Yiddish Music at the Clearwater

[Joe Kurland <ganeydn...>]

For immediate release:

Yiddish Music at the Clearwater/Beacon Pumpkin Festival

The Wholesale Klezmer Band of Massachusetts will be one of the groups
performing at the Beacon Pumpkin Festival alongside the Hudson River Sloop
Clearwater on Sunday afternoon, October 13.  The festival will take place
at the Old Ferry Dock near the Railroad Station in Beacon, NY from noon to
6 pm.  Wholesale will be performing from 2  to 2:40 pm.

Since its inception in 1982, the Wholesale Klezmer Band has performed
throughout the Northeast, shared the Carnegie Hall stage with Pete Seeger
and Sweet Honey in the Rock (after being noticed at the 1990 Beacon Pumpkin
Festival) ... and played at Bill Clinton's 1993 presidential inaugural. In
a review of the group's first album, "Shmir Me," the folk magazine Dirty
Linen said, "It is the balance they achieve between social understanding
and social satire that marks The Wholesale Klezmer Band as a truly great
klezmer band."  Wholesale performs most of its songs in Yiddish, but uses
story telling, vocabulary lessons, subtitles and body language to assure
that non-Yiddish speakers understand what the songs are about.  Their
instrumental music, celebratory and soulful, needs no translation.

Wholesale is about to release a new recording called "Tfile far a
tsebrokhener velt" (Prayer for a Broken World). The new discs and tapes are
not expected to be back from the manufacturer by the time of the festival,
but the band will have order forms available.

The festival includes events for the whole family: performers will offer
songs and stories, the sloop will stand ready for dockside visitors, living
creatures from the river will be on display, there are crafts, food booths,
free stone
soup, a festive pumpkin patch with pumpkins for sale, and information and
exhibits by local activists and environmental groups. In recognition of Cancer
Awareness Month there will be information available highlighting the local
environmental factors believed to be linked to the rising rate of breast cancer
in the Hudson Valley (PCB's, pesticides and radiation).

Pumpkin Sail is Clearwater's annual two-week musical odyssey from Albany to
Manhattan, celebrating the sloop's quarter of a century of work on the Hudson
River. From October 5th through October l9th, Clearwater invites local
residents, as well as guests from afar, to join the musical crew in celebrating
the bounty of the Hudson River Valley at this charming series of dockside
festivals and evening concerts at 11 ports along the way. Festival-goers are
invited to bring a vegetable to add to the day's pot of stone soup (free to
the public.)  The crew will collect non-perishable food items at festivals and
concerts for distribution to local food pantries; a gesture of faith that the
river will once again be a healthy source of food for all to share.

Launched in l969, the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater is the flagship of the
river's environmental movement.  Owned by the 14,000 members of the non-profit
environmental education and advocacy organization that bears her name, the
sloop brings a message of concern to nearly 20,000 schoolchildren and adults
who participate in sail programs each year.  Thousands more make dockside
visits at waterfront festivals like Pumpkin Sail.


For information about Wholesale, please contact The Wholesale Klezmer Band at:
Gan Eydn, Adamsville Road, Colrain, MA 01340
Phone/fax: 413-624-3204
email: ganeydn (at) crocker(dot)com
World Wide Web: http://www.crocker.com/~ganeydn


For addtional information, call the Clearwater office at (914) 454-7673.

For information about the Clearwater on the World Wide Web:
        http://www.clearwater.org



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