For the first time, Frank Moyo and Amanda Pascali performing together in Toronto, Ontario.
Frank Moyo is a slow player in a fast world. The Canadian-Italian singer-songwriter and guitarist serenades like a busking bard of the 21st century. His latest releases “Alla Nostra” and “Toronto to Milano” have already cultivated a reputation for Moyo in his hometown. But describing the singer as a suave, smooth and sultry voice with soft hands on the strings is too simple. Discussing feeling with the artist is more candid. “I want people to imagine they are on a beach in Italy listening to my music,” he says. But while one track might take you to the beach, “another might take you into a car going 180 mph.”
Growing up in Toronto Moyo first learned chords as a child, picking up what he could from family, friends and later the live shows he could get into. It wasn’t long until his bandmates and him were sneaking into their own performances. With a taste that meanders from Motown to James Brown and Isaac Hayes to Italian icons like Lucio Dalla and Toto Cutugno, Moyo’s sound is hard to pin down. The folk-informed rhythms that Moyo employs on tracks like “Boys of Major” mingle with pop sensibilities and the laws of ancient attraction that seem as rooted in Greek mythology as they do Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Rhythm Blues.”
As things speed up in an industry that’s begging to slow down, Frank Moyo is a voice of reason, and it sounds good.
As the rising voice of America’s most ethnically diverse generation of young people, 26-year-old Amanda Pascali writes songs that speak to the experience of growing up as a first-generation American. In 2023 her popularity exploded on social media following several viral videos of her song translations. Amanda’s music, now coined, Immigrant American Folk delivers a powerful narrative on being, “too foreign for here, too foreign for home, and never enough for both.”
The internationally acclaimed, bilingual singer/songwriter and 2021 Houston Chronicle “Musician of the Year,” was born in Queens, New York, and is based between Houston, Texas and Palermo, Sicily. Amanda has released music and performed internationally, from the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. to the European Union Parliament in Brussels and across the globe. Her latest work, To Sing and Recount, is a project to translate and revitalize the Sicilian folk songs endorsed by the US State Department and the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Blending folk/Americana influences with southern Italian and Latin rhythms Pascali’s songs are powerful tales of America told through the eyes of immigrants and those who have always felt like the “other”. With a father who was thrown out of his home country for rebelling against the government and an immigrant mother who built a career from scratch in 1980s Brooklyn, Amanda was driven from a young age to be a messenger of her family’s stories and diaspora.
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