Col. MaCaw’s Magical Cure-All

This series started in Spring 2010 when my good friend, musician/poet/dancer Maxima Kahn, asked me if I wanted to curate some happenings with her at her gallery space Heartfire Studios in Grass Valley. Sadly, Heartfire is no more, but I loved the name we came up with for the series, and I’ve continued presenting occasional events over the years at various locales around my Nevada County home–some of which have included Maxima in one of her many artistic guises, most recently in December 2024 with the Stinson Trio.

We wrap up our Fall 2025 series on Saturday, December 13, with a night of songs for the 21st century. Justin Purtill integrates soulful vocals with dazzlingly intricate guitar work, drawing upon jazz, Americana, Great American Song Book standards and jam band pyrotechnics to perform poetic originals and unexpected cover tunes. He has played with everyone from Stu Allen’s Mars Hotel to Melvin Seals and the JGB, from Esperanza Spalding to Amy Winehouse, and is a mainstay of the Residente band.

Our next outing on November 8 has some extra-added firepower: guitarist David Dvorin’s Pocket Quartet‘s CD-release party for its first record Hard-Boiled Music (coming out on Cure-All Records on 11/7/25) will have a special guest, T.E. Wolfe of KVMR’s A Word In Edgewise. Tom will be reading excerpts from Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep and other crime detective masterpieces that inspired the record, live with improvised accompaniment from Pocket, a la Edgewise‘s weekly prose+music offerings that Tom does so well. Come see it live on 11/8 at Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains in Grass Valley.

Our latest happening is October 17, 2025 at the Unitarian Universalist Community of the Mountains in Grass Valley. This second of four in our Fall 2025 series at UUCM features pianist and composer Toon Vandevorst performing modern works inspired by J.S. Bach. I was lucky to see this same program at a house concert Toon played earlier this year.  I loved the way Toon began with two preludes and fugues from Bach, and then spun an intriguing tapestry of modern works (20th & 21st century) inspired by these pieces: preludes and fugues from Shostakovich, sonatas from Stravinsky and Berg, and magical gems from post-minimalist composer William Duckworth (Time Curve Preludes–how’s that for a name?) and Howard Hersh’s exquisite Dream. It’s going to be an enchanted evening.

December 2024’s event with “Ms. MaCaw,” Maxima Kahn and Stinson Trio:

Here are some of the great posters that Julia Boorinakis Harper has designed for the events over the last few years (and look for her below as “JVBH” on Oct. 8, 2015(!)):