Music at Vanderbilt: Long Island Sound Festival

Music for Many Tastes: Sunday, August 28, on the Museum Lawn

For lovers of jazz-funk, reggae, folk-rock, fusion, blues or just plain old rock ‘n’ roll, the huge lawn of the Vanderbilt Estate in Centerport is the place to be on Sunday, August 28. Lovers of antique cars and Shakespeare plays will want to be there that day, too. (See details below.)

Rich Rivkin founded the Elwoodstock Music Festival in 2001. This year, the Suffolk County Vanderbilt Museum invited him to relocate his popular festival from Elwood Park to the museum’s home, the 43-acre waterfront estate of the William K. Vanderbilt II in Centerport.

In keeping with its spectacular new location, the event is now called the Long Island Sound Festival. The event will run 12:00 to 7:00 p.m. on the wide, bowl-like lawn below the Vanderbilt Marine Museum.

Rivkin said the event will have “the same uniquely friendly vibe” of the Elwoodstock concerts, along with live music by “some of the region’s hottest jam bands.”

Admission to the event is free with a general-admission ticket to the Vanderbilt Museum: General museum admission is $7 for adults, $6 for students with ID and seniors (62 and older), $3 for children 12 and under.

General admission includes estate-grounds access to the marine museum, Memorial Wing natural-history and ethnographic-artifact galleries, Nursery Wing, Egyptian mummy and Stoll Wing animal dioramas. For a mansion tour, add $5 per ticket.

The festival playbill features renowned regional musicians: Cindy Lopez & Friends (jazzy blues), Reckoning (a Grateful Dead tribute band), Roast Beef Curtains (reggae), Fusion Collective (jazz-funk fusion interpretations of the music of Miles Davis, John Coltrane and other greats) and the Adam Gieckel Band (folk-rock). Emcee will be Tim “Easy’ Connolly” of EasytownRadio.com.

For more information, call Rich Rivkin 631-261-2941. More information about the bands is available at: theroastbeefcurtains.com/bio.php, fusioncollective.com and reckoningband.com. 

That day, visitors also can see the MG Car Club–Long Island Centre’s 31st annual Vanderbilt Invitational Concours, an open car show displaying American and British models, 25 years old and older. The show is free to spectators with general museum admission.

That evening, visitors can enjoy an Arena Players Repertory Theater production of Shakespeare’s “Much Ado about Nothing” at 7:00 p.m. in the mansion courtyard, weather permitting. Tickets are $15; seats are provided. To reserve tickets, call the Arena Players box office at 516-293-0674.