March 8, 2008
Second Saturdays at SunnySide Up, 116 NW Third St., 6-8 p.m., opens with Sid Rosen & Friends and features the ensemble River Rocks.
The March event will support Winter Soldier.
River Rocks is an ensemble of four musicians – Laurie Childers (vocals, keyboard, guitar), Mina Carson (vocals, guitar, mandolin), George Beekman (percussion) and Bill Veley (bass) – who play "songs with words that matter." Their songs combine lyrical expression with the gentle beauty of harmony. Both Laurie and Mina write songs with a strong social conscience. With influences of folk, rock, and jazz, it's hard to pigeonhole the chord structures or the instrumentation but difficult subjects are given a hopeful, sometimes humorous, voice.
Opening for River Rocks will be Sid Rosen & Friends – Sid (guitar) and George Beekman and Otto Gygax (percussionists). Sid’s genre is fingerstyle, instrumental guitar, and he’ll be playing mainly electric guitar on March 8. His tunes contain definite influences from Indian and Middle Eastern music, which he describes as a "musical melding of East and West; expansive, inspiring, meditative at times." He uses intricate, compelling rhythms, provided by tabla and dumbek.
In winter 1971, a group of Vietnam veterans spoke out against the Vietnam war. They provided stories of what they’d seen and experienced that showed how the war injured and dehumanized soldiers who took part, and showed how the prosecution of the war destroyed American values as well as harming the Vietnamese people and participating US soldiers. Drawing a contrast to the "summer soldier and sunshine patriot" (Thomas Paine, 1776), they termed it Winter Soldier.
From March 13 through March 16 in Washington D.C., the 2008 Winter Soldier event, organized by Iraq Veterans Against the War, draws on this tradition as it brings testimony to the public concerning how the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations have denigrated the service given by US soldiers serving there, and on the U.S. at large. The event will bring to the hearings Iraq and Afghanistan veterans from all over the country. Photographic and video evidence will supplement their testimony, and there will be panels of scholars, veterans, and journalists to add context including reports on the history of the GI resistance movement and the fight for veterans’ health benefits.