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!
Robert Meade: Presented by Sou’wester Arts
Robert Meade’s a singer/songwriter, solo acoustic musician who’s been living and performing throughout the Northwest area for over a decade. His brand of upbeat Rhythm ‘n’ Blues & Americana music is bound to lift the spirit.
Anna Tivel is an American singer-songwriter from Portland, Oregon. She has released four studio albums on Portland-based Fluff & Gravy Records.[3] Her 2017 album Small Believer received positive reviews[4][5] and was named a “Top 10 underheard album of 2017” by Ann Powers of NPR.[6] In 2019, NPR called her album The Question “one of the most ambitious folk records of 2019”;[7] it was also listed by Paste as one of “10 essential folk albums from 2019”.[8]
Rolling Stone listed her as a standout performer at the 2019 AmericanaFest in Nashville, writing “In a week of countless songsmiths showcasing their attempt at that exact type of singer-songwriter storytelling, Tivel’s winding, largely chorus-less tales shined and shimmered.”[9] The magazine also named the lead single from The Question, “Fenceline”, a “song you need to know”.[10]
Tivel was born in La Conner, Washington and grew up in a musical family, learning violin and fiddle as a child. After moving to Portland at age 18, she developed an interest in songwriting and began to write and perform her own material.[11] Many of her songs are vignettes about the lives and struggles of ordinary people; she said in an interview “I’m drawn over and over to the small stories of people (myself included) just trying to get by, to do a little better, to feel some sort of beauty in an ugly world.”[12] Tivel’s songs are often somber in tone as she has said that she “just [doesn’t] trust happy songs as much”.[13]
On her last album, The Question, she collaborated with engineer Brian Joseph and producer and musician Shane Leonard.[14]
Papi Fimbres: Presented by Sou’wester Art
AC Sapphire is currently living in the beautiful small village of Joshua Tree, CA. The death place of Graham Parsons and birth place of many artistic visions, just a couple hours away from Los Angeles. Annachristie has been writing and recording her newest EP “Sibling Rivalry” while soaking up the mountain views.
Left Coast Country is a country music collective founded by Drew Tucker in 2010. Based in Portland, Oregon, the group has seen a rotating cast of players through the years and have toured extensively throughout the US.
Dustin Hamman is a composer, musician, hack/wannabe actor/director, and donut enthusiast.
Dustin’s musical tastes span many genres but have always been rooted in folk. He had an early fascination with American Indian singing and early punk rock…later he explored the blues and the origins of country, eventually gaining interest in early jazz, swing, and big band. During a short life in Florida he was introduced to Latin rhythms and became intrigued by Flamenco and classical guitar. More recently, he’s been dabbling in marriages of a variety of genres including, rap, rock, r&b, and noise/ambient, many of which can be heard on the recently released soundtrack for Beneath The Harvest Sky. This was his first film scoring effort and he hopes to do many more.
JOLIE HOLLAND & STEVIE WEINSTEIN-FONER
AT THE SOU’WESTER
SATURDAY, AUGUST 21
$30 TIX / ALL AGES
8:00PM SHOW
A fundraiser for: Sou’wester Arts – Sponsored Artist Residency
Dedicated to supporting BIPOC and all underrepresented voices.
Over the span of her career, Jolie Holland has knotted together a century of American song—jazz, blues, soul, rock and roll—into some stew that is impossible to categorize with any conventional critical terminology. This is her burden and her gift, to know all of these American songs of the last ten decades in her head and her heart, and to have to wrestle with their legacy. She dives straight to the pathos of a song the way the very greatest singers, singers like Mavis Staples, or Al Green, or Skip James, or Tom Waits do. Upon first encounter her songs seem challenging, perhaps unsettling at times, but as so many poets and rockers have shown us (from Dante Alighieri to William Blake to Sylvia Plath to Patti Smith to Nick Cave to Mark E. Smith) that’s where the beauty lies. As evident on her first recordings, Holland apparently has no fear of the truth, and there is no emotional core that she cannot reach in song. In fact she thrives on the red hot center of a musical composition, in all its strange and brutal detail. Note how easily the line “I’ve been taken outside and I’ve been brutalized” trips off her tongue in Joe Tex’s “The Love You Save.”
Which brings us to Wine Dark Sea. Astute listeners to Holland’s work can recognize how her writing over the years has deepened, matured, become the songwriting of a wise, worldly adult, not just of a rambler across the American latitudes, but to understand this is still no preparation for the sonic assault, the unprecedented confidence and merciless brilliance of Wine Dark Sea which yokes the New York underground to American song in a way that has rarely been attempted since White Light/White Heat by the Velvet Underground. Yes, the classic Holland lyrical concerns are evident in songs like “Palm Wine Drunkard,” and “St. Dymphna,” and “Out on the Wine Dark Sea,” all of which mix a density of literature and poetry to brutalities of romantic love, to the fragmentation of self and narrator in a torrent of loss and grief, but this tells us nothing about the band Holland has assembled and leads to express her present vision. Two drummers, sometimes as many as three or four electric guitars, horns of a sort that come out of free jazz and the No Wave scene as much as they come from soul music, and a refreshing need, on Holland’s part, to sing out at the extreme of her range, above the squalling insatiable lullaby of the thing. And, just when you think you know how to listen to multiple incendiary devices as occasionally rise up out of the category five of it all—guitar playing that makes Zuma or On the Beach sound somewhat restrained—there are the ballads: graceful, melancholy, wistful. There has been no album of the recent decade with quite this sonic ambition, with quite this command of what a rock and roll song is and ought to be, but Wine Dark Sea is all of that, with a little bit of Homer and Maya Deren mixed in too.
Jolie Holland has a Desperation to tell Now. And she has called on deep, dark forces to get there. It’s always a pleasure to hear a musician come to a new precipice in her output, where great skills and great courage are required to rise to the occasion. Wine Dark Sea is the album of a lifetime, with a lifetime of work in it.
http://www.mamabirdrecordingco.com/nick-delffs
Nick Delffs is a seeker. He’d never identify himself that way. He’s unassuming and self-effacing, careful to discuss song meanings and biographical details without indulgence or melodrama. Delffs cut his teeth playing basement shows in Portland a dozen years ago, just before that city’s cover was irreversibly blown. It was a time when being musically ambitious meant impressing other local musicians. You were a joke, in that world, if you proclaimed yourself an artist or promoted your band with any zeal. So Delffs would probably find “seeker” a rather grandiose title.
https://www.laserslasersbirmingham.com
Luke Borsten: Presented by Sou’wester Arts
Luke Borsten is a songwriter/saxophone man in Portland. After opening for Amanda Palmer, touring nationally, releasing an album at the Wonder Ballroom, and performing on cruise ships for two years, he’s now looking forward to his first live show of 2021. His energetic, front-porch folk performance style keeps crowds singing and clapping along, and he frequently invites special guests up to perform, making for an eclectic and memorable experience.
Luke’s band, Ghost Towns, recorded part of their album at the Sou’Wester, as part of a week-long artist residency in 2014. When not performing live Luke can be found shooting/editing live videos for bands around Portland, and is currently directing his first music video.