From a
Liyana press release. You can see a clip from the planned documentary, "iThemba: My Hope," a documentary in progress about Liyana by filmmaker Roger Ross Williams, on
YouTube.
The John Lennon Educational Tour Bus is pleased to announce Liyana's first-ever American tour featuring bi-coastal performances at a wide range of venues, deepening their mission of growing audiences for the arts by offering a memorable introduction to Afro-fusion music, by an award winning band from Zimbabwe.
Liyana steps off the plane in The Big Apple with their first east coast performance, in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, located in the heart of New York's African Diaspora, where they will share the stage with the Inspiration Gospel Ensemble. As part of their west coast tour, they will appear at MacWorld and NAMM with additional performances at the House of Blues and Disneyland.
Other tour venues include Columbia University, the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, Roxbury Arts Center, and Rutgers University, among others. Stops in Los Angeles, Oakland, Newark, Harlem, and mid-town Manhattan, bring Liyana into contact with public school students where they will perform with local talent and celebrities.
Liyana's eight band members, ranging in age from 17 to 23, are self-taught musicians with severe physical challenges. They met as students at King George VI School in Bulowayo, Zimbabwe, where disabled children and their families are historically shunned because of widespread misconceptions about perceived connections between disability and witchcraft.
Lead singer, Prudence, is an electrifying performer whose remarkable voice amplifies a life experience that has been made both rich and challenging by a condition known as Arthrogryphosis. As Liyana's most experienced musician - a singer, songwriter, arranger, choreographer, and lyricist - she has already received international recognition and has been compared to South African Singer and Civil Rights Activist Miriam Makeba.
The other seven band members specialize in marimbas, African drums, shakers, and keyboards. Their work fuses myriad geographic, cultural, and musical genres including gospel, reggae, and traditional Zimbabwean Shona music, among others. Liyana performs in Shona and Ndebele, Prudence's native tongue, and in 5 additional languages - English, Dutch, German, Hebrew, and Spanish.
The LIYANA 2009 USA Tour is co-produced by the John Lennon Educational Tour Bus and the PG Family Foundation, with additional support from the MCJ/Amelior Foundation, and the Joseph S. and Diane H. Steinberg Charitable Trust, the National Association of Music Merchants, and Apple Corporation, among many others. For full sponsorship information, visit http://www.lennonbus.org/.
From a Liyana press release. You can see a clip from the planned documentary, "iThemba: My Hope," a documentary in progress about Liyana by filmmaker Roger Ross Williams, on YouTube.
