This interior captures the essence of modern luxury through restraint and intention. A sculptural double-pod sectional creates two intimate corners — perfect for curling up with a book, watching a movie or stealing an afternoon nap. Swivel chairs positioned at the windows blur the line between indoors and out, inviting the desert landscape into your daily life.
At the center, an upcycled Brazilian oxcart coffee table introduces character and history, serving as a beautiful reminder that true style honors both old and new. Every element in this room tells a story, from the custom-designed rug that anchors the space to the carefully chosen accessories that reflect the homeowners’ personal journey.
A soft, cohesive palette allows texture, light and form to lead, creating a space that feels both curated and effortlessly comfortable. Thoughtful layering and clean silhouettes strike a balance between sophistication and livability — proof that true elegance is often found in subtlety and that luxury speaks most eloquently through intention and restraint.
SUE BICKERDYKE Allied ASID
ARTIST RENE PALOMINO Reversed Painted Mixed Media
THIRD THURSDAY ART NIGHT
THURSDAY, MAY 21 FROM 4 TO 7 PM
BRITT HANSEN In the Sage, 18” by 36”
MARTIN BOURBEAU
Double Jeopardy, 30” by 60”
LEAH REI Desert Jewel, 20” by 20”
S ANDERSON LINCOLN
PUBLISHER
Shelly Spence
MANAGING EDITOR
Joseph J. Airdo
GRAPHIC DESIGNER
Meaghan Mitchell
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Joseph J. Airdo
Francine Coles
Shannon Severson
PHOTOGRAPHERS
Francine Coles
Loralei Lazurek
ADVERTISING SALES
Cindi Calcinari 860-966-3271 cindi@imagesaz.com
From the Publisher
There is a moment in every great performance when the music stops — when the last note hangs in the air and the audience holds its collective breath before the applause begins. That suspended instant is not silence. It is everything the music just said, still reverberating.
May in Arizona carries that same quality. The season is winding down, the heat beginning to assert itself, and we find ourselves pausing to take stock of all we’ve experienced these past months before the summer asks us to slow down and breathe. It’s a natural rhythm — not an ending, but a breath between movements.
This month, Images Arizona celebrates music in all its forms and all the extraordinary people who make it. We’ve spent these pages with composers and vocalists, educators and collectors, performers and storytellers — people for whom music is not background noise but the primary language through which they understand and communicate the world. Their stories reminded us, again, that music is among the most direct paths between one human heart and another. It transcends generation, geography, circumstance. It finds us exactly where we are.
Images Arizona P.O. Box 1416
Carefree, AZ. 85377 623-341-8221
shelly@imagesaz.com imagesarizona.com
And so, in that spirit, we have some news to share: after this issue, Images Arizona will be taking a summer pause. We’ll return in October, refreshed and ready — and we are genuinely excited about what we’re planning for our fall issues. We’ll be working hard behind the scenes on some extraordinary stories for the season ahead.
In the meantime, imagesarizona.com will be your companion for summer — a full library of Arizona arts, dining, travel, and community coverage to guide your explorations through the warm months. We’ll see you there, and we’ll see you in October.
From our family to yours, we wish you a summer full of music, wherever you find it.
Happy listening!
Shelly Spence Publisher, Images Arizona
Photography by Loralei Lazurek
Cloth & Conscience Fashioning a Sustainable Future
Writer Shannon Severson // Photography by Chris Loomis
An Icelandic fisherman hoists a teeming mass of silver-skinned cod from the frigid waters of the North Atlantic onto his wind-tossed trawler — a portion of the more than 200,000 tons harvested annually in this remote island nation. Beyond what is consumed for food, Iceland’s 100% Fish Project’s zero-waste efforts are part of a vision for sustainability that stretches all the way to ASU FIDM, Arizona State University’s fashion school.
Fusion on First is the school’s gleaming 16-story atelier in downtown Phoenix that houses design studios, digital media labs and a textile lab. Here, overlooking the downtown skyline, Associate Professor Galina Mihaleva — an internationally award-winning fashion designer — transforms the carefully cleaned and preserved fish skin into laser-cut modules that create a material nine times stronger than lamb or cow leather. Mihaleva interlocks the circular and amygdaloid pieces to create an entirely new textile that can become a skirt one day and a handbag the next, a material experiment that embodies the program’s sustainability goals.
Mihaleva has studied, taught, designed and created couture fashion, wearable art and technologically advanced pieces with sustainability at their core. She’s lived and worked around the world and now teaches Materials and Techniques at the institution. Her work has earned global recognition: the Tiffany Award at Paris Fashion Week (2016), the Rumi Award in the United States
(2016) and the WOW Designer Development Award in New Zealand (2024), among dozens of international exhibitions and red-carpet showings, including regular appearances at the Cannes Film Festival.
One of her primary textiles is polyester — a fabric that can take up to 150 years to decompose but can be stretched, twisted, formed, heated and then reused time and again to create impactful fashion. ASU FIDM is both Mihaleva’s classroom and experimentation lab.
The workstations at Fusion on First are a convergence of curiosities: lasered fish-skin modules cluster beside a stack of vintage wool jackets; a 3D-printed clasp cools next to a boiled-polyester bubble skirt. At one end of the state-of-the-art lab, Mihaleva can print human-cellsized sensors onto a flexible sheet while across the room, students like recent graduate Isabelle Johnson-Heston lay out portfolios of capstone pieces that read like a syllabus for sustainable fashion.
Galina Mihaleva, an internationally award-winning fashion designer and associate professor at ASU FIDM, creates sustainable couture and medical wearable technology that transforms materials like fish skin into high fashion while improving patients’ lives.
The future of fashion is no longer to just produce more, more, more collections. Now it’s ‘What do we produce and how do we help?’ As I get older, I realize that it’s better to meet one more person or help one more child than to make one more dress. What we are doing is changing lives. Galina Mihaleva
The $28 million expansion of ASU FIDM into Los Angeles — in the former FIDM building — was designed to put this kind of experimentation and career preparation into one fashion school with two complementary, collaborative locations. The school’s home in downtown Los Angeles boasts the ASU FIDM Museum, with a 15,000-piece fashion collection that serves as a resource for faculty and students, as well as the community.
As Tinseltown glam fuses with desert design, Mihaleva embodies the promise of ASU FIDM. Trained at Bulgaria’s Academy of Fine Arts with a master’s degree, she learned textiles “from the fiber up.” She learned English upon her arrival in Phoenix, picking up the vernacular of the fashion industry here by earning a fashion design associate degree at Phoenix College, then going on to a doctorate at ASU. She has spent a career folding craft into research.
“It’s about knowing your material — in intimate relationship with your medium,” she says.
That intimacy has produced wearable high-fashion installations — “Tranquility,” which visualizes urban noise via embedded LEDs, and “Sense,” a coral-like dress made from 100 yards of manually twisted fabric that cycles from brilliant color to stark white to represent reef bleaching using 15 years of reef data encoded into the dress — alongside applied projects for hospitals and rehabilitation clinics.
Mihaleva’s work utilizes soft sensors embedded in textiles to detect environmental pollutants, conductive-thread breath monitors that comfort young cancer patients and soft exoskeletons paired with virtual reality therapy to restore muscle
movement for stroke survivors. She collaborates with engineers, neuroscientists and technological experts.
“Wearable tech can be hopeful. It can improve people’s lives,” she says.
Her assignments push students to think beyond aesthetics: materials, lifecycle tradeoffs and the social impacts of design become studio work. All begin with a personal story, and the details are negotiated from there.
One student with scoliosis had been mocked for wearing the required medical brace in her native Iran. Mihaleva encouraged her to work with her doctors, body-scan technology and 3D printing to create a fashionable brace that could be worn with pride.
“When she presented it, we all cried,” Mihaleva recalls. “It was something very personal. And with 3D printing it can be affordable. Wearable tech enables a better future.”
Isabelle Johnson-Heston graduated from ASU FIDM in 2025 with a Bachelor of Arts in Fashion Business and a minor in Sustainability after beginning her fashion education at FIDM's Los Angeles campus.
Those lessons are exactly what students like Johnson-Heston wanted when she moved from FIDM’s Los Angeles campus— where she earned an associate degree in merchandising — to ASU’s new four-year program and graduated in 2025 with a Bachelor of Arts in Fashion Business and a minor in Sustainability. The transition shifted her perspective.
“I loved my time in Los Angeles, but the experiences that ASU was able to provide for me in such a seamless way — especially being able to go and study abroad in Florence — there was nothing like it,” she says.
Study abroad, she adds, turned abstract brand histories into tactile inspiration: thrift-based workshops that repurposed donated high-end fabric, studio visits to Gucci and Ferragamo, and professors still active in the industry.
The built environment at Fusion on First made a difference in very practical terms for Johnson-Heston. There, everything is at a student’s fingertips to learn, dream and experiment under the guidance of world-class professors.
Mihaleva says she’s a craftsperson who blurs the lines between craft and technology. The atelier’s knitting machines, looms, laser cutters and 3D printers are the best of both worlds — technology is a collaborator, not a replacement for human thoughts and touch.
“We continue the craft and use technology — including AI — to enable us to be faster and more precise,” she says.
For Johnson-Heston, the accessible labs and responsive advising reduced friction: “Seeing Fusion on First — it was immaculate. It has every tool you could imagine. The professors, counselors and staff always had an answer for me on the spot.”
Johnson-Heston embraced the chance to learn the handson basics of sketching, sewing and pattern reading after primarily focusing on the business side during her time in Los Angeles.
“I felt like I was learning in reverse, as I was a little bit older than the other students, but my professors were so understanding,” she recalls.
The payoff is craft fluency and market readiness while tapping into collaborative ASU research, internships and study abroad pathways that turn coursework into careerready skills. Students also gain access to scholarships and industry luminaries. ASU FIDM students earned 10 awards from the prestigious 2025 Fashion Scholarship Fund competition, elevating the program’s national profile.
Through it all, sustainability remains a focus for designers like Mihaleva, who has innovated the reuse of fabrics into award-winning couture design -- from decompositionresistant polyester to earth-friendly wool that becomes fertilizer when buried and can even be embedded with seeds. For Johnson-Heston, sustainability became more than just a buzzword.
“It means more than I thought it did,” she explains. “I learned from both programs that everyday life can affect our world. We can make little changes, pay more attention to labels and tags and what we eat and wear. It makes a big difference.”
Mihaleva envisions designers who can prototype sustainably and work across supply chains and professional disciplines.
“The future of fashion is no longer to just produce more, more, more collections,” she explains. “Now it’s ‘What do we produce and how do we help?’ As I get older, I realize that it’s better to meet one more person or help one more child than to make one more dress. What we are doing is changing lives.”
As fashion transforms futures, the work continues. Mihaleva guides her students while maintaining her professional practice: In March, her wearable art took center stage at Scottsdale Art Week’s Opening Night Vernissage, benefiting Phoenix Art Museum. The fashion presentation — part of the international art fair featuring more than 120 galleries at WestWorld — offered Arizona audiences a rare opportunity to witness how sustainable couture and technology-infused designs translate from laboratory to runway.
Meanwhile, Johnson-Heston works in retail management in Minnesota as she pursues internship opportunities and volunteers with Dress for Success, buoyed by the program she says “added confidence” and made her feel more prepared.
The promise of ASU FIDM is an institutional translation: craft practices elevated by research infrastructure that takes shape on a human scale in its meaningful application. The success metrics are simple — accomplished faculty that supports and elevates learning, creates an internship-tojob pipeline and boosts the local economy as Phoenix becomes a central hub of the fashion industry.
As those metrics materialize, the fabric of improved lives and new careers will grace runways and medical rehabilitation facilities, and students will keep learning the art of turning scarcity into abundance. That alone is a useful definition of sustainable education: not the absence of waste, but a program capable of turning constraints into creative systems that endure.
asufidm.asu.edu
Community
THROUGH MAY 3
DADDY LONG LEGS
The Phoenix Theatre Company presents this heartwarming musical based on the classic novel by Jean Webster. $60+. See website for times. Hormel Theatre, 1825 N. Central Ave., Phoenix. 602-254-2151; phoenixtheatre.com
THROUGH MAY 3
TARZAN: THE STAGE MUSICAL
Shine Theatre presents an adventurous, family-friendly production featuring a 39-member cast led by Noah Weaver as the iconic title character and Grace Matejsek as Jane. Accompanied by a 12-piece live orchestra performing Phil Collins’ expressive score, the staging brings the jungle to life through stylized animal movement, large-scale puppetry and specialized aerial elements developed in partnership with Gecko Climbing Gym. $20+. See website for times. Highlands Church, 9050 E. Pinnacle Peak Road, Scottsdale. shinetheatre.org
THROUGH JUNE 14
NANCY KRAVETZ: COLOR FORMS THE DAY
Scottsdale Arts Learning & Innovation presents a new exhibition by Nancy
THROUGH MAY 3
Writer Joseph J. Airdo
TENDERLY: THE ROSEMARY CLOONEY MUSICAL
The Phoenix Theatre Company presents an intimate and poignant tribute to one of America’s most cherished voices. This two-person musical traces Rosemary Clooney’s journey from her meteoric rise in Hollywood to her personal struggles with mental health and her triumphant comeback. $60+. See website for times. Judith Hardes Theatre, 1825 N. Central Ave., Phoenix. 602-254-2151; phoenixtheatre.com
Kravetz, whose career spans seven decades of exploring how form and color create meaning. Moving from early representational landscapes to the abstract style she developed after meeting artist Dorothy Fratt, Kravetz uses color as a messenger for her lived experiences. Free. 11 a.m.–5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday; noon–5 p.m. Sunday. ArtReach Space at Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts, 7380 E. Second St., Scottsdale. 480-4998587; scottsdalearts.org
MAY 2
THE STELLA ARTOIS DERBY DAYCLUB
Arizona’s only Kentucky Derby party featuring live local horse racing returns to Turf Paradise for the 152nd “Run for the Roses.” Guests can watch the simulcast and live action from the Sanderson Lincoln Black Label Lounge or the open-air Stella Artois Jazz Pavilion. The event features mint juleps, food trucks, live DJs and jazz bands, plus a new champagne and bourbon tasting experience. $50+. See website for schedule. Turf Paradise, 1501 W. Bell Road, Phoenix. thepoloparty.com
MAY 3
BEETHOVEN’S THRILLING 5TH SYMPHONY
The Scottsdale Philharmonic presents one of the most recognizable and powerful works in the classical canon. Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, with its iconic four-note opening motif representing “fate knocking at the door,” takes the audience on a dramatic journey from struggle to triumphant victory. $20+; discounts available. 4 p.m. La Casa de Cristo Lutheran Church, 6300 E. Bell Road, Scottsdale. 480-951-6077; scottsdalephilharmonic.com
MAY 6–JUNE 14
EVER AFTER
The Phoenix Theatre Company presents a new musical inspired by the beloved film starring Drew Barrymore. $60+. See website for times. Dr. Stacie J. and Richard J. Stephenson Theatre, 1825 N. Central Ave., Phoenix. 602-254-2151; phoenixtheatre.com
MAY
10
DREAMS OF FREEDOM: THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE
Concluding its six-part journey through American history, the Scottsdale Symphonic Orchestra performs a sweeping celebration of the nation’s complex identity. The concert highlights Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” capturing the energy of the Jazz Age, alongside Barber’s poignant “Adagio for Strings” and works by Beethoven, Copland and Daugherty. $20+. 4 p.m. Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts, 7380 E. Second St., Scottsdale. 480-499-8587; scottsdalearts.org
MAY 13–30
AN EVENING AT DESERT BOTANICAL GARDEN
Surrounded by the magnificent desert landscape with the setting sun as a backdrop, this audience favorite features two distinct ballet experiences. The program highlights the U.S. premiere of Artistic Director Daniela Cardim’s “Reset,” exploring themes of modern urban life to a score by Gabriel Prokofiev, alongside Lar Lubovitch’s “Concerto Six Twenty-Two,” a joyful work inspired by Mozart. See website for prices. 8 p.m. Desert Botanical Garden, 1201 N. Galvin Parkway, Phoenix. 602-381-1096; balletaz.org
MAY 14–JUNE 20
OVER THE RIVER AND THROUGH THE WOODS
Don Bluth Front Row Theatre presents Joe DiPietro’s warm comedy about the bonds of family. $38+; discounts available. See website for times. Don Bluth Front Row Theatre, 8989 E. Via Linda, Suite 118, Scottsdale. 480-3140841; donbluthfrontrowtheatre.com
Community
MAY 15–31
OUTSIDE MULLINGAR
John Patrick Shanley’s poetic, Irish romantic comedy follows Anthony and Rosemary, two eccentric misfits straddling their 40s. Fighting their way toward happiness, this hilarious and heartbreaking story proves it is never too late to take a chance on love. See website for prices and times. The Theatre Artists Studio, 12406 N. Paradise Village Parkway E., Scottsdale. 602-765-0120; thestudiophx.org
MAY
16
250 YEARS OF AMERICA
North Valley Symphony Orchestra celebrates the nation’s 250th birthday with a concert dedicated exclusively to American composers. The program showcases the rich tapestry of the country’s musical heritage, featuring Bernstein’s “Symphonic Dances from West Side Story,” Florence Price’s groundbreaking “Symphony No. 1,” Barber’s poignant “Adagio for Strings” and Gershwin’s lively “An American in Paris.” $10; discounts available. 7 p.m. North Canyon High School Auditorium, 1700 E. Union Hills Drive, Phoenix. 623-980-4628; northvalleysymphony.org
MAY 15–24
Writer Joseph J. Airdo
SPRING ARIZONA RESTAURANT WEEK
The Arizona Restaurant Association invites diners to explore the state’s culinary scene during this 10-day tasting tour. Participating restaurants — from five-star dining to hidden gems — offer exclusive three-course prix fixe menus, allowing guests to discover new favorites or revisit beloved local spots at a fraction of the usual cost. The event features a diverse array of cuisines, with meals priced at $33+. See website for participating restaurants. arizonarestaurantweek.com
MAY 16 HAPPY 250TH BIRTHDAY USA!
The Carolyn Eynon Singers celebrate America’s 250th anniversary with an uplifting afternoon of music reflecting the rich and varied soundscape of the nation. The concert features a diverse selection of choral works honoring the country’s history and culture. See website for price. 3 p.m. North Scottsdale United Methodist Church, 11735 N. Scottsdale Road, Scottsdale. 650-746-4237; cesingers.org
ARTISTS OF SCOTTSDALE RANCH RAISE OVER
$11,000
Inspired by the strength of cancer survivors and the healing power of art, the Artists of Scottsdale Ranch raised $11,550 for Tina’s Treasures Cancer Care Boutique at the HonorHealth Virginia G. Piper Cancer Center. The donation, which exceeded the collective’s $10,000 goal, was raised through an annual art show and silent auction. Comprising 20 accomplished artists residing in and around the Scottsdale Ranch community, the group has supported the boutique since 2022.
Tina’s Treasures provides essential postsurgery products, apparel and supportive services for women recovering from cancer treatment, particularly those unable to afford necessities.
BBB ANNOUNCES SCHOLARSHIP CONTEST
The Better Business Bureau invites Greater Arizona high school students in grades 9 through 12 to enter its annual Ethical Torch Essay Scholarship Contest. Sponsored by Swiss America and Kiwanis, the competition challenges students to write an essay of up to 500 words analyzing an ethical dilemma they faced, how they handled it and what the experience taught them about ethics and themselves. Five winners will receive scholarships ranging from $500 to $1,500 and will be recognized at the Torch Awards for Ethics in November. The deadline to apply is Oct. 11. torchessay.bbbcommunity.org
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Recharge Your Cells: Experience the Benefits of NAD+ Therapy We offer
Sarah James had come to the old convent in Pittsburgh for silence — a private meditation retreat, nothing spiritual about it, just a quiet place to think. What she found instead, leaning against a wall in one of the rooms, was a guitar. She asked one of the nuns if she could buy it.
“Honey, you don’t have to buy it,” the sister said. “Just take it. We’ll give it to you.”
James took the guitar to a luthier. His jaw dropped: “You don’t know what you have here.”
What she had was a 1938 Martin 000-28 — what James calls a triple-ought 28, considered the Holy Grail of Martin guitars. She had pulled it from a convent wall thinking nothing of it, and walked out holding one of the most coveted acoustic instruments in the world.
“That’s the guitar that really started everything for me,” says James, now a Scottsdale-based singer-
songwriter, recording artist, and founder of Vintage Guitar Legacies, a video series dedicated to the history and stories of exceptional instruments. “For me, these instruments are connected to people. The sister who owned it was in her 90s, retiring from the order. She said, ‘Oh, the kids play with that all the time.’ And here I am finding out how significant it is.”
That moment of accidental discovery crystallized something James had been circling her whole life — a conviction, inherited from a mother who collected early American antiques and a father who ran the oldest wooden boat-building company on the Great Lakes, that the objects people make and play and pass along carry something irreplaceable inside them. At 76, she has built an artistic life organized around that conviction, performing across the North Valley while simultaneously running a video series that has drawn subscribers from around the world.
The two pursuits are more entangled than they might appear.
Strings Attached Sarah James and the Stories Old Guitars Tell
James launched Vintage Guitar Legacies during COVID, initially as a way to share the instruments accumulating behind her at Lucky Now Studios, her home recording space in Scottsdale. Each episode profiles a single guitar — its history, its construction, its provenance — with a guest musician demonstrating what the instrument actually sounds like in capable hands. The 1938 Martin was among the first. Others followed: a 1966 Gibson Trini Lopez Deluxe, a mid-1960s Buck Owens Harmony guitar whose episode has reached 38,000 views, and eventually instruments with considerably heavier history attached to them.
A Martin D-28 owned and recorded by Steve Earle. A 1957 Stratocaster that once belonged to Waylon Jennings. A 1959 Martin D-18e whose specs, James says, match those of Kurt Cobain’s guitar — the one he played at Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged concert in New York — right down to the rare Bartolini pickup. Only 300 were made.
“I can feel the vibe coming from these instruments,” James says. “When I pick up a guitar that was owned by Steve or another artist, it changes the way I play. Something happens. You approach the instrument the way it feels in your hands.”
The Earle guitar came with a specific story. Earle used it recording “The Mountain,” a 1999 collaboration with Del McCoury that found him venturing deep into bluegrass territory. James eventually added “The Mountain” to her own live repertoire — playing it, she says, on the very instrument Earle used to record it. Last year, Del McCoury came through Phoenix for a date at the Musical Instrument Museum. James brought the guitar.
Writer Joseph J. Airdo // Photography Courtesy of Sarah James
Scottsdale singer-songwriter Sarah James has spent 12 years building a performing career and a video series dedicated to the instruments that carry music’s history forward.
For Sarah James, every guitar has a story worth telling — and after a lifetime of raising a family and building a career, she's finally the one doing the telling.
I’m at a place in my life where I finally get to do what I want to do. My guitar was always under the bed — I raised a family, two great kids, I have grandchildren. But it was always calling me. And now I’m at a station in life where I get to answer.
Sarah James
“He said, ‘Oh, I remember this — Steve had it on the tour,’” she recalls.
That exchange — the living chain of musicians, instruments, and stories — is precisely what VGL was built to document. The series has now taken James to a 40-year-old family-owned guitar shop in Pittsburgh, to Elderly Instruments in Lansing, Michigan, where founder Stan Werbin let her spend three days filming, and most recently to NAMM — the National Association of Music Merchants — in Anaheim, where she walked the convention floor with a cameraman and media credentials and came home with 16 episodes in three days.
“I don’t see many women doing what I do in the vintage guitar world,” she says. “There are a lot of guys out there, and I love them, but it’s fairly rare to find a woman talking seriously about these instruments. Sometimes there’s that initial reaction of, ‘What does she know?’ Well, I know quite a lot.”
The series has also drawn her into a deepening relationship with the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix — one of her first stops after moving to Arizona 12 years ago. Last year, she approached the MIM’s philanthropy office and donated two instruments from her personal collection: the 1957 Waylon Jennings Stratocaster and a 1936 Martin D-18, both in exceptional condition. The MIM’s curator, she says, looked at the Stratocaster and asked whether she was certain she wanted to part with it.
She was.
“It blesses me,” James says. “For me, it’s the giving. I wanted them to be curated and cared for in a place where thousands of people can enjoy them. The tour they gave me of the curator’s suite — getting a sneak peek into the bowels of that museum — was a genuinely touching moment for me.”
The performing life runs parallel to all of it. James plays the Cave Creek and North Scottsdale circuit regularly — Whiskey & Wings, Copper Bull Restaurant, Local Johnny’s, Raven’s View — as a solo act, as the Sarah James Duo, and fronting the Sarah James Project, a full band. She performs with the Desert Cats All-Star Band as well, a loose collective of Valley musicians whose upcoming date at Desert Mountain reflects how thoroughly she has embedded herself in the community since arriving from Pittsburgh. During
At 76, Sarah James is releasing original music, running a globally followed vintage guitar series, and donating legendary instruments to the MIM — on her own terms and timeline.
Singer-songwriter Sarah James counts Ringo Starr among her heroes and mentors — proof, she says, that music keeps you young and relevant no matter what the calendar says.
summer months, James tours western Pennsylvania and New York — including a residency at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, N.Y., the landmark arts and education assembly where she performs, writes, and works on her craft.
“I love meeting people from all walks of life — bikers, golfers, bankers,” she says. “Music is the common denominator. It brings people together and lets them forget, for a moment, what they’re going through. That’s a beautiful thing.”
The songwriting came late — or rather, the recording of it did. James has been writing for years, but it wasn’t until about a decade ago that she committed fully to releasing music. Her latest single, “Swedish Machine” — a lighthearted song drawn from memories of traveling the Swedish countryside in an old Volvo — arrived on all streaming platforms in April. Before it, “Better Than This” surpassed 200,000 YouTube streams in just a few months.
It began one rainy Arizona night when she was sitting at her monitor, feeling melancholy, watching something unfold on the screen that she couldn’t quite believe.
“The lyrics started coming out of me: raindrops running down my window… And when I looked at that image, the thought came to me: shouldn’t we be better than this?”
She still writes lyrics by hand — old school, she says, because she’s a tactile person, because it helps. She brought the pages to Aaron Howard, her producer and longtime collaborator.
MUSIC
Sarah James
“He looked at them and said, ‘Yeah, we’ve got something here,’” James recalls. “It started out as something folky and dirge-like, but by the time we were done, it became this anthem — it builds and builds.”
There’s a line in an earlier James song, “Take It or Leave It,” that functions almost as a thesis statement for this chapter of her life: The window’s closing fast now, got no time to f--- around. She wrote it, she says, about exactly this — about growing older and bolder, about the things that call to you from under the bed while you’re raising a family and building a life, about the decision to finally answer.
Her heroes reinforce the point. She counts Ringo Starr — 85 and still actively touring — as a mentor, and saw him perform at the Celebrity Theatre in Phoenix last year.
“Music keeps me young and relevant,” she says.
James’ guitar was under the bed for a long time. She raised two kids, has grandchildren now, built a career in Pittsburgh before the desert took hold.
“I’m at a place in my life where I finally get to do what I want to do,” she says. “But it was always calling me. And now I’m at a station in life where I get to answer.”
She pauses, and then: “The windows may be closing fast, but I’m going to jump through them.”
Saturday, May 9 // 6–9 p.m. // Whiskey & Wings // 34406 N. Black Mountain Parkway, Cave Creek // Free 480-275-6417 // whiskeyandwingsaz.com Friday, May 15 // 5–8 p.m. // Raven’s View // 42016 N. Old Mine Road, Cave Creek // Free // 480-378-3755 // ravensviewwinebaraz.com
photo essay
Photographer Craig Miller
Elk in the Room
Payson photographer Craig Miller has spent 15 years documenting elk at pay phones, on volleyball courts and across Wells Fargo parking lots — proof that in one Arizona mountain town, the wildlife never got the memo about staying outside.
The elk does not knock. It simply arrives — on your deck, in your rose garden, at the pay phone on the corner you forgot was still there. It walks across the Wells Fargo parking lot with the unhurried confidence of someone who has somewhere to be, pauses at a bird feeder with the focused attention of a connoisseur, and ducks beneath a volleyball net with a grace that has no particular interest in being appreciated. The cars lined up behind it on the road can wait.
This is Payson — or rather, this is what Payson actually is, beneath the assumption that town and wilderness occupy separate territories with a clearly posted boundary between them. That boundary, if it ever existed, dissolved long ago. Payson grew up inside elk habitat, not on its edge. The elk were here first, and they have not forgotten it.
Photographer Craig Miller has spent 15 years documenting what happens when that fact reasserts itself. Going out once or twice a day, every day, he has built a body of work that moves through registers most wildlife photography never attempts: the slapstick of a young girl slowly registering that an elk has joined her volleyball game, the odd tenderness of a massive animal delicately licking a pink rose, the quietly surreal image of an elk standing at a pay phone — two things the modern world has largely moved on from, occupying the same frame as if to confer on the matter.
Miller doesn’t engineer these moments. He finds them. “With the elk, it’s mostly opportunistic,” he says. “They just happen to be near something you’d expect to find humans or other animals around.” But opportunism, practiced daily with enough patience and attention, eventually looks a lot like vision.
The elk in this collection are not lost. They are not confused. They are not wandering into foreign territory with wide, frightened eyes. They are, by every available measure, at home — locking antlers on a high school football field, investigating the geometry of a chain-link fence, grazing their way through neighborhoods where some residents set out bird feeders and others, Miller notes, are less charmed. “Some of us love the elk,” he says. “Some find them a nuisance — don’t like them eating their prize rose bushes, coming into their garages or tipping over their garbage cans.”
The elk, for their part, seem unbothered by the distinction.
Writer Joseph J. Airdo // Photographer Craig Miller
With the elk, it’s mostly opportunistic — they just happen to be near something you’d expect to find humans or other animals around. Craig Miller
I think we’ve all here in Payson gotten used to elk being a part of our lives. Some of us love them; some find them a nuisance — they don’t like the elk eating their prize rose bushes, coming into their garages or tipping over their garbage cans. Craig Miller
Meet the Photographer
Craig Miller grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, where wildlife and urban infrastructure kept a more conventional distance from each other. After earning degrees from Aurora University in social work, physical education and education, he built a career as a public school teacher and counselor. In 2002, he and his wife, Ann, relocated to Payson for semiretirement and the mountain air.
The elk came with the territory.
Miller had been a hobbyist photographer since childhood, but it was in Payson, about 15 years ago, that the practice became something more serious — a daily commitment, pursued once or twice a day, every day. He teaches advanced photography at Eastern Arizona College and, with Ann, operates one of Payson’s most decorated small businesses: a combined photography and disc jockey service that has been voted the town’s best in both categories by Payson Roundup readers for 14 consecutive years. The work moves between art forms, but the instinct is the same in each — attentiveness to what the moment is actually offering.
His photography has appeared in books, magazines, newspapers and calendars, and on the walls of homes and businesses throughout the region. His first Images Arizona feature, “Advent of Antlers,” was published in December 2020. This is his second.
He still goes out every day. As for what he hopes people take away from these particular images, Miller doesn’t overthink it. “Just a smile,” he says, “and a ‘Hey, Mary, you’ve got to see this picture DJ Craig posted today.’”
Payson’s elk, for their part, continue to provide the material — on the football field, in the rose garden, at the pay phone, wherever they happen to be.
djcraiginpayson.com
The B-Side
Music Alive! Teaches the Valley to Listen
Every Wednesday morning, something unexpected happens inside two buildings off Thompson Peak Parkway in North Scottsdale. People gather — 100 of them, sometimes more — not for a concert, not for a gala, but to learn. To listen. To play ukulele for the first time at 70. To argue about James Taylor. To find out, with some surprise, that they are not alone in loving this music as much as they do.
Most people who know Arizona Musicfest know it as a concert series — 35 years of world-class performances, a sold-out season drawing more than 50,000 ticket buyers, a roster of guest artists that has included Johnny Mathis, Mandy Patinkin and Joshua Bell. What those same people may not know is that a parallel programming track has been quietly growing beneath that marquee. It’s called Music Alive!, and this season more than 5,000 people will pass through its doors.
“For a long time we had two pillars — the concert season and what we did for youth,” says Allan Naplan, Musicfest’s executive and producing director. “Now we have a very stable third pillar, and that’s Music Alive! and our community engagement programs.”
The idea came to Naplan in his third year leading the organization, when something obvious suddenly became impossible
to ignore. The community surrounding Musicfest — largely retirees in one of the Valley’s most affluent corridors — was showing up for evening performances in enormous numbers. They loved music. They had time. And during the day, Musicfest had nothing to offer them.
“I thought, this is such a ripe opportunity,” Naplan recalls.
He launched the program in 2016 with characteristic modesty. The original offering was called Music and Muffins — structured like a book club, built around a weekly listening list that participants would explore on their own time before gathering to discuss it. The muffins helped. So did the content. So, perhaps most importantly, did the simple act of bringing people together around a shared passion. The common area of Musicfest’s then-offices in Carefree started filling up every week with people playing ukulele. It was, Naplan says, unmistakable proof of concept.
Today, Music Alive! spans roughly 350 events per season — free lectures, music theory classes, drumming circles, instrument lessons, guided listening seminars and a clinical partnership with the Neurologic Music Therapy Services of Arizona that treats the organization as a laboratory for evidencebased cognitive health programming. During the height of
Writer Joseph J. Airdo // Photography Courtesy of Arizona Musicfest
Allan Naplan, executive and producing director of Arizona Musicfest, created Music Alive! in 2016 as the organization’s third pillar — a year-round commitment to community engagement that now draws more than 5,000 participants annually.
Behind every great piece of music, there’s a compelling story. That’s why it’s called Listen Up — at the end of the day, it’s teaching people how to listen to music better and how to get more out of the experience. Josh Condon
the season, from January through April, there are five to six events every week.
The man most responsible for that programming is Josh Condon, Musicfest’s resident artist and director of community music programs. His background is the kind that resists a single sentence: classically trained pianist, jazz musician, musical theatre director, former cruise ship music director for Norwegian, Celebrity and Princess cruise lines. He came to Musicfest three years ago through a mutual friend, with no particular plan to become a community music educator.
“I never thought I would be in this particular kind of role,” Condon says. “But my background lends itself to the variety that Musicfest provides. When I do these sessions, I’m not thinking of it as teaching per se. I’m simply sharing my own genuine interest in the topic with the audience. I’m somewhat of a nerd — you look up interviews from artists, you learn everything about the style and interpretation. And I think that’s what resonates.”
The flagship offering Condon leads is Listen Up, a weekly Wednesday morning seminar that he describes as a program with no single format. Some sessions are lectures. Some are
guided listening exercises. Some unfold in a podcast-style dialogue with a guest artist. What they share is a consistent mission: to illuminate the music, the person who made it and the human impulse that drove its creation.
“Behind every great piece of music, there’s a compelling story,” Condon says. “What I’m trying to isolate is this: every piece of music was created by a real human, in real time, in a real place. What were they motivated by? What rules were they following — or breaking?” He pauses. “I also try to give people the vocabulary to talk about what they’re hearing, to put words to things they may have always felt but could never articulate. That’s why it’s called Listen Up — at the end of the day, it’s teaching people how to listen to music better and how to get more out of the experience.”
The people in those Wednesday morning chairs are, by Condon’s description, curious people — people of good taste, as Michael Feinstein recently told an audience of them directly. They skew older, reflecting the community Musicfest has always served, though Condon resists language that makes the programming sound exclusive. What he will say, carefully and with some feeling, is that for many of the people who
come through those doors, Music Alive! is doing something that goes well beyond music appreciation.
“We are explicitly building community,” he says. “Studies have shown that seniors who maintain an active social life are happier, live longer, have better health. Someone comes in, hears music they love, looks over at a stranger and says — oh, you love this too? A friendship is born when one person says to the other, ‘I thought it was just me.’”
Naplan makes the same point from an institutional angle. The program is free — no admission, no per-class fee for the lectures and seminars — because it is understood as a charitable mission, subsidized by the margin the concert season generates on sold-out nights, as well as through the generosity of Musicfest’s donors.
“Instead of paying $10 or $15 per class,” he says, “our patrons are giving very meaningfully at the end of the season, because they know we are greatly enhancing their quality of life. It has become part of their lifestyle.”
The music-making classes — piano fundamentals at three levels, ukulele, guitar, West African drumming, HealthRhythms drumming sessions — carry a modest fee of $200 to $225 for an eight-session course, with class sizes running between eight and 15 participants. Condon doesn’t teach them himself; he recruits for them, and the recruiting, he says, is everything.
“If it’s a perfunctory exercise for the teacher, that translates immediately to the students,” he says. “But if the teacher is passing on genuine joy, genuine excitement, a real love for the art — that connects.”
What happens to an adult who learns an instrument for the first time, or returns to one abandoned 60 years ago, is something Condon has watched closely. Audience members used to come up to him after performances and say they wished they hadn’t quit piano. They were 70. They had quit at seven. Music Alive! exists, in part, to answer that wish.
“Music happens in time,” he says. “You’re coordinating your brain with your hands with your ear — all in real time, all within a rhythmic constraint. For people going through dementia, music and musical memory is often the very last thing to go, long after speech and shortterm memory have faded. It lives in a deep place in the brain and the spirit. But there’s also just the profound sense of accomplishment. I think it’s so valuable for anyone, at any age, to do hard things and see them through.”
Once a month, Condon loads his materials into his car and drives to the city of Scottsdale’s Via Linda Senior Center to deliver a smaller version of what he does at Musicfest — a promotional session for an audience that, on a good day, numbers about a dozen. He admits that early on, the disparity gave him pause. He mentioned it to Naplan. They decided to keep going.
From the Top
The youngest people in Arizona Musicfest’s orbit and the oldest don’t often share the same room. But they share the same institutional commitment — and occasionally, the same stage.
Musicfest’s youth programming runs parallel to Music Alive!, built around the conviction that an organization serious about music’s future has to invest in the people who will make it. That investment takes several forms.
Six annual competitions across divisions — strings, winds and brass, piano, voice, jazz and chamber ensemble — give young Arizona musicians a professional performance context and, for winners, cash prizes and a place in the Young Musicians Concert Series. From there, standouts earn access to the Access to Artistry Masterclass Series, working directly with the nationally and internationally acclaimed guest artists who anchor Musicfest’s main stage season.
The Arizona Musicfest Scholarship Program, launched in 2011, has awarded a combined $233,640 to students pursuing college degrees in music — a merit-based program that draws from the competition pipeline and requires prior participation in Musicfest’s youth programs. Recipients have gone on to the Juilliard School, Manhattan School of Music and elite orchestras across the country. Some have come back to solo with the Festival Orchestra — a full-circle moment that Allan Naplan describes with undisguised pride.
A newer initiative reaches further. The Summer Music Camp Scholarship Program, now in its third year, is 100% need-based — built for students whose school-year momentum would otherwise evaporate over a long Arizona summer. Aligned with partner Valley arts organizations serving underserved communities, the program has sent students to Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan, Brevard Music Center in North Carolina, Meadowmount School of Music in New York and Berklee College of Music’s Aspire summer program in Boston, among others.
The concert season fills the hall. The scholarships fill the pipeline.
azmusicfest.org/youth
On one particular morning, Condon loaded the car early, drove over, and caught himself doing the math — all of this preparation, all of this effort, for 12 people. It was a fleeting thought. But it was there.
Walking out to the parking lot after the session, a woman named Doris stopped him. She told him about her first husband, a musician. Her second husband, the love of her life, recently lost. The long days at home afterward. Her daughter calling, urging her to get out. She wasn’t someone who had hobbies, she said. She had been an executive. But she loved music. So she came to his session at the senior center, and then she started coming to everything at Musicfest.
“You have given me, in however many years I have left, my first hobby,” she told him. “And that has given me a new reason to live.”
Condon gets quiet for a moment.
“I was so angry at myself for having walked in with anything less than full presence for that moment,” he says. “Because what I do here is so much bigger than me. I think about Doris, and I think — there are probably many other Dorises out there. And I try to facilitate spaces where anyone can come and have that kind of moment, whatever their story is.”
Music Alive! programming runs year-round. The instrument classes conclude in mid-May, but Wednesday morning sessions continue through the summer — a Songs of Summer series, film screenings, iced coffee — before ramping back up to five events a week when the concert season returns in the fall.
“Five years from now, Music Alive! will be even bigger,” Naplan says. “I have no doubt about that.”
Condon frames it somewhat differently, in the way that people who do the work rather than run the organization tend to frame things.
“I’m always their gateway drug,” he says, “into whatever they choose to explore.”
azmusicfest.org/education
Writer Joseph J. Airdo // Photographer Dillon Driscoll
A Carefree Vocalist
Finds Her Life’s Purpose — One Memory at a Time
Song of the Soul
Vivian hadn’t spoken in five years. She lived in a memory care community, confined to a wheelchair, her hands beginning to turn in on themselves. But when Shannon Wallace entered the room — when the music started — something happened. Vivian moved her arms. She danced a little. She smiled.
At the end of that day’s session, Wallace sang “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” directly to her. It’s the song she always uses to close — timeless, gentle, older than either of their generations. When the last note faded, Vivian said two words.
“Beautiful. Beautiful.”
Wallace’s jaw dropped. So did the jaw of Vivian’s son, who came to see his mother every single day. He turned to Wallace with tears on his face. “Shannon,” he said, “I have not heard my mother’s voice in five years. I can’t even tell you what this means.”
That moment — not the touring, not the television career, not the two decades in marketing — is what Shannon Wallace has spent the past decade pursuing. A Carefree resident and jazz vocalist of 30 years, Wallace is the founder of Musical Memory Care, an interactive program that uses music, movement and memory games to reach people living with dementia, cognitive impairment and developmental disabilities. What began as a volunteer commitment to a single memory care community has grown into something she never anticipated: a program now serving participants in 40 countries.
It started, as the best stories often do, with a question she couldn’t answer.
Several years ago, the Arizona Commission on the Arts offered a $5,000 grant to individual artists. Wallace fit the criteria — a professional vocalist, working steadily, building toward her debut album — and $5,000 was mean-
Music is the elixir of the soul. It doesn’t matter what song, what era, what genre. It’s a soul-to-soul relationship. Shannon Wallace
ingful help toward the $25,000 the recording would require. She began filling out the application. Then she hit a question that stopped her cold.
How does your project benefit your community?
“I thought, well, they can buy my music and hopefully enjoy it,” she recalls. “And then I thought — what am I actually doing for my community? Nothing, other than looking glamorous and singing in front of a 20-piece big band orchestra while husbands and wives danced together.”
She stopped the application. The question had done something more valuable than help her secure funding — it had forced a reckoning.
“I decided the onus was on me to do something for my community,” she says. “So I asked myself: who do I want to work with? And seniors have always been my jam.”
She called an accompanist friend — Charles Lewis, already a senior himself at the time, now 92 and still playing in the Valley — and together they found a memory care community to visit. Wallace arrived knowing almost nothing about the world she was entering. She learned quickly, for instance, that you don’t call them facilities.
“They’re called communities,” she says. “There’s a stigma with the word facility that the elder care industry has moved away from.”
Shannon Wallace, jazz vocalist and founder of Musical Memory Care, has spent a decade using song to reach active adults and people living with dementia — building a program that now serves participants in 40 countries from her home community of Carefree.
The learning curve over those first three years was enormous. But the most important lesson came early, and it reframed everything that followed.
“I realized I wasn’t singing for seniors — I was singing with them,” she says. “It’s a ‘with,’ not a ‘for.’ They taught me more than I could ever provide, and what they provide me is a cup that runneth over, every single day.”
For two years, she showed up to that community every Monday, Wednesday and Friday — for free — while her marketing firm ran in parallel. Eventually she went to Rhonda Thiel, then executive director of a Koelsch Senior Communities property, and said there was something to this. Thiel helped her figure out the transition from volunteer to professional, and the two have remained close colleagues ever since.
Today, a Musical Memory Care workshop looks like this: chairs arranged in a semicircle, name tags on every participant, Wallace working her way around the room before a single note is played — good morning, Beth; good morning, Charlie — conducting a quiet cognitive read as she goes. She’s an entertainer, and an entertainer reads the room. Whether she’s in front of 1,000 people at a jazz concert or 15 people in a memory care community, she says, the job is the same.
The sessions blend music with movement and problemsolving games in ways that are deceptively demanding. In one exercise, participants snap, clap, touch their nose and touch their ears — then sing a song they know from the time of their life while maintaining the full sequence. That’s memory, motor coordination and lyrical recall firing simultaneously. If everyone is keeping pace, Wallace raises the difficulty. If she sees someone struggling, she dials it back.
The songs are not chosen for her own affinity with the Great American Songbook — though that’s where her heart lives. They’re chosen for her participants. Research has established what Wallace calls the “time of their life” — the music absorbed roughly between ages 16 and 30, which leaves a lasting neurological imprint and remains accessible even as other memories erode. If a participant was born in 1933, she does the math on what was popular during their formative years. Born in 1956, same calculation.
“It’s only when someone is around 90 or 95 that the Great American Songbook becomes their time of their life,” she says. “Which is really my time, in that regard, too.”
Carefree resident Shannon Wallace is a certified dementia practitioner, professional jazz vocalist and founder of Musical Memory Care — a program born from a single grant application question she couldn’t answer in good conscience.
Shannon Wallace leads monthly Music, Memory and Movement workshops at Christ the Lord Lutheran Church in Cave Creek, part of the community-wide effort that helped Carefree and Cave Creek earn their Dementia Friendly America designation this past February.
Memory Makers
Carefree and Cave Creek are now officially dementia-friendly — and the designation is anything but honorary.
On Feb. 17, both communities received Dementia Friendly America designation, awarded jointly. DFA typically designates one community at a time but made an exception given how closely the two towns interact. Sherri Boozikee, neighbor engagement specialist at Foothills Caring Corps, spent months building the case — securing the support of FCC Executive Director Brent Downs, then taking it to both town councils in January. Both voted unanimously in favor.
Earning the designation requires assembling a cross-sector action team, submitting a formal application with letters of support and committing to ongoing evaluation. A launch meeting on Jan. 14 drew more than 20 community members; about a dozen signed on to form the Dementia Friendly Action Team, co-chaired by Home Instead President Kelly Cornelius and representing restaurants, churches, businesses, clinics and first responders. For participating businesses, the ask is straightforward: have staff complete a 45-minute information session and display dementia-friendly branding in return.
The designation formalizes what FCC had already been building. The Memory Cafe — held the third Thursday of every month at Good Shepherd of the Hills Episcopal Church — brings people living with dementia and their care partners together in a free, drop-in setting. Caregivers gather for peer support while participants engage in activities. Twenty-eight people attended the last one.
“We're trying to eliminate the stigma,” Boozikee says, “and that starts with everyone understanding what this looks like and how to help.”
foothillscaringcorps.org
Her wardrobe is not incidental. She wears solid colors and red sneakers in every session — in person and online — because as dementia advances, peripheral vision narrows and the ability to locate a focal point breaks down. She wants to be easy to find. She wants her participants to know, before a word is spoken, that this is the same person who was here last time.
“Consistency is the point,” she says.
Vivian understood this. She was in the later stages — stage seven is what Wallace describes as the threshold of transition, where speaking and self-feeding are largely gone — but the eyes, she insists, remain the windows into the soul until the very last moment. Vivian’s eyes were always dancing.
“Music is the elixir of the soul,” Wallace says. “It doesn’t matter what song, what era, what genre. It’s a soul-to-soul relationship. And Vivian was a hundred thousand percent still in there.”
That conviction now anchors Wallace’s work in her own backyard. The second Monday of every month, she leads a free Music, Memory and Movement workshop at Christ the Lord Lutheran Church in Carefree — one of the signature programs that helped Carefree and Cave Creek earn their joint Dementia Friendly America designation this past February. Of the roughly 40 new neighbors Foothills Caring Corps meets each month, about 40% are somewhere on a memory challenge journey. Carefree’s average resident age is 70. These are her people, and she knows it.
She had to walk away from a grant application to find them. She had to ask herself an uncomfortable question in an empty room and sit with the silence until the answer came. What came back wasn’t an album or an accolade. It was Vivian. And a room full of people who, when the music starts, are still entirely, unmistakably here.
“I’ve had a lot of opportunities in my life,” Wallace says. “I love this one most of all.”
shannonwallacesings.com // musicalmemorycare.com
Music to His Years Vietnam Veteran Turns Life’s
TSoundtrack Into Literature
he field house at Bethany College is winding down toward its final song when the dean of students pulls Doug Bradley aside. April 4, 1968. A small town in the West Virginia hills, a Thursday night crowd that came out to see Dionne Warwick — and Warwick is about to come offstage. The dean leans in: Martin Luther King Jr. has been assassinated. In Memphis. About an hour ago.
Bradley is 20 years old, the school’s social chairman, responsible for bringing 19 acts to this tiny campus in just over two years. He drove Warwick from the airport himself. He knows she’ll want to do one or two more songs. He also knows, from the faces he can already see, that something is wrong.
This is the kind of moment that doesn’t belong in anyone’s college years. And yet there it is — the first chapter in what will become a lifetime of intersections between music and history, between songs and the events they outlast.
Bradley, a Vietnam veteran and part-time Phoenician who lives near Piestewa Peak, published “The Tracks of My Years: A Music-Based Memoir” in August 2025. The book — which earned the Vietnam Veterans of America’s 2025 Excellence in Arts Award and drew blurbs from Pulitzer Prize winner David Maraniss and “Matterhorn” author
Karl Marlantes — organizes a life not by dates or milestones but by songs. Each chapter takes its title from a track that shaped it. The companion 46-song Spotify playlist is essentially the table of contents. And what that playlist contains — Sinatra giving way to doo-wop giving way to Motown giving way to Hendrix — is the arc of postwar American music history, lived from the inside.
Writer Joseph J. Airdo // Photography Courtesy of Doug Bradley
Doug Bradley at his typewriter at U.S. Army headquarters in Long Binh, South Vietnam, in 1971 — where music from Hendrix to Motown provided what he calls the soundtrack soldiers needed to “fight and stay alive.”
Doug Bradley, author, educator and Vietnam veteran, splits his time between Madison, Wisconsin, and the Phoenix area, where he teaches courses on music, Vietnam, memoir and memory at Arizona State University.
“Music has always been there for me,” Bradley says. “But the turning point, absolutely, was Vietnam. Music was what we needed to cling to, to keep us alive, to keep us connected to one another, to the rest of the company, to the rest of the world.”
The story begins in Philadelphia, where Bradley grew up listening to his father croon big band standards and his older brother rehearse doo-wop with street-corner groups. When the family relocated to the Pittsburgh suburbs, Bradley assembled a 45 RPM collection and spun records at high school dances. He was, in other words, exactly the kid who would end up social chairman at Bethany College — a tiny school in Bethany, West Virginia, where he ran for office on a promise to bring Smokey Robinson and the Miracles to campus.
Music was what we needed to cling to, to keep us alive, to keep us connected to one another, to the rest of the company, to the rest of the world. Doug Bradley
He won. And on March 5, 1967, Smokey showed up.
“I was 19, 20 years old,” Bradley recalls. “You’re a young kid and these are your idols. You just want to do right by them and not screw up.”
The concert went off without a hitch — and then, as the Miracles were leaving, someone said they wanted to play some ball. Smokey sat it out. But Bobby Rogers, Pete Moore and Ronnie White followed Bradley into the gym, found a ball, and played two-on-two in dress shoes on the hardwood.
“It was like being in church,” Bradley says.
That night was one of 19 concerts in just over two years — Jefferson Airplane, Count Basie, Sam and Dave, the Fifth Dimension — that made tiny Bethany an unlikely musical oasis in the West Virginia hills. But none of them prepared Bradley for the night Dionne Warwick came to town.
Doug Bradley receives his diploma from Bethany College in Bethany, West Virginia, where as social chairman he brought 19 acts to campus in just over two years — among them Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Count Basie and Dionne Warwick.
She had canceled twice before — November 1967, then January 1968 — before finally honoring her contract that April. Her band had flown into a small regional airport separately, so she committed to one long set and gave everything she had. The crowd was full. The night was good.
Then the dean intercepted Bradley near the stage.
“I could see she could already tell by looking at the people right there that something was wrong — we were just shaken,” Bradley says. “So I said, ‘I’m so sorry. This is terrible. Dr. King —’” He didn’t need to finish the sentence.
“It was remarkable how she got strong, got strong in an instant,” he says. “She said, ‘I need to sing. I have to get this out.’”
She never got the chance. A local sheriff, worried about unrest, ordered the lights up and the field house cleared. The audience filed
out not knowing why. Warwick left without singing another note.
“I think we all would have been healed by what she needed to sing that night,” Bradley says. “It never happened because somebody decided it was going to be too risky.”
A year after that night, he was drafted. He aced the Army’s aptitude test and earned assignment as a journalist, eventually landing at U.S. Army headquarters in Long Binh, South Vietnam, from November 1970 to November 1971. Nixon had signaled the American withdrawal was coming. Nobody wanted to be the last GI killed in Vietnam. So they kept their heads down — and they listened.
“Everybody had a radio, everybody had records, everybody had tape decks,” Bradley says. “Vietnamese bands, Korean bands, music coming from every direction. Some guys listened to country, a lot of us listened to Hendrix. Whatever it was, it was what we needed to fight and stay alive.”
Doug Bradley, his brother and their father in the early years before rock and roll drew battle lines in the household.
Vietnam veteran
Doug Bradley has written a memoir organized entirely by its soundtrack — from doo-wop in postwar Philadelphia to Hendrix in Vietnam — tracing a life shaped by music and the extraordinary history it witnessed firsthand.
“The Tracks of My Years” doesn’t stop at the music. It also moves through the complicated personal terrain that makes any memoir worth reading — including a prolonged, unresolved relationship with a high school teacher who opened the teenage Bradley’s eyes to Bob Dylan and the Beatles, and whose intentions Bradley is still working to fully understand.
The book took 10 to 12 years to assemble, built from memory, journals and verification calls to family members. He had to make sure he got the early songs right, he says — “16 Candles,” “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” Sinatra — songs he confirmed with his brother and parents while they were still alive to ask.
Vietnam changed everything, he says, but not only in the ways you’d expect.
“I had to learn patience,” he explains. “I had to learn forgiveness. And I think about where we are now as a country — this division, this fracture. It feels as serious as anything since Vietnam, maybe the Civil War. If you can find something to hold on to — music, memory, food, family, whatever it is — hold on.”
Bradley has found that something, both in his writing and in the life he’s built near Piestewa Peak, where he teaches continuing studies courses at Arizona State University on music, Vietnam, memoir and memory. He speaks about his adopted state the way he speaks about the music that sustained him in Southeast Asia — with the gratitude of someone who knows exactly what it means to need something and find it.
“Everybody’s got their own soundtrack,” he says. “You’re up, you’re down, you’re here, you’re there, and through all of it, music is what connects you to yourself.”
doug-bradley.com
Doug Bradley with his older brother in Philadelphia — four and a half years apart in age, a lifetime apart in taste.
BOURSIN DIP WITH PISTACHIOS AND HOT HONEY
Three ingredients, five minutes, zero effort — and yet this dip has a way of stopping a party cold. A wheel of Boursin pressed onto a plate, blanketed in salted pistachios and finished with a generous drizzle of hot honey, delivers the kind of sweet-heat-salty combination that turns crackers into vehicles for one more bite. It works as a weeknight snack, an effortless happyhour offering, or the appetizer you bring when you want people to ask for the recipe.
Yield: 6 servings
INGREDIENTS:
Francine Coles
Writer and Photographer
thefancypantskitchen.com
1 5.4-ounce wheel Boursin cheese, garlic and herb variety
1/2 cup roasted salted shelled pistachios, chopped (about 1/4 cup crushed)
3–4 tablespoons hot honey
Crackers or apple slices, for serving
DIRECTIONS:
1. Let the Boursin come to room temperature for 15 minutes to soften for easier spreading.
2. Choose a serving plate or platter. Use the back of a spoon to press the Boursin into an even layer across the surface.
3. Top evenly with the pistachios. Drizzle generously with hot honey.
4. Serve immediately with crackers or apple slices. Include a small spreading knife or spoon for easy plating.
