Summer Camargo at Wellfleet Preservation Hall
Among 21-year-old trumpet player Summer Camargo’s many accomplishments over the past year was becoming the youngest member of the Saturday Night Live house band (and the first SNL crew member to be born in the 21st century). She replaced band fixture Earl Gardner, who had been playing with the ensemble for nearly four decades. Camargo also covered for jazz legend Wynton Marsalis on the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra’s 2022 Big Band Holidays Tour; played at notable venues in New York City including Birdland, Dizzy’s, and Bryant Park; and recorded her debut album, which is slated for release in 2024. It’s an impressive resumé for a musician who is still completing her musical education: Camargo is currently a student at Juilliard, majoring in jazz studies.
As part of a collaboration between Cape Symphony and Jazz at Lincoln Center, Camargo will perform at Wellfleet Preservation Hall on Saturday, July 29 at 7 p.m. The concert, which is part of Camargo’s summer “On the Road” series, follows recent performances in Dennis, Falmouth, and Provincetown, and will be followed by two concerts on Nantucket next week.
The program includes a mix of jazz standards and Camargo’s original music inspired by artists including Louis Armstrong, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, Antônio Carlos Jobim, and Wayne Shorter, as well as music from other genres including blues, gospel, bossa nova, funk, and swing. Musicians Raul Reyes Bueno, Esteban Castro, Chris Lewis, Jeffrey Miller, and John Sturino will accompany Camargo.
General admission tickets for the concert are $25 ($12 for kids 13 and under). See capesymphony.com and wellfleetpreservationhall.org for information.
Sutton Lee Seymour’s Special Delivery
The last time Sutton Lee Seymour played Provincetown, she performed in a parking lot. “It definitely taught me to roll with the punches, and we took a lot of punches,” says Sutton Lee’s creator, Prescott Seymour. But the struggle to keep the shows going during Covid also taught him not to take himself or his character too seriously.
“I performed ‘Hot Honey Rag’ from Chicago on top of someone’s car,” he says. “If I can handle that, I can take anything that’s thrown at me.”
Sutton Lee will be performing indoors this year when her one-woman show Glamazon Prime shuffle-ball-changes into town for a four-show run at Red Room (258 Commercial St., Provincetown). She describes the show as a live-singing parody of the streaming media fixation we all went through during the pandemic: think mashups of musicals and television shows like Gypsy and Schitt’s Creek. You can practically hear the orchestra tuning up for “Moira Rose’s Turn.”
Seymour made her drag debut just a decade ago in a show hosted by Paige Turner, another New York City performer who is currently starring in her own show at Provincetown’s Post Office Café and Cabaret this summer.
“Provincetown feels like a rite of passage,” says Seymour as she reflects on why so many drag artists continue to make the pilgrimage to our tip of the Earth. “It’s become the Broadway of drag and cabaret. And drag has become the new vaudeville: the Rainbow Circuit. Performers are dancing down the yellow brick road, and Provincetown is the Emerald City at the end of that road.”
Glamazon Prime opens on Sunday, July 30, and plays on Aug. 1, 2, and 4. All shows are at 8:30 p.m. General admission tickets are $35 ($45 for V.I.P. seating) at redroom.club. —James Judd
Four Ways of Seeing at Four Eleven Gallery
There’s no shortage of “traditional” views of Provincetown in its galleries: think sunsets over the harbor while fishing boats bob placidly in the water. A one-week group exhibition at Four Eleven Gallery (411 Commercial St.), however, shows the town and its surroundings through four more personal and idiosyncratic artistic viewpoints.
Curated by artist and gallery manager Pete Hocking, “Ways of Seeing” features work by artists Matthew Bielen, Caroline Carney, Lisa Farnsworth, and Julie Shelton Smith. While all four share a deep connection to the Outer Cape, each approaches the concept of “landscape” in a different way.
“These artists are immersed in the culture and history of this beloved place,” says Hocking in his statement accompanying the show. “Their commitment to place is so clear while their ways of painting are so distinct.”
Hocking groups the four artists in two pairs based on thematic affinities in their respective works. Bielen and Farnsworth show the big picture: Bielen’s expansive abstractions combine conceptual references to lighthouses, fog, and swirling water with a style inspired by Robert Motherwell’s midcentury “Beside the Sea” series, while Lisa Farnsworth uses photographs of the Outer Cape’s wetlands and buildings as starting points for paintings that she describes as “falling somewhere between reality and imagination.”
Carney and Smith focus on the details. Inspired by off-hour walks and bicycle rides around Provincetown, Carney’s paintings capture quiet and hidden moments — a patch of daisies in an overgrown yard, a shuttered parking lot at Herring Cove — in the town’s streets and natural environment. Likewise, Smith’s floral studies and wetland scenes record how changing light and perspectives reveal new dimensions of familiar scenes and objects. In Hocking’s words, “Ultimately the show is about devotion, and how subjective devotion can be.”
The show opens on Friday, July 28 with a reception for the artists at 7 p.m., and is on view through Aug. 3. See fourelevengallery.com for information. —John D’Addario
