Recap: Gratefully Yours: Under The Starry Night 3/4/23 -By: Ed Conway

Hmmmm, I went to an art exhibit and a concert showed up, or was it, I went to a concert and an art exhibit that showed up? It was, in fact, both.  What kind of crazed mind would think that Grateful Dead music would go well with an immersive exhibit of Van Gogh?  Well, what else, an artistic mind, and guess what, it didn’t just work, it was amazing.

General Manager, Tiffany Scaringe of Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience, was looking for a way to combine two of her loves, art and music in a totally immersive way (there I go using that word again).  She, along with another Capital District musical stalwart Shane Spillenger, decided to try to have a concert in the room where the walls and floor come alive with 360 degrees of the prolific art of Vincent Van Gogh.  The main question is, what type of music would be appropriate.  They took a chance and came up with the music of the Grateful Dead.  At first, that may sound like a strange pairing, but when you think about it, it is the perfect pairing, as the music of the Dead has always had an ebb and flow as the band would become totally immersed (there’s that word again) in the song, as if there was nothing outside of their little bubble flowing from idea to idea .  Here we were with nearly 400 of our closest friends, many of whom wearing their finest Dead concert tees, in our little bubble, watching the art work flow from idea to idea, sound familiar?  Now, what band could pull all of this off?  Well, Gratefully Yours fit the bill nicely, not only do they have a good size following, but they are very faithful to the dead style fusing jazz riffs within the jam band motif.  If I closed my eyes, I could almost smell the patchouli oil and was transported back to sitting back listening to Jerry and company.

It was great to see that despite the snow storm earlier in the day, the attendance was around 80% of capacity as they all settled in for a multi-sensory, multi-media experience and the oohs & aahs were audible from the very beginning.  It may have seemed like a strange concept in the beginning, but many wonderful experiences have come out of cutting edge thinking.  After all, if it weren’t for taking chances, we would never have landed on the moon.  I would deem this to have been a huge success. Check out their website, https://vangoghexpo.com/albany for upcoming events and tickets.