Garland Jeffreys Trio In the Loft

Friday, December 28, 2018 at 8PM at SOPAC

The legendary Garland Jeffreys doesn’t fit into neat little boxes: his thoughtful, passionate songs mix New Wave, Soul, Reggae, Garage Rock, Doo-wop and Latin influences to create a deeply personal hybrid that reflects his own multi-ethnic roots.  A New York native and veteran of the fertile mid-‘70s and early ‘80s scene that included peers like Bruce Springsteen, Lou Reed, Mink DeVille and Phoebe Snow, Garland Jeffreys’ songs range from streetwise urban-romantic love songs to penetrating social critiques tackling issues of race in America, especially on his album Don’t Call Me Buckwheat which has been called “one of the most important, hard hitting records since Marvin Gaye’s masterpiece What’s Going On (Stereo Review). With songs covered by artists as diverse as punk pioneers The Circle Jerks, neo-folk band Vetiver and Jazz trumpet great Randy Brecker, Garland Jeffreys is truly unclassifiable.

After a long hiatus, Garland Jeffreys has self-released three stellar albums over the last 7 years: The King of In Between, was featured on numerous 2011 year-end best of lists, including those of Rolling Stone, MSN, and NPR, and been recognized as “a late career masterpiece” (Minneapolis Star Tribune). Truth Serum in 2013 is “an album that’s urgent and immediate — much like NYC itself — but also filled with seven decades of gritty, street-smart attitude (American Songwriter), and 2017’s 14 Steps To Harlem had critics raving “more proof that he deserves musical comparisons that fall somewhere between Van Morrison, Bruce Springsteen and Graham Parker” (Pop Matters) and “shows the now 73-year old songwriter still reveling in the kind of wide-ranging songwriting that has today become a lost art” (Stereophile).

Garland Jeffreys’ songs have been featured in numerous films and television shows, most recently in the Netflix series The Get Down, The Deuce and Thirteen Reasons Why.

A proud inductee of the Long Island Music Hall of Fame, a New York Blues Hall of Famer and a recent addition to the prestigious Yale University Oral Music Archives, Jeffreys and his team are crowd funding a feature-length documentary, with interviews already filmed with Laurie Anderson, critic David Hajdu and Harvey Keitel.