Akron/Family to Close the NYC Vision Festival June 30th

The greatest free-jazz festival in the world is going to be closed by a performance by Akron/Family on June 30th at Le Poisson Rouge in New York City!

The concert is billed as Akron/Xtended/Family and will be a collaborative performance with legendary free improv masters Hamid Drake and William Parker. Akron/Family recorded their record Meek Warrior with Hamid in Chicago in 2006 and played in support of the record with both William and Hamid.

The Vision Festival was started in 1996 by Patricia Parker, William Parker and Peter Kowald. Over the years it has hosted Milford Graves, Peter Brotzman, David Ware, Marshal Allen, Sam Rivers, Henry Grimes, and too many legendary free jazz artists to mention. The festival’s theme this year is “The Creative Option” and according to the Vision Festival producers “represents our commitment to bring cutting-edge music to new generations of listeners. Emerging artists and young bands are very important in maintaining a link between the pioneering legends and the innovators of the future.”

Akron/Family has always looked to many of these pioneering artists as inspirations and guides in the tone world, and are extremely proud to participate in helping to link younger musicians and fans to what they consider to be one of the most spirited and alive musical traditions in the world. Many of the musicians that play every year in the Vision Festival represent the living history of this music, and it is a true music of the future.

For the show Akron plans to revisit the material of Meek Warrior with William and Hamid as well as explore various improvisational spaces, tone color fields, Ayler theme calls, and elemental groove planes.

The final performance:
June 30th, 2010
Le Poisson Rouge
Slowest Runner 8:00
Southern Satellites 9:00
Akron/Xtended/Family 10:00

Akron/Family Wants Your Videos!

One of my favorite things about Akron/Family is their enthusiasm for connecting, sharing and creating art with their friends and fans.  By calling for submissions of “Woody Guthrie’s America” in The Woody Project, making sure they play all-ages venues and urging crowd participation during their live performances, fans become a part of Akron/Family instead of just observers.

7 – Many Ghosts (video by Jesse & Al Jarnow, Seth Olinsky) from Akron Family on Vimeo.

Akron/Family is now calling for fans to submit videos for songs from Set ‘Em Wild, Set ‘Em Free to their free video channel.  They want fans to take whatever song (or songs) they would like and set them to the weirdest, simplest or funniest visual material they like.  Fan videos began rolling in that have been really inspiring to the band, so they want to see more!

Submit your own video to akakdreamtime@gmail.com, and it’ll be added to this Vimeo channel.  We’ll post our favorites to the blog.

Akron/Family Go Mile High For Three Nights in Denver

Akron/Family are returning to Denver next week for a special three night stand at Quixote’s. Denver has hosted some of Akron/Family’s most magical moments onstage, and we expect this three night run to push the boundaries once again. You can expect to experience new material, old favorites, special guests, extended jams and more from our favorite psychedelic wanderers. We’ll be hitting YouTube Monday morning hoping to relive the magic. They’ll be joined by Bad Weather California for all three shows, who were one of our favorite contributors to Akron/Family’s Woody Project. Purchase tickets for the shows here.

AKRON/FAMILY Hops Freight to Woody Guthrie’s America Encourages Contributors

If you have seen AKRON/FAMILY recently, you have likely heard them close an evening with the unreleased song “Woody Guthrie’s America.” It is an immediately familiar song, one that often evolves into an audience sing-along continuing after the band has exited the stage. Over the past year the band has collected over 20 versions of the song sung, stomped, and videotaped by friends, and is now looking to open the doors of the project and encourage all to contribute. All contributors are welcomed to their headlining shows for free!

Listen to Akron/Family’s version of “Woody Guthrie’s America” HERE.

Seth Olinsky from Akron/Family explains “Woody Guthrie’s America” :

I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim or too ugly or too this or too that.
– Woody Guthrie

You can only drive across America, back and forth, up and down its mountains and coasts a few times before you want to pen a song about the beauty. And then you can only travel around the world a bit more, before you come back and want to write a song about the beauty and that little sing-song infrastructure of freedom you discover folded into the depths of it’s grasses and hills. And then comes a time when you run into Woody Guthrie’s music. Well, maybe you heard it before and liked it, but this time you are a little older, a little more traveled and you realize the power behind those simple songs, the power of humanity riding down those tracks. And in there you hear that same power grid of freedom and deep radical nature that seems to be singing to you from the Rocky Mountain tops, the Redwood forests, the Gulf stream waters, and, well, you all know that song. And so you can only go so long with all that rattling around your brain before you want to write a song about that too.

So imagine you start to write that song and start singing it. Well it just seems to make sense to try and encourage others to help sing it to. So you make the song simple and you try and make it tell that story and then you send it out. And as different voices start singing this same song, something amazing happens. It takes on a life of its own. The song never was and never is finished. The more people involved, the more the song becomes, the more it means, the more it changes, the more it stories, the more it rises like the moon and sets like the sun. A song can take on a life a world a value all its own. And all involved can help make it funny beautiful sad lovely wild and mourning. All in one song you can here 27 people’s stories. 27 people’s lives loves and humors. Now that is a song to feel good about and that is a song we all wrote.

And so I ask everyone to join in. Sing along. Help write this song with us. It may be a romantic idealization of times past and Americana wilderness freedoms unsung, but it sure feels good to share a song for free and imagine a time when you learned a song not from an advertisement but from a wandering friend and played it at home. Changed it to fit your own voice and instrument, your own story, your own news.

So tune in your internet device to http://www.akronfamily.com/woodyproject! Plug in that old solid state receiver and those heavy speakers collecting dust in your closet, and blast these versions loud until you are inspired to make one!

Send your own to akronfamilywoodyproject@gmail.com. Send us a photo and where you are from, and we’ll post it as soon as we can.

Come track us down at our upcoming headlining shows. If you send us a version for posting and tell us which show you are coming to, we will put you on the guest list.

See the full list of Akron/Family’s upcoming tour dates HERE.

Visit the band’s Woody Project website HERE, where you can download the entire first volume of contributed songs or stream and sample those that have been collected.