As A Girl, Gloria Estefan Wore Out Carole King’s ‘Tapestry’ Album

BY RICK MASSIMO

Gloria Estefan comes to the MGM Grand at Foxwoods Resort Casino for three shows next weekend. Platinum-selling artist Carole King shares the bill and the two will perform a set together.

When Gloria Estefan returns to the MGM Grand at Foxwoods (the venue she helped open a year ago) for three shows starting Friday, she’ll have a special guest who means a lot to her: singer, songwriter and fellow platinum-selling artist Carole King.

“She’s probably been one of the most influential people in my career, as a writer and personally as a fan,” Estefan said in an interview.

She said that she and King had spoken on the phone, discussing what songs they would be doing, but that the real rehearsals would begin just a few days before the show. Estefan didn’t want to discuss the set list yet, but said that King would do a set of her own and the two singers would perform together as well.

Estefan remembers listening to King as a girl growing up in Miami.

“She struck a chord. As a teenager growing up, her songs were filled with angst. You could play them on your guitar, which I did, a lot, for my family and friends at school. She was very cool and very young and successful.

And she was one of the first big female icons, and I think that spoke a lot to young women, and I was one of them. I wore out her Tapestry album, for sure, and a lot of others.”

It may seem odd, given her Latin grooves and bilingual lyrics, but the Latin American tour Estefan just finished was her first. “It was my purpose to go back there and perform live,” she says, “and it was a lovefest.”

She describes three-hour shows where they wouldn’t let her leave — “I was able to really pull back and do stuff from 1976, from 1982” — and she “ended up singing a cappella because I ran out of stuff.”

Hey, wait a minute — didn’t she do a farewell tour of the United States in 2004?

“I’m still fare-welling,” Estefan says, “but luxuriously, in bits and pieces.” Her farewell American tour was just that, she adds, adding that her American performance schedule consists only of one-offs and charity shows in major cities. “[This is] still the one; I’m just doing it very slowly.”

Then as now, Estefan’s problem is fitting her career in with the desire to keep her daughter’s life as normal as possible. Her daughter starts high school in the fall, and “that’s going to be difficult,” Estefan acknowledges. “I definitely want to enjoy what’s left of her school career.”

So the touring will end sooner than later, Estefan says, but she’s adamant that she’s not retiring — she’ll continue recording, doing occasional shows and tending to her other business interests, including cookbooks, children’s books and the hospitality industry.

“My husband [Emilio Estefan] and I are both businesspeople, so that’s how we were from the get-go,” Estefan says. “And I always told him — for women in this industry, it’s never like The Stones. Someone like Tina Turner, that’s one in a million, but it’s not natural for [a woman] to survive into her fifties and sixties.”

Estefan is 51. As for music, she hopes to record another Christmas album, and a disc of standards in English, and to continue writing for other artists, as she has done for such as Shakira (“Whenever, Wherever”) and Jennifer Lopez (“Let’s Get Loud”). “At the core, I’m a writer. That’s what makes me the happiest.”

Estefan was one of the first fully bilingual artists, writing and recording in English and Spanish from the beginning of her career. She’s proud to point out that she can do a full show of hits in either language, though she tends to mix it up.

Writing in both languages “really is who I am,” she says; “it wasn’t just recording something in another language to get to a new audience.”

She says songs present themselves as English or Spanish early in the writing process, and she doesn’t write a song in one language and translate it later. “You would think a song like ‘Conga’ would work in Spanish, but to me it doesn’t.

It’s very percussive, and there are a lot of hard consonants in English, whereas in Spanish it’s kind of soft. It really was untranslatable for me. Songs like ‘Mi Tierra’ I wouldn’t do in English, because it’s on the other end of the spectrum. And the subject matter might not have the appeal as it does to people who are Latin who have left their homelands.

“Love songs will work in either language, but in English I have to make them more cerebral, because you get accused of being saccharine and sappy, and there’s no such thing as sappiness in Spanish; you can be as dramatic as you want,” she says with a laugh.

Estefan’s latest album, 2007’s 90 Millas, was a Spanish-language celebration of the music of her native Cuba (she and her family left for Miami in 1959), and she’s guardedly optimistic about the recent loosening of the rules against Cuban-Americans visiting and contributing to their relatives on the island.

It was a good move, she says, but “the only people who can do anything for the Cuban people is the Cuban government. They need to lift their restrictions on the people. … They let tourists enjoy Cuba and they don’t let the Cubans enjoy Cuba.”

Gloria Estefan and Carole King are at MGM Grand at Foxwoods, in Mashantucket, Conn., Friday through Sunday. Each show starts at 8 p.m. Tickets range from $75 to $250; call (866) 646-0609 or go to www.mgmatfoxwoods.com.

rmassimo@projo.com

Taken From Projo.com

Her Tapestry Saga Is No Yarn

In a tiny apartment across from the Hard Rock Hotel, a 72-year-old nomadic artist who goes by the single name Sola has spent the past three years weaving a vibrant tapestry of Las Vegas that will blow your mind.

Embroidered and textured palm trees frame casino properties. Turquoise blue pools dot the landscape. MGM Grand, woven in metallic green, anchors the south end of the Strip. Golden beads mark streetlights that extend north toward the mountains.

Marquees announce Elton John, Danny Gans, Cher. Air-conditioning units sit atop the Sands Convention Center. Hotels, civic buildings, Hard Rock guitars, motel signs, office parks and side streets all clamor for attention.

She put more than 8,000 hours into the piece, working alone in her tidy, sparse apartment, sometimes measuring buildings and counting windows at night from the tops of parking ramps and Strip towers. If a hotel has 54 stories, she wove 54 stories from the ground up.

Holidays, birthdays, weekends, every day.

“I’ve reduced life to the simplest focus — my tapestry,” she says, glancing at the 11-by-7 1/2 foot work that leans against her living room wall.

Today, with the help of Marty Walsh, owner of Trifecta Gallery, the tapestry moves to Atlantic Aviation, the former Las Vegas Executive Air Terminal, where it will hang until it is sold. As she has with her other tapestries, she will donate the profit to arts and other organizations.

Sola has been weaving cities since the 1980s, when she wanted to create a portrait of Vancouver, British Columbia, for the 1986 World’s Fair, but didn’t know how to draw or paint. Textiles were her only sure terrain.

She mostly weaves Olympic cities, traveling to different countries, then moving on. She plans to be in London for the 2012 Olympics. She’ll know in October where she’ll be for the 2016 Olympics — Tokyo, Madrid, Rio de Janeiro or Chicago. She hopes it’s Rio.

She came to Las Vegas after reading about Strip implosions and felt an urge to document the city before the buildings were gone. Already, her piece is outdated — the Stardust (imploded March 2007) is on the Strip in her tapestry, and the Tropicana marquee lists “Folies Bergere” (closed last month after 49 years).

Recycling yarn from thrift store sweaters, Sola literally wove Las Vegas from the fabric of the community. Stretching a swatch of a coal gray Gap sweater, she says, “See, that’s parking lots.”

She’s friendly, chatty. Maybe that’s what happens when you spend all of your time alone, creating and building a city from yarn and string — you feel like talking again.

She has no valuables, aside from what will fit into a rolling suitcase, and buys furnishings at thrift stores and gives them back when she leaves. She wants to own nothing: “I wear the same clothes every day. I just wash them. It frees up income and imagination if you don’t have a lot to take care of.”

Fleeing is her history. As a child during World War II, she was sent away from her family in London during the blitz. She stayed with a host family in a village in Wales, roaming the hills and picking wool off fences, then returned to London after the war. In the ’60s, she settled in Toronto and opened coffee shops and other venues for folk singers and rock stars passing through.

Her daughter lives in Vancouver. Her mother, 96, lives in London. Friends are spread across the globe. Her income comes from knitting hats that sell for about $40 in Vancouver. “Thank you, Gap, for using such incredibly beautiful materials,” she says, stretching a stylish hat, one of hundreds stacked in her bedroom.

Sola shows no sign of fatigue. Trim and fit, she talks about wanting to live to 100.

“If I can touch yarn for 10 hours a day then I am in absolute heaven and I want to do it for as long as I live.”

She heads soon to Vancouver, where she’ll stay through the 2010 Winter Olympics. A cartoon map of Vancouver is taped to a door. When she leaves her apartment for the last time, she will peel it off, fold it up and tuck it into her suitcase. It will be the last item removed.

Taken From LasVegasSun.com

How You Can Create Beauty And Ambience In Your Home With A Tapestry Wall Hanging

Bring a sense of beauty, ambiance and history into your home with tapestry wall-hangings.

The fabric of a tapestry reduces sound vibrations, improving the auditory distinctiveness of the room in which they are hung. Tapestry wall-hangings are becoming increasingly popular for wall decor. A tapestry wall hanging is a unique combination of modern fashion trend and a form of wall art from Antiquity.

A tapestry is created by colored weft threads woven into fixed warp threads to form the picture or the design. The detail of the tapestry is determined by the closeness of the warp threads. The closer together and the more delicate or fine the threads, the more intricate and detailed the tapestry. All original tapestries were hand made.

Tapestry is one of the oldest forms of woven textiles; woven tapestry art has provided the stories of the Ancient Greeks and Romans to the medieval and the Renaissance period as well as the Old and the New Testaments. Documents relating to the origin of weaving tapestries, or wall hangings, date to before 2000BC. The Egyptians used this form of art to adorn their graves, the Incas buried their dead in tapestry woven clothing.

Ancient Greek art also depicts weaving and spinning, as found on painted pottery specimens dating pre 500BC. Hand-woven tapestry art was a significant form used to decorate the walls of houses of the rich and important civic buildings such as the Parthenon, but however, it was the French medieval weavers who brought the craft to fruition especially as we know it.

European weavers including those of the Medieval as well as the Renaissance periods are considered the world's most important producers of tapestries.

Paris was the tapestry capital of the western world during the Middle Ages and through the 100 years War, but the war resulted in many of the tapestries being burnt or destroyed in ways to procure their precious metal content. The artisans of tapestry eventually moved from Paris to the areas that we now know as Northern France and Belgium.

Many of the mass produced tapestries of today continue to be produced in factories in Belgium, the Netherlands with some in France and Italy. Mass production requires the use of computerized jacquard weaving machines. Belgium tapestries are decorative pieces of art which are enjoyed the world over for their artistic flair and creativity.

Tapestry weaving in the USA dates back to before the American Revolution.

Throughout history tapestries have been associated with nomadic life and story telling in fabric and in the modern world they have become a credible form of craft as well as art. Art forms have cycled through periods of growth and decline, but now in Western and Pacific Rim countries Textile Artistry is enjoying a resurgence like never before.

Architects and homeowners continue to seek single pieces and unique hand made tapestries to adorn their building or homes.

Consider the addition of tapestries in the decor of your home. You will be adding a texture to your walls not found in any other form of art. Experience for yourself the changes that can occur in different viewing angles as a result of thread colors and the weave. Experience for yourself the beauty and ambiance that has permitted tapestries to journey from antiquity to modern times.

As co-owner of So Divine, my goal is to provide excellent Home Decor products at affordable prices and to give you the best customer and sales support!

With many travels to Mediterranean countries, a deep love and understanding of this region has developed.

Candles are as much of history as is the ancient world, the two marry together. Candles have always been lit in our home.

A lover of natural products and fragrances I have sought information relating to products that can fulfill those needs as well as providing a safe environment.

Initially our endeavors were to satisfy the needs of our family members, but with requests coming from visitors and relatives far and wide we quickly realized that many people were interested in the same home décor and accessories that we had been sourcing for many years.

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Articles extracts from Susan's book "Spray Salt and Spice - The Taste" soon to be released

by Susan Burgess