Besides playing host to the Folk Music Society of Huntington’s monthly open jam sessions every third Sunday, the Huntington Public Library now hosts an “Open Mic†café once a month. Recent months have featured some talented local musicians (including featured artists Denise Romas and Steve Vitoff), as well as a funny stand-up comedian and even a poker-playing pooch who has appeared on national television. Across the street from the library, a new monthly open mic series also has been launched at the Asta Wine Bar and Art Gallery. See the Long Island AcoustiCalendar for more information on these and other open mic nights on LI.
Ken “the Rocket†Korb and Bruce MacDonald will be heading to Memphis in February to represent Long Island at the International Blues Challenge. Korb, a harmonica player and multi-instrumentalist, and MacDonald, a Ragtime fingerstyle guitarist, have both been performing for decades but just hooked up as a duo recently.
Long Island’s own Little Toby Walker, the 2002 International Blues Challenge winner, who has been drawing well-deserved positive buzz on both sides of the Atlantic, will be recording a new live CD during a January 26 concert at The Boulton Center for the Performing Arts in Bay Shore. See the AcoustiCalendar for details.
Kudos to Paul Helou, a Garden City-based singer-songwriter and interactive musical storyteller, on being named a 2006 winner in the Children’s Music Web Awards . Helou, who released his debut CD for children, entitled Bears, Bees & Butterflies, earlier this year, was honored in the Best New Artist for Pre-schoolers category of this international awards competition guided by adults and judged by children.
With the aid of modern recording technology, Judith Zweiman, a mainstay on the local folk scene who cut her musical teeth with the Fast Folk collective in NYC and currently devotes much of her time to providing therapeutic music for the elderly, has released a new album entitled She will sing, I will sing. The CD features a dozen songs sung in Hebrew and originally recorded by her late mother, Helen, in the early 1960’s, when Judith was just a youngster.
Digitally remastered from the original reel-to-reel tape, some of the songs have been augmented with Zweiman’s own vocal harmonies and acoustic guitar riffs in much the same fashion as Natalie Cole did years ago to create the effect that she was singing duets with the late great Nat King Cole. She also has included a few songs and arrangements of her own, as well as a short spoken-word introduction.
Zweiman believes that her mother, who by her late 40s had already begun to display the first symptoms of early-onset Alzheimer’s, had recorded these songs to preserve her music and her memories. “My mother was a singer too, and it’s all I will keep in the end,†says Zweiman. “She will sing, I will sing, for today and all time… she will live on inside me and sing once again.†The album is dedicated to her mother and to all those with Alzheimer’s and related dementia, as well as their families who must stand by and watch their loved ones disappear into dementia, and eventual death. For more information, write to JZweiman@aol.com
Walter Sargent, a local singer-songwriter and webmaster for the Island Songwriters Showcase (ISS), has just released a new album with an intriguing title – 14 Fish, 2 Bottles & a Shoe. Naturally, it features 17 tracks. “Writing a song is like catching a fish,†maintains Sargent. “You never know what you’re going to get. Sometimes you get a stone crab, a barnacled bottle with gobs of blechy stuff and sometimes you get a black fish – a prize for sitting in a boat for hours, impaling smelly things on hooks. I’m not sure how much credit I want to take for outsmarting a fish. I’m just saying the sense of satisfaction is similar to writing a song.†I’m not a fisherman, but I guess one could get a tuna or two out of it. Holy Mackerel, I can’t believe I just wrote that. I guess I have come to the end of the line – and this column). – Michael Kornfeld
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