• City Winery & Theatre Within Present : A John Lennon 70th Birthday Party
• 7:00pm Seating / 9:00pm Show

City Winery & Theatre Within Present:
A John Lennon 70th Birthday Party

Net proceeds to benefit: Food Bank for New York City & Share our Strength

Saturday, October 9th, 2010

As part of the Food Network New York City Wine & Food Festival

WINE PAIRING

A special unique concert celebration featuring 9 artists performing the classic material of John Lennon. Co-produced with Joe Raiola, co-creator of the Annual John Lennon Tribute to be held at the Beacon Theatre on November 12th which is now in its 30th year.

Each artist wil dig into Lennon's deep canon of work to perform a number of songs in celebration of Lennon's 70th Birthday. Each set will be paired with a special “Imagine Wine Flight” of selected wine for a birthday dinner to remember. 

Regular tickets are $95.00 each and includes the concert and wine pairings. 

Doors at 5pm - Seating is first come first serve - Show starts 9pm.

VIP DINNER

CLICK HERE FOR TICKETS TO THE VIP DINNER

A limited capacity VIP party will take place in the winery(prior to the main concert) for 60 people featuring a sumptious 5-course menu paired with award-wining wines.  This dinner will take place at 7pm and after the meal concludes the party will continue with VIP seating at the concert at 9pm, with the wine pairing included. 

VIP tickets are $225.00 and include the dinner in the winery, preferred VIP seating for the concert and the wine pairings.

ARTIST LINEUP

Dawn Landes, Anais Mitchell, Freedy Johnston, Jesse Malin, The Chapin Sisters, Lisa Bouchelle, The Kennedys and Tony Scherr

About Jesse Malin

Singer/songwriter Jesse Malin was the face of the glam/hard rock band D Generation for eight years, following the dissolution of Heart Attack, the hardcore punk act he fronted as a teenager in the '80s. They weren't a metal band, but critics quickly dismissed D Generation as Johnny Thunders copycats. Their teased hair and glossy wardrobe were just a part of the act, but substance and song structure were there. As one of New York City's more talented acts of the 1990s, the band released three albums before disbanding in April 1999. Malin, who's a punk with a soft heart, didn't stop writing music. His love for Neil Young, Tom Waits, and Steve Earle affected his work; he spent the next two years working on a fresh, countrified sound.

Ex-Whiskeytown frontman Ryan Adams, who'd been a friend of Malin since the D Generation days, was impressed with Malin's new approach. Adams offered to produce Malin's debut album even though he'd never produced a record. The two headed into Lo-Ho Studios in New York in January 2001 and made an album in just six days. A deal with Artemis soon followed. The Fine Art of Self Destruction appeared in the U.K. in October 2002; first single "Queen of the Underworld" was a moderate hit and the British press quickly hailed Malin's debut as one of the year's best. Stateside fans finally got their hands on The Fine Art of Self Destruction in January 2003. Road dates followed, both in America and the U.K. Malin contributed a version of "Hungry Heart" to the benefit album Light of Day: A Tribute to Bruce Springsteen; he also picked up a nomination for the Shortlist Music Prize. By November he was back in the studio, laying down tracks for Self Destruction's follow-up. The Heat appeared in June 2004, accompanied by a string of tour dates on both sides of the pond.

About Freedy Johnston

Freedy Johnston was born in the small town of Kinsley, Kansas, famous for being the exact mid-point between the east and west coasts of the USA. He bought a mail order guitar as a teenager after hearing Elvis Costello’s My Aim Is True. Later while briefly attending college in Lawrence, Kansas, he fell in with the likes of the Embarrassment and the Mortal Micronotz. His own writing mixed literate post-punk with outlaw country and ’70s AM radio fare. His first album, The Trouble Tree on Bar None, was titled after the nickname his Mom gave a local Kinsley watering hole.
His second album, Can You Fly, was made while living in Hoboken, New Jersey, where the music community rallied around the singer. At the time the local scene based around the club Maxwell’s was particularly vibrant and Can You Fly featured a number of club regulars including Kevin Salem, Dave Schramm, Graham Maby, Chris Stamey and Syd Straw. With the release of the album Freedy was touted as one of America’s finest new songwriters by Rolling Stone, Spin and many others. In the Village Voice Robert Christgau hailed it as “a perfect album.” This past year Can You Fly was cited in the book 1,000 Recordings To Hear Before You Dieby music critic Tom Moon.

About Dawn Landes

Titling her third album Sweet Heart Rodeo might appear a calculated risk but singer-songwriter Dawn Landes, Kentucky-born and Brooklyn-based, swears she didn’t have the Byrds’ pioneering 1968 country-rock classic “Sweetheart of the Rodeo” in mind. Instead she was thinking of her great-grandmother’s beau, a young man who ran away to join the rodeo during the Great Depression and decades later inspired Landes to write the title song. A rodeo theme runs throughout the record, as Landes compares the ups and downs of romance to the rigours of bull riding.

“I guess you could say each song is like its own bull,” the twenty-eight-year-old deadpans, “each ride its own love-story…you know, trying to hang on to a wild thing isn’t always graceful.” Her feminist approach proved problematic when it came to turning up images of feisty cowgirls for the artwork. “There aren’t many female bull riders,” she admits. And with good reason. “I went to a few rodeos as research. They don’t stay on those things very long.”

Though she grew up in Louisville her perfect variations on country and folk music have all been recorded in her adopted hometown of Brooklyn. The culture clash of urban and rural traditions is an intriguing base for Landes’ material and audience. She spent most of 2008 touring with a variety of country/folk and indie-rock stalwarts like The Tindersticks, Midlake, Josh Ritter, Jason Isbell (of the Drive by Truckers), Alexi Murdoch and the Swell Season, to name a few. And though she might recognize kindred spirits in contemporaries like Conor Oberst and Jim James of My Morning Jacket, Landes is blessed with a voice as pure and ringing as any folk or country diva.

About The Chapin Sisters

Abigail and Lily Chapin are singing, songwriting sisters who have been performing under the name The Chapin Sisters since 2004. They are known for pristine harmonies and haunting melodies that have gained comparisons to sister acts of old and Appalachian family groups, yet their songs and arrangements have a very contemporary aspect, with elements of pop, blues and psychedelic rock. Their first full-length record, Lake Bottom LP was collaboration with their other sister, Jessica Craven.  Produced by Thom Monahan (Lilys, Devendra Bandhart, Vetiver) and Mike Daly (Whiskeytown, Grace Potter), the record was critically acclaimed and was named on of the LA Weekly’s Top Ten Records of 2008.

In August of 2008, Abigail and Lily, along with co-producers Jesse Lee (Gang Gang Dance) and Louie Stephens (Rooney) retreated to an old family farm in rural New Jersey where they put-together a studio and recorded their newest record, The Chapin Sisters 2. This record incorporates lush keyboards, layered percussion, electric guitars and warm, rich vocals tones, in addition to the staple acoustic guitar and three part-harmonies that the sisters are already known for. It is expected to be released in Fall 2010 (the sisters do not yet have a record label for this project).

Abigail and Lily were born in Brooklyn New York. They couldn’t help but pick up a thorough grounding in traditional American roots music and folk-rock from their father, 3-time Grammy Award winning singer-songwriter Tom Chapin. He, along with their grandfather Jim Chapin, a jazz drummer, and their uncle, singer-songwriter Harry Chapin, created an environment wherein music held an almost sacred purpose, of bringing people together, whether it be for family, humanitarian purposes, or joyful release. When the family relocated to New York’s Hudson Valley, Lily and Abigail attended a Waldorf school whose arts-based education added training in orchestral music and the complicated harmonies of Shape-note songs and old English folk ballads. Through elementary and high school they sang on over a dozen studio albums.

Since graduating from college and pursuing music professionally, the sisters have recorded vocals on many albums, Vetiver, Lavender Diamond, Gary Loures, Ann Magnusen, Will Oldham and Marie Sioux, among many others. In the spring of 2010, Abigail and Lily will set out on tour with SHE & HIM (Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward) as members of their band. THE CHAPIN SISTERS will be opening many of the shows as well.

About Lisa Bouchelle

Lisa has sung backup for Bruce Springsteen, Jon Bon Jovi, Rob Thomas of Matchbox Twenty, Cyndi Lauper, and Daryl Hall, among others. She has opened for Bryan Adams, Kansas, Nancy Sinatra, John Waite, David Bromberg, Hot Tuna, Southside Johnny & The Jukes, Richard Marx, Sophie B. Hawkins, Gary U.S. Bonds, Nils Lofgren, Dar Williams, The Wailers, and members of Phish and the Jerry Garcia Band, among others. She has appeared on NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, ESPN, the Tennis Channel, Comcast shows “Backstage” and “One On One With Steve Adubato,” the “Jersey Guys” Radio show on New Jersey’s 101.5, the morning show on New York’s WPLJ, and NPR (National Public Radio), which highlighted her propensity for “busking” in the Philadelphia train station.

Lisa first started singing at a young age, and sang non-stop... because although her parents loved her deeply, the only time they would stop their constant arguing was when little Lisa sang. Now, after losing her father to complications from a heart operation, and her mother to alcoholism, she still finds refuge in her music.

And that music has kept her going, whether it be going on tour by driving herself thousands of miles around the country in her car, or flying to Japan to perform for Japanese fans. Her style has been compared to Sheryl Crow, Jewel, and Jason Mraz,  but what sets her music apart is an edge reminiscent of classic artists such as Neil Young and Tom Petty.

Lisa’s last CD reached #1 on two indie charts, and #4 on the college charts. With the release of Bleu Room With A Red Vase, she is poised to be a breakthrough artist in 2010. Lisa decided to produce the CD herself, eschewing fancy production and going for the raw, acoustic sound which she has always loved. The songs range from a playful duet with John Popper, the singer of Blues Traveler, to a moving ode to her mother, which she recorded live in the studio. In addition to John Popper, it contains contributions from many great musicians, including David Bromberg, Rob Hyman of the Hooters, Bobby Bandiera, Glen Burtnik, John Eddie, Bob Burger, Lorenza Ponce, and Erin Hill.

About The Kennedys

The story of Pete and Maura Kennedy’s personal and professional relationship, now in its second decade, is somewhere between fate and a fairytale. How else can you explain a chance meeting in Austin between two East Coast-born musicians that immediately sparked a songwriting collaboration, a first date at Buddy Holly’s grave, an enduring romance, and a creative partnership that radiates warmth, positive energy, and captivating music?
In 1992, Virginia native Pete Kennedy was playing a solo show at Austin’s Continental Club on a brief sabbatical from his duties as country-folk singer-songwriter Nanci Griffith’s lead guitarist when he met former Syracuse, NY, resident Maura Boudreau, enjoying a night off from performing with her own country-rock band, The Delta Rays. The duo “instantly connected on a soul level, or maybe even something deeper,” according to Pete. They wrote their first song together the following day before Pete returned to the road, and rendezvoused ten days later at mutual hero Buddy Holly’s grave in Lubbock, Tex., 500 miles equidistant between them. And that’s how it started.

About Anais Mitchell

"Anaïs sings of love among the ruins, coming of age to find yourself an outsider looking for the place you belong, finding other strangers along the way. Details … are offered like clues or keys to the reality all of us sense is imminent and eternal beneath the surfaces of things." 
— Hugh Blumenfeld, Sing Out!

From her current home base in a 200-year-old farmhouse in rural Vermont, Anaïs (“uh-NAY-iss”) Mitchell writes songs that are as intimate as conversations and as rich in detail as short stories. The daughter of “hippie back-to-the-landers” whose father was a novelist and English professor, she remembers her family’s home (another farmhouse in the same state) containing “a library full of novels, and lots of old folk and psychedelic rock albums. The books and the records all lived in the same room, which I am sure led to me thinking of songwriting as a kind of literature, a noble poetic enterprise.”

No surprise, then, that the reference points of her music may seem to come from all over the map while still interconnected: the country ballads of the Carter Family, the hard-edged cabaret of Brecht and Weill, the story-songs of Randy Newman, the vast narrative scope of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, and the intricately crafted tales of her namesake, bohemian feminist Anaïs Nin, to name a few.

All of these influences come together in Hadestown, an epic “folk opera” retelling of the Orpheus myth. The saga of the poet who ventures into the underworld to rescue his dead wife—a tale now set in a post-apocalyptic world of poverty— began as a live performance created in collaboration with fellow Vermont artists director Ben t. Matchstick and arranger/orchestrator Michael Chorney. In their neck of the woods—TV-less by choice, far from big cities, in a land of radical politics and culture—making your own entertainment, and getting your friends and neighbors to help you flesh it out, is the only way to go. After fine-tuning the show, the trio gathered a cast of two dozen, commandeered a silver-spraypainted schoolbus, and hit the road (and several blizzards) for a couple of ragtag DIY tours of New England. The next logical step? Hadestown, the album, performed by a dream-team lineup including Ani DiFranco, Justin Vernon/Bon Iver, Greg Brown, and Mitchell herself, among others.

Anaïs Mitchell is the rare musician who is equally comfortable wielding an acoustic guitar alone onstage, sharing a disc’s worth of alt-country duets, or scripting a vast operatic journey into the underworld. She’s a fearless explorer, and her world just keeps getting larger.

ABOUT TONY SCHERR

Since coming to New York in the 80s, Tony Scherr has become one of the city's most prolific and in-demand sidemen, playing integral roles in the music of such notable artists as Bill Frisell, John Lurie (Lounge Lizards), Steven Bernstein (Sex Mob), and Norah Jones, as well as some of New York's better-kept secrets, such as Jesse Harris and the Ferdinandos, The Wollesens, Ursa Minor, and Slowpoke.

Tony has recorded most of these latter artists at his Brooklyn home studio, helping to foster and document a tight-knit, intimate scene of players who are as skilled and daring as they are broadminded and modest.  Originally hailing from New Haven, CT, Tony played rock guitar in a garage band with his brother Peter as teens, before the two went their separate ways; Peter to become a concert bassist and film composer, and Tony to slug it out in the clubs of New York, ironically as primarily a bassist himself.

His debut album Come Around is a reunion of sorts, between the two brothers, between Tony and the electric guitar, and between the brothers and the rock/song idiom. The lyrical content in particular also charts a deeply personal journey, documenting a process of overcoming catastrophe and a renewed faith in the healing power of music. Above all else, the album serves as a message of hope.

ABOUT JOE RAIOLA

Joe Raiola, Artistic Director of Theatre Within, is co-creator of the Annual John Lennon Tribute in New York, Senior Editor at MAD Magazine, comedian and first amendment activist. He will be appearing in this year's Lennon Tribute at the Beacon Theatre on November 12 for the 30th consecutive year.  

Since 1993, Joe has been touring the country in his acclaimed solo show, The Joy of Censorship, which he has has performed at countless libraries, colleges and theaters in over 40 states. His latest solo show, Obscene Almost, has received critical raves from coast to coast.

In 2006, Joe founded Theatre Within as a not-for-profit Performing Arts Presenter dedicated to staging charity benefits. Since then, under his leadership, Theatre Within has staged successful benefits for local and international charities, from Builders of The New World (education program for New York children living in community housing) to World Hunger Year.