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!
Live at The Sou’wester
Nick Jaina
Presented by Sou’wester Arts
Nick Jaina is a musician and author living with his wife and stepson in Oakland, California. He has published three books, released over a dozen albums, produced several ballets, and composed various film scores. He teaches writing workshops online and in person, and hosts magical tea services that involve music, reading, and color immersion. He was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award in 2015. He has collaborated with dancers from the New York City Ballet and Oregon Ballet Theater.
Lê Almeida Live at The Sou’wester
10/19/23 Free & open to the public
Sou’wester Lodge Living Room
Presented by Sou’wester Arts
“Lê Almeida is the mastermind of an unlikely and noisy indie scene that emerged in the suburbs of RIO DE JANEIRO in the early 2000s. A prolific producer, initially labeled _lo-fi_, he was called the ‘Brazilian answer to Robert Pollard’ in a report in _The Guardian_ which makes less sense as his sound has incorporated elements of kraut, free jazz, afrobeat, hip hop and Brazilian music.” Excerpt from the biography available on DATABASE.FM/LEALMEIDA
October 2023 marks the release of I FEEL IN THE SKY, LÊ ALMEIDA’s new solo album. The album was recorded between 2022 and 2023, during the tour of his band ORUÃ, with more than 100 shows in the USA and Europe. The album will be presented at SouWester, during Lê Almeida’s first artistic residency in the United States, which takes place in Seaview, Washington.
His independent label Transfusão Noise Records was born in his bedroom in 2004 in Vilar dos Teles, Baixada Fluminense, and emerged in the center of Rio de Janeiro in 2013 with the creation of Escritório, a space for recording, rehearsals and shows. More than 100 releases have been made since then. Lê played a major role in recording and mixing most of these albums, where many of the visual ideas came from his collages, associating fantastic realism with improbable combinations of environments and colors.
Since 2011 he has dedicated himself to the visual arts, taking part in exhibitions and collage workshops, both individual and collective. His solo albums Paraleloplasmos (2015) and Todas as Brisas (2016) made him travel the art world beyond the usual music scene between tours of Brazil. Both albums were released by IFB Records, a small Atlanta-based label that presses his LPs independently and distributes them throughout the United States.
Oruã, his main band, was created at the end of 2016 and since 2018 he has been traveling extensively, promoting his first albums recorded in the office on old cassette tapes. 2018 was the year Almeida left Brazil for the first time. He went to play drums with Built to Spill in Chile and with Oruã in Uruguay. His story with Built to Spill began in mid-2018 when he joined the band for its first shows in South America and the following year he traveled between the United States and Europe playing more than 130 shows, 60 of them opening for Oruã. He recorded and mixed the latest BtS release, When the Wind Forgets Your Name (2022, SubPop), where he also acted as drummer.
I FEEL IN THE SKY is out on October 6 on the Transfusão Noise Records website
https://on.soundcloud.com/gDnYT
Pic by Melanie Radford (Central Park, 2023)
LIVE AT THE SOU’WESTER LODGE
K Van Petten
Presented by Sou’wester Arts
K Van Petten is a musician and poet based in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. Their current project explores a new genre they call ‘stargaze’ — music for looking at the stars, or that will make you see stars. Their music combines layered strings, soft harmonies, and moving poetry that explore themes of multiplicity, queerness, and nostalgia, drawn from their experience as a queer, non-binary, Gemini, middle-child. Their enchanting melodies and poetic compositions transport listeners to stellar realms, inviting them to revel in the in-between, liminal spaces of sonic possibility. K started their performing as a musician in residence at a harbor bar in Chicago while living on a sailboat. They relocated to Seattle a decade ago, and most recently authored and composed ‘For Someone,’ a cassette tape of music and poetry created during their residency at Centrum in Fort Worden, Port Townsend. The cassette tape is available at Elliott Bay Books, The Vera Project vending machine, Light in the Attic Records at KEXP, and online at Hello America Stereo Cassette. One of their tape pieces was adapted into a film showcased at Northwest Film Forum and selected for SIFF’s NW Folklife Forum in 2023. Previous projects include Baddy Gold, Wet Whitman, and Everyday in February. They currently support Sonic Guild, a local music non-profit. Find out more at instagram.com/kvanpetten
Hanna Haas
LIVE at The Sou’wester Lodge
Presented by Sou’wester Arts
Hanna Haas performs solo and as a duo (mainly cello as accompaniment). Hanna loves to engage her audiences in sweet story-telling and laughter, leaving her audience in a state of heart-felt introspection.
Isabeau Waia’u Walker
LIVE at The Sou’wester
Presented by Sou’wester Arts
The vision for her music is clear and thought provoking, often expressed through her master storytelling. The authenticity of her presentation as a performer and storyteller taps into human emotions and bonds her with the listeners and audiences in front of her. Grabbing hold of the space with never having to command the attention of the room. Soothing and soft while powerful, accessible while complex, melancholic in celebration, serious while playful, sweet but aching. Songs of love, care, community, fight, self. Vulnerable while her humility guards her impressive force. The tensions of the stretches and contractions nested in her core, reverberate through the layers of her product: storytelling, collaboration, presentation, music. Her craft is seemingly effortless, but a closer attention reveals meticulous engineering and caring intentionality in process and product.
Grief Retreat with The Portland Grief house
Two night retreat with guided meditations and sound healing
Who/How much: w/Julia Francis and Laura Green of The Portland Grief House $498-807 includes lodging
What: We will spend the weekend in conversation with the non-human world; asking what medicine we can offer and what we can take. Except for grief spills and vocalizing during sound healing, we will keep conversation with humans to a bare minimum. We’ll use guided sound work, yoga practice and meditation to let spoken language shift away from the center of our attention. We’ll listen deeply, and talk sincerely with the world around us, and believe what we hear and learn. Retreat pricing includes various Sou’Wester lodging options. Full event details and itinerary found here: https://www.
Email: info@griefhouse.org
Chibia
Live at The Sou’wester
Presented by Sou’wester Arts
Her track ‘Honey’ has been featured in Marvel’s She Hulk as well as Queen Sugar on the Oprah Winfrey Network. It has also been voted one of KMHD’s best singles of 2020, quoted as “not a second of its 4 minutes land[ing] flat— and as soon as it’s over, you put it on again.”
Jess Clemons
Live at The Sou’wester
Presented by Sou’wester Arts
Jess Clemons’ experience as a traveler, former island dweller, and small town girl have influenced her folksy homegrown musical style. Raised in Vermont, she attended music school in Nova Scotia where she was a side and front woman for various bands, touring around Canada in the summers. A big leap took her to Nantucket, working as a gardener & musician, rowing to and from a houseboat she called home for several years. After finding Baja in 2010 and subsequently the wind-loving community of Hood River, Jess now calls the Gorge home. Playing guitar & piano on stages around the Northwest and in Baja in the winters, she has become known for her powerhouse vocals, intimate originals and tasteful covers of folks like Patty Griffin, Brandi Carlile and Lori Mckenna, all of whom she has been compared to. Coming out of the woodwork after a couple of years of limited shows, Jess is excited to be back on the road this year.
Exhibtion opening in our Art Trailer Gallery
No Lo Tenia Escrito / It Wasn’t in My Plans by Jade Mara Novarino
No Lo Tenia Escrito showcases a short film, Mi Abuela La Hormiga / My Grandma the Ant (40 minutes, 2023), and several prints and works on paper. The footage and the work are from a trip to Argentina in February of 2023. This work was made in order to remember—my grandma, us, a place, and a time. In a sense, it is a small archive, a document that marks a special moment in our relationship. Initially, for the film, I had set out to ask my grandmother many questions, and in some cases succeeded in receiving answers—but in the still and quiet moments of the footage, when the camera was just another piece of furniture and not someone to act in front of, was where I learned the most. The film is conscious of its own form, and the camera itself is acknowledged multiple times. Even so, the main subject—my grandma—doesn’t seem shy or to change before its presence. The prints and works on paper are reflections, journal entries, and photographs made within the year leading up to the show.
Jade Mara Novarino is a first generation American artist, educator, farmer, and community member born and raised in San Diego, California. Her work draws on inspiration from her family and the seasons, personal narrative, site-specificity, songs, and attempts to highlight the everyday as sacred. Her multidisciplinary work spans from socially engaged projects to imaginary restaurants to calligraphy to video to collage, photography, painting, and found sculpture. She runs an artist space and farm from her home in Milwaukie, Oregon. Her birthday is in February, her favorite month is September, and she looks forward to planting garlic every October. She is always looking for new pen-pals.
Curated by Nikki Cormaci
Steph Green LIVE at The Sou’wester Lodge
Presented by Sou’wester Arts
11/22/23
Free & Open to the public!
Steph Green’s music is for those who fancy the art of songwriting, depicting a lonely world illuminated by strangeness and beauty. Her sophomore album, “Lore”, is a series of vignettes that immerse the listener in dreams and nightmares of the West. It’s a world of towering storm clouds, flooding rivers, the smell of ponderosa pines, the pull of desert moons, and revenge, regret, and redemption under diamond skies. The natural and supernatural collide, wailing spirits wander lost highways, and shapeshifting starling murmurations soar overhead of restless loners.
Green produced and recorded “Lore” at home on a borrowed 16-track reel-to-reel, creating a distinctive and otherworldly sound with weeping steel guitar, washy organ, and ghostly vocal layering reverberating from a distant dimension. Embarking on an almost entirely solo recording process that allowed room for experimentation, Green also enlisted long-time collaborator Duff Thompson as the rhythm section on bass and drums. Out October 20th on Mashed Potato Records, “Lore” is a rugged, eerie, and wild homage to both a real and imagined place.
Green brought the same DIY ethos and spirit of experimentation that characterizes “Lore” to her previous releases, all of which were also recorded analog and variously featured her in the roles of producer and multi-instrumentalist. Her debut album “Thanks for That” and second EP, “Spooky Love” were recorded mostly live in makeshift home studios while living in New Orleans, with both releases taking influence from a combination of garage, indie rock/pop and country music. Her first release and venture into writing and recording was the cassette 4-track EP, “Salt Spring Island Tapes”, created alone in a seaside barn in British Columbia, following years of traveling and performing as a street musician. In addition to her own project, Green has also performed as a backing musician and vocalist for numerous songwriters over the years, appearing most recently on recordings for Duff Thompson and Dean Johnson. Following an extensive era of collaboration in New Orleans, “Lore” finds Green returning to her roots in Canada, multi-tracking her way through the isolated, northern winter.