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PRESENTED BY BARBARA RAPPAPORT

When Aly Tadros was offered her first paid gig, she had three original songs under her belt. The set time called for two hours.

She took it anyways.

Three years and over 500 shows later, that gutsy attitude has defined Tadros as an ardent and auspicious voice among young singer/songwriters. Spacious and melodic, salty and moving, her classical guitar tempts each listener out of the vacuum-sealed sterility of every day life; writhing in a fusion of Latin, Middle Eastern, and American folk. With a timbre as angelic as it is weather beaten, what resonates about Tadros’s vocals is that “they sound fresh, genuine, and from the gut” (Bootleg Magazine).

Born and raised in the small border town of Laredo, Texas, Aly developed an early fascination with the written word. Between flamenco lessons and theatre rehearsals, she spent hours memorizing, correcting, and transcribing the lyric books of her favorite artists; Fiona Apple, Ani Difranco, and Janis Joplin. “I was a self-proclaimed bookworm,” Aly jokes, “but not like you’d expect.” She recalls taping hand-written lyric sheets to the inside of her junior high textbooks and burying herself in the back of 6th grade Algebra.

An early interest in travel led Tadros to leave home at seventeen, moving between Turkey, Spain, and her father’s native Egypt. Immersing herself in Spanish, Turkish and Arab culture, she developed a keen ear for contemporary and traditional world music. She names Oum Kalsoum, Ali Farka Toure, Duman, and Silvio Rodriguez among her favorites. Years later, The San Antonio Current would attribute Aly’s unique folk-stylings to her extensive travel, calling her “born to fingerpick & execute a perfect cuban clave…a musical sponge that absorbs everything she hears wherever she goes.”

“By the time I was done traveling, the most obvious choice was to study politics and reclaim my chair as the back-seat dreamer,” Tadros recalls. But by her second year at Sarah Lawrence College, Aly was spending more time behind her guitar than her textbooks. “And then one night, as if a switch went off, I realized school wasn’t for me. So ditched cramming for a major final and wrote my first song. “

Aly made her home in Austin, Texas dedicating her full time to songwriting and live performance. She released her debut, “Things Worth Keeping,” produced by Duane Lundy (Ben Sollee, These United States, Vandaveer) in August 2009 amidst her first and second national tours. The self-booked tours spanned seven months, and twenty-five U.S. states. Summer of 2010, she completed her first international tour with Toronto-based Chloe Charles; including Germany, France, England, Ireland, and Italy. In addition to numerous national radio, print, and digital press; Tadros’s DIY release and tour received coverage from USAToday.com. Other 2009/10 performance highlights included CMJ, SXSW (unofficial), Folk Alliance, and Southwest Regional Folk Alliance. She is a three-time winner of the Eddie’s Attic Open Stage in Decatur, GA, where she will return in June 2011 to compete in the infamous Eddie’s Attic Shootout. Former winners include John Mayer and Jennifer Nettles.

Banned with a classical guitar and a cajon, Music Connection Magazine calls her stripped-down set “a mixture of humor, honesty, and playfulness [on] the stage…with the acoustic prowess akin to Amos Lee.” With the full-band, The San Antonio Current dubs the breadth of her live performance as “fierce…larger than life”.

www.alytadros.com

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