MUSIC TO THEIR EARS
Organizers more than pleased with success of Levitt AMP Series at River Island Park
WOONSOCKET — The Mortimer & Mimi Levitt Foundation invested $25,000 in grant funding for a series of 10 music concerts in River Island Park this summer and on Friday the foundation’s executive director, Sharon Yazowski, came calling on the city to find out how it all went.
She was happy to learn, of course, that an active group of volunteers working for NeighborWorks Blackstone River Valley, the grant recipient, had pulled off the concert series with great success.
She even got to see Friday evening’s concert with its line-up of three performing acts, Grace & Gravity of Providence, Emily Luther – a graduate of Woonsocket High School and a contestant on The Voice – and the headliner band, Quincy Mumford and friends from New Jersey.
“I love the energy I found here, the imagination here,” Yazowski said as her visit came to a close Friday evening. “Everyone I met today is committed to creating a new chapter here that is centered around the city’s history but also seeks to bring everyone together in creating strategies that promote opportunity for everyone,” Yazowski said.
The Levitt AMP Series (AMP meaning Amplify, Music, Place) is intended to draw people to little-used parks or other public spaces in a community and highlight them as valuable gathering spots with a series of 10 professional-style concerts.
The Levitt Foundation also supports
similar concert series in established, permanent, community concert venues, which in 2018, meant funding concerts in a total of 26 communities vnationwide over the 10-week concert season run.
“The mission is to bring people together who otherwise would not have a shared experience, and music is the connection,” Yazowski said.
The local venue benefits by the concerts bringing in people to a place they might not normally visit and possibly end up visiting several times during the series.
The Levitt Foundation is a musician-friendly organization and Yazowski said the concerts are intended to have a professional level light and sound equipment to make certain that the performing artists feel “great” while performing on the AMP stage “from beginning to end.”
Hopefully, the concert series will remain in peoples’ minds after they are over and generate future interest in the venues where they were held, she explained. “It re-energizes the space so that it becomes an ongoing destination,” Yazowski said.
As part of Friday night’s concert, Emily Luther planned to sing two songs, “Lovesong,” by The Cure, and “Edge of Glory” by Lady Gaga, in yet another of her back-home performances.
“I am really excited for the city to have something like this,” she said. “It shows what the city has to offer and it is all about showcasing the talent that we have here,” Luther, a 2010 graduate of Woonsocket High School, said.
With trips to California, where the Levitt Foundation is also based, already under her belt as part of her appearances on ‘The Voice’ and other performing endeavors, Luther is putting that experience to use in pursuing her singing career here in the East. She has a benefit concert scheduled for Sept. 8 at the Greenwich Odeum in East Greenwich for the East Greenwich Animal Protection League.
She was also to announce during her performance Friday that she will be performing as the headliner act for Sunday night of Autumnfest, the night fireworks are scheduled, from 7 to 9 p.m.
She has already arranged to for a band to join her on the stage, and Luther said she looking forward to putting on a lively and fun show at the city’s premiere local festival Columbus Day weekend.
“That has a been a childhood dream of mine, to perform on the main stage at Autumnfest,” she said. The Official Blues Brothers Revue will be performing on the Autumnfest stage Saturday night during this year’s festival.
With just one more Levitt Amp concert series event to host next Friday night, Meghan Rego, director of resource development & communications for Neigh- borWorks, said it looks like the concert series was a local winner.
“I think it went amazingly well,” Rego said. “we had nine rain-free evenings and that is pretty much all you can ask for when you are putting on an outdoor concert each week for 10 weeks.”
The idea behind the Levitt series is to build community with free live music, and Rego said she believes the local editions of the concerts did just that.
“I really believe that has happened here in this park,” she said of the River Island Park concerts.
The concert series was made possible by the initial award of a $25,000 grant by the Levitt Foundation which NeighborWorks then matched with $27,000 in donations from 20 concert series sponsors, she noted. The City of Woonsocket, which provided the River Island Park venue, also made a substantial in kind donation to put the concerts on stage, she added.
The funding went to hiring the performing bands, renting the required lighting and sound equipment and also purchasing items needed to set up the park and to promote the events such as posters and signage.
In the end, the series offered local residents a wide variety of musical performances from several different genres and also brought people together to enjoy something new, she said.
“We finish the series next week with a Rhode Island week and will have several local groups performing,” Rego noted. The Eastern Medicine Singers Native drum group directed by Daryl Black Eagle Jameson of Woonsocket will start out and be followed by the Boo City, the headliner band from Providence that performs “a little rock and a little soul,” Rego said.
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