Meet Steve. Steve is your ordinary 20-something career-driven civil engineer with degrees from RPI and Cornell, solving problems to better the public good. He attends meetings, drinks coffee out of one of a vast collection of mugs, keeps a pyramid of perfectly sharpened pencils and a pad of graph paper soon to be devoured in a flurry of concrete and steel design. Steve, however, takes a rare form after the sun recedes behind the mountainous wall of the Hudson Highlands. Meet Steve Malinski: NYS Music Staff Writer; gormandizer of music.
Music has always been a part of his life, beginning in the fourth grade at Poestenkill Elementary School when he picked up the sax against a field of other instruments laid out in front of him. However it wasn’t until his college radio years when he got exposed to a wider world of music. Through many on-air shifts at WRPI he basked in the soothing sounds of a vast collection of vinyl and CDs across several genres and decades. This is where he may have picked up the journalistic knack he carries on now at NYS Music, having interviewed the likes of Johnny Winter, Commander Cody, Country Joe McDonald (amongst others), many Albany-area musicians, and interacting with others in the music industry such as Bela Fleck and Eric Burdon.
Steve’s exposure to live music has been a sort of luck-of-chance. He’s tallied at least 140 concerts since 2005 including 19 Dave Matthews Band shows, 11 Phish shows, and 9 Rush shows. At least half of those have been thanks to working as an EMT at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. His eclectic taste in music has led him to enjoy a range of live performances from the Philadelphia Orchestra and jazz festivals to jam bands and shows like Crüefest and the Warped Tour.
Having moved slightly more than a skip away from Troy dampened an almost daily involvement with radio to a few visits a month. So naturally, Steve’s journey as a writer with NYSMusic began in 2013 after an itch to regain a regularly active involvement in the music scene. He had written a few guest articles and photographed a few concerts and contributed some music reviews and sports articles for The Rensselaer Polytechnic in his undergraduate college years. NYSMusic has opened the door again to writing about music.
Aside from NYSMusic, Steve maintains active roles at WRPI in Troy as their local music director and WVBR in Ithaca as host of “Shakedown Street,” a weekly Grateful Dead program which airs on Saturdays. He also performs regularly with the RPI Pep Band on sax (and sometimes the Cornell Pep Band) and the Hudson Highlands Pipe Band on drums and occasionally finger-picks some tunes on guitar.
Steve’s bucket list dwindled rapidly over the past few years as he has had many great opportunities for shows. He has yet to cross David Gilmour, Dweezil Zappa, Paul McCartney, and The Rolling Stones off that list. His top 5 favorite bands are Rush, Black 47, Phish, The Grateful Dead, and Pink Floyd.
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