Concerts & Events

Andrew Sa

Actor and Vocalist Andrew Sa has earned the title of Chicago's premier queer country crooner. Sa's career was rooted in songwriting that highlights his easy and elegant voice, but when he met mentor and pioneer Patrick Hagerty of Lavender Country, “Lonesome Andrew” was born. Diving headfirst into this new persona, he explored the catalogs of his heroes Patsy Cline, Roy Orbison, and other classic singers that defined his childhood.

Sa found a home for this new character in The Cosmic Country Showcase, an instant smash hit camp-country revue in Chicago where he blew away his contemporaries like Cassandra Jenkins and Honey Harper that the show brought out. Andrew's next step was to take his larger than life voice and turn to his own music.

“Dark Phoenix” and “Little Lamb” came to life out of a writing retreat with fellow crooner Liam Kazar. Both songs find Sa addressing his queer identity. “Dark Phoenix” is a journey of queer awakening, a passion with his first boyfriend. Taking notes from Lavender Country, “Little Lamb” is Andrew's way of inserting his art into the honky tonks and bars often dominated by straight white males.

Sa assembled a new band to work out this new sound that included Andrew Krull (electric guitar, pedal steel), Sam Subar (drums), Aaron Smith (acoustic guitar, vocals), Lyne Rye (bass, vocals), and Sam Cantor (electric guitar, keys). The songs were molded in a packed six month residency at the Golden Dagger in Chicago before they cut the songs live in a day at Fox Hall Studios. Engineer Dorian Gehring and Sima Cunningham finished off the recordings with background vocals.

https://www.localuniverse.net/andrewsa

Jake Blount

A powerfully gifted musician and a scholar of Black American music, Jake Blount speaks ardently about the African roots of the banjo and the subtle, yet profound ways African Americans have shaped and defined the amorphous categories of roots music and Americana. His 2020 album Spider Tales (named one of the year's best albums by NPR and The New Yorker, earned a perfect 5-star review from The Guardian) highlighted the Black and Indigenous histories of popular American folk tunes, as well as revived songs unjustly forgotten in the whitewashing of the canon. Jake Blount's new album, The New Faith, is a towering achievement of dystopian Afrofuturism and his first album for Smithsonian Folkways (released September 23, 2022). The New Faith is spiritual music, filled with hope for salvation and righteous anger in equal measure. The album manifests our worst fears on the shores of an island in Maine, where Blount enacts an imagined religious ceremony performed by Black refugees after the collapse of global civilization due to catastrophic climate change. Jake Blount's music is rooted in care and confrontation. On stage, each song he and his band play is chosen for a reason - because it highlights important elements about the stories we tell ourselves of our shared history and our endlessly complicated present moment. The more we learn about where we've been, the better equipped we are to face the future.

“On top of being wildly intelligent and knowledgeable, he's also a killer musician and it's an incredible combo.” - Rhiannon Giddens

https://jakeblount.com/