Friday December 1

6:30 Doors, 7:00 pm Show

$25 Advance & Day of Show

All Welcome

\--Ryanhood--International Acoustic Music Awards winners for ‘Best Group/Duo’, Ryanhood’s tight vocal harmonies and big acoustic riffs have made them favorites on the touring circuit for over 15 years. A merging of virtuosic musicianship with rich and transformative storytelling, their shows are driven by strong acoustic guitar interplay and turn-on-a-dime harmonies forged in a decades-long friendship. At turns energetic, hopeful, and quietly moving, Ryanhood offers an invitation to soak in a river of melodies and harmonic hooks; to reflect, laugh, sing, and to stand up and cheer.

All ages

Hotel Congress

An Evening with Ryanhood

Ryanhood - I Didn't Put Anything Into Your Place

Ryanhood

Gigs

Tucson

Hotel Congress Plaza

Saturday December 2

6:30 Doors, 7:00 pm Show

$25 Advance & Day of Show

All Welcome

\--Ryanhood--An evening of songs and storytelling, heartstrings and laughter, A Winter’s Evening with Ryanhood is a live holiday show based on the duo's record, On Christmas, that showcases the high-energy, big-harmony, dueling acoustic guitar approach that Ryanhood fans have come to expect. Featuring a blend of original holiday compositions, wintry covers, and reworked classics woven together with holiday stories and memories, Ryan David Green and Cameron Hood invite audiences to experience the joy, depth, intimacy, and excitement of the holiday season by sharing A Winter's Evening with Ryanhood.

A Winter’s Evening with Ryanhood 

This is an All ages event. 

Congress Cookout: Black Cat Bones

Friday, December 8th with support from The Senators

Doors 7pm, Show 7:30

ADV $20 | DOS $25

21+

\--DUSTBOWL REVIVAL-- Dustbowl Revival has always been about pushing the boundaries of what American roots music can be. After celebrating over a decade of sonic adventuring and playing thousands of shows together in ten countries and counting, the group collected a devoted fanbase coast-to-coast. After throwing five of their own virtual Sway-At-Home festivals during the shut-down featuring nearly forty artists, the always evolving group of string and brass players led by founding members Z. Lupetin, Josh Heffernan, Ulf Bjorlin are excited to welcome a new wave of talent to the band, after emerging from a pandemic touring hiatus.

After spending years on the road, selling out hometown shows at LA’s famed Troubadour, headlining festivals and wowing crowds from Denmark to China, Dustbowl Revival never stopped making their joyful, booty-shaking soul songs and cut-to-heart folk-rock ballads that lift up their transcendent live shows.

Even so, with the bands emotional new single “Beside You” and 2020’s ambitious full length Is It You, Is It Me, they wanted to strike into new terrain. As they mined new energetic material from the place where folk and funk music meet, they teamed up with producer Sam Kassirer (Lake Street Dive, Josh Ritter) and engineer Brian Joseph (Bon Iver, Sufjan Stevens). The latest album strikes a more personal note than ever before, representing the latest stage in a band that never stops exploring new sounds.

Many of the songs feel like small theater pieces coming to life verse by verse. It’s the yin-yang conversational harmony that is the true specialty of lead songwriter and singer Z. Lupetin, who also doubles as a playwright and recently wrote the music for a Greek tragedy set in Gold Rush era California. While longtime co-lead Liz Beebe has stepped away from the band after a long run, an amazing young talent in Lashon Halley has stepped in to bring new life to the songs, matching Lupetin’s intense vocal range with her own.

With a big brass-and-strings band building around the voices, Is It You, Is It Me isn’t afraid to explore the personal and political tension that the group may have shied away from facing before. The album tackles uneasy topics, often where the political feels personal, especially in the defiant “Get Rid of You,” which was inspired by the student activists who emerged from the tragic Parkland High School shooting in Florida. The ominous driving brass groove of “Enemy,” hones in on a painful generational split between a daughter and her parents who may have voted in a tyrant, and have become strangers to her. This yearning search for common ground pervades the record as a whole.

Where the band really sets on a new course is on lushly cinematic, orchestrated set pieces like “Mirror,” “Runaway” and, most notably, the current fan favorite and live showstopper “Sonic Boom,” about the struggle to reveal who you really are in the hidden, rose-colored world of social media. There’s a new widescreen expansiveness to these songs that wouldn’t be out of place in a packed arena or orchestra hall with a full neon light show. Acting like a nimble rock orchestra, during the recording process, each member played multiple instruments, and the group brought in new musicians on symphonic brass, and local friends to sing as a spur-of-the-moment choir.

If one thing is clear, Is It You, Is It Me represents another large leap forward for Dustbowl Revival, coming after their acclaimed self-titled 2017 album. Produced by Grammy-winner Ted Hutt (Old Crow Medicine Show, Drop Kick Murphy’s), it transitioned the group from a “roots dance party band” that continues to thrive on the festival circuit, to a nuanced ensemble embracing more soulful territory without losing their original fire. That self-titled record was a direct bridge to the newest work, rising number to one on the Amazon Americana chart and featuring a funky favorite “Honey I Love You” where the band joyfully teaming up with blues master Keb Mo’. Their heartache folk number “Got Over”, surprised the band by racking up over seven million streams and counting online. “Beside You” stayed in the Americana charts for months and “Enemy” became a staple on SiriusXM, especially during the 2020 election. To top it off, Billboard Magazine added about that Is It You, Is It Me is “the biggest sonic work of the Venice, Calif.-based troupe’s career.”

Dustbowl Revival’s story started humbly. Nearly thirteen years ago Z. Lupetin, a Chicago native who attended college in Michigan came to L.A. to be a screenwriter, grew disillusioned with his job in advertising, and placed a hopeful ad on Craigslist. He sought to find fellow musicians who shared his roving love of Louis Armstrong, Bob Wills, Old Crow Medicine Show, Paul Simon, Aretha Franklin and the brass bands of New Orleans, but also wanted to write songs like Americana pioneers Wilco, Lucinda Williams and even Bruce Springsteen. There are still players in the group who responded to that initial odd quest. New talent on electric guitar, piano and more are joining in for 2021. “Maybe we don’t know where this journey will take us or how long it will last,” acknowledges Lupetin, “That’s my take on the importance of what we try to do. Music elevates us, lifts us up, makes us change our minds, takes us out of our comfort zones. If just one person can be moved by just one song, that’s enough.”

Dustbowl Revival 

The Senators - Wild Wide Open

Dustbowl Revival

The Senators

Saturday December 9th

Doors 6pm, Show 6:30pm

$20 Advance, $25 Day of Show

Join us on the Plaza for a holiday edition of the Tucson Opry! This Opry-style variety show hosted by Chris Brashear features the zany Robbie Fulks, Mamma Coal & Alvin Blaine, Mariachi Las Aguilitas, poet Logan Phillips, and more!

Robbie Fulks’s wildly adventurous spirit has defined a critically acclaimed 30-year career that has included 15 solo albums and two GRAMMY® nominations. “With the soul of a country singer and the mind of a vaudevillian, Robbie Fulks is a chameleon-like artist who can tear it up in honky-tonk, country, bluegrass, power pop, or whatever strikes his ample whimsy at the time.”

“If country music has an Elvis Costello, it’s Robbie Fulks, who marries Ivy League cleverness to an appreciation of hillbilly music that actual hillbillies could only envy.” — Entertainment Weekly

All Welcome

Tucson Opry: Holiday Edition!

Robbie Fulks

Congress Cookout: Bad News Blues Band

Friday, December 15th

Doors 7pm

ADV $10 | $15 DOS

21+

\---PHOENIX AFROBEAT ORCHESTRA---PHOENIX AFROBEAT ORCHESTRA \[PAO!\] proudly carries the musical and social torch that was first lit by the powerful duo of FELA KUTI and TONY ALLEN, original inventors of the Afrobeat sound in Lagos, Nigeria in West Africa. Led by funky heiress Camille Sledge the 16-strong orchestra is composed of the most ambitious and outrageous musicians in Phoenix today – making it the hottest super-group on the Hot City scene!

Beginning with a strict repertoire comprised of classic Afrobeat music, PAO! has now penned an abundance of original material that melds the eclectic heritage of the ensemble with that classic Afrobeat style. The outcome is a truly powerful sound that pays homage to the masters while maintaining a fierce individuality, acting as a loud voice-piece of solidarity and understanding for the global community. In 2023, the band will find themselves releasing and supporting their 3rd studio record "The Times" as well as more new music that has been crafted during this time of prolific societal unrest.

From concert hall to music festival, fashion show to fundraiser, PAO! has shared the stage with such musical icons as George Clinton and The Roots, as well as lesser-known masters including Bombino, Vieux Farka Touré, Sierra Leone's Refugee All Stars, Orgone, Dengue Fever, Turkuaz, Sudan Archives, The Dip, and Los Esplifs.

Phoenix Afrobeat Orchestra

Join us for Desert Haze Vintage Market!  
Free on the Plaza from 10am - 3pm

The Bloody Mary bar will be up and running in our newly renovated Lounge and The Cup Cafe & Plaza Eats food truck will be open so you can snack and sip while you shop!

Check back for a full list of vendors!

Desert Haze | All Vintage Clothes Market

social

Social

Saturday, December 23rd

Doors 7pm

$10

All Welcome

\--RENDEZVOUS--a collective of Tucson raised musicians come together once a year during the holidays to cover their favorite songs and artists. The lineup is summoned from different local bands including Soda Sun, Dos Sueños, Road Warriors, Steff and the Articles, and Spafford and also includes many guest artists .This will be Rendezvous’ 8th year putting on this music fest style cover show, which spans across the entire genre spectrum and is a tribute to Hotel Congress’ once featured “Great Cover Up” event. From Daft Punk to Anderson Paak, Radiohead to Vulfpeck, there is something for everyone to sing along and dance to.

Rendezvous

Sunday, January 7th

Congress Cookout Presents: Angel Diamond & the Rhythm Jax

Doors 3:30pm

$10

Congress Cookout: Angel Diamond and the Rhythm Jax 

($40-$45 tickets) What do you get when you combine seasoned jazz professionals from all over the country and put them together in different combos?  
You get great, spontaneous, jazz music played at the highest level with amazing energy. This setting speaks to the very essence of jazz and its inception. You will be captivated and mesmerized through several sets of music on the patio of Hotel Congress. Join us from 12-5pm and just drop in for any amount of time that you want. This is a scene you will want to be part of…..the TJF Jazz Jam.

This is an All Ages event

Tucson Jazz Festival

Tucson Jazz Fest All Star Jazz Jam 

Join us for our annual FREE festival event, the Downtown Jazz Fiesta. 3-4 stages, inside and out, light up the day with music featuring the best local and national artists. Local food trucks and artisans also line the streets to make this a fun-filled event for music lovers and families of any age.

This year, TJF Artist in Residence - Ken Peplowski will be joining the University of Arizona Studio Jazz Ensemble as one of our headliner events for the day. Mr. Peplowski is considered one of the best saxophone players of his generation and is not only an amazing player, but an amazing teacher. He will be inspiring local students through many masterclasses ahead of this signature performance.

There will be dancing. There will be singing. There will be smiles. All we need is you to join us. The fun starts at 11am and goes into the night. We look forward to seeing you there.

This is an All Ages Event

Downtown Jazz Fiesta 

Doors 7pm

$25 Advance, $30 Day of Show

\-- LIZZY & THE TIGGERMEN --Dubbed "10-piece jazz sensations" (LA Weekly) and "one of the hottest swing bands in LA" (Good Day LA), Lizzy & the Triggermen is forging a path like no other.

Underneath the old school glamour is a captivatingly modern band who is just as at home selling out legendary venues like the Troubadour as topping the jazz charts (#3 iTunes) alongside heavyweights like Miles Davis and Kamasi Washington.

Part of Lizzy & the Triggermen’s “time traveling genius” (Music Connection) is their ability to thrillingly marry the old with the new, simultaneously transporting the audience back in time, and forward. Like the great tunes of the 1930s which so inspire them, their music boldly tackles our modern troubles and turns them into killer dance songs that fill the audience with joy the way only a wailing horn section can. As their debut EP succinctly states: they make “Good Songs for Bad Times.”

Lizzy & the Triggermen

Doors 2:30pm, show 3:30pm

$25 Advance, $30 Day of Show

Black Market Trust bring their singing, swinging take on Great American Songbook classics & Gypsy Jazz to Tucson Jazz Festival!

The Black Market Trust

Saturday, February 24th

Doors 7pm

ADV $25 | DOS $30

All Welcome

\---COCO MONTOYA---“’Just play what you feel, be real about it, and enjoy yourself.’ That’s what Albert Collins taught me,” says the award-winning guitar virtuoso and soul-deep singer Coco Montoya. The self-taught, left-handed Montoya mastered his craft under Collins’ tutelage. Incorporating lessons learned from his mentors, the iconic Collins (for whom he originally drummed), and UK legend John Mayall, Montoya puts his own stamp onto every song he performs. Since his first solo album in 1995 (which won him the Blues Music Award for Best New Artist), Montoya’s endlessly inventive guitar work and passionate, hard-hitting vocals have kept him at the top of the blues world. With his new Alligator Records album, Writing On The Wall (his sixth for the label), Montoya delivers what he is already calling one of the best records he’s ever made. For the very first time on Alligator, he decided to bring his road-tested band—noted keyboardist and songwriter Jeff Paris (Keb’ Mo’, Bill Withers), bassist Nathan Brown, and drummer Rena Beavers—into the studio with him. Between the camaraderie of the long-time bandmates and the sheer talent of all involved, the results have left Coco, in his words, “over the moon.”

Produced by Grammy Award-winner Tony Braunagel (Bonnie Raitt, Taj Mahal) and co-produced by Jeff Paris, Writing On The Wall is a tour-de-force of memorable, hook-filled songs, sung with passion and fueled by equally memorable, top shelf musicianship. The 13 tracks include five written or co-written by Montoya. The set opens with a signature, career-defining performance of the soul-baring I Was Wrong, written for Coco by songwriter Dave Steen. From the blistering Save It For The Next Fool to the enjoy now/pay later philosophy of Jeff Paris’ (I’d Rather Feel) Bad About Doin’ It to the riveting reinvention of Lonnie Mack’s Stop, Montoya delivers each song with heart-pounding emotion. Special guest Lee Roy Parnell adds his well-seasoned slide guitar to the smoldering A Chip And A Chair. And Coco’s friend, guitarist Ronnie Baker Brooks (son of late Alligator star Lonnie Brooks), joins in for some good-natured fun on the droll Baby, You’re A Drag and adds his blistering playing to the searing cover of Bobby Bland’s You Got Me.

“I am so proud of this one,” Montoya says of Writing On The Wall. “We recorded in Jeff Paris’ studio and everything just gelled together. And the band inspired me; they all gave extra effort at every turn. Jeff, Nathan and Rena played so great, they ended up making me play even harder. They made me sound better than I am!”

Henry “Coco” Montoya was born in Santa Monica, California, on October 2, 1951, and raised in a working-class family. Growing up, Coco immersed himself in his parents’ record collection. He listened to big band jazz, salsa, doo-wop and rock ‘n’ roll. His first love was drums; he acquired a kit at age 11. He got a guitar two years later. “I’m sure the Beatles had something to do with this,” Montoya recalls. “I wanted to make notes as well as beats.” But guitar was his secondary instrument. Montoya turned his love of drumming into his profession, playing in a number of area rock bands while still in his teens and becoming an in-demand drummer.

In 1969, Montoya saw Albert King opening a Creedence Clearwater Revival/Iron Butterfly concert at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. He was transformed. “After King got done playing,” says Montoya, “my life was changed. When he played, the music went right into my soul. It grabbed me so emotionally that I had tears welling up in my eyes. Nothing had ever affected me to this level. He showed me what music and playing the blues were all about.

I knew that was what I wanted to do.”

The next chapter of Montoya’s story was kick-started by a chance meeting in the mid-1970s with legendary bluesman Albert Collins. Montoya says, “Albert was coming through Los Angeles and needed to borrow my drum set, which I left at the club where he was going to be playing. I went down to see his show that night and it just tore my head off. The thing that I had seen and felt with Albert King came pouring back on me when I saw Albert Collins.”

A short time later, Collins hired Montoya as his band’s drummer. With Albert mentoring Coco on the guitar during the band’s downtime, Coco soon became Collins’ second guitarist. “We’d sit in hotel rooms for hours and play guitar,” remembers Montoya. “He’d play that beautiful rhythm of his and just have me play along. He was always saying, ‘Don’t think about it, just feel it.’ He was like a father to me,” says Coco, who often slept at Collins’ home. When Collins declared Montoya his “son,” it was the highest praise and affection he could offer. In return, Montoya learned everything he could from the legendary Master of the Telecaster.

Needing a more regular paycheck, Montoya left Collins’ band after two years and took a job tending bar, jamming on weekends at Los Angeles clubs. One day, legendary British musician John Mayall heard Coco playing Otis Rush’s All Your Love (I Miss Loving) onstage. Soon after, Mayall called on Montoya to join his famous Bluesbreakers. Filling the shoes of previous Bluesbreaker guitarists Eric Clapton, Peter Green and Mick Taylor would not be easy, but Montoya knew he could not pass up the opportunity to play with another legend. For the next ten years he toured the world and recorded with Mayall on seven albums, soaking up the experience of life on the road and in the recording studio.

Montoya’s recorded debut as a bandleader came with 1995’s Gotta Mind To Travel (originally on Silvertone Records in England and later issued in the USA on Blind Pig Records). The album became an instant fan favorite. Blues enthusiasts, radio programmers and critics sent praise from all corners. The album immediately made it clear that Montoya ranked among the best players on the contemporary scene. Two more Blind Pig albums followed, and Coco was well on his way.

In 2000, Montoya’s Alligator debut, Suspicion, quickly became the best-selling album of his career, earning regular radio airplay on over 120 stations nationwide. Montoya’s fan base exploded. After two more highly successful and massively popular Alligator releases—2002’s Can’t Look Back and 2007’s Dirty Deal—Montoya signed with Ruf Records, cutting both a live and a studio album. Returning to Alligator with 2017’s Hard Truth and 2019’s Coming In Hot, the guitar master continued to blaze his trail. “Montoya unleashes one career-topping performance after another,” declared the UK’s Blues Matters.

Still an indefatigable road warrior, Montoya continues to tour virtually nonstop, bringing audiences to their feet from New York to New Orleans to Chicago to San Francisco. Across the globe, he’s performed in countries including Australia, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Norway, England, Brazil, Argentina, Spain, Mexico, Ecuador, Italy, Poland, Russia, the Czech Republic and Canada.

Now, with the dynamic Writing On The Wall and a tour calendar busting at the seams, Coco Montoya is as excited as he’s ever been to perform the new songs live with his burning-hot band. Montoya’s well-earned reputation as an eye-popping live performer precedes him. Vintage Guitar states, “Coco keeps getting better and better. He plays with fire and passion rarely seen in this day and age.” Billboard declares, “In a world of blues guitar pretenders, Coco Montoya is the real McCoy. He exudes power and authenticity. Be prepared to get scorched by the real thing.”

Coco Montoya

Stars Aligned Tour featuring Reverend Horton Heat, Dale Watson, & Jason D. Williams

Friday, March 1st

Doors 7pm

ADV $30 | DOS $35

\*Standing Room Only\*

This is a 21+ event

Reverend Horton Heat, Dale Watson, & Jason D. Williams

Right String, Wrong Yo-Yo

Reverend Horton Heat

Dale Watson

Jason D. Williams

Thursday, March 14th

7pm Doors, 7:30pm Show

$20 Advance, $25 Day of Show

21+

\--MICHAEL PALASCAK-- is a comedian who grew up in Wabash, Indiana, began his career in Chicago and now resides in LA. He performed on both The Late Late Show with James Corden and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in the same year. In addition, his resume includes A Little Late with Lilly Singh, Letterman, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, Conan, has a Comedy Central Half Hour special, and was a Top 5 Finalist on Last Comic Standing where one judge claimed, “My first impression of Michael was a great likability. This is a guy that could star in a sitcom.”

Michael’s likability allows him to relate to his audiences in a real way which sets up the huge laughs he gets from his sharp, personal material. Consistently writing and performing, Michael recently released both a new album— The Internet Live through 800 Pound Gorilla and a new stand-up special on the Dry Bar app— 1984. Available for free streaming.

​Drew Hunt of The Chicago Reader wrote about Michael, “In a lot of ways, he represents the ideal antidote to the sort of unbridled cynicism that pervades much of contemporary stand-up.” Michael’s optimism continues in the new National Lampoon series — The Bright Side where he takes a positive stance on a negative topic streaming on YouTube.

Michael Palascak: Not a Stalker Tour

comedy

Comedy

Saturday, March 16th

Doors 6:30pm

ADV $30 | DOS $35

21+

\--- DEVENDRA BANHART---“This dewdrop world -Is a dewdrop world,

And yet, and yet...”

\- Kobayashi Issa

Devendra Banhart’s Flying Wig, is a landscape of recurrent dualities; a can of paradoxes, a box of worms. What goes up, must come down, eventually. Battle-scarred by life and loss, Banhart found himself despondent, folded inwards; finding it difficult to speak, let alone sing.

“It’s about transmuting despair into gratitude, wounds into forgiveness, grief into praise” ruminates Banhart on his eleventh studio album. Gliding through the air, the whisper of two buoyant words symbolically and at times, literally appear — “and yet...” (inspired by ‘A World of Dew’ by 19th century Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa) — coloring in the melancholic outlines and replacing them with a bonded optimism. “The ‘and yet, and yet,’” Banhart explains, “is our ability to face despair with hope, to keep on failing and loving. My whole life has been filled with sadness. Everything I do in life is to help cope with that sadness.”

Turning his back on Los Angeles’ wailing sirens, he packed the bones that would become Flying Wig’s songs into a bag and took to the secluded woodland of a Topanga canyon. The album is the actualisation of a precious friendship with the acclaimed solo artist, multi-instrumentalist,

Mexican Summer stablemate and producer of Flying Wig, Cate Le Bon. The pair’s coming together is one prophesied by the mirror-image titles of their early solo albums (Banhart’s 2002

Oh Me Oh My to Le Bon’s 2009 Me Oh My) and a tenderness built on crude haircuts (“we finally met, soon after she was cutting my hair with a fork and that was that”) and home-made tattoos —but never previously translated into the recording studio. “She’s the only person I wanted to make this record with,” Banhart admits. “We set out to make a record sonically unlike anything I have made before – with a new creative partner at the helm. We definitely wanted a new sound, electronic yet organic and warm...we wanted to draw out and emphasize the emotional aspect of a synthesizer.”

The redwood and pine-surrounded cabin studio (once owned by Neil Young) where Banhart was “constantly listening to the Grateful Dead” somehow birthed something slick, city pop-adjacent and Eno-esque. The product of a ritualistic creative practice that melts down and re-casts as it mulls, the stuff of sadness beautified as it changes shape — culminating in a record that “sounds like getting a very melancholic massage, or weeping, but in a really nice outfit...if I’m going to cry”, Banhart mentions, “I want to do it in my best dress.”

Wearing, for much of the writing and recording, an Issey Miyake dress the color of the spring sky — a gift from Le Bon’s own wardrobe — and his grandmother’s pearls, Banhart found himself emboldened, protected; an experience “like returning to from where I started to sing when I was a kid” (as recently emulated onstage at an emotional homecoming gig in Caracas — Banhart’s first ever Venezuelan show). He elaborates: “I first started singing in my mother’s dresses when I was nine years old. It wasn’t about sexuality, just connecting with my feminine side and feeling that I had permission... It felt like a power. And that’s a very safe and comfortable place for me. I think a lot of the record is that – searching for hope, searching for a safe feeling.”

Nowhere more than in the album’s title is this sense of joyful abandon most strongly distilled. The real wig that inspired it was, explains Banhart, a birthday present from the artist Isabelle

Albuquerque. “I placed it on a mic stand and it just hovered there for months in the middle of my living room. Over time, it began to take on a playfully eerie presence and I started to imagine that while I was asleep the Wig would fly off into the night and hang out with all the other wigs and toupees that were flying around... It seemed like a lovely and haunting image, a symbol for freedom.” Combined with Banhart’s wry and jubilant list of other inspirations for the record — “the ballroom scene of the mid 80s, glamor, whales, the lonely employee at a dead-end corporate gig, the bloodshot eyes of the divorcee, the night nurse, the rebellious nun” — there is, after all, much up to be found with the down.

“I’m looking for a feeling / Hard to explain,” he echoes on Flying Wig’s opening track ‘Feeling,’ sibilant waves on sand, reverb pedals, elemental drones and mantric tones carrying a confessional intimacy to the fore as dusk falls. The album’s ten songs unfurl languorously into the embrace of the night: becoming trails of light on the mournful ‘Fireflies’, bathing in the glow of the new-risen moon on ‘Sight Seer’, and bearing witness to the strangeness of metropolitan solitude on ‘Sirens’ — the sound of panic the only company in a place filled with people.

Ever an intuitive producer, Le Bon reflects Banhart’s craft back on itself; arrangements of off-beat percussion, cascading piano and subtly wonky sax the looking-glass double of the softly-spoken dismemberment that suspends “blood outside the vein” on ‘Sight Seer’; conjures “an eye without a head” on the title track, and on ‘Nun’, finds Banhart “running / running / running / running / running out of legs.” The album’s contributing circle was kept small and familiar; its personnel drawn from both artists’ tried, tested and trusted list of collaborators (Nicole Lawrence on pedal steel and guitar, Todd Dahlhoff on bass, Greg Rogove on drums, Euan Hinshelwood on saxophone), with Le Bon playing a panoply of additional parts (synths, guitar, percussion, bass, piano) herself. The record’s finishing touches also came courtesy of Le Bon stalwarts, with mixing and engineering by Samur Khouja — “He and Cate have such a dynamic at this point,” notes Banhart, “that non-verbal communication, that psychic exchange that comes from proximity and time and trust” — and mastering by Heba Kadry.

Through it all, Issa’s spirit of the upside — that glimmering “and yet...” in an otherwise dark and fleeting world — pervades. The tough riff of ‘Twin’ serves as the iron bars that entrap its writer in the “Same desolate space / Same no way out / Same infinite doubt”, and yet...at its core, there is something cherished: “this precious thing / At the heart of everything you’ve wanted.

Stepping outside of himself to examine the unspeakable, Devendra Banhart is suddenly freer than a bird. He is as free as a wig that transcends the body, transcends the head, and makes for the clouds.

Devendra Banhart

Friday, May 3rd

Doors 7pm

ADV $25 | DOS $28

All Welcome

*Caroline Rose’s The Art of Forgetting VIP Screening:*  
*\- Invitation to a pre-show screening of “The Art of Forgetting” short film*  
*\- Limited edition lyric booklet signed by Caroline Rose*  
*\- $10 merchandise coupon\*\* and merchandise shopping opportunity before doors open to the public*  
*\- Commemorative Movie Laminate*  
*\- Priority entry into the venue*

*\*\*merchandise coupon is only redeemable at this show only\*\**

Hotel Congress Plaza

Upcoming events