freddi price is a multi-disciplinary artist currently dividing his time between New York and the San Francisco area who’s musical, performance, and design/construction based talents have had him variously quite busy for the last thirty years.
Born into a large family in the southern Appalachian Mountains of the United States, freddi price grew to maturity at an accelerated rate which forced his relegation, along with that of the other lusus naturae, to the world of the stage and a life of performance. Joining the theater at age 11, he was schooled in the arts of deception (known to the world at large as entertainment), those comprising the combined disciplines of acting, music and dance as well as the behind-the-stage illusory arts of building, painting and dramaturgy. This laid the groundwork for a life on, and just off, of the stage that has come to define life itself for said personage.
After a coming of age in such surroundings and being steeped in an atmosphere of theater, classical music, literature and the like (i.e. late night, coffee-fueled exegesis of everything from Shakespeare to Bukowski, SCTV and Sherlock Holmes when, by all rights, a boy of such an age should have been at home in bed), fp turned, for a time, just adjacent to such trappings of pretense and chose instead to seek out those of the real world, and as a young man he managed to scarcely adopt a life of gainful employ in the trades, which supported his somewhat rootless nature as well as his creative ventures. This lead naturally to a period of travel in and around the world which saw him gaining more of the knowledge, useless or no, that has continued to be his bailiwick in addition to providing him with additional skills with which to ply his natural-born trade, as it were, being that of the polymath artist/entertainer.
And so, while continuing to meander from the tops of mountains to beneath the sea, fp returned to his native land, settling in the, however foreign, part of it known as California. It was here within the creatively fertile context of the rich San Francisco Bay Area arts scene that roots began to take hold for a return to the life of the stage. This started first in the street as fp together with a couple other ne’r-do-wells formed (the soon to be SF institution) Rube Waddell, a street-performing, DIY, homespun musical montage. The Bad News Bears of Rock, if you will. This lead to tours of this country and the European one …(sorry) ones, as well as a relationship with the aforementioned rich climate of Bay Area and then back east with New York performers. Through these relationships fp has since formed or performed, recorded or otherwise been involved with: Mark Growden, Eric McFadden, Amy Denio, Jewlia Eisenberg, the Idiot Flesh/Sleepytime Gorilla Museum franchise, Moe! Staiano, the Extra Action Marching Band, the Ad Hoc Brass Band – nee the As Is Brass Band and Jolie Holland as well as with the Tiger Lillies, Carla Kihlstedt, the Apocalypse Puppet Theater, the Last Night of the Barbary Coast, Lord Loves a Working Man , all in addition to his frequently appearing solo in the guise of himself!
Music being at the center of most of these life endeavors, he has nevertheless continued the development of the other sundry talents gathered throughout. He has built and fixed houses, maintained old cars and machines, served as innkeeper and chef, house painter, carpenter/electrician/plumber, watched loved ones die, gone through a couple near deaths of his own, mucked about in the native lands and tongues of far off places, given in to the digital age, built his own computer and learned those computer arts of visual design, sound design, recording and editing, written for the stage as well as upon the trials and tribulations of life itself, acted, stage managed, built and painted sets, directed cabaret and puppet theater, composed music for large and small ensembles, worked as voice-over artist, whistler, singer, and noise-maker, helped construct a self-contained, bicycle powered theater for puppets and people, provided voices, sounds, music and puppeteering for same, and performed what is called music on keyboards, strings (of the picking/plucking variety), brass (of the keyed variety), percussion and voice through an assortment of genres from rock to classical to jazz to “world music” (whatever that isn’t!). He is ever (and ever haltingly) trying to learn the nautical arts of both the real world in the form of seamanship and the virtual world in the form of internet cloudsmanship in addition to the art, however prosaic, of business and speaking of oneself in the third person.
In recent years, he has been particularly active in almost all his capacities: performing in the avant-music-theater project Necessary Monsters with Carla Kihlstedt in Chicago and San Francisco; as writer and performer in presenting two of his original puppet theater works at the Underground Zero festival in New York; composing the score for, as well as leading the live musical ensemble and starring in, the Last Night of the Barbary Coast theater production in San Francisco; beginning – with Robin Frohardt– the ongoing development of the current puppet theater success, the Pigeoning , born as part of St. Anne’s Warehouse’s Puppet Lab in Brooklyn, and for which fp was nominated in the 2015 Drama Desk Awards – most outstanding music in a play, followed in 2016 as composer and live accompaniment to the Untitled Theater #61 production of Paul Auster’s City of Glass. All this in addition to performing in his various onstage musical roles as lead singer/songwriter in the 10-piece soul band, Lord Loves a Working Man, composer/leader of the small, energetic brass ensemble, As Is/Ad Hoc Brass Band, leader/singer/composer/multi-instrumentalist in Rube Waddell, and making regular appearances as a solo “singer/songwriter” and composing and recording for various commercial projects.
