Wednesday Folk Traditions
WORLD RHYTHMS with TONY VACCA
JULY 29 at 6:30 pm
HADLEY, MA. -The Porter-Phelps-Huntington Museum continues its 28th season of its Wednesday Folk Traditions Concert Series on July 29, 2009 with a performance by World Rhythms with Tony Vacca. World Rhythms is a hard-hitting, earthy fusion of jazz and world music with particular emphasis on West African and American traditions. Al Evers in Jazziz magazine writes, “Their music is a journey to all corners of the world; from Africa to India, Paris to New York City and beyond. Their music dazzles and the mind and spirit.” Their concerts include call-and-response rhythms, as well as upbeat songs in which the audience becomes part of the ensemble. The concert will be held in the museum’s sunken garden at 6:30 p.m.; picnickers are welcome on the grounds beginning at 5 p.m. Admission is $10 for adults and $2 for children under 16.
Composer/performer Tony Vacca, a graduate of UMass-Amherst, has studied and performed extensively in West Africa, and plays many African percussion instruments including the talking drum, the mbira (thumb piano), and the kora (a twenty-one string lute). His primary instrument, however, is the balafon, a one-thousand-year old West African precursor of the marimba, with wooden bars and gourd resonators. Vacca has studied percussion in West Africa and Dakar, Senegal, has taught percussion at Amherst, Smith, and Trinity colleges, The Omega Institute, the Northampton Center for the Arts, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Smithsonian Institute and elsewhere. Vacca has performed throughout the United States and Africa with many jazz and world musicians, including Senegalese griot Baaba Maal, pop icon Sting, Wolof master drummer Massamba Diop, and the genre-defying Yusef Lateef. Though he is certainly well versed in the traditions of the music and instruments he plays, Vacca does not allow his music to remain ossified in the past. As he observes, “Part of every tradition is innovation, and as we practice our traditions and challenge ourselves, we change these traditions, and ourselves as well.” We hope you will join us on July 29th to join Vacca and his band in engaging dynamically with these evolving traditions.
The Wednesday Folk Traditions concert series concludes on August 12th with Senegalese hip-hoppers Gokh-Bi System. The group plays a unique, vibrant brand of music that draws on traditional Senegalese influences as well as contemporary hip-hop traditions. They rap in multiple languages (among them English, French, Arabic, and several Senegalese dialects), and incorporate traditional Senegalese instruments and storytelling techniques. The concert was originally scheduled for June 24th, but was rescheduled due to rain. We couldn’t have picked a better show to end our 28th season of Wednesday Folk Traditions, however. We at the museum have been looking forward to this concert all summer, and we will hope you will join us for this exciting performance.
The concerts are funded, in part, with generous support from People’s Bank, Easthampton Savings Bank, Gage-Wiley & Co., MicroCal, LLC, and Western Massachusetts Electric Company, and many other local businesses.
The Porter-Phelps-Huntington Museum is located at 130 River Drive (Route 47) in Hadley, two miles north of the junction of Routes 9 and 47. The Museum is open for guided tours Saturday through Wednesday from 1 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. and by appointment. For further information about the tours and the Wednesday Folk Traditions series, call the Museum at (413) 584-4699.
