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"You
will play like the water rolls,
like the wind gets wild
and the night
grows cold, and heals the ground and the cracks of day,
comes out like
a ray of the sun on fire."
© Judith-Kate Friedman
from A Spider's Tale
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Welcome Home concert Port Townsend click here
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2/28 photo |
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An award-winning vocalist, songwriter, and producer, Judith-Kate Friedman is a creative catalyst. She performs internationally, drawing diverse audiences into soulful celebrations of courage, compassion, grace, and groove. With a poet's eye on the world, and a folk/roots sound sprung from passion, improvisation and tradition, Friedman affirms heritage, justice, and the powers to change and to heal. Her eclectic concerts, intergenerational collaborations, and artist-in-residency programs awaken and honor the inner - and the collective - voice.
Born in New York City, Friedman's musical heritage roots in Yiddish folk song, Broadway, Belafonte, Vivaldi, and doo-wop and threads through studies in world music, folklore, and Karnatic (S. Indian) voice at Oberlin College and Conservatory, to the beauty of the California coast, jazz, improvisation, public radio, and eight years touring with Jewish/world music acapella ensemble Vocolot. In 2006, she moved to Port Townsend, on the Pacific Northwest's Olympic Peninsula where the mountains, sea, forests and community of artists now feed the finely-etched images, lyric melodies, humor and life-stories in her songs.
Judith-Kate has released two critically acclaimed solo CDs, "Count Me In" and "Bigger Things" and the award-winning "Island on a Hill" project featuring Singers and Songwriters of the Jewish Home, average age 87, featured in Nathan Friedkin's internationally acclaimed documentary "A 'Specially Wonderful Affair." She is currently working on two long-awaited recording projects - one of original songs and one of traditional and new Jewish music. She has also produced festivals and tribute events, and creates songs and musical works on commission.
In addition to performing, touring and producing, Friedman serves as founding director of Songwriting Works™, a non-profit educational organization that engages hundreds of elders, families, and health/arts providers each year in giving voice to their lives through songwriting and performance. A recipient of the Society for the Arts in Healthcare's 2008 Blair J. Sadler International Healing Arts Award, and the 2007 MetLife Foundation/American Society on Aging MindAlert award for Innovative Brain Fitness Enhancing Programs for Older Adults, she offers keynote presentations and trainings for arts, health, and education professionals and family/ kinship caregivers internationally.
An ethnographic study of Friedman's Songwriting Works process by Dr. Theresa Allison,
M.D. M. Music, is published in the chapter: "Songwriting in the Nursing Home: Transcending Boundaries of Institutionalization through Music," in The Oxford Handbook of Medical Ethnomusicology (Oxford University Press, 2008). Songwriting Works' 2009 Olympic Peninsula program is supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
For more information about Songwriting Works or to contribute, visit: www.songwritingworks.org
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