Evento

Skunk Funk Workshop: Andy Friedman

Andy Friedman workshop Any Questions...An open-ended conversation about creativity with the artist, musician, writer, illustrator, performance-poet, and New Yorker cartoonist. This workshop will be held at the Stone Quarry Hill Art Park

Andy Friedman is a bit of a renaissance man. Hes a writer, illustrator, cartoonist, painter, musician, and performance artist. He is a Brooklyn-based art-country singer-songwriter, and one of the best Americana acts around today. His bleary-eyed poetry and beat-inflected delivery suggests, and rightly so, that he is influenced just as much by Allen Ginsberg as he is by Johnny Cash. His last album, Laserbeams and Dreams, was recorded in 18 hours in the home studio of jazz bassist and close friend Stephan Crump, who, along with guitarist and producer David Goodrich, provides Friedman with his only accompaniment.

Unvarnished beauty on a record is a rare thing these days, particularly with this kind of sonic subtlety. Goodrichs mesmerizing electric guitar work recalls recent jazz greats like Pat Metheny and Bill Frisell, while Crump alternates between melodious jazz riffing to beautifully symphonic bowed string passages. Together, they give this record an otherworldly vibe that emphasizes the unique, unconventional nature of Friedmans songs.

Not left behind in the new approach is Friedmans signature knack for wide-ranging, complex, and varied lyricism. Although he has drawn frequent comparisons to Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan for both his un-dogmatic re-imagination of American roots music and his sprawling lyrics, which effortlessly shift from humorous and referential to wizened and weary, it is truly Friedmans range and depth that puts him in the same breath as those musical giants. His writing tackles topics both big and small, from the joys and costs of being a traveling artist to musings on life and death, art and drinking, and the odd disconnect between who he is and what he does.

Andy will also have artwork exhibited at the Stone Quarry Hill Art Park - visit their website for more info: http://www.stonequarryhillartpark.org