BOB MARLEY & REGGAE MUSIC
Saturday, September 13, 2008, 8pm, the Arts Café will feature Roger Steffens who is recognized world wide as the premier authority on Reggae music and on the life and works of Bob Marley. Steffens, founding editor of The Beat, is a L.A. based archivist who has been collecting all things reggae since 1973. In a special one day East Coast appearance, he will present "The Life of Bob Marley" - a multi media production including never released concert and “behind the scene” footage of Marley that has been lauded as "the definitive history of the reggae king."
Roger has hosted local and syndicated radio and tv shows since 1961, written countless liner notes, shot dozens of album covers and authored five books about Bob Marley and reggae. Advance tIckets for the show only are $12 to members and donors to the Center and $15 to the public. Special VIP tickets are $40/person and includes a pre-show Patrons' Party with Roger Steffens.
L.A. based Steffens wears many hats: actor, author, lecturer, curator, editor, photographer, reggae archivist, broadcaster, director, and producer. His professional radio career began in New York in 1961, and was highlighted by a decade-spanning stint in the 1980s on NPR’s Los Angeles station, KCRW, where he hosted five shows, including the award-winning “Reggae Beat,” which was eventually syndicated to more than 130 stations worldwide for four-and-a-half years during the 1980s.
He has been acting professionally in films, television, and theater since 1964, and narrated an Oscar-winning documentary, The Flight of the Gossamer Condor, in 1978. His voice has been prominently featured in Wag the Dog, Forrest Gump, Ghosts of Mississippi, The American President, Can’t Hardly Wait (as “The Loooove Jock”), and Liberty Heights. He is also one of the main voices for the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, was the corporate voice for six years for Time-Warner Audio Books (for which he received a recent Audio Book Publishers’ Award nomination for reading Bill Gates’ best-selling book Business @ The Speed of Thought); and has narrated documentaries for the Getty Center, the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, and scores of other institutions.
But it is in his capacity as top authority on reggae music that he is perhaps best known. His Reggae Archives fill six rooms of his home, and contain the world’s largest collection of Bob Marley material that includes over 300,000 titles on tape, record and CD, and the world's most extensive collection of Marley/reggae memorabilia, plus tens of thousands of other reggae- and Rasta-related items. From January to September of 2001, he curated a critically acclaimed 6,000 piece exhibition of his Reggae Archives at the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California, as well as authoring a 100-page exhibition catalog with more than 1,600 illustrations.
He lectures internationally on the life of Bob Marley at a variety of venues and has been interviewed on hundreds of radio and television programs. He is coauthor of Bob Marley and the Wailers: The Definitive Discogrpahy; Bob Marley: Spirit Dancer; One Love: My Life with Bob Marley and the Wailers; and Roger Steffens and Peter Simon’s Reggae Scrapbook. He is also the founding editor of The Beat magazine, the premiere reggae and world beat magazine, for which he edits an annual Bob Marley collectors’ edition. For more information and tickets for Steffens’ unique presentation please contact New Hope Arts at 215-862-9606 or Newhopearts@aol.com.
"Roger, thank you for turning me on to so much good music, particularly Ladysmith Black Mambazo" - Paul Simon
