gonzalez is a Puerto Rican singer-songwriter and Latin fusion artist based in New York’s Hudson Valley — and a living testament to the power of not giving up. Possessing a rich contralto range that extends into mezzo-soprano territory, Alessandra blends Caribbean rhythms, Latin genre traditions, and contemporary fusion into emotionally resonant live experiences.

Born in New York and raised in Puerto Rico, Alessandra discovered her voice at the age of five. She performed in television programs, competitions, and theater productions across the island before studying Music Education at the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras, where she refined her technique and deepened her understanding of vocal artistry. In 2017, she returned to music, singing on La Super Latina radio in Poughkeepsie, expanding into regional festival circuits, university stages, and cross-state cultural showcases across New York, Massachusetts, and Puerto Rico. At the heart of Alessandra’s work is a simple but powerful message: No matter how far you feel from your dreams, you are never too late to return to them.

AMBER RUBARTH

Refreshingly unique in her styling, Rubarth has built an eclectic collection of songs from the fun and frivolous to the raw and destructive – her voice knows no bounds where genre is concerned. But it’s in her lyrics where the most satisfaction is found, and her musings on life are delightful in their innocence and have the capacity to appeal to the most diverse audience.

Touring from South Africa to Japan and all throughout Europe and North America, her music has taken her from Carnegie Hall to Glastonbury Festival (UK), to being handpicked to open for legendary artists including Emmylou Harris, Richie Havens, Dr. Ralph Stanley and Kenny Loggins. Grand Prize Winner of the prestigious NPR Mountain Stage contest, songwriting is at the heart of how Rubarth navigates the world.

ARM OF THE SEA THEATER

Arm-of-the-Sea is an arts ensemble that fuses visual storytelling with live music in large-scale works of mask and puppet theater. Founded in 1982 by Marlena Marallo and Patrick Wadden, the company’s hybrid performance style channels the evocative power of the arts as a force for joy, insight, and community uplift. Their low-tech devices of theatrical enchantment illuminate relations between humans and the life-support networks of this blue-ocean planet.

Arm-of-the-Sea tours its original productions to cultural centers, festivals, and community venues throughout New York and adjacent states. The organization is transforming the ruins of a 19th century papermill In Saugerties, NY into a waterfront cultural park for bio-regional arts & science.

DAVID AMRAM

David Werner Amram is an American composer, arranger, and conductor of orchestral, chamber, and choral works, many with jazz flavorings. He plays piano, French horn, Spanish guitar, and pennywhistle, and sings. David Amram started his professional life in music as a French Hornist in the National Symphony Orchestra (Washington, D.C.) in 1951. Since then, he has traveled the world extensively, working as a musician and a conductor in over thirty-five countries including Cuba, Kenya, Egypt, Pakistan, Israel, Latvia and China also regularly crisscrossiong the United States and Canada. In addition to writing new music, he continues to perform around the world as a guest conductor, soloist, multi-instrumentalist, band leader at jazz, folk and classical festivals and narrates them in five languages.

ELIZABETH MITCHELL & YOU ARE MY FLOWER

Elizabeth Mitchell and You Are My Flower are Grammy-nominated Smithsonian Folkways recording artists and have been making music for children of all ages for over 25 years. They are based in Woodstock, NY.

KEY OF Q CHOIR

Based in Kingston, NY, Key of Q Choir is an auditioned group of LGBTQ and allied singers who travel from all corners of the Hudson Valley to blend their voices and perform beautiful a cappella music. Formed at the beginning of 2016, Key of Q focus on mostly-modern secular music in four-part harmony. Common themes within our music include equality, love and celebration of identity in its many forms.

They perform at least two themed concerts per year as well as various smaller gigs and private events, and have been known to break out into song whenever and wherever we congregate after rehearsals!

KOFI & SANKOFA DRUM & DANCE ENSEMBLE

MADELEINE PEYROUX

Much like songbird Edith Piaf, Madeleine Peyroux spent her teenage years busking the busy streets of Paris. Just like the ‘little sparrow’, Madeleine befriended the city’s street musicians and made its Latin quarter her first performing stage. Years later, Peyroux would cite iconic Piaf as an influence on her music and record a rendition of the classic La Vie En Rose, soulfully capturing the tune’s romanticism and melancholy. Born in Athens, Georgia in 1974, Madeleine “grew up in a house filled with music” and from an early age “instinctively realised music’s soothing power” but it was her teenage years in the French capital that turned the childhood notion into an all-consuming vocation for life.

Madeleine’s thirst for creative exploration is unfading and her willingness to face creative challenges remains as solid now as it was five decades ago. Her ninth album, Let’s Walk, is acclaimed singer-songwriter’s most assured, courageous work to date. Powered by the distinctive, honeyed croon that delivered her from the Paris streets to concert halls, these ten unabashedly personal songs, all co-written by the versatile Peyroux, deftly interweave jazz, folk, and chamber pop, with themes ranging from the confessional to the political, from whimsy to yearning. In every note, Peyroux digs deep, rendering this exquisite work with the disarming grace and gravitas of an artist in peak form.

PABLO SHINE LATIN JAZZ BAND

Pablo Shine has been playing congas since my early teens in Puerto Rico. One afternoon at his grandmother’s Gabriela uncle-William showed me some rudiments and the basic tumbao pattern, the lifeblood of Salsa and Latin Jazz. That was my initiation in conga playing. There is no lack of African base music in the Island, so he learned a great deal from watching some of the best percussionist in the Salsa bands. In 1983 he came to SUNY New Paltz to finish my degree in Fine arts and that took priority, completing my BFA and MFA. In the mid 90’s he was re- introduced to conga playing by my teacher and dear friend Nadir Velez, a master of Folkloric Afro-Caribbean percussion. Pablo has played with different local bands including Passero, The Latin Jazz Express , and Nu Bossa. Over two years ago, together with Rick Altman on Vibes and John Drechsler on upright bass, Pablo Shine founded my own band Pablo Shine Latin Jazz Band (formerly Sabor), which plays Latin Jazz Standards as well as originals.

THE RESTLESS AGE

The Restless age –Will Bryant, Lee Falco, and Brandon Morrison–are mostly tucked away at the Building, their recording studio near Woodstock, NY, recording songs that, like their live performances, seem to exist outside of time. Sharing songwriting and vocal duties, swapping instrumental responsibilities, and self-producing their work, the band is slowly documenting a catalog of songs that are steeped in tradition, but are also personal and urgent and modern. They write with the same dexterity with which they perform: at times cheeky and self-effacing, other times pensive and self-reflecting, and still other times hopeful and optimistic, weaving the charm from their live shows and their trademark three-part harmonies together with colors and textures from across the musical universe to create a sound that is uniquely the Restless Age.