At the Hangar, a Brass Band and a Storyteller Fill the Summer's Quiet Weeks

While the club scene held its breath through late summer, one room out at Cass Park kept the lights on and the music serious. The Hangar Theatre (801 Taughannock Blvd.) — Ithaca's professional summer producing house, an intimate thrust-style stage — runs a music strand alongside its plays, and this year it quietly programmed two of the more rewarding tickets of the whole window.

First, the brass. The Fall Creek Brass Band took the Hangar stage for a pair of "concert reading" dates — Monday, July 27 and Monday, August 3. If you caught them, you know the joy of a New Orleans-style second-line horn section in a room small enough to feel the low brass in your sternum; if you didn't, note that this same band also turns up in the GrassRoots undercard, which tells you how deep their roots run in the local soil. A brass band in an intimate theatre is a specific and wonderful thing — all the swagger of a street parade, none of the traffic.

The headline, though, is this weekend. Ugandan musician and storyteller Samite plays the Hangar Saturday, August 8 in the evening, with a Sunday, August 9 matinee to follow. Samite's music — voice, flute, kalimba, and the kind of between-song storytelling that turns a concert into something closer to a shared evening — is exactly the sort of booking that rewards a listening room. The Hangar's intimate house is built for precisely this: an artist who works in nuance, in a space where nuance survives.

Here's why the Hangar matters to the larger story we keep telling this summer. When the mid-size clubs collapsed, Ithaca didn't just lose loud rooms — it lost seated, attentive, sit-down-and-listen rooms too. The State Theatre is dark until September. Deep Dive is gone. That leaves a real gap for the quieter, more considered kind of show, and the Hangar has stepped into it almost by accident, using a theatre's infrastructure — professional sound, actual seats, a staff that knows how to run a house — to give acoustic and world-music artists somewhere worthy to play.

It's a reminder that "live-music venue" is a broader category than the rock-club model suggests. A summer theatre with a music strand, an intimate thrust stage, and a taste for the international and the acoustic is doing something the brewery rooms and DIY basements structurally can't. Ithaca's scene is surviving on variety of form as much as volume of shows — and the Hangar is a load-bearing part of that variety.

Samite is Saturday night and Sunday afternoon. Take the drive out to Cass Park, sit down, and let someone tell you a story. In a summer this thin, a room this good deserves a full house.

Sources: Hangar Theatre; CNY Concert Calendar Jul 28–Aug 1; CNY Concert Calendar Aug 7–11