E-Mail This Article to a Friend Save acoustic! The Passim Folk Music and Cultural Center holds a benefit for singer-songwriters, plus Jacob's Pillow 2004 and the Tanglewood Jazz Festival

Club Passim benefit

The recently renamed Passim Folk Music and Cultural Center’s sixth annual benefit concert headlined by English folk-rock legend Richard Thompson next Friday isn’t just one of the year’s premier nights of folk music. Yes, the event has been that since the Center, which operated under the name Club Passim until late last year, began staging it with a string of prestigious headliners who’ve included Bill Morrissey, Odetta, and Doc Watson. But the concert remains the non-profit organization’s largest yearly opportunity to trumpet and sustain its mission, which executive director Betsy Siggins defines as "the survival and growth of acoustic music as a very important part of our past and future musical culture."

"We’re always running close to the bone here," Siggins says. Indeed, what with the cultural-outreach programs for children, a school of music, a folk-history archive in development, and the performances at 47 Palmer Street’s tiny Club Passim in Harvard Square and the absence of large-scale corporate funders or major grants, the Center’s resources are constantly stretched thin.

In addition to raising money through the concert, which also features singer-songwriters Peter Mulvey and Mark Erelli and the Celtic fiddle band Hilali, Siggins hopes the show at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre will "attract the attention of the public. One of my goals is for the public at large to support folk music as the culture of America in the same way they support the local ballet and dance companies. Next year, which will be our 47th, is very important for us. We’re poised to launch a major capital campaign with the goal of doing something profound so we can grow into a true music and cultural center. We really need more space and more staff to support the programs we’ve begun. We’re taking ‘Culture for Kids’ out into the community more, because there’s a need for it. The music school could be teaching seven days a week if we had the space. All of our non-profit programs look forward to the concert every year as a way of refilling the larder, but it’s still not enough to really fulfill our mission and grow." If the capital campaign is a success, the Center aims to find a larger building to house its programs and performances.

Meanwhile, Siggins sees this year’s roster of benefit performers as emblematic of the Center’s history and mission. "Richard Thompson is one of the finest artists in this field, an eloquent preserver of the past and a creator of the music’s future. We’ve wanted to have him here for years, but Club Passim is too small. We don’t have a stage for him to play other than at this show. Peter Mulvey is a fine example of how musicians work within their community and grow, and Mark Erelli is the quintessential example of how a musician can launch a career on the small stage of a club like Passim and develop. Last year he was at the Newport Folk Festival’s main stage. And Hilali, whose members are all in their early 20s, represent the most recent decade of Passim and its ability to serve as a place where young people can be introduced to traditional music, come to be deeply connected to it, and become unbelievably creative in performing it themselves."

The Passim Folk Music and Cultural Center Annual Benefit Concert will take place at Sanders Theatre in Harvard’s Memorial Hall, 45 Quincy Street in Harvard Square, next Friday, March 26, at 7:30 p.m.; call (617) 496-2222.

— Ted Drozdowski

Jacob’s Pillow 2004

It’s not just the usual suspects who’re back for this summer’s edition of the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival. For starters, Boston Ballet is celebrating its 40th anniversary with a "rare appearance" in Becket; the program includes Mark Morris’s Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes and George Balanchine’s Duo Concertant (which the company is performing at the Wang Theatre next weekend, but maybe you’ll be out of town, or you’ll want to see them again) and Balanchine’s Who Cares (which we’ll go anywhere to see). Making Pillow debuts are New Zealand’s Black Grace, which "incorporates the dance and music traditions of the Maori people into a contemporary dance vocabulary," and Shen Wei Dance Arts, whose staging of Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps was lauded by Anna Kisselgoff in the New York Times as one of the top dance events of 2003. We’re also looking forward to "Dance Movies," a weekend mini-festival including the 1955 musical Three for the Show (choreography by Jack Cole; Marge Champion will introduce), The Tales of Beatrix Potter (choreographed for film by Sir Frederick Ashton and with dancers from the Royal Ballet), and the 1987 feature Dancers, a contemporary gloss on Giselle with Mikhail Baryshnikov and American Ballet Theatre principal Julie Kent (who’ll introduce). And who can complain about a season that brings back Nacho Duato’s fabulous Compañía National de Danza 2 plus Paul Taylor (doing Promethean Fire, Black Tuesday, and Le Grand Puppetier), Mark Morris (the announced program includes V and I Don’t Want To Love, works not performed at the Shubert this past weekend), and Lar Lubovitch?

The festival kicks off Saturday June 19 with a benefit evening of dance stars in the Ted Shawn Theatre. The guest artists have yet to be announced, but we know that dancers from the School at Jacob's Pillow will perform the world premiere of a work by Leslie Browne, a former principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre who performed with Mikhail Baryshnikov in Dancers and The Turning Point.

Here’s the line-up in the Ted Shawn Theatre:

June 23-27: Grupo Corpo

June 30–July 4: Paul Taylor Dance Company

July 7-11: Compañía National de Danza 2

July 14-18: Lar Lubovitch Dance Company

July 21-25: Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal

July 28–August 1: Bathsheva Dance Company

August 4-8: Peter Boal and Company

August 10-15: Mark Morris Dance Group

August 18-22: Shen Wei Dance Arts

August 25-29: Boston Ballet

And here are the bookings for the Doris Duke Studio Theatre:

June 24-27: "Dance Movies"

July 1–July 4: Zvidance

July 8-11: New Danish Dance Theatre

July 15-18: Paradigm

July 22-25: Lakshmi Vishwanathan Dancers and Musicians

July 29–August 1: Robert Moses’ Kin

August 5-8: "Jazz on Jazz"

August 12-15: Black Grace

August 19-22: 33 Fainting Spells

August 26-29: Seán Curran Company

Subscriptions (any five shows or more) are on sale now through May 31; single tickets for individual performances will go on sale April 26. The Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival box office is currently open Monday through Friday from noon to 5 p.m.; call (413) 243-0745. Complete season information and on-line ticketing are available at www.jacobspillow.org.

— Jeffrey Gantz

Tanglewood Jazz Festival

The Boston Symphony Orchestra has announced the line-up for its annual Labor Day Weekend Tanglewood Jazz Festival, which this year runs September 3 through 5. Friday finds Brazilian pianist Eliane Elias on a double bill with Nuryorican jazz genius Eddie Palmieri and his La Perfecta II band for an 8 p.m. show in Seiji Ozawa Hall. September 4 brings ageless octogenarian pianist and kibitzer Marian McPartland with a special guest yet to be announced (last year it was Norah Jones) for a live taping of McPartland’s NPR Piano Jazz show at 3 p.m. in Ozawa Hall. The big-deal Saturday night show in the Koussevitzky Music Shed will be Harry Connick Jr. with a 16-piece band plus 16-piece string section as part of his "Only You" tour. On Sunday afternoon at 2 p.m. in Seiji Ozawa Hall, Branford Marsalis’s Marsalis Music label will showcase its small, heavy-duty roster: Marsalis’s quartet, Connick and his intriguing quartet ("no vocals," emphasizes the press release), guitarist/singer/composer Doug Wamble and his quartet, and saxophonist Miguel Zenon. Sunday night, another ageless octogenarian, all-time superstar Dave Brubeck, closes the event with his quartet plus a set where the quartet will be joined by a "string symphonette," a chance for Brubeck to show off some of his extensive non-quartet writing, perhaps. That’s at 8 p.m. in Seiji Ozawa Hall. For tickets to all Tanglewood Jazz Festival events, call (888) 266-1200.

— Jon Garelick