ERIC KUHN & ANITRA BROOKS “Two of Us March 13, 2012

Anitra Brooks and Eric will be doing some songs by him, some by her, some by them both, and some by others. An obscure Laura Nyro song, an equally obscure Nina Simone. Between the two of us them will be piano, guitar, ukelele, bass, and two voices. They will do songs from Eric’s recent album Eden @ the Coffeehouse and from Anitra’s EP called Flood. Influences on display will include blues, island, folk, a little jazz.
Anitra and Eric met when she was an Oddfellows Playhouse kid and Eric was musical director/composer for Midsummer Night’s Dream. They met again twenty years later at an Artfarm production: this time As You Like It. See, it’s all about Shakespeare, or maybe about Dic Wheeler…. We’ll be playing a couple of songs Eric wrote for As You Like It, and two others from other OP shows.

Extra tidbits:
Anitra in a blues-rock-giant head-puppet costume band called The Big Nazo. Eric was in a power trio called the Bus. They’ll also be doing some material from Eric’s late-80′s cassette album
“The Blues for You”, a few copies of which are for sale at The Buttonwood Tree

Eric Ward Kuhn is a multi-instrumentalist, singer, and composer. He played his first professional gigs in and around the Bronx in 1975, as bassist with an outfit called The Destinaires, which was four guys out front singing and bass/drums/guitar in back. They had started out as an a capella doo-wop act and swung with the times; while Eric was with them they were doing Doobies classics, Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes, and also the Hustle, which was just out on the charts. They wore polyester and platform shoes. Eric had to join the musician’s union to play some of the rooms, but somehow this did not mean getting union scale.
Eric left the band to attend Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut- where he resides to this day. He knocked around out west for a while; at one point he was in a country-rock trio in Oregon called Cascade Freedom with two guys who both had pregnant wives named Dolores. Never having even smooched with anyone named Dolores, he felt very left out.
Back in Connecticut he became a sort of house musician for a youth theatre outfit called Oddfellows Playhouse: for a while there in the 1980’s he was their go-to guy for a musical director when they did a musical and they also hired him to actually write music for some of these productions. Four of the songs on Eden @ the Coffeehouse were written for Oddfellows shows.
Eric put an album out on cassette in 1988 called The Blues for You, which will soon be digitized and re-issued. He played in a trio called the Bus which put out an album in the same period, and there is a lot more music already recorded and on its way to the website.
Eric was a columnist for the local paper in Middletown- his picture, his by-line, the whole bit- until he got tired of not getting paid. At that rate he figures he’d rather blog, and so he will. He is also interested in anagrams. He thinks his next album will be called Scion of the Sonic Icons….

ANITRA BROOKS …

isten to tracks from Flood on MySpace
www.myspace.com/anitrabrooks

Singer, songwriter and musician Anitra Brooks (www.anitrabrooksmusic.com) is happy to bring her music back to her hometown. Her debut EP, Flood, was released in 2008 and she is currently in pre-production for her new LP. She plays the ukelele, banjo, tar-rine and is presently a student of the didgeridoo. Her voice has been likened to those of Ani DiFranco, Cassandra Wilson, Tracy Chapman and even Dolly Parton but Anitra is quite certain she sounds like none of these lovely artists. The unique timbre of her rich contralto is alluring and resonant in songs that span jazz, blues, folk and pop music. While Flood swelled with themes of water, weather, dreams and metamorphosis, her new LP will smolder, burning with insatiable tongues of flame.
Brooks is also a professional actor (www.anitrabrooks.com) with major stage and television credits. If you watch a lot of TV, you can see her in commercials for Edward Jones and Time Warner Cable. She lives in Greenwich with her husband and son.