2007-08 Sovereign Bank Music Series at Berklee Presents These Go to 11: Christopher Guest Meets Berklee, November 30 November 30, 2007

Guest, Berklee students and faculty will perform the music of This Is Spinal Tap, A Mighty Wind, and Waiting For Guffman

Guest to receive honorary doctor of music degree

Boston, November 14, 2007 – The 2007-2008 Sovereign Bank Music Series at Berklee presents writer, director, actor, musician, and Grammy Award-winning composer Christopher Guest. This show – with Guest guesting on guitar and vocals – will feature Berklee students and faculty interpreting his music from This Is Spinal Tap, A Mighty Wind, and Waiting For Guffman in surprising new ways. At the concert, Berklee will present Guest with an honorary doctor of music degree in recognition for his exploration of the cultural and comic possibilities of folk, rock, and musical theater in his films.

These Go to 11: Christopher Guest Meets Berklee takes place on Friday, November 30, at 8:15 p.m., at the Berklee Performance Center (BPC), 136 Massachusetts Avenue, Boston. Tickets $30 and $22.50 for seniors, and on sale at the BPC box office or through Ticketmaster 617-931-2000 or ticketmaster.com. Call 617-747-2261 or visit berkleebpc.com for more information. The BPC is wheelchair accessible.

The program will include Spinal Tap classics “Big Bottom,” “Stonehenge,” and “Hell Hole,” and favorites from Guest’s more recent films like “Nothing Ever Happens In Blaine” (Waiting For Guffman) and “A Mighty Wind,” with some of the material being performed in diverse styles, such as big band, swing, Latin, and Bossa Nova. Berklee faculty performers and arrangers include Ken Zambello, Jim Kelly, Jim Odgren, Adi Yeshaya, Bill Elliot, and Jon Aldrich.

Says Berklee President Roger Brown, “Talk to any rock, blues, or jazz musician and you are likely to find that they can quote This Is Spinal Tap chapter and verse. “Turning it up to eleven,” harmonizing “Heartbreak Hotel” at Graceland, or playing absolutely inappropriate music at a US Air Force base capture the highs and lows of the musician’s life like no other film. Guest not only starred in the film, and others like Waiting For Guffman and A Mighty Wind, he is also a very talented guitarist and mandolin player who wrote many of the hits from these seminal films.”

Christopher Guest has acted, written and composed for theater, radio, television and film. From the late 1960s until 1975 he worked as a stage actor in New York. Concurrently, he began writing for National Lampoon magazine and contributing to the National Lampoon Radio Hour, making five albums, three of which were nominated for Grammys, as well as co-writing and performing in the stage show Lemmings. His television credits include The TV Show (with Rob Reiner), The Chevy Chase Special, The Lily Tomlin Show, for which he received an Emmy Award, and Saturday Night Live as a writer, director and cast member.

Guest directed his first feature film in 1989, The Big Picture, starring Kevin Bacon, and went on to do Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman with Darryl Hannah, (1992) Waiting for Guffman (1997), Almost Heroes (1998) Best in Show (2000), A Mighty Wind, (2003) for which he and Eugene Levy and Michael Mckean won a Grammy award, and For Your Consideration (2006).
Along with Harry Shearer and Micheal Mckean, Guest has toured the world with the band Spinal Tap as well as The Folksmen. At Carnegie Hall, The Folksmen actually opened for Spinal Tap, which was either meglomania in it’s purest form or merely overreaching.
Guest has acted in over a dozen films including A Few Good Men, The Long Riders, The Princess Bride, Little Shop of Horrors, and This is Spinal Tap. He was most recently seen in Stephen Frears’ Mrs. Henderson Presents with Judy Dench.

The 2007-2008 Sovereign Bank Music Series at Berklee features a wide variety of music ranging from rock, jazz, and Latin, to r&b, hip-hop, and Broadway and film tunes. Christopher Guest, K-OS, The Fab Faux, George Duke, the SFJAZZ Collective, and Berklee’s outstanding students, faculty, and alumni will perform in this unique and astonishing season.