The Music Inn Presents
Premiering on May 27, “The Music Inn Presents” will be a monthly songwriters showcase: a series of concerts that aims to sustain the Greenwich Village world music scene and promote the best young emerging talents of its community. The oldest music shop in New York City and the famous mecca for artists and music lovers stays true to its seventy-year-old mission to keep alive the old spirit of Greenwich Village music by gathering and nurturing its community of young artists and cultivating performances alongside the most iconic music figures of its historical songwriting scene.
The first show will feature New York Blues Hall of Fame singer-songwriter and music icon Erik Frandsen. This month, the Music Inn’s world music scene will be represented by the Music Inn folk-blues trio The Moonskippers and the Italian singer-songwriter and music critic Fabio Fantuzzi.
1- Erik Frandsen
Singer-songwriter and guitarist Erik Frandsen (aka Fresno Slim) has been a fixture of the Greenwich Village music scene for well over fifty years. He has accompanied, on various instruments, Harry Belafonte, Jerry-Jeff Walker, Bob Dylan, the Muppets and a host of others. As an actor he has appeared on and off Broadway and on television and film in Law & Order, The Blacklist, John Wick 2 and as Stephen Colbert’s one-man rep company for over a dozen years. He won the Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards for “Song of Singapore,” in which he played the guitarist Spike Spauldeen. In 2015, he was inducted into the New York Blues Hall of Fame.
Press:
“Brilliantly inventive” – New York Times
“The straight Cole Porter.” – Boston Globe
“An outstanding performer.” – Montreal Star
Web: https://www.erikfrandsen.biz/
2- Fabio Fantuzzi
Singer-songwriter, music critic, and scholar, Fabio Fantuzzi has played with various exponents of the Village folk scene (Erik Frandsen, Chris Lowe, and many others), founded the band Ombre di Rosso, and composed folk-blues-inspired records and musical plays. He also collaborated with Italian-American poet Luciano Cecchinel publishing an album that puts to music his latest poetry collection Da sponda a sponda about the Italian-American diaspora, which won the Viareggio Prize (the most prestigious Italian prize for poetry).
As a scholar, he carried out the first Italian doctoral project on Bob Dylan, published articles and essays on the relationship between music, poetry, and visual arts and co-edited the book Bob Dylan and the Arts. He is a Marie Curie Fellow at Columbia University and Ca’ Foscari University.
His albums have them saying:
“Something that is missing in the Italian music scene today are good songwriters. If the rule is widespread mediocrity, every rule has an exception, in this case a very valuable exception”.
«I Think Magazine».
“Though in different measures, these are all songs that tap into those gypsy and Balkan flavors that nowadays have become more and more naïve, worn-out cliché, and here instead relive an authentic cultural heritage cultivated and masterfully revitalized”.
Indiana Music Magazine».
Web: www.rockit.it/leombredirosso
Links to music:
– Momenti di Lucidità: https://leombredirosso.bandcamp.com/releases
– Da sponda a sponda: https://open.spotify.com/album/05yj6eZsz6AclVAKisCCc8
3- The Moonskippers
Drawing from the deep traditions of folk and American primitive guitar, The Moonskippers have a familiar yet fresh sound. Featuring Adrian Koss on guitar, Charles Stacy on violin, and Coulée Slatnick as a tap dancer, these three friends from the West Village are reviving the roots of the folk music of New York City.
Web: www.instagram.com/the.moonskippers
The Music Inn
Opened in 1958, the Music Inn is New York’s oldest continually-run music store, gathering a vast collection of instruments and records and offering a place where different cultures find common ground. It owes its mission to its long-time Jewish owner, Jeff Slatnick, who, after collaborating with the likes of Van Morrison and Chuck Berry and studying sitar with Ali Akbar Khan, has been part of the New York music business for more than half a century. When Slatnick took over the place in the early seventies, he moved the shop from a sea of guitars to a mix of instruments from all over the world. Since then, he never ceased to produce records and events, offering an instrument, a stage, and a creative community for rising stars and music lovers.
