Joe Craven's Group Is Going To Be Filmed By PBS!

FANTASTIC!:

Musician Joe Craven — perhaps most familiar in Davis for his annual appearances as emcee and performer at the “Home for the Holidays” concerts each December, benefiting the Davis School Arts Foundation — will give a pair of solo shows this week: one at The Palms Playhouse in Winters, the other at the Center for the Arts in Grass Valley.

Both shows will be recorded for an upcoming broadcast on PBS television, and Craven will be sharing the bill with singer/songwriter/humorist and storyteller Antsy McClain.

Craven has lived in various parts of the Davis area for years; he currently makes his home in Dixon. His son Cody is a recent graduate of Da Vinci Charter Academy (and starred as Jean Valjean in a Davis High School production of “Les Miserables”); his daughter Hattie just started seventh grade in Da Vinci’s junior high program at Emerson, and is enjoying the acclaim generated by the recent release of her debut album “Eleven,” which was recorded when she was 11 years old. (She’s since turned 12.)

...“I love giving people the ‘ah ha’ moment,” he continued. “When education is at it’s best, it is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. My work as an educator is like that. Folk music is social music, a social process, and an informal one.”

...Filmmaker Peter Berkow will be filming the concerts featuring Craven and McClain, and editing the recorded concerts for a program that will be distributed to PBS affiliates sometime during 2014.

More than anything, Craven said, he wants people to experience “the joy of making music. It needs to be something that enhances your life, and gives you a sense of joy.”