Grammy Winner Headlines Opening of Williamstown Jazz Festival

08:11AM / Friday, September 04, 2026Print Story | Email Story

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Jazz and R&B vocalist Lisa Fischer and her ensemble, Grand Baton, will take center stage on the opening night of the inaugural Williamstown Jazz Festival.

The performance will take place on Friday, Sept. 11, at 7 p.m. at the '62 Center for Theatre and Dance located on the Williams College campus.

According to a press release:

Fischer, who was a breakout star in the Oscar-winning documentary 20 Feet from Stardom (2013), is one of the most inventive contemporary jazz live performers working today. Her 1991 signature solo hit, "How Can I Ease the Pain," won the Grammy Award for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance in 1992.

Over her career, Fischer has collaborated with an extraordinary roster of music royalty, most notably touring for 26 years as the primary female backing vocalist for The Rolling Stones and sharing the stage with rock and pop icons like Tina Turner, Sting, Bruce Springsteen, and Nine Inch Nails. In the realm of R&B, she spent over two decades working closely with Luther Vandross and lent her powerhouse vocals to legendary artists like Aretha Franklin, Patti LaBelle, and Chaka Khan. Today, she continues to expand her genre-defying footprint by collaborating with premier jazz and funk artists like Chris Botti, Bobby McFerrin, and Ranky Tanky, while fronting her own progressive world-rock band, Grand Baton.

Ticketing: Individual tickets and 3-Day Festival Passes can be purchased via Jazz in the Berkshires (jazzintheberkshires.org) or InstantSeats.

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Mount Greylock School Committee Sets 2026-27 Agenda

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
11:50AM / Friday, September 04, 2026

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Mount Greylock School Committee last month laid out its priorities for the next year while acknowledging three members of the seven-person panel may be gone by November.

In a special in-person meeting at the middle-high school on a Saturday morning in August, the School Committee finalized its goals for the academic year ahead.

The four-hour meeting was attended by six of the committee's seven members, including three who face challengers in the Nov. 3 election.

The committee ended up agreeing on five goals to set for 2026-27: setting regular meetings and getting regular reports from its Outcomes Subcommittee; improving community outreach by the full committee; implementing a committee member orientation plan for the at least one new member who will be elected in the fall; advancing a district-wide "visions and values" process; and aligning the committee's practice with state requirements for a student representative.

Before the group got into goal-setting, it reviewed the results of a self-evaluation process it undertook for the previous academic year.

Members noted that in 38 areas outlined by the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, the seven Mount Greylock members rated its own performance as below satisfactory in just seven. And it was those areas that are addressed in the goals for 2026-27.

The MASC has five different subcategories headed "community engagement," and the MGRSC members rated themselves between 2.9 and 3.3 on a scale of 1 to 4 in three of the five. The lowest score in the self-evaluation was for the topic of "Community Engagement - Building Support" with an aggregate score of 2.86 and two of the seven members giving the panel a score of 2 in the wake of a budget season when one of the district's two towns chose to amend the district's budget on the floor of its town meeting.

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