In late 2020, my wife Julie and I left Brooklyn and moved two hours upstate to Phoenicia, New York. We’d been in the city for nine years and with the pandemic raging, it felt like time to try something else. When I move to a new place, one of the first things I like to do is explore the music history of the area. I find it connects me to my surroundings, and broadens my perspective. When we lived in Fort Greene, I liked to read about the neighborhood’s history as a bohemian enclave, particularly for Black artists. Jazz musicians would often stay there when coming through town, with neighborhood residents like bassist Bill Lee (Spike’s father, who passed away last year and lived around the corner from our apartment) or trombonist Slide Hampton, whose house inspired the title of an Eric Dolphy tune. When we arrived upstate, learning about the music of the area meant diving into Barney Hoskyns’ book, Small Town Talk, which chronicles the history of the town of Woodstock, particularly in the ’60s and ’70s, when Bob Dylan’s presence drew a wide swath of musicians to the area.
When I was in Brooklyn, much of my music listening was via headphones as I walked through the city. I’d call headphones + city streets one of the best settings for hearing music ever devised, offering you infinite ways to soundtrack your daily travels and also giving you new ways to think about what you’re hearing. But listening in the car, which I was doing regularly after moving, is an experience all its own, one that brings me back to trips when I first learned how to drive many (many) years ago. And motoring through the Catskills, through beautiful roads like Route 212—which winds through the hills between my house and Woodstock—offers an especially beautiful setting for hearing something new.
I began exploring music that fit this setting. Some of it was drawn from the storied history of this area, including songs Dylan wrote while living in Woodstock and classics from artists like The Band and should-have-been-famous Bobby Charles who followed Dylan here. Others were from newer artists who recorded in Woodstock, immersing themselves in the area’s beauty to complete a record in one of the many studios that dot the hillsides. This playlist is mostly acoustic music, befitting the area’s history as a folk mecca, and a good deal of other artists with no direct connection to the Catskills—the rootsy rock of Lucinda Williams, Wednesday’s noisy alt-country, Sandy Denny’s witchy meditations from rural England—sounded great in the car next to these locally spawned sounds.
Woven in with these rural jams are a handful of jazz tunes by artists who relocated to the Catskills, tying this playlist back to ones I made in my early days in Brooklyn. When driving to Woodstock on 212 I’d pass Grog Kill Road, which snaked up a hill, and think of the composer Carla Bley, who lived there until her death in 2023—most of her records since the early ‘80s were cut in her home studio. Drummer Jack DeJohnette is another jazz legend who has been based in the Woodstock area for years. Having this music in one place will always bring me back to these winding roads through the trees, thinking about a new phase in my life.
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