Join us on the Library lawn for the Annual Summer Music Series! Held on select Saturdays throughout the summer from 5:00 to 7:00 PM, this beloved outdoor concert series features live performances by local and regional musicians, delicious bites from area food vendors, and a welcoming, family-friendly atmosphere. Bring your blankets, lawn chairs, and even your leashed dog — all are welcome at this free community celebration of music, summer, and connection.

At the intersection of traditional and contemporary music, Slow Pony is the accordion-centered, organ-adjacent musical collective led by Eli Dworkin. Whether channeling the trance of Balkan rhythms or the raw charge of punk and folk traditions, their music is innovative, powerful and authentically their own. Slow Pony revels in the continuous study of narrative music, those rhythms and melodies that haunt the subconscious— giving rise to songs that ask questions and create a new musical language for emotional, celebratory and shameless possibility.

For over two decades, Eli has redefined and broken the boundaries of Americana, Folk, DIY, Punk and Roots scenes, making a lasting impression and building community wherever he travels, spreading joy and defying genre in his feats as a multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, songwriter, storyteller, and performer. As a collective, Slow Pony showcases an ever-growing cast of accompanists whose musicianship astonishes as they navigate the intricate and concise, passionately composed-yet-improvised material.

Known for soulful eerie originals that draw on Balkan, blues, tango, klezmer, cumbia, jazz manouche, punk, rock, and Americana, Slow Pony endears its listeners through dark humor, collective awkwardness, chaotic delusions of grandeur, and hypnotic instrumental shredding.

Recently, Eli has caught the Hammond Organ bug, learning to repair, modify and design a wide range of instruments and amplifiers.His technical studies in electronic instrument repair have propelled Slow Pony into bold new directions, incorporating electronic music, keyboards, and experimental accordion effects. In 2025, Eli received the VT Arts Council Development Grant and Creation Grant to compose a new body of music for the Hammond Organ.
Slow Pony has shared stages with an eclectic array of world-class performers, touring and gigging regionally, nationally and internationally, and captivating audiences everywhere—from family-oriented festivals to burlesque events and freak shows; from crusty mosh pits to weddings and farmers markets. Slow Pony doesn’t belong to anywhere, yet is a welcome breath and disarming presence wherever they appear.
Slow Pony embodies an irrepressible drive to create, to connect, to resist, to revolt. Their music is a response to the millennia-long struggle for human survival and wellbeing against immeasurable forces of oppression and exploitation. Through a potent, ever-evolving ritual of study and sound, the collective channels that struggle—and night after night, they, somehow always, emerge triumphant.

This event is presented as part of the Yiddish Book Center’s Public Libraries Program, a partnership with the American Library Association. Made possible by the Lilly Endowment, Inc. Funding from this program allows the Manchester Community Library to host reading groups and related programming to explore how Yiddish literature can provide a springboard for powerful conversations about religion, assimilation, identity, and immigration.