SOU’WESTER EVENTS!

Discover what’s happening during your next stay or plan a visit around our free live music, workshops, wellness offerings and more!

Aug
18
Wed
Dustin Hamman: Presented by Sou’wester Arts @ The Sou'wester
Aug 18 @ 8:00 pm – 9:30 pm

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.

 

Aug
21
Sat
Jolie Holland: A fundraiser for Sou’wester Arts Sponsored Artist Residency. @ The Sou'wester
Aug 21 @ 8:00 pm – 9:30 pm

A fundraiser for Sou’wester Arts Sponsored Artist Residency.

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.

 

Sep
4
Sat
Henry Chadwick: Presented by Sou’wester Arts @ The Sou'wester
Sep 4 @ 8:00 pm – 9:30 pm

http://www.henrychadwick.net
Henry Chadwick is a Santa Cruz, CA-based singer-songwriter, musician & producer. Chadwick’s music dances between genres – landing somewhere between indie, garage rock, psychedelia, and shimmery, sunshine-tinged power-pop. His 2nd full length record – We All Start Again – is due out this fall (2021) via Swoon City Music. 
 
“Chadwick not only mixes his tastes into something original, he also has something worth hearing to say.” – Grimy Goods

 

Sep
11
Sat
Nick Delffs : Presented by Sou’wester Arts @ The Sou'wester
Sep 11 @ 8:00 pm – 9:30 pm

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.

Sep
25
Sat
Lasers Lasers Birmingham : Presented by Sou’wester Arts @ The Sou'wester
Sep 25 @ 8:00 pm – 9:30 pm

https://www.laserslasersbirmingham.com

Tipping the Stetson hat that covers his scruffy hair, Lasers Lasers Birmingham carries on the legacy of hard living, left of center country music from the city of angels. Owen’s brand of “weird country music” draws inspiration from both right and left field, citing George Jones and Pink Floyd as influences.
 
“A fresh outlook on country music…” – Glide Magazine
“The music is an irresistible take on California country music.”-Twangville
Oct
2
Sat
Luke Borsten: Presented by Sou’wester Arts @ The Sou'wester
Oct 2 @ 8:00 pm – 9:30 pm

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.

Oct
9
Sat
Music: Faustina Masigat @ The Sou'wester
Oct 9 @ 8:00 pm – 9:30 pm

Faustina Masigat at The Sou’wester
Frustrated by academia and emotionally raw from a breakup, Faustina Masigat stepped away from her peers in her mid-twenties. She had come to realize that her personal and artistic maturation had been stifled by her relationships and her overly angular traditional musical schooling. She knew she needed to spend more time alone, committed to a process of unlearning, before she could move forward. As she peeled back the rigid layers of her youth, she began to write the songs that, a few years later, would make up her debut record. Seeking honesty over perfection, her approach to composition became much more intuitive; seated in the natural expression of not only her emotional life, but also that of a spiritual life, an expression of her own femininity, and a means of self improvement through self reflection. She became obsessed with the old, forgotten, second-hand guitars she would find in the “As Is” section of local music shops, believing that magic and songs still lived in the beat-up wood. One album track, “Willie Nelson”, manifested, fully formed, from one of these guitars – an ancient, labeless individual that she called “Red.” 
 
The songwriting on her self-titled debut is all at once heartbreaking, intelligent, meditative and elegant – centered around a voice that is difficult to attach genre to. There is a quiet intensity running through the world that Faustina creates: sweet and heavy, a touch of angst, brutally honest, smoldering. The album is understated, arranged as to allow Faustina’s effortless rapport with pedal steel player Tucker Jackson (The Minus 5, The Delines) to shine clearest. It’s a spacious and lush debut, with all of her vulnerabilities laid bare in songs hemmed together with fragile intimacy.
 
Faustina Masigat is out now on Mama Bird Recording Co. It was recorded by Rian Lewis, mixed by Ben Nugent and mastered by Timothy Stollenwerk, all in Portland, Oregon.
Oct
16
Sat
The Hackles: Presented by Sou’wester Arts @ The Sou'wester
Oct 16 @ 8:00 pm – 9:30 pm

The Hackles: Presented by Sou’wester Arts

“We’re processing a lot of things going on in our world right now,” reflects Kati Claborn during a respite from touring. Along with her partner Luke Ydstie, Claborn is striving to make sense of the present by looking to the past in The Hackles’ upcoming album, A Dobtrich Did As A Dobritch Should, out on Jealous Butcher Records on November 8, 2019. “We’re looking at the big picture through individual lives,” says Claborn.  In an era rife with discord, The Hackles are using melodic, shimmering indie folk to chronicle means of control and autonomy through idiosyncratic narratives.

 Ydstie and Claborn first met in Portland in the mid-2000s after Israel Nebeker and Ryan Dobrowski of Blind Pilot recruited additional band members to flesh out the band. Still members of Blind Pilot today, Ydstie and Claborn first met at these initial band practices, and now live in Astoria, Oregon with their five-year-old daughter. After discovering how well each of their creative processes’ enrich one another’s, Ydstie and Claborn decided to form their own musical project. “I think one of the reasons why it’s so successful when Luke and I write together is that we feel very safe and open,” says Claborn. “Both of us feel like we can throw out any idea and it’s okay. We can try anything.” Co-producer Adam Selzer expands this environment of experimentation. “Going into the mixing process, we gave Adam free reign to do whatever he wanted, and he made a lot of interesting mixing choices and added effects that had a huge effect on how the album turned out.”

Though The Hackles’ upcoming record title might at first seem imbued in mystery, the  eccentric name is a nod to the life and death of 20th century Bulgarian circus impresario, Al Dobritch, who appears most markedly in “And The Show Goes On.” The chief producer of famed Circus Circus Casino in Las Vegas, Dobritch made a name for himself after escaping World War II and settling in America, eventually rubbing elbows with celebrities and marrying film star Rusty Allen. His gilded life came to a dark end when he was charged with kidnapping and, soon after, jumped to his death on the Las Vegas strip. “Dobritch went through so many crazy things in his life,” says Claborn, “And though he was able to persevere and create this incredible life, it goes to show that at the end, there are sometimes things you can’t control.”

The interwoven notions of predestined fate, as well as the hopeful antithesis of regaining power over one’s personal circumstances, stream throughout The Hackles’ upcoming release, complemented by the album’s serene sound. The duo’s propensity for glowing chords shines, though it soon becomes apparent that the expert delicacy of the couple’s guitar work only barely contains the graceful, mounting power prevalent in the meeting of Claborn and Ydstie’s voices. Similar to the tug-of-war stories that Claborn and Ydstie portray, the dynamism of the duo’s vocals never overpowers the tranquility of the chords below. Instead, both strengths support and enhance one another. “There’s a thread going through the album about the things that control us in our lives and the things that we’re able to take back,” surmises Claborn, “It’s about the impact of inevitability, the webs you can weave, and the webs that weave you.”

Oct
24
Sun
Joe Kaplow: Presented by Sou’wester Arts @ The Sou'wester
Oct 24 @ 8:00 pm – 9:30 pm

Joe Kaplow: Presented by Sou’wester Arts

http://joekaplow.net

Singer/songwriter Joe Kaplow lives in a four-acre mansion in the hills of Santa Cruz. Of course, he shares the space with a group of hippies, some rats, and some very dilapidated floors and walls… but it does have a swimming pool.

For Kaplow, becoming a full-time musician – and adopting the lifestyle that often accompanies it – didn’t happen by accident. Having moved from farm life and family in New Jersey to the rich Santa Cruz music community, Kaplow has often found himself living paycheck to paycheck as he departs on three-month U.S. solo tours, records music in various bedrooms of the house where he lives, rehearses with his new band and writes constantly, dedicating himself fully and lovingly to the craft of songwriting.

Kaplow’s debut album Time Spent In Between is simultaneously grounded and exploratory; the music is equal parts intimate and expansive. With raw instrumentation and earthy vocal melodies, Time Spent In Between is rich with folk songwriting brilliance.

 
Oct
30
Sat
Music: Johnny Franco, Mike Coykendall @ The Sou'wester
Oct 30 @ 8:00 pm – 9:30 pm

Johnny Franco + Mike Coykendall : Presented by Sou’wester Arts

Johnny Franco is a Brazilian rock n’ roll marauder who now resides in Portland, and who crafts inventive spaghetti western/folk-rock stompers. Armed with propulsive, spindly guitars, Dylanesque vocals, and adventurous vibes, Franco recently signed to label Blanket Fort.

“A sly blender of old-school country & western and modern Americana, “Treated Like Grass” thrives on its rollicking rhythms and catchy, twangy melodies” – Impose Magazine

 

Veteran songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist Mike Coykendall has been amazingly prolific over the last three decades or so. Currently most well known for his duties as a sideman, producer, and recordist via his work with M Ward, Blitzen Trapper, She & Him, Annalisa Tornfelt, & Tin Hat Trio, to name a few, Coykendall has been making his own unique outsider records since the mid ’80s.