Trumansburg band Mama Look! to host music retreat 

The Trumansburg-based band Mama Look!, made up of Tompkins County music scene veterans, will host a music retreat at the end of August at a scenic inn on Oquaga Lake. 

The folk trio, made up of Amy Puryear, Uniit Carruyo and McKenzie Jones, is organizing the trip to Scott’s Farmhouse at Oquaga Lake, hoping to draw interested Tompkins County residents for a weekend of harmonious learning. 

Tentative dates for the potential retreat are Aug. 23 and 24, with a registration cap anticipated by Aug. 15, according to a flyer made by the band. 

Jones said, however, that those dates are flexible and subject to change.  

Mama Look! hopes that this new endeavor will bring more interest to songwriting and crafting music.

“We are all educators of some kind,” Jones said. For instance, she noted that Puryear teaches SingSong classes for children ages 1 through 4 in the Trumansburg area. 

“[The children] are by far the highlight of my week, every single week,” Puryear has said in previous interviews. “We get together and sit in a circle, and we sing songs, some in different languages. We do some sign language with the children. We do some dancing and some clapping, stomping and moving our bodies.”

Leading adults in music education courses will be a first for the band. 

“We’ve never led other adults through the process of songwriting or crafting music,” Jones said.
“And so we were really interested in this idea, and we want to hopefully get some folks to come spend like 36 hours with us.”

Jones said she hopes to have practical activities for learners during the retreat.

“We want to teach things like breathing techniques and warming up your voice and singing harmonies,” Jones said. “And those things are activities that we engage in a lot, and so we feel capable of teaching them.”

There are some less practical lessons, too, like helping learners tap into their creative side, Jones said. “A lot of musicianship and songwriting is like leaning into your intuition. And so what we hope to do is to create a space where people feel safe enough to lean into their intuition and creativity, and some of that will be through prompts — like questions and sharing our own songwriting experiences.” 

The location of the retreat, Jones hopes, will also be inspirational for learners. Scott’s Farmhouse on Oquaga Lake, in the Catskills region of New York, is all-around beautiful, Jones said. 

“It is on a beautiful piece of land, on this beautiful lake, and so we’re gonna leave a lot of time for people to have their own space, to think, dream and be creative,” she said. “We really tried to think about all the angles of songwriting, knowing that there’s no way to touch upon everything in a short time. But we really realized that for a lot of people, they feel hindered towards creativity simply because they don’t have the time and the space for it. And so this is a place for people who have interest in creativity and digging into their musical intuition.”

Their connection to the inn is indicative of the trio’s mission of creating a community for Tompkins County artists to thrive. Scott’s Farmhouse is partly owned by Jai Meyerhoff, a musician from the county who met and performed with the musicians in Mama Look! throughout the past few decades. 

“For me, it’s very exciting to have people come to this beautiful property that is very dear to me, but also to practice or learn new skills or tools for songwriting, which is also something that I want to learn, myself,” Meyerhoff said. “I wanted to share the property with people — wanting to share in a creative process with people and wanting to learn, myself.”

On top of the educational and instructional lessons, Mama Look! plans to have a performance during the retreat.

Interested parties may contact the band about joining the Oquaga Lake retreat at mamalookmusic@gmail.com.

Eddie Velazquez is a local journalist who lives in Syracuse and covers the towns of Lansing and Ulysses. Velazquez can be reached at edvel37@gmail.com.