Voices Café Presents Cricket Tell the Weather

Voices Café Helps Refugees in Bridgeport

Cricket Tell the Weather will be performing at Voices Café on Saturday, May 14 at 8:00pm. The concert will benefit the International Institute of Connecticut, Inc. (IICONN) resettling refugees in Bridgeport. 

Voices Café is located at The Unitarian Church in Westport, 10 Lyons Plains Road, Westport, CT 06880. Seating is cabaret style. Everyone is welcome to bring your own beverages and snacks. Table reservations are accepted for a minimum of 4 people. Contact David Vita at david@uuwestport.org or call 203.227.7205 x14. Doors open at 7:30.  Purchase tickets at: http://voicescafe.org/show/cricket-tell-the-weather/.

Cricket is a Brooklyn-based string band with its roots deep in the bluegrass tradition and its branches stretching wherever the sun shines.

Winners of the 2013 Fresh Grass Award, Cricket combines indie folk songwriting and traditional bluegrass instruments. As a listener, you can expect Cricket’s core to beat with the heart of a restless spirit determined to play it out and move along. Whether you want to call it a folk roots string band, or an indie bluegrass quartet, it’s going to be personal in a way that stretches against categories and familiar in a way that honors those who have come before — most certainly, it will take you on a trip.

Award-winning songwriter Andrea Asprelli (fiddle) came to the East Coast from Colorado’s front range, and was shaped by local bluegrass communities scattered across Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York, before co-founding Cricket Tell the Weather and setting up shop in Brooklyn, NY.

Winner of the 2011 Podunk Songwriting Competition, Andrea is joined by Doug Goldstein on banjo, Jeff Picker on guitar, Sam Weber on bass, and Dave Goldenberg on mandolin.

The band has twice been awarded the Neighborhood Arts & Heritage Grant from the City of Bridgeport, and is actively involved in providing bluegrass workshops to students of all ages under their “American Roots Revival” workshop series. In 2014, Cricket released its independent eponymous debut album of original music recorded at Signature Sounds studio in Pomfret Center, CT.

The International Institute of Connecticut, Inc. (IICONN) will resettle 115 refugees this year in Bridgeport, the majority from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Colombia. IICONN staff and volunteers welcome refugees, arriving with not much more than the clothes on their back, into their new community turning empty apartments into homes.

Turning a place into a home means transporting furniture, household items, and other donations from one location to another and then to the apartment that must be set up in advance of a refugee's arrival, often that very same day. Right now, IICONN relies on staff or volunteer transport for this. Voices Café will raise funds to provide IICONN with a trailer to enable the pre-arrival case manager to transport and store items more easily and more efficiently, thus helping to ensure that it is able to set up welcoming homes on time for all newly arriving refugees.

IICONN is grateful to The Unitarian Church of Westport for dedicating the proceeds from its Voices Cafe concert on May 14 to assist IICONN with the purchase of a trailer. This one piece of equipment will make a huge difference in our work! Purchase tickets at: http://voicescafe.org/show/cricket-tell-the-weather/.

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Submitted by Westport, CT

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