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FOR
IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Long’s Park Amphitheater Foundation
Will Open its 48th Free Summer Music Season June 6, 2010 with Lilith
Fair-Bound Indie Band.
LANCASTER,
PA -- On June 6, 2010, the Long’s Park Amphitheater Foundation
will open its 48th summer of exciting, free music on the Long’s
Park amphitheater stage. The annual Long’s Park Summer Music
Series will showcase 13 Sundays of award-winning performers.
All Sunday night performances will begin at 7:30 pm.
Kicking off the season June 6 will be the powerful vocals and blazing
Hammond B-3 organ of fearless front woman, Grace Potter and
the Nocturnals. One of the country’s up-and-coming
indie bands, they will bring their funky blues, soul and rock and
“play blues-based rock with glorious passion,” proclaimed
USA Today. “Potter's voice earns its inevitable comparisons
with Bonnie Raitt and Lucinda Williams,” they added. No doubt
this is what caught Sarah McLachlin’s attention when she invited
Grace Potter and the Nocturnals to be a part of the
acclaimed 2010 Lilith Fair tour.
Sponsoring the first concert of the 2010 season will be the Intelligencer
Journal/Lancaster New Era.
Appearing Sunday, June 13 will be triple-Grammy-winning, bluegrass
legend Dr. Ralph Stanley & His Clinch Mountain Boys.
Their work was featured on the soundtrack of the Coen Brothers’
epic comedy, “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” which captured
two Grammys.
The sponsor of the Dr. Ralph Stanley & His Clinch Mountain
Boys concert is Susquehanna Bank.
“Dr. Stanley” and his late brother Carter were inducted
into the International Bluegrass Hall of Honor in 1992. He received
America’s highest honor for artistic excellence, the National
Medal of Art, in 2006. The following year he was nominated for another
Grammy for his “A Distant Land to Roam: Songs of the Carter
Family” album. His 2007 album, “Mountain Preacher’s
Child,” moved to Number 9 on the bluegrass
chart.
Concertgoers will need to batten down their lawn chairs June 20
when Esperanza Spalding comes to Long’s Park.
The remarkable jazz singer-double bassist promises to infuse every
inch of the park with “a breath of fresh air” and “fearsome
musicianship” (The Strad). Acclaimed for “injecting
new life into string jazz” by The Strad in a front cover story,
Esperanza Spalding “sings, writes and plays bass so
brilliantly that ... Berklee begged her to join the staff”
(London Evening Standard). “It’s impossible not
to warm to someone who dances while playing the double-bass,”
they confessed. PopMatters proclaimed her “a sprawling
collage of jazz fusion, Brazilian and even a tour of hip-hop.”
On June 27 Long’s Park will welcome back “Africa’s
premier diva” (Time Magazine), Grammy-winning singer-songwriter
Angélique Kidjo. One of the world’s most
electrifying performers, she left her Long’s Park audience
breathless in 2005 with her uplifting blend of West African music,
tinged with R&B, funk, jazz and Latin styles. For more than
three decades, she has been amassing fans around the globe through
her dynamic, uplifting music and social activism. Wrote The Los
Angeles Times, “[Kidjo’s] supercharged pipes have
never sounded better, her irresistible energy and joie de vivre
never more palpable...Kidjo reaffirms her global-diva credentials.”
Cosponsoring Angélique Kidjo‘s performance
is Smithgall’s Pharmacy.
Another highlight of the season will be the annual patriotic concert,
falling this year on the Sunday, July 4 holiday. Always the community’s
favorite holiday celebration, the evening will again feature The
257th Army Band, former Lancaster City mayor Charlie Smithgall’s
historic cannon brigade and a spectacular fireworks display.
Helping to make the July 4 patriotic concert possible is the James
Hale Steinman Foundation. Founding cosponsor of the community celebration
is the Lancaster Summer Arts Festival.
The Felice Brothers, the exciting folk rock quintet
who’ll be returning to this year’s heralded Newport Folk
Festival, are coming to Long’s Park July 11. With opener billing
on The Dave Matthews Band several times this tour, the quintet
infuses their rustic Americana country and roots music with a tinge
of a Louisiana accent — a surprising twist for a band that
hails from the Catskill Mountains of New York.
This ubiquity has attracted a world following for the group. Their
“Yonder Is The Clock” album captured BBC Music’s
2009 Country Album of the Year. London’s The Guardian
seconded that nod by declaring The Felice Brothers
“among the most exciting prospects in rootsy American music.”
Sponsoring The Felice Brothers’ appearance at
Long’s Park will be the Pennsylvania College of Art & Design.
Long’s Park concertgoers on July 18 will be in for the real
deal when the Benjy Davis Project layers them with
lovesick, good-times-a-rollin’ Southern sweetness. With their
fourth album, “Lost Souls Like Us,” just hitting store
shelves and iTunes in early March, the Benjy Davis Project
“meld[s] rock and country into undeniably catchy pop”
(Baton Rouge Advocate).
Stepping up to underwrite the free performance of the Benjy Davis
Project is LancMarketplace.com.
On July 25 double Grammy-nominee Sammy Figueroa & His
Latin Jazz Explosion will detonate the Long’s Park
amphitheater stage. With their last two releases capturing Grammy
nominations as best Latin jazz albums, they have fast become “one
of the jazz world’s most exciting bands (All About Jazz).
The legendary conguero-percussionist has been personally honored
as Best Jazz/Fusion Percussionist by Drum! Magazine. Wrote
Drummers World Magazine, “Sammy is the Cat. He has long
been regarded as one of the premier musicians in the world.”
“To say the man has chops is an understatement,” declared
Latin Beat Magazine.
Cosponsoring legendary conguero-percussionist and his band is Lancaster
General Health. Radio sponsor will be WLCH “Radio Centro.”
The final month of the 2010 Long’s Park Summer Music season
opens on August 1 with the hot rockabilly group from the Windy City,
the West Side Winders. They are sure to have concertgoers
lovin’ their lyrics and dancing like there’s no tomorrow.
“You haven’t heard rockabilly until you have heard The
West Side Winders,” declared Pipes, cohost of Six String Bliss
podcast. He promised “rockabilly [with] a modern twist while
still keeping true to the legends that came before them.”
Performance sponsor of the West Side Winders’
Long’s Park concert is Hilton Garden Inn Lancaster.
On August 8 Long’s Park concertgoers will discover the magic
that happens when Santana’s former leader vocalist Alex
Ligertwood takes the stage with high-energy, jazz keyboardist
David Garfield. The David Garfield & Alex
Ligertwood Group promises an evening to remember when their
pop and jazz blend with R&B and Latin.
Musical icons in their own right, they give birth to a distinct
and contemporary sound that David Garfield and Alex
Ligertwood have been performing together around the world
for 10 years. Together, they go far beyond the confines of traditional
and smooth jazz, covering everything from sensitive ballads to foot-stomping,
soul classics.
August 15 Galway’s music ambassadors will treat Long’s
Park concertgoers to one of the region’s favorite sound flavors
when The Saw Doctors take the amphitheater stage.
The gritty Irish folk-rock band is “one of the world’s
most appealing roots rock outfits,” according to The Washington
Post. Since coming together in 1986 in County Galway, The
Saw Doctors have released 18 top 30 singles in Ireland with
3 reaching the top of the charts. Their record, I Useta Lover,
became the country’s all-time, best selling single. In 2008,
they received a lifetime achievement award at the Meteor Ireland
Music Awards.
“America’s great blues poet” (Austin American-Statesman)
Chris Smither and The Motivators will be coming to
Long’s Park Sunday, August 22. “A product of the musical
melting pot” (Associated Press), the New Orleans bred singer-songwriter
captured a 2008 Player’s Choice acoustic guitarist award from
Acoustic Guitar Magazine, coming in one down from Eric
Clapton.
Wrote The New York Times of Chris Smither,
“With a weary, well-traveled voice and a serenely intricate
finger-picking style, [he] turns the blues into songs that accept
hard-won lessons and try to make peace with fate.” In 2006,
his song, “Origin of Species” from the critically acclaimed
album, Leave the Lights On, ranked No. 42 on Rolling Stone’s
100 Best Songs. A year later he took home a Boston Music Award for
Outstanding Folk Act.
Helping to bring Chris Smither and The Motivators
to Long’s Park is Wickersham Construction and Engineering,
Inc.
On August 29 C. J. Chenier, “the best living
zydeco singer and accordionist” (Living Blues Magazine),
and his Red Hot Louisiana Band will close the Long’s
Park 2010 Summer Music Season on a sizzling high note. With a music
tradition laden with funk and blues, the foot-stomping, dance-inducing
music of the bayou, C. J. Chenier & His Red Hot Louisiana
Band are sure to have their Long’s Park audience on
their feet with “contemporary, turbo-charged dance music”
(The Boston Globe). Led by the consummate showman C.
J. Chenier, the band’s music “remains unparalleled
as a party starter” (Billboard Magazine).
The Long’s Park Summer Music Series is produced and underwritten
by the Long’s Park Amphitheater Foundation. The award-winning
performances free of charge at Long’s Park, thanks to generous
sponsors, private donors and proceeds of the Labor Day weekend Long’s
Park Art & Craft Festival. Season sponsors are Pennsylvania
College of Art & Design and Susquehanna Bank. Season media sponsors
are WARM
103 and 96.1 WSOX. Weather sponsor is WGAL-TV News 8.
Partial funding has been provided through a grant from the Pennsylvania
Council on the Arts (PCA), a state agency funded by an annual state
appropriation and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal
agency. PCA supplies funding to nonprofit, tax-exempt corporations,
a unit of government or a school district with arts programming
or services in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
Long’s Park concertgoers are invited to bring picnics, blankets
and lawn chairs to the park. A selection of food purveyors will
also be in the park, offering a complete meal’s worth of family
foods and desserts. Long’s Park is an alcohol-free park.
Long’s Park is conveniently located at 1441 Harrisburg Pike
in Lancaster, just off Route 30 across from Park City Center. All
events are free of charge and held rain or shine, except in the
case of dangerously inclement weather.
Additional information and links to musical previews of Long’s
Park’s performers can be found at www.longspark.org
or on Facebook. For details on corporate sponsorships of the Long’s
Park Summer Music Series and to learn how to make individual and
corporate contributions, contact the Long’s Park Amphitheater
Foundation at www.longspark.org.
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