GLEN — The Glen Conservancy Hall is holding a Vic Kibler Memorial Jam with Sue Casler and Friends at 7 p.m. on Aug. 3.
“He took a lot of joy in playing,” said Paul Kibler in a news release. “I don’t think I ever saw an audience that didn’t like him.”
He is speaking of his father, Vic, whose legacy will be honored by the jam session.
Vic Kibler was renown as an Adirondack fiddler — although he confessed to later playing more in the Canadian style — after his inadvertent Caffe Lena debut in the 1970s, when a friend persuaded him to let loose with a couple of tunes during a concert intermission. His playing won him induction into the North American Old Tyme Fiddler’s Hall of Fame. Kibler was a repository of traditional tunes, and played them anywhere but in a dance hall — he’d promised his mother to stay away from such places. Kibler was born in Wells in 1919 and never strayed far from the Adirondacks; he died in 2013.
According to the release, Casler treasures the lessons she had with Kibler, and notes that his compassion always came through.
“Our fiddle sessions were mixed with life and living, very practical things, while he was teaching me the tunes.”
With the opening of Conservancy Hall in Glen, where she lives, for concerts, she has devised a structured jam to celebrate Kibler’s work, with a program of traditional tunes and the fiddler’s own originals, which will be taught to participants.
And she has assembled a roster of distinguished local performers to help, among them guitarists Bill Ackerbauer and Daryl Kosinski, fiddler Olof Janssen, Sue Grimm on accordion, and Vic’s band mates Paul Kibler, George Ward, and Jim Lestrange.
The event takes place in a former church in Montgomery County’s Mohawk Valley. The structure, which seats over 100 and is ADA accessible, is located at 1538 Route 161, part of the Glen National Register Historic District, which was created in 2001. The Hall was acquired by the Glen Conservancy in 2014 and is continuing to undergo restoration.
