Ollin To Perform at Lummis Day Festival, June 3
Following appearances at the Wiltern Theater and San Francisco's Fillmore Auditorium, Ollin, one of Los Angeles' top emerging alternative bands, will join Quetzal and the Susie Hansen Latin Band as performers at the second annual Lummis Day: The Festival of Northeast L.A. on Sunday June 3 at Sycamore Grove Park, (4900 N. Figueroa Street).
Admission to all Lummis Day events--at Lummis Home and Sycamore Grove Park--is free. The Festival, a celebration of the city's diverse culture and rich history, will be presented by Occidental College and will begin with an 11:00 am poetry reading at nearby Lummis Home. Lummis Day activities will continue at 12:30 pm in Sycamore Grove Park, where music, dance performances, puppetry, art exhibitions and food service will continue through 7:00 pm. A broad cross-section of the city’s cultural traditions will be represented at the community-building event.
Ollin (Aztec for movement/earthquakes) has been recognized for their inventive hybridization of Chicano rock and world music. The group incorporates Celtic, African and a potpourri of other world musical forms into their music into an instrumentation that has its heart in the music of rural Mexico and its spirit in the post-punk musical uproar of North American and European cities.
Ollin used Tex-Mex barn burners and stomping Jarocho tunes as a musical point of departure, but as the group matured, they began to look beyond the walls of their own culture for inspiration. Ollin soon discovered musical and social parallels in African, Irish, Klezmer, and other world genres.
They have appeared on the college circuit with Ozomatli and have had dates with Lucinda Williams, Los Lobos, Meshel Ndegeocello, and most recently The Pogues - all at San Francisco’s fabled Fillmore Auditorium. Ollin’s impression on The Pogues was so significant that the group called their booking agent and demanded that Ollin open for them in Los Angeles at The Wiltern Theatre in November 2006.
The group's most recent recording, "San Patricios" pays homage to the Irish soldiers of the 1847 Mexican American war. The record also features songs about one of their favorite subjects – L.A.'s backdoor politics and the seedy side of the city's history.
Lummis Day takes its name from Charles Fletcher Lummis, who joined the L.A. Times as the paper’s first city editor in 1876. Lummis was also one of the city’s first librarians, founded the Southwest Museum and helped introduce the concept of multi-culturalism to Southern California.
Lummis Day: The Festival of Northeast Los Angeles is presented by Occidental College and sponsored by the Arroyo Seco Neighborhood Council, the Historic Highland Park Neighborhood Council, the Glassell Park Neighborhood Council, the Greater Cypress Park Neighborhood Council, the Autry Center for the American West, public radio station KPFK 90.7, the Arroyo Seco Journal and the Boulevard Sentinel with the support of the North Figueroa Association, Los Angeles City Council Districts 1 and 14, SIPA (Search to Involve Pilipino Americans, the Department of Recreation and Parks, the Historical Society of Southern California, Heritage Square Museum, the MTA, the Highland Park Heritage Trust, the Arroyo Arts Collective, the L.A. Poetry Festival, Rock Rose Productons, Orchestrada Audio and other community organizations
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Contact: Eliot Sekuler 818-535-9178