Misley - Fashion for Women

                      Misley - Designed and Made in Spain

Germany’s Stefanie Früchtenicht checks all of the boxes for the entertainment industry and is a casting director’s dream. The film, television and theater actress is trilingual, German, Spanish and English and fluent in all three languages. She worked for several years in musical theater on the Spanish islands of Mallorca and Ibiza. She is however much more than an actress as the mezzo-soprano  performed with singer Jeffrey Staten. Her favorite genres are Jazz, Soul and R & B. She counts U.K. singer Katie Melua as one of her favorites.

As if all that talent was not enough, Stefanie Früchtenicht says “I was born to dance as well. I've been dancing since early childhood. When I dance, I can forget the whole world and I can get lost in the passion.  

I prefer Latin American dances because they are more in line with my temperament, but I also know many other European and worldwide dances and techniques. A few years ago, I won a competition, and I am the German Champion, the reigning Queen of Lambada.”

In addition to the Lambada dance, Stefanie Früchtenicht is also accomplished in modern dance, Salsa, Argentine Tango, Tap and several other Latin American dance forms.

Like many who have made a strong statement in the arts, Stefanie Früchtenicht grew up in what she describes as “a very small town,” in Hessen, Germany. She finds herself in good company with others who began their journey in small towns singer, songwriter, musician Joni Mitchell (Fort MacLeod, Canada – 2,967), Lili Babs (Järvsö, Sweden 1,407), actress Jessica Biel (Ely, MN, U.S.A – 2,460) and one of the most well-loved celebrities of all Dolly Parton (Pittman Center, TN, U.S.A. – 502).  

Continuing, Stefanie Früchtenicht says, “My family were not artists. My father worked in a bank. I was the first (creative) person in my family.

The town was so small that the kids really knew each other and we played outside (including) football.

When I was growing up I had a flute and an accordion and twice each week my mother took my brother and me to get lessons. It was really fun to play the accordion.”

As for when she started to perform, she says, "My dancing teacher and I created a show and I was paid for it. We showed people how to dance during the (era) of Dirty Dancing and Mambo. I was about seventeen. A lot of people attended the performance and they liked it. My family was also there.

Two months after I did my test another person asked me if I wanted to have my own dancing school. It was during the time of Lambada and I was the queen of Lambada. Everybody knew me, because of competitions. I opened my own dancing school. It was a great success and it was really, really good. It was ballroom dancing. We had a show called Let’s Dance. In the beginning people came, not only to dance, but to get to know each other (she laughs lightly). It is a social event to go to a dancing class. My job was to entertain the people and to show them how to dance.”

Now, in her early twenties,  Read More

These Fine Moments - Season 10

Through the magic of technology our guests recently at Riveting Riffs Magazine were Hilary Kaufmann who was in Austin, Texas and Robert Watts who was in the Greater Beaumont area of Texas, while this writer talked to them from Toronto, Canada. They joined us to talk about their brand-new album Season 10, whose title informs the listener that the music duo has now spent ten years performing as These Fine Moments.

Hilary Kaufmann talks about their respective musical styles when she first met Robert Watts, “We were different in that my musical interests were completely opposite from Robert’s. I was more into Bonnie Raitt, Linda Ronstadt and I guess more Folk Rock and Americana, but I have been doing original music in bands for a long time. My band was a finalist in the Kerrville Folk Festival. I am also a songwriter. Robert is much more edgy than I am, and he took me way out of my comfort zone. Our voices blended so well together it was a natural progression. I feel writing with him has really helped me to grow as a musician.”

Robert Watts picks up the conversation, “I come at it from a little different angle. My writing style is not so much literal, but it is more abstract. Hilary centers me a lot to keep me from getting too far out there.”  

“Robert’s influences are more from eighties music and I am slightly older, so my influences are mostly from the seventies,” she says.

As far as how their music has evolved during their ten-year careers together, Robert says, “We started as a duo and then we progressed as a full band thing. We have always had control over the music, the arrangements and everything else when we had the band. It got to the point when it didn’t make sense to have the band anymore because it was too expensive. We went with the model we now have.”  

Hilary adds, “Initially, I would play acoustic guitar like Robert and some harmonica, with the band, but once we started going with the duo (music) Robert set me up with a pretty cool electric guitar and an old Gibson Falcon amp from ’63, so I get to do all the tremeloes and colors. That made it much more interesting than just two acoustic guitar players. We are a lot moodier now (the music not them). It is a lot of fun.”

As for the name These Fine Moments there are two interesting stories attached to that.

“The first EP that we put out when we first got together, there was a line in a song that said, “I won’t let these fine moments pass you by,” Hilary Kaufmann says.  

Robert also recalls, “One of the first bookings we got in Austin, they thought These Fine Moments was the name of our band and so they booked us as that. We thought at first, that’s not right, but then we thought it sounded kind of cool and so we went with it.”

Hilary Kaufmann and Read More

Actress Ana Cerdeiriña

Actress  from Madrid, Spain has been a lot of things when she first took up acting. She was a mosquito, a bird, the sun, and a tree, but as her career progressed, she was cast in juicer roles, such as, a nun who sold aphrodisiac candies, and a psychopath. One gets the sense the role she enjoys the most is being the mother to her daughter. Ana Cerdeiriña has been in drama series such as Si No Thagues Conegut, sitcoms like Gym Tony (2015) and her most recent role in the television series Los Hombres de Paco Reboot.

Life began for Ana Cerdeiriña, “in Salamanca, a little town in Castile y León. It is a big area in the northwest of Spain, but not as far north as Galicia. It is a university city with students from all over the world. I have a small family, my father, my mother, my sister, and me. The center of my life is my father, my mother, my sister and now my daughter. My mother is a nurse, my father is a doctor, and my sister works as a hospital administrator. My father and mother split up when I was twelve years old, and I went to live in Madrid with my mother and my sister. I have lived in Madrid for thirty years.

When I was a child and I wanted to become an actress, my mother and father thought that was bad news. They wanted me to study for a different career. In Spain when you are fourteen and sixteen years old and if you say you want to be an actress, it is not beautiful news, because it is so difficult to be an actor or an actress here. Our country has a lot of good things, but the arts and acting or creative (careers) are difficult.

If my daughter came home and said she wanted to be an actress I would probably tell her no, but fortunately she loves math and science,” says Ana Cerdeiriña.

Her first training in the arts came through the music conservatory where she studied piano, learned to sing, and studied music theory.

“It was the way for me to (keep alive) the arts in my body, in my brain and in my life. When I played the piano, and I sang songs I thought I wanted to dance. When I told my parents, I wanted to dance they said okay, I could do it. I attended a dance academy in Salamanca and step by step I got closer to acting.  

I went to a private academy for dance, but I do not consider myself a dancer. For me it was another way to learn. I can sing, but I do not consider myself a singer. I am an actress who can sing.

When I was fifteen years old and I was living in Madrid, I told my parents I would like to study acting and my mother said okay. It came through the music first. First it was music, then dancing and then acting.

I always loved American and English dancers, singers, actors, and actresses. For me it was Wow! I want to be this way. For me it was different than other actors and actresses. In Spain it was not common for an actress to sing and dance and to play an instrument. It is more common with younger actors and actresses, but not for people in my age group,” she explains.  Read More

                                                 Cozy Rebel

Leah Belle Faser - Rising Star

It has been a long time since Riveting Riffs Magazine has said of any young artist that she or he has superstardom in their future. In fact, the last time we said that was when we sat down in April 2005 with then little-known singer, songwriter and guitarist Kimberly Perry of The Band Perry and that is exactly what we predicted. Here we are almost sixteen years later and having recently spoken with sixteen-year-old Leah Belle Faser from Atlanta, Georgia, we are saying the same thing. She has the voice, the songwriting skills and the maturity to become a really special artist, one that we suspect someday will receive serious consideration for and could possibly be the winner of any of the top music awards in Country music.

When you first listen to songs such as “Better Than Mine,” “Back Home,” “The Lift,” and “Second-Hand Store,” from Leah Belle Faser’s new album Crossing Hermi’s Bridge, songs about relationships and longing for home, the first thing you want to do is go to the album credits to find out who co-wrote these songs with her. Surely, you think, a sixteen-year-old could not write so insightfully about such mature themes and compose such well constructed songs. Then you think there must be information missing from the album credits, because all of these songs are attributed to this affable teenage girl who answers your questions thoughtfully and you realize not only are her songs mature, but so is she. Yes, she has all the exuberance of a sixteen-year-old, but she also is wise beyond her years.

Leah Belle Faser says, “There is only so much that has happened in my life at sixteen, so there are only so many things that I can write about. There are ideas and concepts, but I like to observe things and people around me. They are not happening to me, but it is what is happening to other people in my life and even to strangers. It is like listening to the booth behind you in a restaurant (you can hear the smile in her voice), not in a creepy way, but as you observe what people are going through. They may not be my age and they may be older than me with problems that I might not experience at this age. I think that is a really cool way to approach writing.

We share a joke about your writer imagining her slinking around restaurants with a wig and dark glasses looking for new stories. She replies with a laugh and says, “Everybody better watch out! I am on the hunt for hot new stories!”

“I worked with my mentor Phil Barnhart, a veteran songwriter up in Nashville and he gave me that piece of advice, to observe the things around me. I think it holds true with my writing today and it is a great piece of advice. He also told me that not every song is worth writing. When you write songs, a lot of songs have the same core idea, heartbreak or love or happiness and it is important to write (the songs) in a fresh way that nobody has heard before. It is why I like to weave stories into my songs, because you can follow along with the melody and the lyrics and it (becomes) a new story you have never heard before.  Read More