Society Hall  "where community celebrates!"

Doors open at 6:00 pm, Show at 7:00pm

February 08, 2020

$15.00 Advance, $20.00 General Admission

On the walls of any local used music shop there hangs a gallery of mysteries. Picked up and handed down across the decades, each instrument contains the imprints and stories of those who have played it before, most of which remain untold. For Kansas City-based songwriter Kelly Hunt the most intriguing of these stories is the origin of her anonymous calfskin tenor banjo. “I really wasn’t looking for it,” she says, “but I opened up the case and it said ‘This banjo was played by a man named Ira Tamm in his dog and pony show from 1920 to 1935.’ I strummed it and said ‘This is unlike anything I’ve ever heard.’ People often think of the banjo as being rather brash and tinny - loud and kind of grating - but this was so warm and mellow, with an almost harp-like quality to it, very soulful” – apt words for the Memphis native’s debut album, Even The Sparrow, coming out May 17 on Rare Bird Records.

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The daughter of an opera singer and a saxophonist, Kelly Hunt was raised in Memphis, TN, and grew up performing other people’s works through piano lessons, singing in choirs, and performing theater. “It was a very creative, artistic household,” says Hunt. During her teenage years, influenced by musical inspirations as diverse as Norah Jones, Rachmaninov, and John Denver, she began writing her own songs on the piano as a creative outlet. After being introduced to the banjo in college while studying French and visual arts, Hunt began to develop her own improvised style of playing, combining old-time picking styles with the percussive origins of the instrument. “I’m self-taught, I just started letting the songs dictate what needed to be there,” she says. “I heard a rhythm in a song that I wanted to execute, so I figured out how to do it on the drum head while still being able to articulate certain notes in one motion.” After college, Hunt followed a rambling path that took her through careers in acting, graphic design, traditional French breadmaking, and medicine, all the while making music as a private endeavor. “I wanted to get serious about a responsible career choice, but music kept bubbling up. I was writing a lot and playing a lot and started to not be satisfied just playing to my walls of my room.”

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After moving to Kansas City and discovering her mysterious Depression-era tenor banjo, Hunt began recording Even The Sparrow in Kansas City alongside collaborator Stas’ Heaney and engineer Kelly Werts. “It took almost two years to record,” she says, “learning how to let the songs dictate the production.” Having finally come to light, the album displays Hunt’s penchant for masterful storytelling and intriguing arrangement, as researched and complex as they are memorable, punctuated by her articulate melodies and a well-enunciated and creative command of lyrical delivery infused with deft emotional communication. While reminiscent of modern traditionalists such as Gillian Welch–a number of her songs even borrow titles and phrasing from traditional American music (“Back to Dixie,” “Gloryland”)–Even The Sparrow reveals an ineffable quality that hovers beyond the constraints of genre, à la Anais Mitchell and Patty Griffin. In “The Men of Blue & Grey,” what begins as a Reconstruction-era ballad about the repurposing of Civil War glass plate negatives in a greenhouse roof soon becomes a meditation on the hope that growth and life may one day be able to emerge from the ruins of suffering and haunting of violence. “Across The Great Divide” turns an otherwise traditional accounting of spurned love into a philosophical epic of the ethics of forgiveness and freedom, evoking the ideas of Søren Kierkegaard and Walt Whitman.

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As for the original owner of Kelly Hunt’s mysterious tenor banjo, not much is known. “I’ve never been able to find anything about Ira Tamm,” she says, “I think he just had a humble little traveling show.” What’s clear is that the itinerant performer laid down his banjo at the height of the Great Depression, almost eighty years before it would be picked up by Hunt. “That banjo has stories. I wish I knew them all,” says Hunt, though the banjo’s most intriguing story may just be beginning with Even The Sparrow. “The marks of Ira’s hands are still in the calfskin head, so I can see where he played and left his mark,” she says. “Now my own hand marks are there too, in different places, like a kind of portrait.”

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February 22, 2020

More information to follow.

Doors open at 6:00 pm, Show at 7:00pm

March 06, 2020

$15.00 Advance, $20.00 at the door

Salt & Pepper, a duo comprised of Tony Nardi (Hammond B-3, piano, vocals) and Eddie Mobley (percussion, vocals) will be playing at Society Hall in Alamosa, Colorado on Saturday, May 25th.

Nardi and Mobley first met and recorded together as a group while serving in the Air Force and stationed in Thailand in 1969 during the Vietnam War.  Although they played together whenever possible over the years, Eddie decided to make a permanent move to join musical forces again a few years ago after their original recording made a comeback in the Northern Soul Dance Clubs in Europe and was reissued on Kent Records as a new 45 and on a compilation CD.  In December 2012, Salt & Pepper was the subject of an article in the German pop-culture magazine, “gethappy!?”, and again in May of this year in the EASEY PBS Magazine in Australia.  

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In the summer of 2012, they spent a month in Australia where Nardi conducted workshops for Hammond of Australia.  Mobley came along and became part of the “Live at Bernie’s” recorded concert series.  They were interviewed by Samantha Goldie for PBS Radio in Melbourne. 

In January 2013, they represented their hometown of Hot Springs, Arkansas at the 29th International Blues Challenge in Memphis, Tennessee.  Salt & Pepper were named finalist in the solo-duo category after defeating rivals from around the globe in quarter- and semi-finals competitions.  By advancing to the finals they had the honor of playing at the famed Orpheum Theatre in Memphis in front of thousands of blues fans. 

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They play regularly in Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, and Colorado.  The Salt & Pepper Band has played the Summerfest on the Rio for the last three years, and perform on regular basis at the Historic Taos Inn in Taos New Mexico. 

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David Hughes of Nightflying Magazine noted “Watching Salt & Pepper perform, it’s obvious that Mobley’s assumption about the duo being destined to be together is right on.  They blend together Motown, blues, and jazz and mix it with their own touches including their own very distinct voices, to create something that has both the past and present in it.”  No one enjoys the true joy of music more than these two veterans of the music industry.

Doors open at 6:30 pm, Show at 7:30pm

March 14, 2020

$20.00 Advance, $25.00 at the door

Chris Arellano's deeply personal Americana weaves together the Norteno music of his Northern New Mexico upbringing with Alternative  Country and Blues influences-for a signature style that he calls Nuevo Americana. Fused with song and story, Spanish and English, his transcendent lyrics move listeners with emotion and passion. 

To understand Chris' unique musical perspective and sound its best to start with his early influences growing up in Costilla, New Mexico  part of a musical family. When Chris was 8 he joined his father Jake (guitarist singer/songwriter) his mother Henrietta (vocalist) and his 11 year old brother Rodney (bass) in the family band. The family played music together throughout Northern New Mexico and Colorado until the loss of his father Jake when Chris was 12. During the sad period following his fathers death Chris immersed himself in his fathers instrument of choice, the guitar, and his love affair with stringed instruments began.