10th Annual Albany Latin Fest

Spice up your weekend with a trip into Washington Park on Saturday, where the 10th Annual Latin Fest will be warming up downtown Albany. Highlights of this popular festival are Hispanic food vendors, craft vendors, children’s events, live entertainment and more. According to the Albany events Web site, this Latin festival has had one of the largest attendance rates of any Latin Fest in upstate New York.

This year’s performers will include Drumming Benediction, Taineri, Dashira, Ralphy Sabater Y Su Orquesta (a Bronx-based salsa-music orchestra, pictured), Frankie Negron, and the Spanish Harlem Orchestra.

The 10th Annual Albany Latin Fest will take place on Saturday (Aug. 27) from noon to 8 PM at Washington Park in downtown Albany. The rain site is the Corning Preserve. For more information and a full performance schedule, call 434-2032 or visit www.albanyevents.org.

Martin Sexton

Martin Sexton oozes sensuality, in both his voice—a powerful, woody baritone, vaguely similar to Ben Harper or, if your pop-culture radar only goes back six months, Bo Bice—and his inventive acoustic-guitar work, in which he picks out bass lines with his thumb while strumming chords. The Syracuse-via-Boston troubadour has flown just under the radar for most of his decade-plus career, but that seems to work just fine for him. After releasing two wonderful records on Atlantic (The American, Wonder Bar) around the turn of the century, Sexton parted ways with the label, and only then did he really hit his stride. In 2002, Sexton launched his own label (Kitchen Table Records) and released the career-defining Live Wide Open album. The record captures all of the elements that make the average Sexton show worth a long drive on a hot night: Impassioned singing and playing, and a genuine connection between the hard-touring performer—whose onstage mannerisms have been described as everything from “insane” to “evocative” to “creepy, in a good way”—and his audience. He’s a good enough performer that, even if you don’t like him, you’ll probably like him.

Martin Sexton will perform at the Berkshire Music Hall (30 Union St., Pittsfield, Mass.) this Saturday (Aug. 27). Tickets for the 8 PM show are $35. Chris Trapper of The Push Stars will open the show. For more information, call (413) 528-3394.

Lava

This New York City-based, six-woman, “gymnastically inclined” dance troupe has been praised by Newsweek as presenting “an exhilarating mix of circus and dance.”

In addition to the fun, there’s ample ambition evident in their latest work-in-progress, which will be performed this weekend at MASS MoCA. w(HOLE) is nothing less than an attempt to tell “the story of the earth’s history in terms of geologic and evolutionary events and phenomena.”

Lava will present (w)HOLE tomorrow (Friday, Aug. 26) and Saturday (Aug. 27) at 7:30 PM at MASS MoCA (1040 MASS MoCA Way, North Adams, Mass.). Tickets are $20, $15 for kids 12 and under. For reservations and information, call (413) 662-2111.