FREEPORT – He is making homemade family music, encouraging friends and neighbors to celebrate family and singing along with people everywhere. He is Grammy Award winner Dan Zanes and he will give two performances Saturday, June 30, as part of the L.L. Bean Summer Concert Series.
Born in Exeter, N.H., in 1961, he was a member of the Del Fuegos, a four-piece band from Boston, from the beginning to the end of the ’80s. In 1994, he released a solo CD, “Cool Down Time,” and shortly after moved to Brooklyn, N.Y., with his wife and daughter, where he released “Rocket Ship Beach in 2000, launching his own record label, Festival Five Records.
The CD was an immediate hit with families around America, as well as with the New York Times Magazine, which wrote: “Zanes’ kids music works because it is not kids music; it’s just music – music that’s unsanitized, unpasteurized, that’s organic even.”
His next CD, “Family Dance,” released in 2001, contains songs that are difficult not to dance to and features Loudon Wainwright III and Rosanne Cash. Next in the Festival Five family series came “Night Time!” in 2002, featuring collaborations with Aimee Mann and Lou Reed – followed by the Grammy-nominated “House Party” in 2003, a rambunctious 20-song collection that includes Deborah Harry, Bob Weir, and Philip Glass, as well as the Rubí Theater Company and Rankin Don, aka Father Goose.
“Sea Music,” a collection of maritime songs that was the first CD in the Festival Five Folk Series,was cited in Rolling Stone’s Hot Issue in the category of Hot Maritime Sounds. The next CD in the Folk Series is “Parades and Panoramas: 25 Songs Collected by Carl Sandburg for The American Songbag.”
The Grammy Award-winning CD, “Catch That Train,” co-released by Starbucks/Hear Music, is the latest in the Family Series. It brings together the Kronos Quartet, the Blind Boys of Alabama, Father Goose, Dan’s mother-in-law, and the children of South Africa’s Agape Orphanage to sing Zulu folk songs, an old labor organizing tune, a song about the joys of farming the English countryside, and, of course, a few train songs. “Catch That Train” features an instrumental mix that highlights cuatros, lap steels and trombone.
Zanes is the author of two picture book collaborations, “Jump Up!” and “Hello Hello,” with artist Donald Saaf, Little, Brown and Company Books; and he can be seen in the Dan Zanes and Friends concert video and DVD titled “All Around the Kitchen!”” – recorded in 2005 at the Knitting Factory, in New York City.
The outdoor concerts will begin at 4:30 and 7:30 p.m. in Discovery Park by the L.L.Bean Flagship store on Main Street. For more information, call 1-800-559-0747, extension 37222.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
