Dom Flemons, Buckwheat Zydeco, Stephanie Fogg to play Quad concerts
The great Buckwheat Zydeco performs at Bates on July 30.
Dom Flemons, former Carolina Chocolate Drop; crowd-rousing zydeco artist Buckwheat Zydeco; and the Maine soul and jazz band led by Stephanie Fogg are featured in this summer’s Concerts on the Quad at Bates College.
The 2015 series comprises outdoor shows at 6:30 p.m. on three Thursdays: July 16, Flemons; July 30, Zydeco; and Aug. 13, Fogg.
The concerts are held on the Coram Library porch on the college’s Historic Quad, at College Street and Campus Avenue (rain site is the nearby Peter J. Gomes Chapel, 275 College St.).
Admission to this family-friendly series is free, and audience members are encouraged to bring picnics and chairs or blankets. For more information, please call 207-753-6953.
Dom Flemons
Flemons draws deeply from the rich American folk tradition — ragtime, early blues, Southern folk, spiritual, string, and jug band music — and revives it for contemporary audiences. His work has been praised for its gritty, intimate style, which, as The Guardian writes, “sounds as if he’s sitting on the front porch enjoying himself.”
Roots musician Dom Flemons opens Bates’ Concerts on the Quad on July 16.
Flemons self-released his first solo recording, Prospect Hill, last summer. “Flemons’ talents are best-suited to intimate settings,” wrote Mark Segal Kemp in a review of the CD in Acoustic Guitar magazine, “where he can sit with his banjo, guitar, and percussion, jam a little, tell stories and talk about the rich history of African-American folk traditions.”
A co-founder of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, in 2005, Flemons started his solo career in 2013.
Buckwheat Zydeco
Widely regarded as the biggest contemporary zydeco artist in the world, accordionist-keyboardist Buckwheat Zydeco has introduced this upbeat blend of blues and traditional Creole music to audiences far away from its birthplace in Lafayette, La.
His energetic style has revitalized zydeco by drawing from mainstream genres like rock and R&B. Zydeco released the first-ever major label zydeco album in 1987, Island Records’ On A Night Like This, and has issued more than two dozen recordings since. Over the course of Zydeco’s career, he has gigged with everyone from Eric Clapton (with whom Zydeco also recorded) and U2 to the Boston Pops.
Stephanie Fogg Band
Singer Stephanie Fogg.
Hailing from Portland, Maine, Fogg is an experienced vocalist and an instructor at the Midcoast School of Music. Growing up listening to jazz and soul artists like Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, and Etta James inspired Fogg’s love of singing from a young age.
Fogg has toured widely throughout New England. The Stephanie Fogg Band’s recent gigs have included performances of Back to Black, the second and final album by the late and lamented Amy Winehouse, in its entirety. Supporting Fogg are guitarists Mike Derosier and Seth Warner, drummer Chris Marro, bassist Duane Edwards, keyboardist Matt Fogg, and saxophonist David Wells.
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