Gillen & Turk

"A winning match! Fred and Matt are two of the best singer-songwriters around, and together they're even more dynamic and compelling." —Lisa Grey, leading radio consultant

During the last five years both Fred Gillen Jr. and Matt Turk have engaged audiences and refined their art in the Hudson Valley's fertile singer-songwriter scene north of New York City. On numerous occasions the two performers shared the stage and eventually became close friends. After months of rehearsals, several impressive gigs around New England and world-wide notice in an Associated Press article that featured the duo auditioning for the Metropolitan Transit Authority in Manhattan, the news is finally out: Gillen & Turk are twisting their talent together into something new and exciting.

"There's so much energy and fun playing with Fred, it's like I'm starting out all over again," says Turk. Augmented by drummer Andy LaDue and multi-instrumentalist Steve Kirkman from Hope Machine, the Woody Guthrie tribute band, Gillen & Turk present both their acoustic and electric repertoire in a fashion that bends toward the recognizable folk-rock genre without losing any respective idiosyncrasies. Harmonies abound, along with singing that's tough, sincere, full of heart and soul. Guitars are front and center. There is also some spirited playing of the washboard and mandolin. Gillen concurs: "This is the kind of 'meeting of the muses' I've always hoped and waited for."

Gillen's chrome-rimmed specs give him a downtown Manhattan image, but he loves them for their durability through the bumpy, this-way and that-way nature of his musical career. A Hudson Valley native, he took up the electric bass guitar first and landed in a prog-rock outfit before ending up in the Rain Deputies, one of New York's top bands in the early-1990s. Always a voracious reader, Gillen's literary interests became manifested in songwriting, and by the time he cut his first solo CD, Intentions as Big as the Sky, in 1997, his ability to stir listeners with the power of his words and performances was obvious. The album's lead track, "Face of Love," inspired by the AIDS-related death of his foster sister, became a touchstone hit on the folk circuit, and from this elegiac song Gillen's reputation grew.

Since his recording debut Gillen has independently released four more solo CDs and two EPs, including his latest, Gone Gone Gone. The readers of the Westchester Weekly voted him "Best Folk Artist" three consecutive years, and he was also a recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts grant. In 2003 he also co-founded the aforementioned Hope Machine, which released its first CD, March, in November 2006. Gillen has also served as president of Tribes Hill, the singer-songwriter collective based in Upstate New York.

Matt Turk, like Gillen, can mesmerize audiences with his idealistic storytelling. A soulful vocalist who has been playing guitar and mandolin since his teens, Turk has been adeptly combining various music styles since the early 1990s, when he had a run at rock stardom with The Hour, one of the leading proponents of the jam-happy sound that grew out the Manhattan club scene. He then teamed up with world famous folk music icon Pete Seeger as part of "The Street Singers," a group that taught folk music to schoolchildren and others in and around New York City.

Putting his career on hold for three years to work for God's Love-We Deliver, a not-for-profit grassroots group that brought meals to homebound AIDS sufferers and their caregivers, Turk returned to the tuneful arts in 1996. Since then he has released three albums, including 2002's highly-acclaimed What Gives, and his latest, Washington Arms, which showcases Matt's indie- and alt-rock prowess. In October 2006 he released the "free" digital single, "The Fog of War," which featured musical contributions from Seeger and multi-instrumentalist Rob Morsberger.

Turk has also spent a good deal of time researching Jewish folk music from the Middle East and North Africa in an attempt to keep ancient melodies and songs alive. These efforts led him to co-found the world music group Mandolin Caravan with drummer Kevin Hupp; their first album, Desert Soul, was released in 2003.

For the past several years both Gillen and Turk have been mainstays at the "Circle of Song" tent at the Great Clearwater Music and Arts Festival, an event inaugurated by Pete Seeger in the 1960s that's held each June on the banks of the Hudson River. This is where they first sang together, and fittingly so, considering the festival's environmental advocacy and eclectic musical offerings. The fans of these two artists know how much they mean what they sing. Together, Gillen & Turk mean that much more.