WEDNESDAY FOLK TRADITIONS at the PORTER-PHELPS-HUNTINGTON
MUSEUM CONTINUES WITH FUSION NOMADS
JUNE 26, 2019
HADLEY—The Porter-Phelps-Huntington Museum continues the 38th season of Wednesday Folk Traditions concert series on Wednesday, June 26th with Fusion Nomads, a group of four life-long musicians passionate about innovation and converging traditions. Their music takes audiences on a journey inspired by countless regions, and genres from Electro-Funkadelic to Western Classical. This and all other performances are held Wednesday evenings at 6:30 pm in the Sunken Garden at the Porter-Phelps-Huntington Museum, 130 River Drive, Route 47, Hadley MA 01035. Admission is $12, $2 for children 16 and under. Picnickers are welcome on the museums grounds starting at 5:00 pm. The museum and its grounds are a smoke-free site. For further information please call (413) 584-4699 or view www.pphmuseum.org.
From the first time a musician went beyond his or her home village, or region, or nation... music has been an ever-expanding hybrid of instruments and ways to play them. Enter Fusion Nomads John Sheldon, Derrik Jordan, Tony Vacca, and Jo Sallins. Their careers have covered everything from Pop Music to Avant-Garde, from Electro-Funkadelic to Spirit-Guided Improv, from Western Classical Music to Spoken Word, and from Old School to Nu School to No-Schooling-what-so-ever. They have been around the music, around the world, and around each other for more decades than they want to tell, and when they play together, you’d have to say it sounds like all that... and more. Their collaboration is a creative, momentary fusion that takes shameless advantage of their nomadic careers.
John Sheldon is in his 50th year of composing music and performing his unique style of electric and acoustic guitar. After a stint as lead guitarist for Van Morrison, and songwriting for James Taylor, John has performed for five decades as a solo performer, as the lead singer-
songwriter with his own rock band, Blue Streak, and in collaboration with other musicians and theater artists. John also co-founded a new musical and spoken word collaboration, Do It Now with Tony Vacca and beat poet laureate Paul Richmond. Recently, John has performed with internationally acclaimed Senegalese talking drum master Massamba Diop. Since 1978, he has released 13 CDs of his own music.
Derrik Jordan is an award-winning composer and singer-songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist on the 5-string electric violin, guitar, keyboard, kalimba, ngoni and percussion. He runs his production company, Worldsoul Records, based in Putney, Vermont. His music is currently being heard in more than 100 TV shows and films in over 20 countries, and he performs in many bands including Tony Vacca's World Rhythms, Impulse Ensemble, Simba and Natural History. His piece “Sky Mirror” won the Shakuhachi Chamber Music International Prize 2008, and he was commissioned by Vermont Symphony Orchestra in 2009 for their Made In Vermont Fall Festival Tour.
Tony Vacca is an innovative American percussionist with Jazz and World Music roots going back to the 70’s. Over the course of his career specializing in West African and American musical traditions he has made a habit of pushing the already adventurous conventions of World Music into new territory, both as a soloist and as the leader of his World Rhythms Ensemble. His wide range of performance collaborators include Sting, Senegalese Afro-pop star Baaba Maal, Jazz trumpeter and World Music legend Don Cherry, poet Abiodun Oyewole of The Last Poets, Senegalese Hip-Hop stars Bideew Bou Bess, and Gokh-bi System, Jazz giant Yusef Lateef, and Massamba Diop, Senegalese master of the tama or talking drum.
Jo Sallins has had 37 years of musical performing experience as a drummer. He has toured internationally in Asia, Singapore, Canada, Senegal, West Africa and the US. He is a teaching member of Massachusetts Cultural Council Events & Residency Roster, the New England Foundation for the Arts Touring Roster and a member of BOCES Arts Organization for upstate New York. Jo has performed with: Alvin Ailey, Frank Hatchett, Vishu Wood, Tony Vacca’s World RhythmsTM, Dan Akroyd, Matt “Guitar” Murphy of the Blue Brothers (1 year),
Stanley Clarke, Stanley Jordan, Michael Gregory, Gokh-bi System, Marvin “Smitty” Smith and many more.
To visit Tony Vacca’s website: Click Here
Wednesday Folk Traditions continues on July 10 with Viva Quetzal, World/Afro- Andean/Latin/Jazz Fusion, an astonishing array of exotic and familiar instruments and folkloric themes connecting the rain forests of Central and South America, the carnivals of Brazil, the high plateaus of the Andes, and the urban barrios of Latin America and the United States. “More than eclectic or rhythmic, it’s spiritual, it’s all cultures existing as one. That’s universal music!” – Rafael Charres, Cashbox Magazine (NYC)
The Porter-Phelps Huntingon Museum’s Wednesday Folk Traditions is funded, in part, by grants from: the Marion I. And Otto C. Kohler Memorial Fund at the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts; the Amherst and Hadley Cultural Councils, local agencies, supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency; Massachusetts Cultural Council Festivals Program, Easthampton Savings Bank, Eversource Energy, Gage-Wiley & Co., and with generous support from many 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 1:00 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. The house, which remains unchanged since the family’s occupancy, tells the story of six generations of prominent Hadley residents. The family, prosperous traders turned farmers, fought in both the French and Indian and Revolutionary Wars, rose to prominence in local government, and embodied a consistently progressive social consciousness. Tours highlight both local and regional narratives, from architecture, material culture, and labor, to early-American theology, economics, women’s history and social movements. For further information about tours or other programs, please call the Museum at (413) 584-4699 or visit our website at http://www.pphmuseum.org .