For Immediate Release Contact: Jen Fortin Phone: (617) 876-4275 Email: [email protected]
WORLD MUSIC/CRASHarts & CROSSROADS PRESENTS present CRASHfest 1 NIGHT • 3 STAGES • 10 BANDS GLOBAL STREET FOOD • INTERNATIONAL BEER & COCKTAILS featuring:
Bombino San Fermin & NOW Ensemble Salif Keita Debo Band Orkesta Mendoza Daby Touré Carrie Rodriguez LADAMA Air Congo & Emperor Norton's Stationary Marching Band
SATURDAY, JANUARY 28, 5:30PM HOUSE OF BLUES, BOSTON
Tickets on sale Friday, November 18, 10am
BOSTON, MA -- World Music/CRASHarts and Crossroads Presents present CRASHfest, an indoor music festival, on Saturday, January 28, 5:30pm at the House of Blues, 15 Lansdowne St., Boston. Tickets are $48. For tickets and information call World Music/CRASHarts at (617) 876-4275 or buy online at www.WorldMusic.org, www.crashfest.org or call (800) 745-3000 or visit livenation.com or houseofblues.com/boston.
CRASHfest transforms the House of Blues into an indoor music festival with three different stages, lush lounge areas, and a kaleidoscope of sounds and cultures that brings an eclectic and worldly spin to the Boston music scene. This year’s festival features Bombino, San Fermin & NOW Ensemble, Salif Keita, Debo Band, Orkesta Mendoza, Daby Touré, Carrie Rodriguez, LADAMA, Air Congo, and Emperor Norton’s Stationary Marching Band. The House of Blues features an expansive dance floor and seated balcony overlooking the main stage, more intimate listening in the luxurious and exotic Foundation Room, and a spotlight on local bands in the restaurant. Global street food, international beer, and custom cocktails will be available for sale.
The CRASHfest Main Stage features headliners Bombino, San Fermin & NOW Ensemble, Salif Keita, Debo Band, and the Boston debut of Orkesta Mendoza.
Omar “Bombino” Noctar, a Tuareg guitarist and songwriter from Niger, was raised during an era of armed struggles for independence and violent suppression by government forces. His electrifying jams and desert-blues capture the spirit of resistance and rebellion while echoing with guitar riffs reminiscent of fellow Africans Tinariwen and the late Ali Farka Touré, not to mention rock and blues icons such as Jimi Hendrix, John Lee Hooker, and Jimmy Page. A superstar in the Tuareg community, Bombino's stature as one of Africa's hottest young guitarists has been revealed to the world. His raw, rock'n'roll take on traditional Tuareg music has won him a huge global audience.
Since the release of his 2011 album, Agadez, and Ron Wyman's accompanying feature-length documentary, Agadez: Music and Rebellion, Bombino has gained a large international following. For his 2013 Nonesuch Records debut, Bombino traveled to Nashville to record with the Black Keys’s Dan Auerbach. The resulting album, Nomad, is full of grit and funky elegance, which boosted Bombino’s guitar-hero status to the next level and ultimately won a spot as one of Rolling Stone's 50 Best Albums of 2013. More recently, Bombino went to upstate New York to record his new album, Azel, with his band and producer David Longstreth of Dirty Projectors. Released by Partisan Recordings in April, 2016, Azel is arguably Bombino's best, most well-rounded and groundbreaking album to date.
San Fermin, the Brooklyn-based indie baroque-pop band, teams up with the new-chamber music group NOW Ensemble in a genre-bending collaboration to create musical magic. Ellis Ludwig-Leone founded San Fermin in 2011, initially working with nearly two dozen musicians before refining the band to its current eight-piece configuration, which includes vocalists, horns, strings, and more. Renowned for its exceptional live shows, San Fermin has been selling out concerts and performing worldwide at major festivals including Austin City Limits, Firefly, Lollapalooza, Osheaga, Festival d’été, Reading, and Leeds. They have shared the stage with alt-J, The National, St. Vincent, Arctic Monkeys, and The Head and the Heart. Still riding the high of its 2015 sophomore album, Jackrabbit, San Fermin joins with NOW Ensemble to present new works by Ludwig-Leone and NOW Ensemble’s composer and electric guitarist Mark Dancigers, as well as original material for both ensembles.
NOW Ensemble is a dynamic group of performers and composers dedicated to making new chamber music for the 21st century. With a unique instrumentation of flute, clarinet, electric guitar, double bass, and piano, the ensemble brings a fresh sound and a new perspective to the classical tradition, infused with the musical influences that reflect the diverse backgrounds of its members. Having recently celebrated 10 years together as an ensemble, they have brought some of the most exciting composers of their generation to national and international recognition, including Nico Muhly, Timothy Andres, Missy Mazzoli, Judd Greenstein, Kathryn Alexander, and more. In recent seasons, NOW has performed at the Apples and Olives Festival in Zurich, Switzerland, Town Hall Seattle, Da Camera Houston, Lincoln Center, and the Carnegie Hall Neighborhood Concert series.
Called the golden voice of Africa, Mali’s Salif Keita creates a mesmerizing sound with chilling, soulful vocals and an infectious beat that has placed him at the forefront of contemporary African music. A master of West African rhythms and credited as one of the founders of the Afro-pop genre, Salif Keita is world renowned for his unforgettable live performances and emotionally-fueled songs. With over a dozen award-winning albums, Keita has had a hugely influential career that has ranged from the debonair bands of the 1970s, reaching and surpassing that revolutionized West African sound through the glossy world-music productions of the 1980s and 1990s, and then back to his roots in the 2000s, with Talé (2012), an electronic dance album, thrown in for good measure. Today Keita, who was born albino in Djoliba, Mali in 1949, puts much of his energy into the Salif Keita Global Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded to assist persons with albinism on a global level.
Debo Band takes the funky, psychedelic grooves of 1960s Ethiopia and transplants it firmly onto a 21st-century dance floor. With earth-rattling horns and mesmerizing vocals, the 11-member band merges Ethiopian pop with American soul, funk rhythms, and instrumentation reminiscent of Eastern European brass bands. Led by Ethiopian-American saxophonist Danny Mekonnen and fronted by charismatic vocalist Bruck Tesfaye, the Boston-based band has won raves for their groundbreaking sound from The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, and NPR, who placed the band’s debut album—produced by Thomas “Tommy T” Gobena of Gogol Bordello—on their “50 Favorite Albums of 2012” list. The band’s highly anticipated sophomore album, Ere Gobez (FPE Records; May 20, 2016), continues the band’s innovative approach to Ethiopia’s musical past, but gets even wilder in its grooves and imagination. Pitchfork calls it, “a big, brave roar of an album, reaching and surpassing the heights of their excellent 2012 self-titled debut. This is a powerful, and, perhaps, inspirational record: it certainly inspires dancing, filling spaces and capturing a dynamic live sensibility.” Debo Band performances have ranged from the Kennedy Center and Lincoln Center to major festivals like South By Southwest and Bonnaroo and has shared stages with Gogol Bordello, Arcade Fire, Questlove, The Family Stone, and Ethiopian legend Tilahun Gessesse.
Orkesta Mendoza bangs out a simmering meltdown of Mexican mambo, psychedelic cumbia, ranchero, merengue, rumba, jazz, and indie rock. Bandleader and multi-instrumentalist Sergio Mendoza is one of the great innovators of the thriving, border-crossing music scene of Tucson, Arizona. He’s a composer, arranger, producer, and programmer who also plays in the indie band Calexico. Orkesta Mendoza’s fast-paced “indie-mambo” big-band sound centers around Mendoza's guitar, keyboards, and energetic animation and the elegant figure and powerful baritone voice of singer Salvador Duran, who dueted with Willie Nelson on “Señor” in the Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There, and who has performed alongside Neko Case, Iron and Wine, and Glen Hansard. While Duran’s vocals create that classic vibe, the band’s progressive arrangements and unique instrumentation make for a vital sound that keeps the band well off the nostalgia track. The vihuela (Mariachi guitar), lap steel, and Mariachi trumpets along with a baritone sax and a huge percussion section keep dancers on their feet. The bands 2012 release, Mambo Mexicano, was co-produced by Mendoza and Joey Burns of Calexico. Orkesta Mendoza is touring in support of its 2016 release ¡Vamos A Guarachar!, a red-hot recording that aims to match the band’s explosive live performances.
Additional artists will perform on stages in the luxurious and exotic Foundation Room and the House of Blues Restaurant, including Daby Touré, Carrie Rodriguez, LADAMA, Air Congo, and Emperor Norton’s Stationary Marching Band
A singer, songwriter and guitarist with a global perspective, Daby Touré never fails to astound audiences with his ethereal voice, masterful guitar work, and catchy original songs. His singular vision reveals a complex yet approachable sound, one that defies expectations and stereotypes of what it means to be an African artist today. He was brought up in Mauritania and Senegal before moving to Paris, where he began mixing African influences with pop and jazz. Touré is touring in support of his new album, Amonafi, released on Cumbancha last year.
Carrie Rodriguez, a singer-songwriter from Austin, Texas, finds beauty in the cross-pollination of diverse traditions. A passionate performer, she effortlessly melds fiery fiddle playing, electrifying vocals, and a fresh interpretation of new and classic songs with an “Ameri-Chicana” attitude. Her newest project, the Spanish/English album Lola, is both a return to her musical roots and something of a departure where she delivers her own Texas- bred twist on Mexican Ranchera songs, creating culturally blended music for a culturally blended world.
Featuring five women from four countries, LADAMA combines the rhythms and traditional instrumentation of frevo and maracatu from Pernambuco, Brazil; joropo songs from the high plains of Venezuela; cumbia, gaita, and champeta from the Colombian coast, and contemporary strains of American pop and jazz. With original compositions and traditional songs sung in Spanish, Portuguese, and English, the band combines disparate elements into a cohesive danceable whole.
Musician and composer Nathaniel Braddock, who is perhaps best known as the leader of the African soukous group the Occidental Brothers Dance Band International, returned to Boston this year and just launched a new Boston-based African dance-band called Air Congo. The band features upbeat dance ravers inspired by the 1960s and 70s Kinshasa/Brazzaville scene–the music of Docteur Nico, Tabu Ley, Les Bantous de La Capitale, Franco et l’Orch TPOK Jazz, and more.
Boston’s own Emperor Norton’s Stationary Marching Band combines the rich musical history of the circus and the vagabond peoples of Europe with the raw energy of avant-garde jazz, the burning heat of funk, and the infectious grooves of Balkan brass for a sound that is somehow familiar yet like no other. This group of raucous and rambunctious musicians brings a unique blend of brass, winds, violin, accordion, and an eclectic rhythm section to get the crowd up and dancing all night long.
For more information CRASHfest www.CRASHfest.org Bombino www.bombinomusic.com San Fermin www.sanferminband.com NOW Ensemble www.nowensemble.com Salif Keita www.salifkeita.net Debo Band www.deboband.com Orkesta Mendoza www.orkestamendoza.com Daby Touré www.dabytoure.com Carrie Rodriguez www.carrierodriguez.com LADAMA www.ladamaproject.org Air Congo www.nathanielbraddock.com/ensembles/air-congo Emperor Norton’s Stationary Marching Band www.reverbnation.com/rpk/ensmb
To download high resolution digital photos go to www.WorldMusic.org and click “PRESS CENTER.”
Presented in association with Crossroads Presents.
About World Music/CRASHarts World Music, a non-profit organization established in 1990, is New England’s premier presenter of global culture, featuring music and dance from the far and near corners of the globe. In 2001, World Music launched CRASHarts as a division of World Music dedicated to presenting a contemporary performing arts series in greater Boston. World Music/CRASHarts strives to offer audiences an opportunity to share in many different cultural and artistic expressions and seeks to foster an atmosphere of discovery and exploration. The organization presents approximately 70 concerts and 15 educational programs per year. For more information, call (617) 876-4275 or visit www.WorldMusic.org.
World Music/CRASHarts is funded in part by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency which also receives support from the National Endowment for the Arts.