David Amram, The Village Trip Artist-in-Residence, started his professional life in music as a French hornist in the National Symphony Orchestra (Washington, DC) in the early 1950s, as well as playing French horn in the legendary jazz bands of Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie and Lionel Hampton. Appointed by Leonard Bernstein as the first Composer-in-Residence for the New York Philharmonic in 1966, he also composed the scores for the films Pull My Daisy (1959), Splendor in The Grass (1960) and The Manchurian Candidate (1962), and for Joseph Papp's Shakespeare In the Park from 1956-1967. He premiered his comic opera, 12th Night with Papp’s libretto in 1968, and wrote a second opera, The Final Ingredient, An Opera of the Holocaust, for ABC Television in 1965. From 1964-66, David was the Composer and Music Director for the Lincoln Center Theater and wrote the score for Arthur Miller's plays After the Fall (1964) and Incident at Vichy (1966). Read more.
VISIT DAVID AMRAM'S WEBSITE
Joanne Brackeen, jazz pianist and educator, has been described as “one of the greatest living pianists hands down; no footprints!" (Metroland) Whatever the musical setting – solo, duo, trio, quartet, or quintet – Yamaha Artist and 2018 NEA Jazz Master Brackeen's unique style of playing commands attention.
Her sound was honed through periods of apprenticeships with some of the world's greatest names: Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers (the first and only female member), Stan Getz and Joe Henderson.
In addition to her captivating and complex improvisations, Brackeen has recorded 25 albums as a lead musician and appears on more than 100 recordings in total. She has written over 300 intricate and rhythmically daring compositions in a wide stylistic range.
Brackeen maintains an active worldwide touring calendar, headlining and playing to sold-out and standing room-only crowds. Most recently at the Kennedy Center, at the Newport Jazz Festival (where her solo piano concert was named one of the best live performances of 2017 by the New York Times) and at the Monterey Jazz Festival where Jazz Times magazine declared her trio "a most revelatory and favorite act of the evening”, and proclaimed: "After years of listening to her albums, the first time hearing Brackeen live, and with such a responsive ensemble, felt like transitioning from black-and-white TV to the Technicolor Land of Oz."
Brackeen balances touring by teaching as a professor at Berklee College of Music and at the New School, by conducting master classes and residencies and by adjudicating competitions.
VISIT JOANNE BRACKEEN'S WEBSITE
Tom Chapin’s career spans five decades, 26 albums and three Grammy awards. The New York Times has called him “one of the great personalities in contemporary folk music.” A multi-talented singer-songwriter-guitarist, Tom has covered a vast swathe of creative ground. In addition to his work as a recording artist and concert performer, he has acted on Broadway, as well as working extensively in television, radio and film.
As a music-maker, Tom has maintained two long and productive parallel careers, both as a respected contemporary folk artist and as a pioneer in the field of children's music. In both roles, he has established a reputation for insightful, heartfelt songcraft and charismatic live performances. His witty, life-affirming original songs convey positive messages about family, good food and the green earth. Tom accompanies himself on guitar, banjo and autoharp. Read more.
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The Chapin Sisters carry on a proud family musical legacy: father Tom Chapin is a Grammy-winning singer-songwriter; legendary late uncle Harry Chapin was a musical artist and activist best known for his 1974 #1 hit "Cat's in the Cradle"; and grandfather Jim Chapin was an esteemed jazz drummer and author of seminal drum instructional books.
"Prepare to lose your soul," said LA Record of the Chapin Sisters’ seventh recording, Ferry Boat. Produced by drummer/composer Evan Taylor, it features two songs each by Abigail and Lily alongside their take on a number written with them in mind by friend and musical compatriot, banjo player and multi-instrumentalist Hilary Hawke. Read more.
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Keller Coker
Keller Coker is a jazz trombonist, composer, and arranger, who immediately prior to joining the New School was a full-time professor of music at Western Oregon University. Educated at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music, where he received his bachelor and master of music degrees in jazz studies, a doctor of musical arts degree in historical musicology, and completed his PhD, Coker joined School of Jazz and Contemporary Music at the New School as Dean in spring 2017.
Coke founded the American Metropole Orchestra, served as executive director of the Smith Fine Arts Series, arranged music for Kurt Elling, Cuong Vu, Martha Reeves, Joe Lovano, and Allen Toussaint, produced shows for Aiofe O’Donovan, Dr Lonnie Smith, the Turtle Island Quartet, and Sean Jones, and has developed and taught an extraordinarily wide range of courses including songwriting, early music ensemble, jazz composition, brass seminar, ethnomusicology, music history, improvisation, world music, music theory, popular music in America, and more.
He has worked in the record business as a booking agent, performer and composer. He says he plans to use everything that he’s learned from his experience of being in the industry. “I can’t imagine another job like that, that would let me be all the things that I am.”
In the 1990s Coker was co-founder of an “eclectic classical label” in Los Angeles called RCM. He has also produced recordings for Sony, Sierra and Teal Creek.
MORE ABOUT KELLER COKER
Billy Harper, tenor saxophonist, composer, arranger and educator, was born into a musical family in Houston, Texas, and lists as his main influence the black church and the spiritual and musical experience that comes with it. Family members noted his talent for singing at the age of three and his singing career began early with his performing at sacred and secular functions. Around the age of 10 he became fixated on a saxophone in the window of a music shop he passed each day on the way home from school. He would stare at the horn, trying to figure “how anyone could actually play all those notes that appeared on the instrument, when there were only ten fingers available for use.” At 11, he was given his first sax as a Christmas gift and was initiated into the Texas experience of marching bands.
One of his first and strongest connections at this early age was Malcolm Pinson, who would later become one of the favorite professional drummers of his Quintet. Already Harper was working professionally in blues groups, his drama and speech instructor Vernell Lillie teaching him how to develop his character and stage savvy. Harper graduated cum laude in 1961 and went on to North Texas State University where he would extend his musical development with the acquaintance of James Clay, Claude Johnson, David “Fathead” Newman, Louis Spears, Ted Dunbar and Roger Boykins. He was the first black musician to be inducted into the NTSU Big Band which was awarded first prize at the Kansas Jazz Festival.
Harper graduated in 1965 as a Bachelor of Music, with a major in saxophone, and a minor in theory. He moved to New York City in 1966 and after a year of unemployment, sitting in with bands, he caught a lucky break in a New York documentary, The Big Apple. He met Gil Evans on Broadway and within six months was working with the prolific arranger-composer. In 1967 he also began working with the Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers.
Trumpeter Lee Morgan asked him to join his group in 1969, and Harper played in Lee’s Quintet until the trumpeter’s in 1971. Over the following years, Harper worked with Gil Evans, Donald Byrd, Thad Jones/Mel Lewis, Max Road and Randy Weston, with whom he still performs from time to time. A tour of Japan in 1968 with Art Blakey established Harper as a favorite with Japanese audiences and he embarked on regular tours of that country. With his quintet, Harper has toured extensively in Western and Eastern Europe, and in Malaysia, Indonesia, Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and beyond.
In 1970, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Harper, Harold Mabern, and dedicated listeners formed the Jazz and People’s Movement.
MORE ABOUT BILLY HARPER
Diana Jones has been called the “Emily Dickinson of song” and “the female Johnny Cash.” But a journey of adoption and reunion as mysterious as her songwriting led to the gritty, authentic, Americana storytelling that has become her life’s work and her live show. Adopted as an infant, Diana grew up in suburban Long Island feeling an unexplained attraction to rural Southern music. “My brother had Johnny Cash’s Live at Folsom Prison album, and I stole it from his room. Whenever I heard that or someone like Emmylou Harris, I’d think, ‘Wow, that’s beautiful.’ I just didn’t know where to find more of it.” In her twenties the attraction was explained when Jones met her biological grandfather, a singer and guitar player, who introduced her to the folk songs her ancestors had been singing for generations. Gradually she discovered an uncanny affinity for Appalachian music and began claiming it as her own as she discovered her true artistic calling. Read more.
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Vic Juris has been hailed as one of the premier guitarists of the 21st Century with an undeniable command of the acoustic and electric guitar. Growing up as a child prodigy, he performed at a young age with Dizzy Gillespie, Phil Woods, Ron Carter, Sonny Stitt, Jimmy Scott, Michel LeGrand, Freddie Hubbard, Sarah Vaughan, Eddie Jefferson and Nancy Wilson. Juris has been a member of the Davie Liebman band for 20 years, part of the Gary Peacock Group, and Rufus Reid’s Quiet Pride, and has performed with Joe Lovano, Joe Locke and many others. He is also a master of the duo, partnering with Phil Woods, Larry Coryell and vocalist Kate Baker.
Juris’ 25 recordings have featured in the Top Ten Airplay Charts and have received widespread critical acclaim. They include A Second Look, Free Admission, Walking on Water, Blue Horizon, and Night Tripper.
The Vic Juris Trio has acquired fans from across the globe with its innovative arrangements, brilliant originals, organic grooves and ability to cross genres. The latest release is Blue (Steeplechase Records).
Pat Methany has commented: "Vic Juris has been a total monster ever since we both hit the scene at around the same time in the seventies, playing great no matter what the setting. But he has taken the knowledge gained from a long stay in Dave Liebman's band to form a really new way of thinking about melody and harmony on the guitar. His playing is always musical and his pure mastery of the instrument is something to behold.”
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Yoshiko Kline performs as recitalist, soloist, and chamber musician throughout Asia and the New England area. Her most recent travels brought her to Shenzhen China where she performed with saxophonist Kenneth Radnofsky. Yoshiko’s performances have been reported as “carefully colored and musically refined … with a sensitive ear, relating sound to musical expression… Her remarkably unique interpretations were the charm of her performance…” Since her debut concert, in Tokyo, she has appeared in the Steinway Concert Hall in China, Boston’s Jordan Hall, Museum of Fine Arts, and Gardner Museum; as well as The Tanglewood Music Festival, the New York Keyboard Festival and Aspen Music Festival. Performances have also been broadcast live from the studios of Boston radio stations WGBH and WMNB and Aspen, CO Radio KAJX. In addition to her classical interests, she excels as a contemporary artist performing and premiering new works for numerous emerging composers, artists and ensembles. Her solo CD, Jon Meets Yoshiko, released in December 2015 by Phoenicia Publishing, is a collection of neo-classical, neoromantic piano music by Jon Appleton. Read more.
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David Massengill, storyteller, songwriter and picture-book maker, "emigrated" from Bristol, Tennessee to the Greenwich Village folk scene in 1976 with a dulcimer and a dream of bohemian nirvana. He was a key figure in Jack Hardy’s Fast Folk which featured Suzanne Vega and Shawn Colvin, and which produced 115 issues of The Fast Folk Musical Magazine, now part of the Smithsonian collection.
David’s songwriting style ranges from tragic mountain ballads to the lure of tender love songs and iconic political narratives. His songs have been recorded by Joan Baez, David Bromberg, Chad Mitchell, the Roches, Lucy Kaplansky, Tom Russell, Nanci Griffith and his mentor, Dave Van Ronk, who once said that David "took the dull out of dulcimer." Dave on Dave: A Tribute to Dave van Ronk is among David Massengill’s six CDs, 11 bootlegs, 15 books, a movie score, Boudicca Bites Back, and school programs. In 2016 the Southern Folklife Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill offered to archive his works. He accepted, thus joining his friends and heroes Dave Van Ronk, Bill Morrissey and Mike Seeger as a member. He once chased a bobcat, and visa versa. Read more.
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Lucy McDiarmid is a scholar and writer. Her academic interest in cultural politics, especially quirky, colorful, suggestive episodes, is exemplified by The Irish Art of Controversy (2005) and Poets and the Peacock Dinner: the literary history of a meal (2014; paperback 2016). She is a former fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation and of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Her most recent book is At Home in the Revolution: what women said and did in 1916; at the moment she is completing a book on contemporary Irish poetry. She is currently Marie Frazee Baldassarre Professor of English at Montclair State University. Her dating memoir will be published soon, but not too soon.
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Andy McKee’s bass playing, like his way of moving through life, is defined by three words - strength, passion and artistry. Having performed for 25 years with many jazz greats, his reputation stretches from his home base of New York across the United States to Europe and Japan.
McKee’s hard-swinging approach evolved naturally from his formative years on Philadelphia’s jazz scene. Musicians such as Hank Mobley, Johnny Hartman, Slide Hampton, and Clarence “Cee” Sharp provided a nurturing environment for him and other young players. Philly Joe Jones, in particular, was an important mentor.
The next major influence on McKee’s musical development came in 1983 when he debuted with the Elvin Jones Jazz Machine at the Village Vanguard. Over the next decade, he played with the group for years at a time as staff bassist on tour in Europe, the Middle East and at home in New York City. In the mid-80s, McKee was living in Paris. He performed and toured extensively with Mal Waldron, Clark Terry, Steve Lacy, Don Cherry, Horace Parlan, Steve Grossman, as well as European greats Daniel Humair, Marcial Solal and Franco D’Andrea and others. At about this time, he was introduced to one of the most celebrated French jazz pianists of the period: Michel Petrucciani. Between 1987 and 1991, McKee, Petrucciani and Victor Jones played to great acclaim at venues throughout Europe, Japan and the US. McKee recorded two albums with Michel for the Dreyfus label.
Back in New York for long stretches between 1992 and 2003, McKee toured, recorded and served as associate musical director of the Mingus Big Band and the Mingus Dynasty. More recently, he has enjoyed sessions with the venerable and swinging Vanguard Jazz Orchestra where sight-reading the intricate arrangements of Thad Jones and Jim McNeely keeps him sharp. Other notable performances in the last few years have included the Kennedy Center and other venues supporting the Three Baritone Saxophones led by Ronnie Cuber.
While continuing to tour in Europe with various musicians several times a year, McKee has released the recordings Sound Roots with Ed Cherry and Billy Kilson and One World with Idris Muhammed, Alex Foster and Joe Locke. With Manolo Badrena and Dave Stryker, he laid down the groove for Trio Mundo, which recorded the Grammy-nominated Carnaval in 2002 and the 2004 follow-up, Trio Mundo Rides Again. His latest project, All @ Once, began in collaboration with tabla master Badal Roy and has evolved into a complex bass-rooted soundscape colored by the synthesizers of Adam Holtzman, the harmonic richness of Vic Juris’ guitar work and the fireworks of percussionists Badrena and Mino Cinelu. Drawing on his classical training with Homer Mensch among others, McKee distinctively incorporates arco work into his compositions and solos.
Challenges outside jazz include playing for film scores, performance art pieces, neo-classical European composers and Broadway orchestras. His teaching takes him to Europe each summer where he puts his French and Italian to work with students in master classes and workshops. At the New School in New York City the rest of the year, McKee teaches the Mingus repertory as well as ensembles and individual bass students.
And he brings almost as much subtlety, drive and inventiveness to the kitchen as he does to the bandstand — his “chops” in the kitchen have earned him a reputation as the best bass-playing cook on the road.
VISIT ANDY McKEE'S WEBSITE
Kenneth Radnofsky, saxophonist, has appeared as soloist with leading orchestras throughout the world, including the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and New York Philharmonic under Kurt Masur, Jerusalem Symphony with Gisele Ben-Dor and Boston Pops with John Williams. Radnofsky gave the world premiere of Gunther Schuller’s Concerto with the Pittsburgh Symphony (composer conducting). David Amram's Concerto, Ode to Lord Buckley, was premiered with the Portland Symphony, under Bruce Hangen's direction, as well as three other works dedicated to him from Amram, including a new trio entitled Three Lost Loves, for violin, saxophone and piano written for his Amram Ensemble' (with Elmira Darvarova and Thomas Weaver).
Of the 100-plus works he has commissioned, Ken has also premiered the works of Michael Colgrass, John Harbison, Donald Martino, Michael Gandolfi, Betty Olivero, James Yannatos, Baris Perker, Jakov Jakoulov, Osnat Netzer, Elliott Schwartz, Michael Horvit and Yang Yong, to name but a few. Read more.
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Martha Redbone’s music flows equally from her own unique, award-winning blend of Native American elements with funk and her deep roots in Appalachian folk and Piedmont blues favored by the matriarchy that raised her on a rich sojourn from Clinch Mountain, Virginia to Harlan County, Kentucky and beyond to Brooklyn’s Dodge City-esque mean streets.
Since the establishment of her career in London and New York City, Redbone has humbly and steadfastly earned a solid reputation as a sought-after collaborator. Working with rising comers like Brit Grammy winner Shola Ama or such legends as Redbone’s Ohio Players/P-Funk mentor Walter “Junie” Morrison, she and UK-bred partner Aaron Whitby consistently provide essential direction and soulful support to knit track and artist into an indelible whole.
Thus it may come as a surprise to some that Redbone, noted for purveying the wilder shores of R&B on prior releases Home Of the Brave and Skintalk, recorded her 2012 album Garden of Love: The Songs of William Blake in the fabled center of country music, Nashville. Yet, proudly retracing the path of her uniquely American mixed heritage back to its earliest source, she is merely taking the inevitable next step of a maverick artist who has never been chained by borders. Americana is her natural homecoming, sonic and otherwise.
Redbone and Whitby crafted Garden of Love between touring, producing albums at their Brooklyn studio, an ongoing foray into banjo mastery, activism, and the never-ending daily joys of raising a young son during 2011; but the album attains the heights of an imperishable artifact, due to the acute losses of her mother, aunt and other trials amidst the writing and recording process.
The couple has spent the last couple of years creating Bone Hill, a musical theater piece based on Redbone’s Kentucky mining family’s history and heritage, a project supported by a grant from the New England Foundation for the Arts.
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Cecilia Rubino has written, devised and directed theater pieces which recently have performed at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade and Bruno Walter Theaters, the New Victory @ 42nd Street, Jefferson Market Playhouse, the New York Fringe and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland. Her just-completed documentary, Remembering Shakespeare, explores new ways of thinking about memory and Shakespeare’s words in our digital age where memory itself is at risk. Her chapter, “If It Live in Your Memory” appears in The Whirlwind of Passion: New Critical Perspectives on William Shakespeare (Cambridge Scholars Publishing). At Jefferson Market Library Playhouse, she recently directed Lives of Tiresias which she co-wrote with David Richman; Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde; and her own adaptation of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. Rubino also wrote and directed From The Fire, which won the UK/Music Theater awards for best music, best production and best new musical at the Edinburgh Fringe Theater Festival. She is an Associate Professor of Theater at Lang College/The New School.
VISIT THE REMEMBERING SHAKESPEARE WEBSITE
Happy Traum, renowned folk singer, writer, teacher, recording artist and first-rate fingerstyle guitarist, began playing guitar and five-string banjo as a teenager, and was an important participant in the legendary Greenwich Village folk scene of the 1950s and ‘60s. He was a student of blues guitar legend Brownie McGhee, a major influence on his picking style. Happy has played in concerts, clubs and festivals throughout the US, Canada, Europe, Australia and Japan, both solo and with his late brother, Artie Traum, with whom he performed for more than 40 years. Their performances at the 1968 and 1969 Newport Folk Festivals helped to gain them an avid following and a contract with famed manager Albert Grossman.
“Between them they've been studio musicians, composers, comedians, writers, editors, folklorists, and a host of other things... A brilliant and unique entity in the world of country-folk music” - the New York Times. Read more.
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Suzanne Vega emerged as a leading figure of the folk-music revival of the early 1980s when, accompanying herself on acoustic guitar, she sang what has been labeled contemporary folk or neo-folk songs of her own creation in Greenwich Village clubs. Since the release of her self-titled, critically acclaimed 1985 debut album, she has given sold-out concerts in many of the world’s best-known halls. In performances devoid of outward drama that nevertheless convey deep emotion, Vega sings in a distinctive, clear vibrato-less voice that has been described as “a cool, dry sandpaper- brushed near-whisper” and as “plaintive but disarmingly powerful.”
Bearing the stamp of a masterful storyteller who “observed the world with a clinically poetic eye,” Vega’s songs have always tended to focus on city life, ordinary people and real-world subjects. Notably succinct and understated, often cerebral but also streetwise, her lyrics invite multiple interpretations. In short, Suzanne Vega’s work is immediately recognizable, as utterly distinct and thoughtful, and as creative and musical now, as it was when her voice was first heard on the radio over 20 years ago.
Vega was born in Santa Monica, California, but grew up in Spanish Harlem and the Upper West Side of New York City. She was influenced by her mother, a computer systems analyst, and her stepfather, the Puerto Rican writer Egardo Vega Yunque. There was a heady mix of multicultural music playing at home: Motown, bossa nova, jazz and folk. Age 11 she picked up a guitar and as a teenager started to write songs.
Vega studied dance at the High School for the Performing Arts and later attended Barnard College where she majored in English Literature. It was in 1979 when she attended a concert by Lou Reed and began to find her true artistic voice and distinctive vision for contemporary folk. Receptionist by day, she was hanging out at the Greenwich Village Songwriter’s Exchange by night. Soon she was playing iconic venues like the Bottom Line and Folk City.
At first, record companies saw little prospect of commercial success. Vega’s demo tape was rejected by every major record company—and twice by the very label that eventually signed her: A&M Records. Her self-titled debut album was finally released in 1985, co-produced by Steve Addabbo and Lenny Kaye, the former guitarist for Patti Smith. The skeptical executives at A&M were expecting to sell 30,000 LPs. One million records later, it was clear that Vega’s voice was resonating around the world. “Marlene on the Wall “was a surprise hit in the UK and Rolling Stone eventually included the record in their “100 Greatest Recordings of the 1980s.”
1987’s follow up, Solitude Standing, again co-produced by Addabbo and Kaye, elevated her to star status. The album hit #2 in the UK and #11 in the States, was nominated for three Grammys including Record of the Year and went platinum. “Luka” is a song that has entered the cultural vernacular; certainly the only hit song ever written from the perspective of an abused boy.
The opening song on Solitude Standing was a strange a cappella piece, “Tom’s Diner” about a non-descript restaurant near Columbia University uptown. Without Vega’s permission, it was remixed by UK electronic dance duo DNA and bootlegged as “Oh Susanne.” Suddenly her voice on this obscure tune was showing up in the most unlikely setting of all: the club. Vega permitted an official release of the remix of “Tom’s Diner” under its original title which reached #5 on the Billboard pop chart and went gold. In 1991, a compilation, Tom’s Album, brought together the remix and other unsolicited versions of the song. Meanwhile, Karlheinz Brandenburg, the German computer programmer was busy developing the technology that would come to be known as the MP3. He found that Vega’s voice was the perfect template with which to test the purity of the audio compression that he was aiming to perfect. Thus Suzanne Vega earned the nickname “The Mother of the MP3.”
Vega co-produced the follow-up album with Anton Sanko, 1990’s Days of Open Hand, which won a Grammy for Best Album Package. The album also featured a string arrangement by minimalist composer Philip Glass. Years earlier she had penned lyrics for his song cycle “Songs From Liquid Days.” Continuing to battle preconceptions, she teamed with producer Mitchell Froom for 1992’s 99.9F. The album’s sound instigated descriptions such as “industrial folk” and “technofolk.” Certified gold, it won a New York Music Award as Best Rock Album.
In 1996, Vega returned with the similarly audacious Nine Objects Of Desire, also produced by Froom, who by then was her husband. “Woman On The Tier (I’ll See You Through)” was released on the Dead Man Walking soundtrack. Over the years, she has also been heard on the soundtracks to Pretty in Pink (“Left Of Center” with Joe Jackson) and The Truth About Cats & Dogs, and contributed to such diverse projects as the Disney compilation Stay Awake, Grateful Dead tribute Deadicated, Leonard Cohen tribute Tower of Song, and Pavarotti & Friends. In 1999, The Passionate Eye: The Collected Writings Of Suzanne Vega, a volume of poems, lyrics, essays and journalistic pieces was published by Spike/Avon Books. In 2001, she returned to her acoustic roots for her first new album in five years, the critics favorite, Songs in Red and Gray.
Vega’s neo-folk style ushered in a new female, acoustic, folk-pop singer-songwriter movement that would include the likes of Tracy Chapman, Shawn Colvin, and Indigo Girls. In 1997, she joined Sarah McLachlan on her Lilith Fair tour which celebrated the female voice in rock and pop. She was one of the few artists invited back every year. She was also the host of the public radio series American Mavericks, 13 hour-long programs featuring the histories and the music of the iconoclastic, contemporary classical composers who revolutionized the possibilities of new music. The show won the Peabody Award for Excellence in Broadcasting.
In 2007, Vega released Beauty & Crime on Blue Note Records, a deeply personal reflection of her native New York City in the wake of the loss of her brother Tim and the tragedy of 9/11. But the record is not a sad one per se, as her love for the city shines through as both its subject and its setting. In it, she mixes the past and present, the public with the private, and familiar sounds with the utterly new, just like the city itself. “Anniversary,” which concludes Beauty & Crime, is an understated evocation of that time in the fall of 2002, when New Yorkers first commemorated the Twin Towers tragedy and when Vega recalls her brother’s passing. It’s more inspiration than elegy, though: “Make time for all your possibilities,” she sings at the end, “They live on every street.” Produced by the Scotsman, Jimmy Hogarth and featuring songs such as “New York is a Woman” and “Ludlow Street,” Beauty & Crime is that rare album by an artist in her third decade; an album that is as original and startling as her first. It won a Grammy for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical.
Suzanne Vega is an artist that continues to surprise. In 2006, she became the first major recording artist to perform live in avatar form within the virtual world Second Life. She has dedicated much of her time and energy to charitable causes, notably Amnesty International, Casa Alianza, and the Save Darfur Coalition.
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VickiKristinaBarcelona comprises Rachelle Garniez, Amanda Homi and Terry Radigan, a power trio dedicated to re-imagining the songs of Tom Waits via three-part harmonies and a treasure trove of instruments including banjos, bottles and bells. They create a world of sound at once powerful, playful and poignant.
Seasoned singers and songwriters, each a hybrid story-teller and multi-instrumentalist in her own right, join forces to salute the tragicomic lyrical genius of the Waits songbook. Picture the Triplets of Belleville disguised as Depression Era hobos riding the rails across America stopping to play dance parties and funerals along the road to nowhere.
hree distinct styles form a captivating original mix, greater than the sum of its' parts, never failing to amaze and delight audiences of all stripes. Collectively, they have worked with artists including Jack White, Jackson Browne, Jane Siberry, Patty Loveless, Dan Penn, Ray La Montaigne, Thomas Dolby, and Taylor Mac.
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The Village Trip Team
Dawn Drew, Associate Producer – Business Operations, has always connected music with place, time and culture. As the Vice-President and Publisher of National Geographic Traveler for 16 years, and as head of her Manhattan-based consultancy MOSTE, Inc. Dawn, with partner Danny Kapilian, has co-executive produced more than 20 live cultural programs featuring music, the visual arts, artisan handicrafts and food in major venues around the USA including New York's Central Park, the Hollywood Bowl, and Millennium Park in Chicago. She has also been creator and co-executive producer of 39 half-hour television episodes about food and travel, all filmed on location in India, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa.
Contact: ddrew822@gmail.com | 202 258 5728
Danny Kapilian, Artistic Director, is a Brooklyn-based producer of original live events, touring productions and festivals. Premier presenters of Kapilian productions include Carnegie Hall, the Apollo Theater, Lincoln Center, BAM, the Hollywood Bowl, the Kennedy Center, Tanglewood, London’s Barbican Center, Sydney Opera House, and the Montreal, Newport, New Orleans, North Sea, and Montreux Jazz Festivals. Danny has presented great artists of every genre, among them Joni Mitchell, Chaka Khan, Ravi Shankar, Lou Reed, James Taylor, Snarky Puppy, Herbie Hancock, David Byrne, Roberta Flack, Miles Davis, Tina Turner, Ornette Coleman, Alan Cumming, XTC, John Cage, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Laura Mvula, Wynton Marsalis, La Santa Cecilia, Rufus Wainwright, and George Clinton and P-Funk.
Contact: danny@kapilian.com | 718-930-1166
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Liz Thomson, Co-Founder and Executive Producer of The Village Trip, born and raised in London, has long been fascinated by Greenwich Village, an area she has come to know well over two decades of visiting, always staying at the Washington Square Hotel.
The idea for The Village Trip sprang from her work on the restoration of the late New York Times journalist Robert Shelton’s biography of Bob Dylan, No Direction Home (2011), which chronicles in vivid detail the 1960s Village scene. She is a widely published journalist and author and a frequent broadcaster and has appeared on platforms at literary festivals around the world as an interviewer.
A contributor to The New Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians, she has lectured at Liverpool University’s Institute of Popular Music and been a Visiting Fellow of the Open University Sixties Research Group. Liz is the co-founder of Square Roots Productions, a UK-based charity celebrating the folk music heritage which connects the British Isles with North America, and a founding trustee of the Desmond Elliott Prize for first novelists.
Contact: LizThomson@thevillagetrip.com | (00) 44 7799 503414
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