Inaugural Artist Spotlight Event featuring Frank Maza
Frank Maza and his father, Grammy Award winning producer Javier Limón, are currently on a world tour celebrating the release of Frank's debut album, Back Then. Raised between Madrid and Boston, Maza grew up immersed in the music of Bebo Valdés, Paco de Lucía, Nat King Cole, Enrique Morente, and Leonard Cohen. His distinctive voice draws upon these influences, blending poetic storytelling and American songwriting with the rhythms and traditions of the Spanish-speaking world.
Cafe Wha? on November 4 at 7pm.
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The Village, Bob Dylan once said, “is the place to come to escape America.” Even in these challenging times, the Village feels like an island apart – a special oasis where, as Edna St Vincent Millay put it, everyone cares about “art and beauty, and freedom of the mind.” And for 10 days in September – October, The Village Trip once more celebrated all that. Marcel Duchamp and John Sloan’s drunken dream of “a free and independent republic” may not have survived contact with the next day’s grey dawn but its spirit lives on.
Each year, as summer turns to autumn, The Village Trip seeks to honor the unique and important history of “the Village” – Greenwich Village and the East Village/Lower East Side. But as we honor the past with our annual cornucopia of cool, we also celebrate the present and seek to inspire a no less vibrant future, showcasing both new and established talent.
This year’s Village Trip, the eighth, was later than usual, leapfrogging over the Jewish High Holidays to begin on the last weekend of September. It was preceded by Framing the Village, the festival’s annual art show, curated by Village artist and art historian Marc Kehoe and hung this year in the Parish Hall at St Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, where the artists gathered for a celebratory party.
The festival’s theme this year was “Revolutionary Voices,” the Trip’s contribution to USA250, and it sought to celebrate the best of America, a nation built on the friction and fusion of high ideals, and defined by individual liberty, relentless reinvention, pluralism, and that famously enduring sense of optimism. And so many of those who built and shaped these United States had their roots in the Village, a place that has always sought to provoke debate and reject dogma.
It was Jamie Bernstein who launched the proceedings this year with a reprise of her Wonderful Town tour which takes its cue from the musical her father Leonard Bernstein wrote with pals Betty Comden and Adolphe Greene. Musical and theatrical revolutionaries all, they brought a plethora of progressive ideas to their shared endeavor – as did Ruth and Eileen, the sisters at the heart of the story, when they leave their Babbit-y Ohio home for the freedom and excitement of the Village.
Like the tour guide in the musical (“On your left, Washington Square / Right in the heart of Greenwich Village”), Jamie led her party – fueled by goodies from Janie’s Life-Changing Baked Goods – through the crooked streets and into The Village Trip launch party at the Church of the Village, where performers and friends of the Trip gathered for wine and nibbles and a degustation of the festival program. City Council Member Carl Wilson, and Kevin Capuno and Julia Bailey from the Meatpacking District BID, stopped by to wish everyone bon voyage!
Sadly, a nor’easter forced some rescheduling of the opening weekend’s events, but it didn’t dampen the spirits. We the People, Poetica Musica’s opening concert, offered a tour through 250 years of American music, including bon-bons by Barber, Bolcom, Joplin, Gershwin, and Monk.
The weekend opened with the sell-out première of New York City Children’s Theatre’s production of Songs to Grow On, written by Frank Ruiz from a manuscript he’d discovered in Tulsa’s Woody Guthrie Center. Babes in arms, kids with parents and grandparents – everyone loved it!
A lively two-hour discussion as to what the Founding Fathers really meant with the Declaration of Independence—and what it means to us today--returned everyone to the classroom. Following a reading by actor Henry McDaniel, Professor Robert Snyder put every “student” on the spot with sharp and incisive questioning. No slacking!
Greenwich House Music School was packed for a performance by the genre-busting Ahn Trio, joined by guitarist James Moore for Sting – Dusan Bogdanovic’s Prisms-Six Songs By Sting, commissioned by the Ahns in honor of their late mother.
At St Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, Sunday’s afternoon’s concert celebrated a giant among men with Let Freedom Ring: Paul Robeson – His Words, His Music. Created by baritone James C Martin with pianist and music historian Lynn Raley, the program featured leaves from Robeson’s treasured songbook plus settings of “Let America Be America Again,” the 1935 poem by Robeson’s friend and fellow-activist Langston Hughes. Commissioned by the musicians with support from the Roger Shapiro Fund, it featured work by Village Trip Artist Emeritus David Amram and others. Reviewing the concert in Classical Voice North America, Susan Brodie wrote: “After the end of the cycle, Martin sang the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. It felt like the sun breaking through the clouds. The audience then sang along with Martin in the spiritual ‘Jacob’s Ladder,’ an act of soulful solidarity that invoked the spirit of the old Village.” The audience rose to their feet, faces wet, and Brodie concluded: “Let Freedom Sing offered an inspiring portrait of this protean figure and a very satisfying afternoon.”
Back at Greenwich House, The Horszowski Trio premièred 25 Decades, a piano trio composed by William Kenter Anderson, TVT’s Director of Classical and New Music. An Homage to the New York School concluded with John Cage’s Suite for Toy Piano.
At Drom, Janis Siegel and Lauren Kinhan had prepared a nourishing serving of their Vocal Gumbo series, celebrating “Voices of Dissent and Hope.” Among the guests were Antoinette Montague, Theo Bleckmann, Loren Sklamberg and La Tanya Hall.
By Monday, the rain clouds had cleared sufficiently for walking tours to commence. The historic HB Studio was the venue for a discussion, moderated by TVT board member Edith Meeks, about Robeson’s political and artistic journey. Then it was over to the Bitter End for Janie Barnett’s Americana-inflected showcase of songs by Cole Porter. Among the capacity audience: singers Liz Queler and Amanda Homi, and composer Kitty Brazelton.
The Village Trip Lecture – Dorothy Day: A Radical Saint of the City — drew a lively crowd to the Jefferson Market Library where Robert Ellsberg spoke about the bohemian-cum-radical Catholic who is now poised to become “The Venerable Dorothy Day.” Not entirely unrelated and running concurrently was Women’s Work, an evening of music and poetry curated by Joan Forsyth and featuring words by Edna St Vincent Millay and Eleanor Roosevelt among others and the première of Brazelton’s song cycle Sin Ladder, about the Magdalene Laundries. For those in need of a laugh, Stand Up & Be Counted, the annual Village Trip comedy night, directed by Lindsey Barnes and Katie Finn provided plenty.
Two very special events honored downtown’s theatrical revolutions. The first, titled Mapping the Legacy, brought together playwright Barbara Kaplan, actor-producer Alica Kaplan, founder of Danis Arte, and performance artist Lulu Lolo to discuss the Performing Arts Legacy Project, to which they have contributed. Joan Jeffri, the project’s founder, moderated. The next day, La MaMa, with Spiderwoman Theater, partnered with TVT for a remarkable tour of their archives, led by Kylie Goetz and followed by a discussion with Spiderwoman’s Muriel Miguel and some of her collaborators.
David Amram, a living legend if ever there was one, celebrated two musical revolutionaries in their centennial year: John Coltrane and Miles Davis, with whom he had of course jammed. A magnificent evening of music and anecdote, it featured guest performances by Janis Siegel and his frequent compadres Kevin Twigg, Rene Hart, Earl McIntyre, Renee Manning, and Ron Jackson.
America Sings a Siren’s Song showcased the Cygnus Ensemble and friends with three musical interpretations of that old American Dream. These included a scene from Victoria Bond’s opera Sirens inspired by James Joyce’s Ulysses, the setting wittily relocated to a bar. And there were yet more premières at Village Voices, including Scott Wheeler’s Blue Ridge for sax and piano, and Ella Milch-Sheriff’s song cycle Irgendwer – settings for soprano, cello and piano of Village poet Mascha Kaléko, commissioned for The Village Trip by the Roger Shapiro Fund. The closing weekend brought two further classical and new music concerts: Notes from a Life: An Evening with Allen Shawn, and Classical Cool: Ich Bin Ein New Yorker, an orchestral concert for young people hosted by Nina Bernstein Simmons and featuring master percussionist Amos Gabia, and conductor Garrett Keast.
Under perfect blue skies, The Slambovian Circus of Dreams headlined the festival’s signature free concert, held this year on Gansevoort Plaza in the heart of the Meatpacking District. From tots to teens, millennials to old hippies, it seemed everyone was out having fun in the sun as Joziah Longo and his magnificent band transported us all – via “The Trans-Slambovian BiPolar Express” – to a much-needed break in Utopia.
TVT2026 closed in the historic surroundings of the Great Hall at Cooper Union, with the all-star Greenwich Village Folk Festival Live 40th Anniversary Concert. With a score of performers, it was a marathon, but the audience savored every word and chord. When Noel Paul Stookey gathered everyone for the finale of “If I Had a Hammer” and “America the Beautiful” – rewritten as a prayer for God’s grace that “we may renew our Founders’ call… and liberty and justice be the right of one and all” – there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.
Amen to that. Thanks for coming.
We’ll see you next year – dates for your 2027 diaries: Friday, September 17 – Sunday, September 26.
Liz & Cliff
Jamie Kalikow
Jamie Kalikow is a City-based photographer specializing in music and street photography. She graduated from Syracuse University Newhouse School of Public Communications with a degree in photojournalism. Directly after graduating, she moved to Greenwich Village and has maintained an apartment on Bleecker Street since 1979. From the late 1970s till the present, she has photographed the streets of New York City and in the last decade photographed and videotaped over a thousand NYC music events.
Robert Helman
Robert Helman is a city-based photographer covering events and rallies. While not shooting professionally, his background includes experience and continuing education classes from the School of Visual Arts in NYC.
THE VILLAGE TRIP READING LIST
A selection from the reading list compiled for The Village Trip by Three Lives & Company, Booksellers
The Village Trip has been named
Best Urban Celebration Event 2025 and
Best Urban Festival 2025 – USA
in the LUXElife Magazine Travel & Tourism Awards 2025
