RANDY WESTON QUINTET SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 2012 (JAZZ)
Lively Arts 25th Anniversary Gala!
After contributing six decades of musical direction and genius, Randy Weston remains one of the world's foremost pianists and composers today, a true innovator and visionary. Encompassing the vast rhythmic heritage of Africa, his global creations musically continue to inform and inspire. "Weston has the biggest sound of any jazz pianist since Ellington and Monk, as well as the richest most inventive beat," states jazz critic Stanley Crouch, "but his art is more than projection and time; it's the result of a studious and inspired intelligence ... an intelligence that is creating a fresh synthesis of African elements with jazz technique". In his travels dating back to the early 1960s, the musician has visited 18 African nations and lived in Morocco, where he founded a jazz club in Tangier. Weston says," if you take out the African elements of bossa nova, samba, jazz, blues, you have nothing ... To me, its Mother Africa's way of surviving in the new world."
www.randyweston.info
LILA DOWNS FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 2012 (WORLD MUSIC)
Lila Downs is a Mexican American singer who performs her own compositions as well as tapping into native Mesoamerican music of the Mixtec, Zapotec, Maya and Nahuatl cultures. Her passionate and emotional performances are spell-binding. She grew up partly in Mexico and the United States. She sang in the club scenes of Oaxaca and later Philadelphia along with Paul Cohen, an American-born saxophonist. They began collaborating together on songs that would slowly evolve into Downs's subsequent recordings. In recent years, Downs and her band have toured widely in Mexico, South America, the US and Europe. She was also heard in the soundtrack to the movie Frida in a song, Burn it Blue, that was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Song and that she performed at the 75th Academy Awards.
www.liladowns.com
THEATRE HORIZON production of Pretty Fire FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2012 at 7 PM POTTSTOWN Community Room Starring: Cathy Simpson
THEATRE HORIZON production of Pretty Fire SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2012 at 8 PM Black Box Theater Starring: Cathy Simpson
Pretty Fire is an autobiographical one-woman play written by Tony Award nominee, actor and playwright Charlayne Woodard. The show chronicles the experiences of an African-American girl from birth to age 11. The winner of the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle award and the NAACP Theatre awards for best play and best playwright, Pretty Fire dramatizes the life of its protagonist but also celebrates the circle of relatives and other role models who affect the lives of children.
www.theatrehorizon.org
