Philly Soul sensation Vivian Green

Frou Frou’s Imogen Heap and Guy Sigsworth

Philly Soul, Trip Hop and Americana Music Fill Final Days of Music Café

As record crowds filled Main Street at Park City’s Sundance Film Festival, record crowds also filled the main seats at the ASCAP Music Café. The last three days of the eight-day series continued to highlight some of ASCAP’s most exciting and entertaining members from across the musical spectrum.

From Brooklyn’s HEM, an 8-piece Americana orchestra, to the sultry and searing neo-soul singer/songwriter Vivian Green, to the saucy jazz/pop stylings of Judith Owen, to the innovative trip hop songs of Frou Frou, the ASCAP Music Café was the place to find some of the best writing and performing at the festival, and that’s counting the hundreds of films showing around town. It continued to be one of the most popular draws at the festival.

Pictured (l-r) are Harry Shearer, Judith Owen, Vivian Green, Paul Brady and ASCAP’s Loretta Munoz.

Actor/Directors Forrest Whitaker and Steve Buscemi stopped by to catch a few performances on Thursday. Judith Owen’s husband, Harry Shearer, was also on hand to see her performance. Writer/actor/director Shearer is best known as Spinal Tap’s bassist Derek Smalls, as well as the voice behind several characters on “The Simpsons.” He has recently completed a comic musical based on the life of J. Edgar Hoover and A Mighty Wind, the mockumentary film about folk music directed by Christopher Guest which is due out in April.

Music in the Lens

Tupac: Resurrection Director Lauren Lazin’s Tupac: Resurrection is an extraordinary documentary about the the late pivotal hip hop artist, ASCAP member Tupac Shakur. The film, which had a special screening at this year’s film festival, is narrated entirely by Tupac himself, through a variety of interviews, journal readings, poetry performances, private home movies and never-before-seen concert footage captured before his untimely death. Lazin captures the rise of this cultural phenomenon, the son of former Black Panther Afeni Shakur, and how he captured the imagination of an entire generation. Intimate, entertaining, inspiring and soulful, the film shows that rap and the indomitable spirit of one of its biggest stars is very much alive.