We hope music is helping you get through this difficult time. We cannot have an audience in the house, but we haven’t shut down! Watch live shows in real time broadcast from Caffe Lena’s stage. Your tips help offset the loss of work for musicians, and help our legendary, non-profit venue survive the shutdown. Click the tip jar to lend your support!
Coming Up Next
Concerts & Music Classes Streamed Live.
Sample Class: After School Folk Ensembles
Sample Class: After School Folk Ensembles
Bruce Molsky and Maeve Gilchrist
Bruce Molsky and Maeve Gilchrist
Live Stream: Bruce Molsky & Maeve Gilchrist
Live Stream: Bruce Molsky & Maeve Gilchrist
Live Stream: Beppe Gambetta
Live Stream: Beppe Gambetta
It’s All About Community
Weekly Newsletter
March 19 – 26
GRAMMY-nominee Bruce Molsky and Scots harpist and composer Maeve Gilchrist (Silk Road Ensemble) create sheer joy when they play together. Molsky, described as an “absolute master” (No Depression), creates intimacy & warmth on fiddle, banjo and guitar. Grounded in the Irish & Scottish tradition, Maeve’s total command of the harp is entrancing . . .
March 6 – 12
Guy Davis, coming Friday night, is a 2-time GRAMMY nominee for Best Traditional Blues album. Whether he’s playing the six or twelve string guitar, the five-string banjo or harmonica, Davis uses music to confront social injustice, historical events and common life struggles with songs that are timeless, and storytelling that’s earthy, warm and bold.
Feb 27 – March 5
Ecstatic gospel, dusty country blues, thoughtful folk, rip-roaring rock and roll, even avant-garde studio experiments. She melds them together into a powerful statement of survival, revealing a probing songwriter who indulges no comforting platitudes and a highly innovative guitarist who deploys spidery riffs. Sunny War is poised to be a major break-out artist in 2023.
Caffè Lena In the News
Caffè Lena at 60: Still ‘Essential’ After All These Years
While New York City wrote itself into music history with its sheer volume of folk venues—The Gaslight Cafe, The Bitter End, Cafe Wha?—Saratoga Springs needed just one. Caffè Lena, opened by Lena and Bill Spencer on Phila Street 60 years ago last month, typified a decade marked by great cultural upheaval and the transformation of societal norms. “The first show that ever happened on Caffè Lena’s stage was a Jewish woman opening for an African-American man,” says Sarah Craig, Caffè Lena’s executive director of 25 years, referring to Maxine Abel and Jackie Washington Landron. “It was very clear that Lena and Bill, while they may not have been out at the front of marches and might not have been making speeches, were having the Caffè take a position.” That same month, the Civil Rights Movement was in full tilt in the segregated South, with lunch-counter sit-ins in Nashville, TN. And the soundtrack of that cultural revolution—the punk rock of its time—was folk music.