A mother and father want to protect their children in an uncertain world. Fireflies are brightening a worn road at night. The scent of chiles remind a man of the home he hasn’t seen since he was a child … The music shifts from one song to the next, teasing and lonely, angry, intimate and laughing.
Rosi and Brian Amador have been singing together for 30 years, and you can feel it. On the night after the storm, at Dewey Hall, they performed original songs and music from contemporary composers and songwriters and poets across Latin America. It felt doubly rare, they told us — their first live concert in months, and they had not known whether they would make it out from Boston before the snow fell, or who would be able to come listen. But we were there, and the room transformed around them.
She often led the melody, and he held the harmonies over Spanish guitar. She played the bongos and the cajon, a wooden sounding box with a snare inside — she would sit on it, surrounding it. She had told me how close a physical connection she feels to the music when she’s playing percussion, and now I understood. She sent up a counter-rhythm, a lithe beat always coming in when you didn’t expect it and swinging you with it.
The whole night seemed to run on that kind of energy, and the whole day too. And it carries on. A shift is beginning. Sugar shacks are starting to boil, and Ioka Valley Farm is opening their maple café. College events are opening up to the community like the daffodils in the greenhouse at the Berkshire Botanical Garden. Gradually, a thread of warmth is returning, and we’ll have a touch of color again.
