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NEAL FRANCIS w/ Jombi
1884 Lounge
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2023
DOORS: 7 PM / SHOW: 8 PM
ALL AGES
TICKET PRICE:
ADV: $27 | DOS: $30

Neal Francis Bio:
On his new album In Plain Sight, Neal Francis offers up a body of work both strangely enchanted and painfully self-aware, unfolding in songs sparked from Greek myths and frenzied dreams and late-night drives in the depths of summer delirium. True to its charmed complexity, the singer/songwriter/pianist’s second full-length came to life over the course of a tumultuous year spent living in a possibly haunted church in Chicago. The result: a portrait of profound upheaval and weary resilience, presented in a kaleidoscopic sound that’s endlessly absorbing.

The follow-up to Francis’s 2019 debut Changes—a New Orleans-R&B-leaning effort that landed on best-of-the-year lists from the likes of KCRW, KEXP, and The Current, and saw him hailed as “the reincarnation of Allen Toussaint” by BBC Radio 6—In Plain Sight was written and recorded almost entirely at the church, a now-defunct congregation called St. Peter’s UCC. Despite not identifying as religious, Francis took a music-ministry job at the church in 2017 at the suggestion of a friend. After breaking up with his longtime girlfriend while on tour in fall 2019, he returned to his hometown and found himself with no place to stay, then headed to St. Peter’s and asked to move into the parsonage. “I thought I’d only stay a few months but it turned into over a year, and I knew I had to do something to take advantage of this miraculous gift of a situation,” he says.

Mixed by Grammy Award-winner Dave Fridmann (HAIM, Spoon, The Flaming Lips, Tame Impala), In Plain Sight finds Francis again joining forces with Changes producer and analog obsessive Sergio Rios (a guitarist/engineer known for his work with CeeLo Green and Alicia Keys). Like its predecessor, the album spotlights Francis’s refined yet free-spirited performance on piano, an instrument he took up at the age of four. “From a very early age, I was playing late into the night in a very stream-of-consciousness kind of way,” he says, naming everything from ragtime to gospel soul to The Who among his formative influences. With a prodigy-like gift for piano, Francis sat in with a dozen different blues acts in Chicago clubs as a teenager, and helmed a widely beloved instrumental funk band called The Heard before going solo. Along with earning lavish acclaim (including a glowing review from Bob Lefsetz, who declared: “THIS IS THE FUTURE OF THE MUSIC BUSINESS!”), Changes led to such triumphs as performing live on KCRW’s “Morning Becomes Eclectic,” sharing the stage with members of The Meters at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, and touring with such acts as Lee Fields & The Expressions and Black Pumas.

Jombi Bio:
Hailing from the historic music city of Memphis, TN, Jombi are a psychedelic rock band known for their eclectic sound and genre-bending catalog. With a main focus of classic rock and neo-psychedelia, Jombi has incorporated hints of indie, jazz, folk, pop punk, and experimental/progressive rock into their music. They broke into the Memphis scene in 2021 as a live band with a heavy dose of improvisation, and have garnered a dedicated local following that stretches musical taste.

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SHELL YEAH! BENEFIT CONCERT SERIES PRESENTS:
DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS
Saturday, October 7, 2023
7:30 PM 9:00 PM

On the title track to Welcome 2 Club XIII, Drive-By Truckers pay homage to the Muscle Shoals honky-tonk where founding members Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley got their start: a concrete-floored dive lit like a disco, with the nightly promise of penny beer and truly dubious cover bands. “There were no cool bars in town and Club XIII was the best we had—but it wasn’t all that good, and our band wasn’t particularly liked there,” says Hood, referring to the vocalist/guitarists’ former band Adam’s House Cat. “From time to time the owner would throw us a Wednesday night or let us open for a hair-metal band we were a terrible fit for, and everyone would hang out outside until we were done playing. It wasn’t very funny at the time, but it’s funny to us now.” The 14th studio album from Drive-By Truckers—whose lineup also includes keyboardist/guitarist Jay Gonzalez, bassist Matt Patton, and drummer Brad Morgan—Welcome 2 Club XIII looks back on their formative years with both deadpan pragmatism and profound tenderness, instilling each song with the kind of lived-in detail that invites bittersweet reminiscence of your own misspent youth.

Produced by longtime Drive-By Truckers collaborator David Barbe and mainly recorded at his studio in Athens, Georgia, Welcome 2 Club XIII took shape over the course of three frenetic days in summer 2021—a doubly extraordinary feat considering that the band had no prior intentions of making a new album. “We had some shows coming up and decided to get together and practice, since we hadn’t even seen each other in a year and a half because of the pandemic,” Hood recalls. “We started demoing song ideas, and pretty soon we realized we had a whole record. It was all sort of magical.” Featuring background vocals from the likes of Margo Price, R.E.M.’s Mike Mills, and Mississippi-bred singer/songwriter Schaefer Llana, Welcome 2 Club XIII was recorded live with most songs cut in one or two takes, fully harnessing the band’s freewheeling energy. “For us it’s always about just getting together and having fun, but this time there was the added feeling of being set free after a long time of wondering if we’d ever get to do this again,” notes Cooley.

Arriving as the band enters its 26th year, Welcome 2 Club XIII marks a sharp departure from the trenchant commentary of The Unraveling and The New OK (both released in 2020). “All our records are political to some extent, but after making three overtly political records in a row we wanted to do something much more personal,” says Hood. A hypnotic introduction to the album’s sprawling autobiography, “The Driver” kicks off Welcome 2 Club XIII with a seven-minute-long, darkly thrilling epic punctuated with lead-heavy riffs and Llana’s unearthly vocals. “Around the same era of Club XIII, I spent a lot of time driving around late at night when I couldn’t sleep, listening to music loud and often having a beer or two,” says Hood. “Sometimes during those drives I’d have these epiphanies about what to do with my life—like listening to Tim by The Replacements not long after it came out and deciding to drop out of school to try and make this whole band thing work.”

The album’s swinging centerpiece, “Welcome 2 Club XIII” spins a sublimely gritty portrait of the spot Cooley sums up as “part disco, part honky-tonk, part place to score cheap cocaine.” With its litany of inside jokes and references to Foghat and The Jim Carroll Band, the track unfolds as a joyful piece of anti-nostalgia, a sentiment perfectly captured in its sing-along-fueled outro (sample lyric: “Our glory days did kinda suck”). Meanwhile, on “Every Single Storied Flameout,” Cooley shares a far more pensive recollection of his younger years. “I wrote that song when my son was turning 16 and going through a rough patch for a bit,” he says. “Luckily, he’s turned it around and he’s doing great now, but it was a tough time for a while. Part of my way of dealing with it was to take ownership of the example I might’ve set, in the hope of leading him out of it.” Graced with the radiant melodies of a three-piece horn section, the result is a spirited anthem merging Cooley’s unsparing self-reflection with a bit of rambling wisdom (e.g., “That part of you that feels alive is wired and can’t be severed from the damage-seeking part of you that runs it/Just don’t embrace it with a vengeance before you’ve even shaved with a razor that you bought with your own money”).

Although Welcome 2 Club XIII has its moments of real-time observation (including “Maria’s Awful Disclosures,” on which Cooley connects the dots between early-19th-century anti-immigrant agitprop and the noxious paranoia of QAnon), much of the album serves as a free-flowing coming-of-age memoir. “Cooley and I have been playing together for 37 years now,” Hood points out. “That first band might have failed miserably on a commercial level, but I’m really proud of what we did back then. It had a lot to do with who we ended up becoming.” And while Drive-By Truckers never shy away from illuminating the many shades of grief that come with getting older, Welcome 2 Club XIII ultimately embodies a certain world-weary joie de vivre—an element beautifully encapsulated in one of its final lyrics, from the softly stunning “Wilder Days”: “As the sun gets dizzy watching us as we go spinning around/I find it best to laugh at the absurdity of life above the ground/There’s no comfort in survival, but it’s still the best option that I’ve found.”

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Big Ass Truck “All You Can Handle” 30th Birthday Bash at MinglewoodHall 10.14.2023 Support by The Indefinite Mash O Matic. Pre show listening party with Capital A includes a GA ticket, Limited Edition 180g splatter vinyl record, show poster.

Big Ass Truck is a rock and psychedelic funk band from Memphis, Tennessee. The band released its debut album in the mid 90’s and developed a passionate, underground following in the South. Who Let You in Here? was released by Terminus Records in 2000 and the band followed up with The Rug in 2001. Both albums mix timely funk, grooves and splashes of turntablism to defy easy categorization. Big Ass Truck etched a unique imprint in the storied legacy of Memphis music. Terminus is proud to present Who Let You in Here? on vinyl for the first time available in the summer of 2021. This limited-edition audiophile pressing is remastered from the original analog tapes on 180-gram vinyl, with new artwork and housed in a deluxe Stoughton tip-on gatefold jacket.

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Victor, bass guitar/vocals; Joseph, keyboards/vocals; Roy, percussion/vocals; and Regi, guitars/vocals. For over four decades the Wooten Brothers have been recognized as some of the most innovative musicians in existence and are collectively known as one of the most talented and dynamic band of brothers the world has ever known. Since they were young, the five brothers have been a musical tour-de-force redefining the limits of jazz, funk, soul, R&B, rock, and bluegrass. Sons of military parents, their early years were spent living in different states including Hawaii, California, and Virginia where they shared stages with the likes of Curtis Mayfield, The Temptations, Ramsey Lewis, Stephanie Mills, War, and other artists. In the mid 80’s, the brothers released an album as The Wootens for Clive Davis’ Arista Records. This will be the brother’s first tour together as a band since the untimely death of their saxophone-playing brother Rudy a few years ago.

Victor Wooten, a five-time Grammy Award-winning artist, has graced the cover of Bass Player Magazine five times. He is a founding member of the eclectic group Bela Fleck and the Flecktones and is recognized as one of the greatest living bassist today often drawing comparisons to Jaco Pastorius, and was named one of the “Top ten bassist of all time”by Rolling Stone Magazine. He is also an award-nominated author, naturalist, and music educator and has been running his unique music/nature camps since the year 2000. Wooten’s camps are held at his own Wooten Woods, which is just outside of Nashville. In 2010, he started his own record label, Vix Records, which has released a series of acclaimed recordings over the last few years.

Joseph Wooten has a dizzying list of talents that is impressive even by the Wooten clan’s standards. Currently the keyboardist for the Steve Miller Band (since 1993), he is also a composer, orchestrator, motivational speaker, and has been showcased as an amazing vocalist since he was a child. In 1981, Joseph became known as the “overnight accordion player” when he literally auditioned, bought an accordion, and began performing within a matter of a few days for the Busch Gardens amusement park in Williamsburg, VA. He has collaborated with the likes of Whitney Houston and Kenny G, and when not touring with Miller, leads his own band, performs with Freedom Sings, and even helps out his little brother as keyboardist, vocalist, and composer for The Victor Wooten Band. Roy “Futureman” Wooten, also a five-time Grammy Award winner, is best known for his masterful drumming and percussion skills and is a founding member Bela Fleck and the Flecktones. Roy, a seasoned drum set player, is mostly known for his frenzied, inimitable on-stage performances heightened by his surreal choice of instruments: his trademark inventions “The Drumitar” and “RoyEl” keyboard. He is also a philosopher, researcher, filmmaker, and educator. His impressive solo career and “Black Mozart” projects scan the genres of classical, jazz, soul, gospel, and spoken word.
Regi Wooten’s signature guitar style of chording, slapping, tapping and frenzied strumming has earned him world-wide notoriety and comparisons to Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa and Chuck Berry. In recent years, Regi has performed with many artists including the legendary Ginger Baker. Regi, known worldwide as “The Teacher”, currently teaches music in Nashville, TN and has taught many notable musicians. He was teaching his little brothers Joseph and Victor when he himself was only 9 years old. One of his early, but lasting contributions was the composition of his and his brother’s high school Alma Mater.
Together The Wooten Brothers bring an uncanny level of experience, originality, and musical expertise to the stage. Their shows will be a high-energy, super-funky, artistic blend of styles including original songs and classics. In short: these brothers are the real deal and their shows are not to be missed.

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“The California Honeydrops…evoke the greasy rumble of Booker T and channel the spiritual ecstasy of Sly and the Family Stone.” -Rolling Stone

Formed in the subway systems of Oakland, retro-soul outfit The California Honeydrops are an electrifying group that defy convention at every turn. They’ve become a mainstay at festivals including Byron Bay Bluesfest (Australia), Outside Lands, Monterey Jazz, Lightning In A Bottle, and touring with B.B. King, Dr. John, Bonnie Raitt, Buddy Guy, and Allen Toussaint. Led by the enigmatic and energetic frontman, Lech Wierzynski, and drummer Benjamin Malament, each member of the band is a virtuoso in their own rite — Yanos “Johnny Bones” Lustig on saxophone, Lorenzo Loera on keyboards/guitar, Beaumont Beaullieu on bass, and regularly accompanied by Scott Messersmith on percussion, Oliver Tuttle on trombone, Leon Cotter on saxophone/clarinet, and Miles Lyons on trombone/sousaphone — navigating through a vast repertoire of original songs and timeless classics every night. But what truly sets them apart is their unwavering commitment to the art of improvisation – a skill so finely honed that they have completely abandoned the use of set lists and no two shows are ever the same. Off stage, their music has been streamed more than 200 million times, and placed in a variety of TV and films, including “Dead To Me,” “Alaska Daily,” “Black-ish” and more. They are currently touring North America in support of their new deluxe album, ‘Soft Spot’.

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Get ready for an unforgettable evening of live music as Dark Star Orchestra takes the stage at Poplar Hall on November 9th, 2023.
Known for their remarkable ability to recreate the iconic sound and feel of the Grateful Dead, Dark Star Orchestra will transport audiences back in time with their faithful renditions of classic songs. Prepare to be mesmerized by their impeccable musicianship, infectious energy, and the magical atmosphere they create. Don’t miss this opportunity to experience the timeless music of the Grateful Dead brought to life by Dark Star Orchestra.
Doors open at 6:30pm and the show starts at 7:30pm.

Performing to critical acclaim for over 20 years and over 3000 shows, Dark Star Orchestra continues the Grateful Dead live concert experience. Their shows are built off the Dead’s extensive catalog and the talent of these seven fine musicians. On any given night, the band will perform a show based on a set list from the Grateful Dead’s 30 years of extensive touring or use their catalog to program a unique set list for the show. This allows fans both young and old to
share in the experience. By recreating set lists from the past, and by developing their own sets of Dead songs, Dark Star Orchestra offers a continually evolving artistic outlet within this musical canon. Honoring both the band and the fans, Dark Star Orchestra’s members seek out the unique style and sound of each era while simultaneously offering their own informed improvisations.

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“There’s this great duality to our band,” reflects Greensky Bluegrass mandolinist, vocalist, and songwriter Paul Hoffman. “We’re existing in a few different places at once: we’re a bluegrass band and a rock band, we’re song-driven and interested in extended improvisation.”

“We play acoustic instruments,” adds dobro player Anders Beck, “but we put on a rock’n’roll show.

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Mempho Presents: Shake Em’ On Down Tour with Jesse Dayton, Samantha Fish, Jon Spencer, & Eric Johanson

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MEMPHO PRESENTS:
AMERICAN AQUARIUM
SPECIAL GUEST LANCE ROARK

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 10, 2023
DOORS: 7PM / SHOW: 8PM
ALL AGES

ON SALE: FRIDAY, AUGUST 18 @ 9AM

Minglewood Hall is a cashless venue. This event is general admission standing.

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Anywhere off Hatteras Island, Chicamacomico sounds made up, like some wine-drunk incantation or maybe a tongue twister—try to say it ten times fast. But as a former life-saving station built in 1874 on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, the name is perhaps the perfect metaphor and title for American Aquarium’s ninth studio album.

The Old North State is tattooed on the bones of front man BJ Barham, who has never lived more than two hours from his hometown in Reidsville. But, more so, what better to represent an album about loss than a place built to save the lives of shipwrecked mariners and passengers? Song as a sort of salvation is something Barham hopes this album can do for the band’s established and growing fanbase. Sometimes when we’re drowning, music keeps us afloat.

“When these massive life changes happen, we feel like we are the only ones facing these problems,” Barham said. “I hope this album serves as a salve to anyone who has experienced this sort of loss over the last few years. I hope it makes them feel a little less isolated and disconnected. I want them to know that someone out there is going through the exact same shit and that they are not alone.” With tracks tackling personal loss—the loss of his mother and grandmother, the loss of a child, the loss of youth and time and the creative spark that drives him—Chicamacomico feels stripped down and bare-boned in its instrumentation compared to earlier records. The orchestration is dialed back leaving the lyrics to stand naked front and center. It’s reminiscent of Rockingham, Barham’s 2016 solo album, and this may be in part a result of producer Brad Cook, who produced both albums as well as the band’s 2015 record Wolves. But it’s likely more a sign of the maturing sound and expanding scope of a songwriter now fully comfortable and confident in his own skin.

“When you are young, you want to play everything loud and fast and I think that comes, at least in part, from uncertainty. I hadn’t fully found my voice back in those early days so the louder and faster the songs were the less chance someone could actually hear what I was saying. I’m not afraid of the lyrics sitting way out front anymore because I am confident in the songwriting. The band can still cut loose and take over a song, but they aren’t expected to do all the heavy lifting these days.”

Few songwriters swing the hammer as hard and precise as Barham and it is a testament to the humility and trust of his bandmates that they take the back seat and allow his storytelling to drive us home. With a heavy tour the rest of the year and a backlist of brass-knuckled bangers, each will surely have their fair share of time at the wheel.

But as for this record, be thankful for the subtlety, for the stillness and for the quiet. For ten songs, Chicamacomico will hold your head above water.

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JAZZ IS DEAD
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2023
DOORS: 7PM / SHOW: 8PM
ALL AGES
TICKET PRICE:
ADV: 29.50 | DOS: 35

Jazz is Dead is an instrumental Grateful Dead cover band that interprets classic Dead songs with jazz influences. The group is notable in featuring veterans of jazz and jazz fusion ensembles.

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He calls it Cosmic Country, a moniker that’s both self-descriptive and a statement of purpose. It’s an organic rock band aesthetic with plenty of roadhouse twang, a showcase for Donato’s instrumental virtuosity and facility for melodically infectious songcraft. Bridging Nashville and the Great West, Kentucky and mid-60s northern California, tie-dye and plaid, it’s a world of his own, and wide world of musical adventure at that.

“I think Cosmic Country is a tale as old as time, really,” Donato explains. “It’s yin and yang in a musical form. It’s three chords and the truth, and then on the other side it’s exploration and bravery. I really went through a lot of years of grinding, and still am, to achieve this sound which is a vehicle for my personality, and the personality is a vehicle for my soul. So (Reflector) is more that than any other record I ever put out.”

Reflector’s 15 songs offer 66 minutes of ecstatic musical immersion. It’s an album in the classic sense of the word, tracks that are individually memorable but sound even better coming one after the other and make the sum greater than the total of its parts. “We’re touching on a lot with this record, which is also why there’s so many songs on it,” acknowledges Donato, whose stinging Fender Telecaster tone is the strongest glue of continuity throughout — and is positively screaming on tracks such as “Gotta Get Southbound” and “Dance in the Desert Pt. 2.” “If you’re the kind of person who wants to listen to a record and have a record be a companion with you, then Reflector is going to vibrate in your frequency.”