• Tue Aug 01 2017
  • 8:00 pm

  • Main Hall
  • Hurray for the Riff Raff, with Becca Mancari

Hurray for the Riff Raff, with Becca Mancari

Collective Concerts presents
HURRAY FOR THE RIFF RAFF (Alynda Segarra)
with opening act Becca Mancari
Tuesday, August 1, 2017
in The Great Hall’s Main Hall
Tickets online $20, also at Rotate This and Soundscapes
Doors 8 pm | 19+
Join the Facebook event

Alynda Lee Segarra, the creative force behind Hurray for the Riff Raff, spent her formative years crisscrossing the country on greyhounds and freight trains. She climbed from the streets of New Orleans to the airwaves of NPR with a washboard and a banjo, a Horatio Alger narrative for the Americana set. Her last LP, Small Town Heroes, felt like a thesis presentation from a student of American folk music. She’d spent years studying the form and its practitioners, a product of a community that helped lift her from street corners and coffee shops to international tours and a record contract. While searching for herself, she also imitated others, living inside classic folk, roots, and country songs while shaping her own powerful voice.

In that sense, The Navigator (her 2017 6th album which will be showcased at Toronto’s The Great Hall show)  represents a departure. She hasn’t abandoned those sounds, rather she’s graduated to something singular. It’s roots music for the immigrant ID, a folk concept album from a Nuyorican runaway who grew up obsessed with West Side Story before being liberated by Bikini Kill. They lay bare the conceit in the album’s Playbill-themed packaging: The songs are presented in two “Acts” that follow her alter ego, a Puerto Rican street kid named Navita Milagros Negrón, who visits a bruja at the end of Act I looking for an escape from the oppressive confines of her city. When she wakes up from the bruja’s spell at the start of Act II (40 years later), everything she knew is gone, and she begins to realize what she’s lost. — Pitchfork

Listen to Hurray for the Riff Raff’s official video for “The Navigator,” here.

BECCA MANCARI
Becca Mancari is a singer-songwriter and traveller currently living in Nashville, TN. Following her first single, “Summertime Mama,” her first full-length album is expected to be released in 2017. www.beccamancari.com

www.hurrayfortheriffraff.com| Facebook @hurrayfortheriffraff | Twitter @HFTRR | Instagram @hurrayfortheriffraff