Guatemalan Grammy winner is playing in Springfield this week
Mercedes Escobar, a country-blues singer also from Guatemala, will join her.
The show, for which tickets can be reserved for free online, will begin at 7 p.m.
Moreno, who was born and raised in Guatemala, mixes her Latin roots with soul, blues and jazz inspirations. She has released nine albums and has been nominated for three Grammys, winning one. She was nominated in 2017 for Best Latin Pop Album for 'Ilusión,' in 2023 for Best Latin Rock or Alternative Album for 'Alegoria,' and finally, earned her first Grammy Award in 2024 for Best Latin Pop Album for 'X Mi (Vol. 1).'
Moreno also has earned two Latin Grammys: the Best New Artist Award in 2013 and Best Traditional Tropical Album in 2023.
In addition to her album accolades, Moreno's music has appeared in TV and film, including 'Parks and Recreation' and 'Orange is The New Black.' She also wrote 'A Song in My Heart' for the 2022 movie 'The Valet,' for which she was nominated for a Guild of Music Supervisors Award alongside the likes of Taylor Swift, Rihanna and Lady Gaga.
Tickets to Thursday's show at the Hope Center for the Arts can be reserved online for free, though a donation of $25 is suggested to support the Springfield Jazz & Roots Festival. Premiere seating, with a reserved spot in the first three rows, can be purchased for $35.
The Springfield Jazz and Roots Festival continues Friday at 7 p.m. with the Jo Sallins Experience, also at the Hope Center for the Arts, before kicking off on Saturday at noon with a day of live music in downtown Springfield.
For more information about the festival and for a complete lineup of this year's music acts, go online to springfieldjazzfest.com.
Read the original article on MassLive.
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Abel Meeropol, a New York City teacher and songwriter who used the pen name Lewis Allan, wrote 'Strange Fruit' after seeing a photograph of a lynching that shocked and haunted him: 'Black body swinging in the Southern breeze / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.' Holiday's rendition of Meeropol's song remains as stunning – and searing – today as when it was first recorded. 'It hits, hard,' syndicated columnist Samuel Grafton wrote soon after the record's release in 1939. 'It is as if a game of let's pretend had ended.' I'm a scholar of American religion, literature, and the arts, and I'm interested in the ways that even powerfully secular works draw energy from religious narratives of justice, injustice, truth-telling and redemption. I find 'Strange Fruit' a resonant example. Like so many composers whose songs Holiday recorded – George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern – Meeropol came from a family of Jewish immigrants to America who fled antisemitic violence in Europe. Two Great Migrations defined America in the early 1900s: rural South to industrial North, and Old World to New. Both were driven, in part, by the desire to leave racial terror behind. Together, these migrations enabled some of the most enduring musical collaborations of the 20th century. Thematically, the joint productions of Black and Jewish musical artists – Broadway productions of 'Show Boat' and 'Porgy and Bess,' Holiday's performances with Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw – tended to sidestep the brute realities of prejudice, focusing instead on the luxury of ordinary happiness and unhappiness. 'Strange Fruit' was different. The song gazes unflinchingly on the 'strange fruit' of the title: hanged, burned and mangled flesh left to rot on a tree. 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According to the Christian story, Jesus was crucified, buried and rose from the dead to redeem humankind from sin. In Catholic settings, one is more likely to find the 'filled' cross: the body of Jesus with arms outstretched, hands and feet nailed to the wood. The crucifix emphasizes the agony of Jesus' death and his solidarity with all who suffer. The filled cross also communicates the message that the crucifixion of Christ – God in human form – is not a once-and-for-all event. 'When [Meeropol] showed me that poem,' Holiday said of 'Strange Fruit,' 'I dug it right off' because it 'seemed to spell out all the things that had killed Pop.' Her father, jazz guitarist Clarence Holiday, died at 39 while touring in Texas. She believed he'd been refused lifesaving care because of his race. Holiday's 'Strange Fruit' evokes the filled cross in its testament to lynching as ongoing reality. 'It still depresses me every time I sing it,' Holiday said in her autobiography. 'But I have to keep singing it … the things that killed him are still happening in the South.' Journalist Vernon Jarrett recalled seeing Holiday perform in 1947. She was 'singing this song as though this was for real, as though she had just witnessed a lynching,' Jarrett said of 'Strange Fruit.' 'There was a sense of resignation, as if 'these people are going to have power for a long time and I can't do a damn thing about it except put it in a song.'' Keeping company with brokenness, rather than transcending or overcoming it, also describes Holiday's way of relating to others in precarious circumstances. Her Harlem apartment, she said, was a 'combination YMCA, boardinghouse for broke musicians, soup kitchen for anyone with a hard-luck story, community center, and after-hours joint.' A 1943 papal encyclical described the church itself similarly, as a place of shared pain, solace and sustenance. 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