11th St.
Broad Fest returns on Sunday, September 3, from 2 – 7 p.m. with an afternoon of music, food and interactive entertainment. Admission is free.
The plaza will be lively with activities, booths, sounds and people of all ages who love the arts. Come hear an array of live musical performances intermixed with DJ grooves.
Outdoor on the Plaza Stage, duo Sadubas blends tabla and a global DJ mix in between sets by Aaron Nigel Smith with his family friendly reggae sound sharing original music and the classics we love; in between sets of Tres Souls playing their vibrant style of Bolero music, electric violinist Val Vigoda looping in old and new sounds and The Reverend Shawn Amos and his band closing out the night with a hot Blues set.
Inside in The Edye Second Space will be additional performances and talks from their partners Santa Monica College and Heal the Bay. Throughout the afternoon, Bernard (Keali’i) Ceballos will teach tango for all ages; Hoop Revolution shares hula hooping skills; and The Broad Stage Education & Community Programs, with artist Marni Gittleman, will facilitate collective art projects inspired by wind and waves.
Food from local favorites Thyme Café, Truxton’s and Treats, as well as beer and wine, will be available for purchase throughout the day.
SADUBAS, aka The Sadhus of Bass, converges classical Indian rhythms with 70s Bollywood vibes to create psychedelic soundscapes that are one part trip hop and two parts cinematic south Asia. DJ/turntablist Ameet Mehta and tabla artist Robin Sukhadia bring a global lounge feel to their live sets, which feature classical instrumentation alongside midi controllers. Robin, a disciple of Pandit Swapan Chaudhuri of CalArts and the Ali Akbar College, humanizes the Sadubas sound with tabla, the classical drums of North India. Samples captured from the realms of classical Indian music, Bollywood, ancient rhythms, jazz, and film add texture to each Sadubas performance and recording. Ameet uses the turntable as a pure instrument, applying skratches and abstractions to create the lush atmosphere of Sadubas. Attuned to lounge and downtempo grooves, Ameet lays down the deepest bass kicks driven by a wide range of electronic music tools.
AARON NIGEL SMITH’s “Call To Action” is to get kids and families to sing, dance and play together. In 2002 he founded FUNdamentals of Music and Movement, an arts program which is now the program of choice to over 100 early education centers in Los Angeles, San Francisco, NewYork and Boston. In 2009 Aaron and his wife of 15 years Diedre, formed the non-profit One World Chorus with the goal of building bridges internationally through choral singing. There are currently over 500 children involved in the music outreach programs in Portland, Los Angeles, New York, Kenya & Jamaica. In 2012 One World Chorus released a debut CD, Welcome to the Village, to critical acclaim. People Magazine and USA today recognized the project as one of the best children’s releases of the year and the CD received a Parents’ Choice Award!
In the summer of 2013 in a partnership with the City of Lake Oswego, The Lake Oswego Library and Northwestern Mutual, Aaron launched the Rox in Sox Children’s Music & Book Festival. This one-day free event features some of the nation’s leading talent from the worlds of family music and literature.
TRES SOULS The genre of Boleros originated in Cuba then it made its way into Mexico in the 1940s. Three piece bands were known to perform this style of music and now we have a new generation of artists: Roberto Carlos, Jesus and Rocio that relive the sounds and songs of the 1940’s- 1960’s Mexico's golden era of "trio romantico" music while also adding a fresh sound and bilingual repertoire to their performance. Tres Souls creates an environment of celebration and appreciation of the musical richness of Latin America.
VAL VIGODA is an electric violinist, singer, writer, former Army lieutenant, and founding member of the band GrooveLily. She has toured the world with Cyndi Lauper, Joe Jackson and the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, and is now launching her solo live-looping multimedia project, Just Getting Good. Co-writer of many songs for Disney, as well as the scores for ten stage musicals which have been produced from La Jolla Playhouse to Off-Broadway, Val has won the Jonathan Larson Award for Excellence in Musical Theatre, the LA Ovation Award for Best Musical, and the ASCAP Richard Rodgers Award. She studied at Princeton University and has taught at Stanford University, Emerson College and the Berklee College of Music. Val is now the newest Artist Mentor in the Electrify Your Strings program, which brings rock arrangements and high-octane performance energy to school orchestras throughout the nation. She lives in Los Angeles with her 10-year-old son Mose.
SHAWN AMOS is a songwriter, blues singer, record producer and digital marketing entrepreneur. His most well-known work, Thank You Shirl-ee May, is an homage to his mother who performed under the stage name Shirl-ee May. His most recent album The Reverend Shawn Amos Loves You came after many years of working as an entrepreneur. He has described his style of blues as coming from a “place of vulnerability” and not necessarily pain or anger. He continues to make his music accessible with projects like Kitchen Table Blues, a weekly YouTube series that offers up live, love-filled blues canon classics, Amos originals, and bluesified covers.
GLOBAL MOTION is a world dance performance company that expresses the concept of humanity in the form of global citizenship. The company is composed of Santa Monica College students who learn, rehearse and perform world dance styles. It provides students a platform to experience and learn about other cultures through world dance while working with choreographers who are professionals and experts in the field of world dance.
HEAL THE BAY is an environmental nonprofit dedicated to making the coastal waters and watersheds of Greater Los Angeles safe, healthy and clean. To fulfill their mission, they use science, education, community action, and advocacy.
HOOP REVOLUTION is passionate about facilitating transformation in people’s lives through the practice of Hoop Dance. They aspire to bring the element of play back into the lives of adults everywhere. After all, they believe “you don’t stop playing because you get old, you get old because you stop playing.” For 18 years, Hoop Revolution has been empowering people to actualize strong bodies, clear minds, joyful hearts and playful spirits through innovative and highly effective Hoop Dance curriculum.
MARNI GITTLEMAN is an educator, artist and ideation architect known for conceiving and producing exhibits, programs and community galvanizing events that meaningfully engage, inform, affect and inspire. From community projects to corporate boardrooms, museum, mobile and public art installations, Marni is passionate about crafting an alchemy of disciplines, engagement strategies and specialists to bring project vision and values to light.
Admission is free. For more information and a complete festival line-up, visit thebroadstage.org. The Eli & Edythe Broad Stage, 1310 11th St.
- Submitted by the Broad Stage
