SOU’WESTER EVENTS!
See what’s happening during your next stay or plan a visit around our free live music, workshops, wellness offerings and more!
Kendra McKinley perceives a song like a painter views a blank canvas: an opportunity to expand an audience’s mind, to wash their thoughts in brilliant hues of blue and violet, scarlet reds and effusive orange. Inspired by the past but not chained to it, McKinley’s music spans the diverse spectrum of pop music. She echoes the intricate vocal arrangements crafted by Brian Wilson, fractures the narrow definitions of a genre like St. Vincent, and recognizes storytelling as the key aspect of a great tune the way the best singer-songwriters have for generations.
“Kendra McKinley is a rising star in San Francisco.” – Annie Bacon, SF Critic
“Her 1960s chamber-pop sound and strong, undulating vocals — which slightly resembles St. Vincent (Annie Clark) — will make you feel like ditching work to skip through a field of sunflowers with your new lover.” – Melissa Hellmann, The Bold Italic
“…McKinley is no throwback act – her sound may echo the past but she belongs firmly in the present.” – Nick Schneider, The Bay Bridged
This event is free and open to the public!
Iowa-born, Portland-based, Nate Lumbard is a songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who has toured the nation and the world sharing both introspective and groovy de and re-constructions of life as we know it. When he is not inventing instruments or bouncing his newborn baby girl, he is eating clam chowder for breakfast.
Born in Austin and splitting his down time between Oregon and Ecuador, twenty years exploring music from around the world finally led Michael Shay back to his artistic home deep in the North American vocal and songwriting traditions. With the nuance of a classically-trained musician, the twang of a born-and-bred Texan, and a career spent collaborating with musicians in a dozen countries, Shay’s vision exists comfortably outside any “Americana” box while still evoking his earliest influences: Featuring original acoustic country-folk and roots-Americana with touches of bluegrass, world music and more, Shay’s songs are as likely to touch down in the bars and backroads of cow towns as in the graveyards and parlours of old Europe, dancing with the ghosts of William Blake, Hank Williams, or Sappho – sometimes while you dance too. Shay’s lush baritone voice and guitar plus mandolin, upright bass and 3 part vocal harmonies in the Michael Shay Trio combine for a powerfully elegant sound in the tradition of Townes Van Zandt, Gillian Welch, Neil Young and Bob Dylan.
This event is free and open to the public
Cat Hoch is a multi-instrumentalist out of Portland, Or creating psychedelic dream pop samba mama jazz music and performing it with her band. Willamette Week’s Best New Bands of 2016: “Sounds like: A summer daydream where Tame Impala and St. Vincent go swimming in a moonlit Technicolor lagoon below a sky of shooting stars….Released last October, Cat Hoch’s Look What You Found EP contains four tracks of dreamy, slow-burn psych rock, full of driving, fuzzed-out guitars that fade in and out of celestial synths.” She is currently working on a full length album that will release in 2017.
Photo by Raina Stintson Photography
Jeff was born August 14, 1954. There are probably official documents somewhere that will attest to that.
With a musical sound born in 1970s Los Angeles and the American roots revival. In the early 80s, he formed the band The Lonesome Strangers with Randy Weeks. They recorded three full-length albums, each of which received enthusiastic critical acclaim: “Lonesome Pine” (1985),”The Lonesome Strangers”(1989), and “Land Of Opportunity”(1997).
In 1998, the band went their separate ways and Jeff focused on starting a family in Georgia. Following a divorce in 2006, he turned back to songwriting to help ease his mind and find his way forward.
Jeff showed some of his new songs to his old California musician buddy, Taras Prodaniuk, who has spent the last thirty years in world class bands, laying it down for artists like Dwight Yoakam, Lucinda Williams, Merle Haggard and Richard Thompson, and he brought his excellence to bear on every aspect of the project. The result is the 11-song “Even If The Sun Don’t Shine”.
While trying to drum up some interest and figure out how to best release his music, Jeff took the suggestion of a friend and started recording stripped-down acoustic versions of some of the “Sun Don’t Shine” songs. These, plus some more original material, some demos, and one Lennon-McCartney cover, have turned into the homespun “companion” CD, “Lonesome Pine Rides Again”. With these two recordings, Jeff hopes to reach an audience that will enjoy and appreciate what he has to offer.
Check it out – it’s goin’ down! This event is free and open to the public.
Jenn Rawling composes highly melodic songs from fascinating scraps of images and phrases, singing them with a vibrant, immediately engaging yodel-edged alto. Rawling’s poetic lyrics are enhanced by her sophisticated sense of phrasing and pace. Her work binds people back to the web of life, reconnects us to the land, and celebrates the continuance of human, animal, plant, and elemental relationships. She is celebrating the release of her new record ‘Golden Colors’.
This event is free and open to the public
Grasshopper. Seasoned Roadhouse Americana with a dose of dance-inducing psychedelic hop
This event is free and open to the public
Lana and Kevin’s original songs quietly honor the simple beauty of early American folk, blues, and country. Guitars, sweet harmonies, and the occasional harmonica, fiddle, or singing saw blend together to result in a perfect tranquil soundtrack for a long road trip, or a late- night porch gathering on a quiet summer night.
Dramady, formed in 2006, is a low-key indie-pop duo from Portland, OR. They make blissed out mellow tunes that will replay in your head for days. A multi-instrumentalist band that hits all the frequencies they possibly can with 4 hands. Their music ranges from lazy Sunday morning love songs to synthed-out catchy dance ditties.
This event is free and open to the public
Chicago-born jazz/punk/barrelhouse musician Stephanie Nilles has been doin’ Kesey proud one bar at a time since 2008, hustling around the United States, Europe, and Canada (except from 2009-2010 for legal reasons), averaging 150 gigs a year, and captivating unsuspecting listeners with a voice that would make Jelly Roll Morton look orthodox and Ma Rainey look sober.
Having studied piano and cello since the age of six, she was a finalist at the Young Concert Artists’ International Competition, a gold medalist at the Fischoff Competition, and had performed on NPR on three occasions by the age of seventeen. At twenty-two, she had graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Music with a degree in classical piano performance and temporarily relocated to New York City, where she began writing songs and performed regularly on the east village anti-folk scene while making a living working odd jobs as a dog walker, valet parking attendant, Italian coffee bar barista, ghostwriter, and research assistant to a blind bioethicist at an all boys’ Jewish university.
She has since sung with Bobby McFerrin in Carnegie Hall, directed the musical program of a Brooklyn burlesque series, covered Busta Rhymes’ “Break Ya Neck” in the skeletal remains of a bombed-out cathedral in Nuremberg, been invited to perform official showcases at SXSW and International Folk Alliance, and self-released 5 full-length albums, three of which were picked up for European release by German roots/blues label Tradition und Moderne (Taj Mahal, John Fahey).
When Stephanie’s not sleeping in her car, she lives in New Orleans, which might not be the best idea.