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10/02 Friday
7:00 PM “Scorned, Swindled and Back for More: Songs of Love, Hate and Retribution”
Leading Canadian Recording Artist and National Folk Music Award Nominee, Donna Creighton Philistine Recording Artist, Arthur Nasson, and Master of the Spoken Word Marc Zegans
In this unique triple bill, three of North America’s most original and inventive voices will be playing for the people and happily taking their money, as they present a richly layered exploration of love, loss and what follows in its wake. This gorgeous evening of song and spoken word is not to be missed.
“Smart, funny and talented as hell.”
~Vern Theissen, Canada’s leading playwright
The acclaimed Canadian singer-songwriter, begins her 2009-10 “Ass in Gear” U.S. with shows on September 30th at Bascom Lodge atop Mount Greylock, and on October 2nd, at the Lily Pad in Cambridge. Nominated in 2008 for a Canadian Folk Music Award, and the four-time winner of the London Music award, Creighton toured for ten years with Borealis recording artist, Sirens, and has appeared on stage with countless talented musicians ranging from Bruce Cockburn to Lisa Loeb. Donna is a classically trained vocalist with the Royal Conservatory of Music, and a veteran recorder player.
Her music and lyrics are precise, elegant, genre blending explorations of love and its prospect when life has reached its middle. In “Naked” the centerpiece of her soon to be released solo album she sings, “Here I stand with my heart in my hand and dare to chance familiar beginnings with similar ends.” Later she asks, “If I reach around the corner where the feelings hide, and I pluck one from the darkest hour and show you my tattered side, will you run?” With these lyrics, Donna reveals why she has been described as “a stage personality who can steal your heart and openly hand you hers in return.” This is one performer not to be missed.
ARTHUR NASSON
"Genre-bounding, funny, and endlessly inventive."
~Harp Magazine
Arlington’s own Arthur Nasson, is making a rare public appearance following the release of his breakout album, False Prophets, whose arch and stylish pop confections, such as Princess Chardonnay, are drawing heavy national radio play. Philistine Recording artist Nasson, has released five critically lauded albums in the past four years. About him the critics have said:
"Perfect Pop. Richly arranged technicolor songs…. It's no more artistic or less accesible, than the multi-million selling albums, The Beatles made in their prime."
~The Boston Herald
"Like an unhinged Dylan hammering a jazz piano, Nasson has a great ear for a tune and seems to be willing to try anything once in order to make one, resulting in a fine burst of aural entertainment."
~Americana UK
Marc Zegans
"The mix of voice, lyric and sound keeps us captive in shared emotion...Zegans’ voice-- a bold, honeyed, nuanced instrument creates the music of these poems."
~ Sandra Miller
Poet at Large and Master Spoken Word Artist, Marc Zegans will be previewing material from his soon to be released second album, Marker and Parker, recorded with Legendary Jazz Pianist Don Parker. Marc’s first album, “Night Work” released in 2007 was described by Screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson, whose films, include “Secretary” and “Fur”, as, “erotic and sad, a logue of girls: broken-hearted, cruel and grieving—a celebration of love and naughty women… “ About His Book, Pillow Talk (2008, g.spot press) gushed reviewer Kelvy Bird, "A provocative and delightful book...a marvel."
"Dangerous yet alluring eroticism....Zegans pushes us ever further into the dark and murky areas of our own sexual and primal natures. Guided by his verbal flashlight, the nooks and crannies of loss, regret, desire, and memory are set in the gallery for viewing.... This is poetic intercourse… "Night Work" is the aphrodisiac."
~ Writer and Director Matthew D’Abate
"These are the words of a man whose senses are acute. It's the work of a cat, a city cat: all awareness.”
~ Recording Artist, Jennifer Greer
10:00 PM Michael Holt/Lee Feldman
These are two of the most creative song writers around, and both are serious pianists too. If you love excellent composition with humor waiting for you just around the next chord change you should be here this night!
< href="http://www.myspace.com/mikeyholt">http://www.myspace.com/mikeyholt
I started out in New York, have been a long-time member of The Mommyheads, and now live in Toronto. North America & Europe tour this fall. It's Not Up To Us, The Sound Of Love, and The Desert Song are rough previews from my newest, forthcoming album, "The Dawn Chorus" by Michael Holt & The Kids. Nino Wrote A Tune is from my first album, "Pajama Garden". Spiders is from the Mommyheads album "Flying Suit". June and All The Michaels In The World are from my last album, "Windows". I Do Not Think I Would Have Some Fun is from my high-school band The Connotations, live at NYC's CBGB in 1986. Visit michaelholtmusic.com for more info and free downloads, and myspace.com/michaelholtclassical for my classical side.
THE MOMMYHEADS' new album, "You're Not A Dream", may be sampled at myspace.com/theoneandonlymommyheads, downloaded at iTunes, and mail-ordered at bladencountyrecords.com
A Short History Of Lee
Lee Feldman, born in 1959, is a New York based songwriter, pianist, singer and composer. He has released three critically acclaimed albums -- Living It All Wrong (Pure/Mercury, 1996); The Man in a Jupiter Hat (Bonafide/Mercury, 2000); and I’ve Forgotten Everything (Bonafide, 2006) -- and STARBOY (2004), an animated musical about a 2-dimensional superhero.
Lee has had extensive training in classical piano, jazz piano and composition. In spite of that, he writes music that has meaning and sticks in the brain. Lee is on the piano faculty of Third Street Music School Settlement and lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two children.
"Lee Feldman's I've Forgotten Everything is unlike anything else in cotemporary pop. If you have a passion for good songwriting, you need this album. - Stereophile
"Lee Feldman uses a Tin Pan Alley bounce to make twisted or troubled situations sound like parlor songs." – New York Times
"Lee Feldman plays the piano in just the dry, subtle, understated manner that his dry, subtle, understatedly hilarious songs call for." - Atlantic Monthly
From Art Dudley's "Listening" column in Stereophile #45:
...Then there's Lee Feldman, a classically trained pop musician who brings a strong if decidedly off-center sense of melody to the art of traditional American songwriting, and whose lyrics betray a poetic sensibility in tune with the best of the 20th-century Americans (especially Theodore Roethke, whose "My Papa's Waltz" could easily hide on one of Feldman's albums). All of which is to say that Lee Feldman is unclassifiable.
Michael Fremer turned me on to Feldman's music when he wrote about it for Listener back in the early days of 2001, and my fondness for the Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter has since grown steadily. His third album, I've Forgotten Everything (Urban Myth UM-114-2), has just been released, and it's already an indispensable part of my pop-music collection. Almost half of the album's songs discuss aging or abandonment-not in a maudlin or self-pitying way, but impressionistically, with carefully chosen images and scraps of monologue. In "Me and My Sara Remaining," an elderly man talks about his changing neighborhood with a mixture of fear and resignation; in his plaintive, unaffected style, Feldman sings the opening line- "And all of the places are changing" -against a continually changing string of chords that never quite resolve, yet that support a strangely sad melody. And in "Give Me My Money," the album's thematic center, the narrator focuses his motley thoughts just long enough to express his frustration as something tangible:
Give me my money
I'm a human being
I used to write music that people could sing
Give me my footsteps
Where did they go?
I wish I had known that I needed them so
Some of the tunes on I've Forgotten Everything meander in a happy, childlike way - such as the upbeat "Big Women on the Shelves," the album's happiest and most triumphant moment. Others are more serious-minded, such as the stark setting for a creepy-funny lyric titled "Cave." That one opens with a solo trumpet playing a series of descending intervals, then switches to an ascending series of mildly dissonant chords led by a solo cello: It's almost Schmidt's Symphony 4 in miniature. The simplest melody of all is reserved for the closing number, "See You Again" -yet even then, the leitmotif of aging returns, as the final lines are sung by the Northside Senior Center Chorus. From Brooklyn, of course.
Lee Feldman's I've Forgotten Everything is unlike anything else in contemporary pop. The songs are alternately sad, whimsical, harrowing, and very funny (although the album's best laugh may be the visual joke on the disc itself). A third of the tunes are waltzes, and all of the melodies are catchy and challenging in more or less equal measure. Above all, the writing voice behind it all is kind, humane, and clever without being too clever: There's nothing arch about Feldman's music.
Every one of these songs is like a smile you can't read, yet that pulls you along in spite of yourself. Lee Feldman is one of the few musicians in contemporary pop whom I think of as an artist, and I've Forgotten Everything is far and away his best work so far. If you have a passion for good songwriting, you need this album. ######