Local Music

Southwest Florida-based singer/songwriter Sheena Brook and Nashville-based Cajun country artist Sara Douga will perform at the Sidney & Berne Davis Art Center in downtown Fort Myers, July 21, through the center’s Sounds of Summer concert series. Ahead of their performances, we feature music and conversation with both of these dynamic musicians.

Southwest Florida musicians Claire Liparulo and Caleb Neff talk about their efforts to elevate the craft of songwriting and feature local great musicians’ original work through Claire’s “High Lonesome Sound” performance series and Caleb’s “In the Pool” recording sessions.

A conversation with Southwest Florida Symphony Maestro Radu Paponiu and Community Outreach Ambassador Robert Van Winkle about the orchestra’s upcoming concert featuring Cuban-American cellist Thomas Mesa performing Antonín Dvořák’s Cello “Concerto in B Minor, Op. 104. The Masterworks series concert, Saturday, March 11, also includes a piece by contemporary American composer Jessie Montgomery and Edward Elgar’s “Enigma Variations.” We’ll take a deeper dive into these compositions.

The tragic loss, last summer, of the incomparable trumpet player Dan Miller has left a huge void in the jazz world. We preview this coming weekend’s “Celebration of Love and Life” tribute concert and learn about how his legacy will continue through the Dan Miller Jazz Foundation in a conversation with his long-time significant other Judi Woods. We also hear selections from a previous episode of this program featuring Dan Miller performing live in studio.

Gulf Coast Symphony is currently performing a unique holiday musical revue production with “Snowbird Follies.”

Musicians and long-time Fort Myers Beach residents Laurie and Steven Martin are among those who lost almost everything due to Hurricane Ian’s catastrophic devastation. Despite their harrowing ordeal riding out the storm in their home, they composed and recorded a moving song meant to encompasses the uplifting determination of the community.

A conversation with and music performed live in-studio by the Florida phantom folk band the Swamp Rats consisting of Scotty Crow on vocals, guitar and cajón and Andy Starkey on vocals and banjo

We listen back to our episode from this past April featuring music from South Florida-based rap, hip-hop, and EDM artist, performer and producer Nory Aronfeld. From lo-fidelity beats to psychedelic instruments, to songs heavy on lyricism and wordplay, his original compositions are genre blending and genre bending.

Conversation and music performed live in-studio by the Florida phantom folk band the Swamp Rats consisting of Scotty Crow on vocals, guitar and cajón and Andy Starkey on vocals and banjo.

We listen back to selections from our show from this past spring featuring jazz performed live in studio by musicians studying under the Florida Gulf Coast University Bower School of Music’s Director of Jazz Studies Brandon Robertson. Robertson and his students have performed on past editions of the show, but this episode marked the first time we heard his students performing vocal jazz selections.