Get Your Dancing Shoes On and Get Ready to Preservalapagos!
On Sunday, June 6th, come experience a world of music and fun with HDC in one of Brooklyn’s premier art/music venues, Galapagos Art Space. Doors open at 7pm, and tickets are a mere $20 (prepaid or Friend price), $25 at the door. This event will benefit HDC and 2 of our colleagues; the 4 Borough Neighborhood Preservation Alliance and the DUMBO Neighborhood Alliance. Go here to register for the event.
The evening’s musical entertainment ranges from traditional Hungarian music to the latest in contemporary rock. Here are the bands:
The Worthy Few, a folk/indie/alt-rock five-piece, is the latest musical project from Paul Graziano (HDC’s First Vice-President!). The band, based in Flushing, Queens, is in the midst of completing their upcoming album, Public Displays of Isolation. Several of the songs on this current offering have been featured in recent independent films, including The Watering Hole, New Boobs and Amexicano.
The band’s line-up is: Paul Graziano on acoustic guitar and vocals; Shane Miller on mandolin and banjo; Ehren Brenner on bass; Scott Sieber on electric guitar; and Michelle Tsai on percussion.
Életfa Hungarian Folk Ensemble plays authentic folk music of the Hungarians living in Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and New Jersey. The group gets its power and drive from being true to the village traditions and respecting the stylistic differences between the different villages.
The group is intimately tied to dance, and most of the musicians are outstanding dancers. Hungarian dancers have often been known to travel many hundreds of miles just to get their dancing fix of Életfa!
Founded in 1987, the group has studied, performed and toured with almost all the internationally-known Hungarian folk bands from Hungary and Transylvania. In 2009 they performed at venues such as Lincoln Center (with the NY Philharmonic and Alec Baldwin in the program “Inside the Music: Brahms’s Serenade No. 1“) and the Music Center of Los Angeles. The group regularly travels around North America, and has loyal followings in Louisiana, Ontario, New York, Ohio, California and of course New Jersey.
The basic setup of the group is violins, kontras (a Hungarian 3-string viola that functions like a rhythmic guitar) and bass (played by Raul Rothblatt, executive director of the 4 Borough Neighborhood Preservation Alliance). The group also performs with cimbalom (the elaborate Hungarian hammered dulcimer), the utogardon (a percussive cello from eastern Transylvania), the trumpet-violin and the hurdy-gurdy.
Based in Brooklyn, Jan Bell was born and raised in Yorkshire, England. She moved to America on her own at nineteen and discovered the similarities between the coal-mining countryside where she was born and raised and the sounds of the working American south.
Jan has said “sometimes the main difference is in the name of a river, a town, a girl or a boy – but the melodies, and the stories are often a lot alike. When folks from Yorkshire sailed across the Atlantic- especially if all they knew was mining – they often made their way to the Appalachian mountains in search of work.
For generations, they stayed there, and the music was not only kept alive – but thrived. The songs now stand as a people’s history, passed down through an oral tradition. When I first went to Virginia and Kentucky, I could hear broad Yorkshire in the way people spoke. When I hear the songs, I can hear the courage and the strength it took to even just survive. Industrialization and privatization hit hard in Appalachia, just like it did where I come from. All those families – they had to be true dreamers, to get on the boat back then, and you can hear all that sheer hope and faith in their voices, and the songs.”
Called “a latter day Loretta Lynn” by The Sunday Times (UK), in 2009 Jan played stages from Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival to Glastonbury. Also in 2009, she sang alongside Samantha Parton and Jolie Holland in a tribute album to E.C. Ball. Jan and her bands have been featured in The Musician’s Atlas, The Nashville Scene, Americana UK, The Village Voice, The Sunday Times (UK), Time Out NY and NOW Toronto.
Rick/Reward is a new band out of Queens, specializing in contemporary rock.