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| Sofia Rei & Lorin Sklamberg at Flushing Town Hall - November 21 Flushing Town Hall's new concert series, Common Ground: Mini-Global Mashups, will present "Yiddish Meets Argentina" on Sunday, November 21, featuring Lorin Sklamberg, lead singer of the Grammy Award-winning, Jewish American roots band The Klezmatics, and Argentinian vocalist and songwriter Sofia Rei with accompanist JC Maillard. This will be the third concert in Flushing Town Hall's monthly series, which "mashes up" unique pairings of musicians from different practices and cultural identities. The small, intimate configurations pair distinct solo or duo artists in collaboration to create entirely new sounds rooted in old traditions. The series has been curated by acclaimed trumpeter and composer Frank London, who has himself performed in Flushing Town Hall's original, large-scale Global Mashups series that is such a hit among Flushing Town Hall's devoted global music fans. "Lorin and Sofia are the only two artists in our series who have actually performed together before, " says London. "Although their musics are essentially unrelated, their personal relationship and beautiful voices make a harmonious blend. This will be a really special performance." Lorin Sklamberg is best known as the co-founder and lead vocalist of The Klezmatics, his Grammy Award-winning band with Frank London. Sklamberg, who says he "sang before he spoke, " is a self-taught guitarist, pianist, and autoharp player. His longtime involvement in the world of Jewish music began at age 15 when he co-founded a band, Rimonim, with three Hebrew school classmates in Alhambra, California. At university he went on to study Early Music, opera, American folk and pop, and Balkan and Eastern European music, and he performed with four semi-professional ethnic song and dance ensembles. Sklamberg studied voice, guitar, accordion, and oud (a lute-like instrument) and served as the cantor at USC's Hillel House and Los Angeles' gay and lesbian synagogue, Beth Chayim Chadashim. He performed throughout the country one summer as part of a "gay-Jewish-radical faerie folk duo" called Philshaw and Sklamberg, before moving to New York and co-founding The Klezmatics. Through the decades, The Klezmatics have been recognized with numerous awards, including a GRAMMY for Best Contemporary World Music Album in 2006, and have been hailed by critics in publications like Time Out New York, which ranked the group "among the greatest bands on the planet." Separately, Sklamberg can be heard on some 50 recordings, both solo and alongside Itzhak Perlman, Don Byron, Uri Caine, Matt Darriau, Rob Schwimmer, Jane Siberry, Mac Cohn, Tony Kushner, Moxy Früvous, the Western Windo, and Constantinople. Sofia Rei is an award-winning vocalist, songwriter, and producer, who has carried diverse Latin American musical traditions from her native Buenos Aires to the multicultural mecca of New York City, where she now lives. Rei's career began at age nine in the Colon Theater Children's Choir. She went on to train at Buenos Aires' National Conservatory of Music, where she divided her time between early Renaissance music ensembles and premiering new works by contemporary composers. She went on to pursue jazz and improvisatory music at Boston's New England Conservatory. Today, she describes her sound as "tradition-spanning." She continues to delve deeply into the folk musics of a number of South American countries, including Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, and her native Argentina, and she has increasingly incorporated looping and electronics in recent years. As an educator, she is passionate about guiding other musicians to carve their own paths. She is currently a Professor at New York University's Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music and a co-founder and producer of Berklee's Latin America Vive Music Festival and the NYC South American Music Festival. Rei's music has been hailed by New York Times critic Jon Pareles as "wildly eclectic" and "near hallucinatory" and by NPR's Felix Contreras as exhibiting "stellar musicianship." Her newest album, the critically acclaimed "Umbral, " was released earlier this year. When Sklamberg and Rei "mashup" on November 21, they will be joined by Rei's accompanist, the Caribbean born, multi-instrumentalist JC Maillard. The concert is a hybrid event, playing to in-person audiences while also livestreaming for viewers at home. This fall, Flushing Town Hall has increased its in-person audience capacity to 50% and is adhering to the city's vaccine mandate for performance venues. The Common Ground: Mini-Global Mashups series first kicked off in September with Haiti Meets Middle East, featuring Haitian singer Emeline Michel, Israeli guitarist Dan Nadel, and their piano accompanist Yayoi Ikaw. It then continued with Balkan Romani Meets Ukraine, featuring Eva Salina, Peter Stan, and Zhenya Lopatnik. Following this November mashup with Sklamberg and Rei, the series will continue this fall on December 12 with US-Africa Meets China, featuring Newman Taylor Baker/WashboardXT and Fei Fei Yang with accompanist Zhihua Hu. Each month's Mini-Global Mashup performance is followed by a Q+A conversation between the artists and audience hosted by Frank London or other special guests. For the fall series' full schedule and to purchase tickets, visit: https://www.flushingtownhall.org/mini-global-mashups In the new year, audiences can look forward to "Southern Italy Meets Senegal" (January 9, 2022), "Korea Meets Armenia" (February 13, 2022), and "India Meets Egypt" (March 13, 2022). write your comments about the article :: © 2021 Jazz News :: home page |