$5 at the door

Dinner Set featuring David Huckfelt(The Pines) 5:30pm-8pm

Evening performances by Ayvah + PaviElle + Black Market Brass kick off at 8:30pm!

Indeed Brewing Company:

Indeed Brewing Company LLC is a packaging microbrewery and self-distributor of hand crafted beer with a production and packaging facility found in Northeast Minneapolis. The brewery opened on August 10, 2012, and began wholesale distribution to bars/restaurants shortly there after in mid-August 2012.

Founded in 2011 by three friends and former college roommates, Indeed Brewing Company has a penchant for adventure, both in the beers we brew and the way we go about brewing them. Situated in the heart of the Northeast Minneapolis Arts District, Indeed began production in July 2012, and it is the first brewery to open its production brewery and taproom in the historic Minneapolis Northeast neighborhood that was once filled with Grain Belt, Gluek Brewery, and James Page Brewing.

Backed by award-winning brewer, and former Minneapolis Town Hall alum Josh Bischoff, Indeed’s brews will be at once bold enough to savor, but also tame enough to fully imbibe.

We will use the finest ingredients available and brew our beer with the utmost attention to detail. This is the baseline commitment we make to you, and we see no wiggle room there.

 

Black Market Brass:

Founded in Minneapolis during the spring of 2012, BMB came together when two guitar players discovered each other's almost identical craigslist ads aimed at starting a funk band influenced by among other things, the sounds of Fela Kuti, K Frimpong, and King Sunny Ade. 

Over the next 3 years the band would relentlessly rehearse, fine tune, and develop their deeply powerful sound.  What started as a funk band playing obscure covers eventually blossomed into a creative collective of musicians writing, arranging, and performing original music that builds on the sound of Nigerian Afrobeat by tastefully blending it with other styles.  As time went on, the band cycled through players and material before arriving at what would become the permanent lineup and their signature sound.  

In 2013 Secret Stash Records released BMB’s debut single to critical acclaim within the collector and DJ communities.  The bible of all things funky, Wax Poetics, declared the record to be “Heavy Nigerian Madness.”  Flea Market Funk raved “This is some authentic music right here people, recorded in the United States. Inspired by the likes of The Funkees, The Black President, and Moussa Doumbia as much as James Brown and The Meters, this Twin Cities dozen (and sometimes more) is shoveling out their musical path with their unique sounds.”  The entire pressing quickly sold out as Secret Stash shipped copies around the globe while BMB slang copies from the stage after shows throughout the Midwest.  

Two years later, after almost non-stop gigging and rehearsing, BMB finally tracked their debut album at Secret Stash’s new recording studio in the Loring Park neighborhood of Minneapolis.  Cut live in one room over the course of 3 days, the recordings jump out of the speakers with an energy reminiscent of the band’s celebrated live shows.  About the process, guitarist Hans Kruger says, “This music needs to be recorded live.  Everytime we play there are these little connections that are being made between a couple of the musicians.  The bass and drums might lock into something that the horn players don’t consciously know about.  But while that’s happening, the horn players might find their way to some new interpretation of their parts.  You would lose some of that if you went in and tracked everything one at a time.  There needs to be room for collective improvisation.” The incredible thing about recorded music is its ability to travel across time, space, and cultural boundaries.  The story of Black Market Brass and their debut album, Cheat And Start A Fight, is a testament to that miraculous feat.  Recorded in 2015 by the 12 piece instrumental band, it is heavily inspired by the sounds of West African popular and spiritual music from long ago.

PaviElle:

PaviElle is an amazing interdisciplinary artist, Upper Midwest Emmy Award and Sage Award winner. She is known for her powerhouse vocals and performing with an equally powerful 6 piece band. Most recently, PaviElle was voted as Minneapolis City Pages "Best R&B Vocalist of 2015", her band was named one of First Avenue's Best New Bands of 2015 and, was a featured artist on TPT's "Lowertown Line", 2015. PaviElle hails from Rondo, a historically Black neighborhood in St. Paul, Minnesota. She honed her craft as a teenager at Penumbra Theatre and with collective, EduPoetic Enyerbrainment. Growing up in a family steeped in music, she says that she wants to make music that honors and represents the Black aesthetic. As a songwriter, PaviElle always has a way she wants her songs to “swing,” and it’s this free-style emotion, in the scatting and vocalizing, that brings a millennial’s heart-born, contemporary vision to a classic soul music sound.

Ayvah:

Ayvah is a collection of jazz-trained musicians and hip-hop lovers rooted in soul; as they combine all of these influential and eclectic sounds, Ayvah has emerged as a jazz-funk, neo-soul band. Ayvah creates music from a wide base of inspiration, including love, heartbreak, coming of age, sexuality, poetry, nature and more. Minneapolis/Saint Paul based, Ava (lead vocals), Sam (keys), DeCarlo (bass), Joey (drums) and Andy (guitar) bring a strong sense artistry and collaboration to all local music niches. “We don’t want to limit ourselves to any specific genre or taste— we just want to create art that is technical, thought out and charged with inspiration.”

David Huckfelt:

One of the founding members of The Pines. 

The Midwest is to The Pines what Monument Valley was to filmmaker John Ford. The flat, endless expanses of the band's native Iowa are at once the settings of, characters in, and muse behind the songs on their new album, Above The Prairie. Songwriters David Huckfelt and Benson Ramsey-who along with Benson's brother Alex form the band's touring trio format-craft their music with a filmmaker's keen eye for detail and framing, blending celestial, ethereal atmospherics with rich, warm vocals and earthy acoustic instruments. It's a gripping brew that demands your total presence, transporting you into vividly painted musical and lyrical snapshots.

'Almost all of the songs on the album are somewhere between the first and third take,' says Huckfelt. 'It was a matter of capturing raw performances and preserving that spirit, of not losing the energy of the songs in the recording of them.'

'It's kind of a risky way to work,' adds Ramsey, 'but we went back to Iowa and just did it in three days and that was pretty much it. It's almost like a photograph.'

Much like the photograph on the album's cover-which depicts a stunning nighttime landscape of wide-open grassland spotted with crumbling, abandoned cabins beneath an infinitely expansive galaxy of stars-the songs on Above The Prairie at once evoke the vastness of space, the ceaseless passage of time, the beauty of Earth, and the inescapable loneliness of inhabiting it.

In some ways, Above The Prairie may sound like an attempt to reconnect with the past, to capture the feel of the land and the communities of their youths, but the songs seem rather to reflect on the impossibility of such an endeavor in the modern age.

"People say you can't step in the same river twice," says Huckfelt, "but you can't even step in the same river once, because change is the only constant. Home isn't the same home you remember, and you don't get a minute to catch your breath to think about it."

It's a sentiment that pervades the album and comes vividly to life on the record's closing track, "Time Dreams," a poem written and read by the famed Native American activist/poet John Trudell and set to music by The Pines. 
"He articulates some profound truths that resonate throughout the record," says Ramsey. "There's just this kind of disconnection from the Earth that we experience. There's this loneliness about it, and there's this truth that's sort of undeniable but that no one really wants to talk about."

"We both grew up in Iowa in very sparse, rural communities," adds Huckfelt, "and we watched our towns kind of dissipate and the vitality go away, but at the same time also remain in certain hidden, unexpected ways."

Above The Prairie explores those hidden places, from "Lost Nation"-a synth-driven instrumental penned by Alex and named after an Iowa town with a population of less than 500-to "Villisca," another soundscape featuring Uilleann pipes and titled for an Iowa community that lives under the ominous cloud of an infamous 1912 axe murder.

"There's a remoteness to the record and the feelings," says Huckfelt. "These communities are tiny, but they're out there. There are homes with people and lives being lived there, and the towns we grew up in were not so different."

Finding somewhere to feel at home is a recurring theme on the record. On "Where Something Wild Still Grows," Huckfelt longs for a place "through the trees, past the city, beyond the glow" where he can be at ease, while "Sleepy Hollow" finds Ramsey contemplating our treatment of each other and our planet as he looks into the abyss of the night sky, and "Come What Is" (which features Ryan Young of Trampled By Turtles on fiddle) tries to find contentment in the present moment.

At the core of it all, though, is the realization that if this life is nothing more than a fleeting journey on a tiny speck of a planet floating among the stars of an infinite universe, then there's no more important act than to love each other and the Earth. When Ramsey sings "hold, hold on to me" in opener "Aerial Ocean"-which brings together lush, sweeping slide guitar with gently plucked guitar and banjo-it's repeated in the intimate, reverent tone of a prayer. The narrator might be singing to a person, or he might be singing to the prairie. In the case of The Pines, he's probably singing to them both.