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... by Joanne Corsano ... joanne@picturelake.com

Tom Leidenfrost, one of the 1st Night performers
click thumbnail to see a photo gallery
of the concert

Chatham First Night -- performers were:
Andrea Terrio & Cape Cod Jazz Trio at the Chatham Orpheum. Andrea Terrio (vocals), Bart Weisman (drums), Ron Ormsby (bass), Fred Boyle (piano)
Zoë Lewis at the Chatham Orpheum.
Tom Leidenfrost and Tom Nuendel at the Community Center.

Scroll to below videos for a review of the show.

"Dream a Little Dream of Me" by Andrea Terrio & the Cape Cod Jazz Trio

"Gringo" by Zoë Lewis

"When Dog Meets Wolf" by Zoë Lewis

"Wonderlust King" (a song by the punk rock band Gogol Bordello) by Tom Leidenfrost (accordion, vocals) and Thomas Nuendel (violin)

Andrea Terrio & Cape Cod Jazz Trio at the Chatham Orpheum. Andrea Terrio (vocals), Bart Weisman (drums), Ron Ormsby (bass), Fred Boyle (piano) .

We took a lesson from last year's First Night. Last year on Dec. 31 Concert Going Partner and I arrived in Chatham in time for a 2 pm performance and there was nowhere to park anywhere in town. Every lot was filled. So we drove up to the middle school on Crowell Road and there was one space; but from there we would have had to take the bus back into town, and we'd missed the performer we'd wanted to see, so we gave up and went home and watched Twilight Zone episodes instead.

So this year we got to town wicked early. To our delight there was plenty of parking at the Orpheum Theater. There's a nice little restaurant right in the theater building where, as early birds, we had the place to ourselves. We had rollup sandwiches and went upstairs to the movie theater which is the First Night venue, and found a comfy seat in the front row for Andrea Terrio & Cape Cod Jazz Trio, the first performer of the day. The Cape Cod Jazz Trio are a very busy three piece band led by the famous name of jazz on Cape Cod, drummer Bart Weisman, a name well known even to me, non-jazz follower that I am. The room had largely filled up when Andrea and her three accompanists started at 1 pm. I enjoyed their show. They played songs from the Great American Songbook, songs that your parents or grandparents had on LPs, 45s, or even 78s when a lot of the audience members were growing up decades ago, very familiar songs. Andrea has a smokey voice and was obviously enjoying singing the tunes backed up by such a practiced trio, and each musician took their allotted solos on each tune. I got one video, a song folks from my generation know from the Mamas & Papas cover. They played precisely from 1 pm to 1:45.

The songs they played included: Somewhere Beyond the Sea (Bobby Darin) - Blue Skies (Irving Berlin) - Dream a Little Dream Of Me - Route 66 - S'Wonderful - Dancing Cheek To Cheek - Fly Me To the Moon - Till There Was You - Old Cape Cod

Zoë Lewis at the Chatham Orpheum.

After Andrea's set was over the four musicians scrambled to break down their gear and vacate the stage, while the next performer, Zoë Lewis, set up her equipment. If she was just one singer with a guitar, that would be easy, but of course, Zoë, the cliched "band in a body," brings a keyboard, guitar, ukulele, harmonica, whistles of one type and another, various percussion instruments, a magic trick or two, cue cards, and who knows what else, and she needs some time to set up, so there was a madcap scene for the fifteen minutes between sets.

Regular readers of this website have enjoyed numerous descriptions of late of how good Zoë is, so I won't get too repetitive on that score. I'll just mention that she has gotten pretty clever with adding a few magic tricks, appropriate for New Year's Eve, such as pulling a bouquet of flowers out of a pot. I'm also getting to really love her new "Box Car" song, in which she describes the rowdy hijinks of her younger years, riding the rails with a punk rock companion of those years. She played two sets, the 2:00 - 2:45 and 3:00 - 3:45 time slots. She debuted a new song, "Dandelion," in the first set.

The second set was livelier, partly because Zoë started off with the sure crowd pleaser "Gringo," which was the first song I ever heard her play, exactly eleven years ago when I was first introduced to this amazing dynamo of a musician at Chatham First Night 2013. After tonight Zoë is off to her annual residency in Puerta Vallarta, Mexico; best wishes for a happy and warm wintertime!

Set list 2:00 - 2:45: I Can't Give You Anything But Love (Baby) - 78 - Blink - Never Too Old (uke) - Dandelion {new song} - Always Have the Moon - These Shoes - Chili - Audience just like you (not sure what song this is, it's what I wrote in my concert notebook)

Set list 3:00 - 3:45: Gringo - Breakfast Blues - Always a Sixpence - Box Car - When Dog Meets Wolf - Welcome To the Circus - Imagine (John Lennon) - Prince Of Love

Tom Leidenfrost (accordion) and Thomas Nuendel (violin) at Chatham Community Center.

After Zoë's sets we left the Orpheum and trotted up the road past the Chatham Rotary to the Community Center. It was a pleasantly warm afternoon, unlike other times we'd been to Chatham First Night. We were interested in seeing Tom Leidenfrost because we'd seen him a couple of times backing up Zoë Lewis. During one of those shows he had sung a couple of songs and we knew he had a good singing voice and a fun stage personality. He was playing on the second floor in a room with plenty of comfortable seats. There was also good lighting, enabling me to get some pictures of Tom and his accompanist, a good thing after the darkness of the Orpheum. I think Tom has an appealing look on stage that makes him worth taking pictures of. Unfortunately we arrived a little late and missed probably two songs.

Accompanied by violin player Tom Nuendel, Tom played an interesting variety of songs ranging from Great American songbook to traditional English folk to modern punk. This was the second of two sets at the Community Center and he was on his way to another venue after this one. Tom has played at Renaissance Fair type shows numerous times and you can tell he's used to having no time at all between sets.

The piece of his set I heard: Mack the Knife - Sweet Georgia Brown - Saint James Infirmary (sung by Tom Neundel) - Wonderlust King (the punk song I videod) - After You're Gone

Here is a page with a handy list of links to all pages on this website with content relating to Zoë Lewis.