Category Archives: Music

Ownership change in the works for South on Main; Oxford American 2020 concerts remain there at present

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Today it was announced that South on Main owners/operators Chef Matthew and Amy Bell will be relocating outside of Arkansas and will be transitioning restaurant/venue operations to new proprietors after the first week of February 2020.

The Oxford American put out a statement that it is grateful for their generosity of culinary talent, commitment, and investment in the creation of South on Main. They’ve made South on Main a special place for so many people in our community. For seven years they have been enthusiastic partners of the Oxford American in the shared pursuit of enhancing our region’s cultural landscape. We thank them and wish them the very best.

The OA staff are working with the new operators to ensure no interruption of Oxford American concerts. At this time, all Oxford American shows will proceed as scheduled.

This includes the following concerts:

      • January 30 | Fred Hersch Trio (Jazz Series)
      • February 18 | Todd Snider (Special Addition)
      • February 19 | Todd Snider (Special Addition)
      • February 20 | Jon Cleary (Americana Series)
      • February 26 | Elio Villafranca & The Jass Syncopators (Special Addition)
      • March 12 | John Fullbright (Archetypes & Troubadours Series)
      • March 15 | John Moreland (Special Addition)
      • March 26 | Mary Gauthier (Americana Series)
      • April 16 | Ranky Tanky (Archetypes & Troubadours Series)
      • April 23 | Miguel Zenón Quartet (Jazz Series)

Patrons having questions about tickets, should contact the Oxford American directly by phone at 501-374-0000 and speak with Kendel Haycook at extension 201.

Arts Take Action today at Wildwood Park

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Arts Take Action is a student-led fundraising performance benefitting young adults in Central Arkansas.
Today at 3pm their first event will take place at Wildwood Park for the Arts.  Tickets are available at Wildwood.
High schoolers from around Little Rock will share their art in this competition. The competitive event format will feature a variety of mediums including acting/musical theatre, vocal, art, dance and instrument. Winners will be voted on by the audience. All proceeds of the event will support Immerse Arkansas.
The purpose is to raise money for teens in crisis. With their mission set with #teenshelpingteens, this is a chance to support their goal of helping turn teen survivors into “overcomers”.

Three Little Rock arts organizations announced as NEA grant recipients

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Three Little Rock organizations were announced today as recipients of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.  They are: Arkansas Symphony Orchestra, Chamber Music Society of Little Rock, and the Oxford American magazine.

Each year, more than 4,500 communities large and small throughout the United States benefit from National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grants to nonprofits. For the NEA’s first of two major grant announcements of fiscal year 2019, more than $25 million in grants across all artistic disciplines will be awarded to nonprofit organizations in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. These grants are for specific projects and range from performances and exhibitions, to healing arts and arts education programs, to festivals and artist residencies.

Arkansas Symphony Orchestra Society, Inc.
$10,000
Challenge America
To support concert performances and related outreach activities.

Chamber Music Society of Little Rock
$10,000
Challenge America
To support a series of chamber music performances and related educational programming.

Oxford American Literary Project
$20,000
Art Works — Literature
To support publication and promotion of the magazine.

Tonight, South on Main welcomes Lera Lynn back to its stage!

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Related imageSouth on Main welcomes Lera Lynn back to the stage on Wednesday, January 1, 2020. Show beings at 8 PM. Purchase advance tickets for $10 or pay $15 at the door. Tickets do not guarantee you a seat. To reserve a table, please call South on Main at (501) 244-9660.

Throughout her career — a nearly decade-long run filled with three album releases, a career-shifting appearance and soundtrack for HBO’s True Detective, hundreds of shows on both sides of the Atlantic, and a sound encompassing everything from Americana to stark indie rock — Lera Lynn has balanced her fierce independence with a string of collaborations.

She’s written songs with T Bone Burnett and Rosanne Cash. She’s recorded albums with full bands (2014’s The Avenues, hailed by outlets like Rolling Stone and American Songwriter) and smaller lineups (the experimental, NPR and New York Times-approved Resistor, which Lynn co-produced at her Nashville home). On her fourth album, Plays Well With Others, she teams up with eight different duet partners and seven co-writers, resulting in her most diverse, collaborative work to date.

Plays Well With Others is a unique duets album — one in which nearly every song is completely co-written and co-sung. Peter Bradley Adams, John Paul White, Dylan LeBlanc, Andrew Combs, Rodney Crowell, Shovels & Rope, JD McPherson, and Nicole Atkins all make appearances, working alongside Lynn not only to perform these songs, but to create them, too.

Lynn recorded Plays Well With Others at John Paul White’s studio, Sun Drop Sound, in Florence, Alabama. There — with Lynn, White, and the Alabama Shakes’ Ben Tanner all serving as co-producers — she tracked nine songs in a series of live takes. Looking to add some sonic framework to an album whose tracklist was vast and varied, she only used acoustic instruments, layering upright piano, strings, percussion, acoustic guitars, and creative sounds into arrangements that nodded to artists like Roy Orbison, George Harrison, Neil Young, John Lennon and Tom Petty. The result is an album that’s at times more stripped-down than The Avenues and far less amplified than Resistor, while still shining a light on Lynn’s striking voice and unique blend of American music.

With Plays Well With Others, Lera Lynn cements her own identity as both creator and collaborator. On an album filled with Grammy winners, country icons, folksingers, and Americana heroes, it’s still her star that shimmers the brightest, shining light on the newest phase of an eclectic, ever-expanding career.

Enjoy an Informance by the ASO Quapaw Quartet today at lunchtime

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The Arkansas Symphony Orchestra is inviting you to an Informance today (January 15) at 12 noon.

What is an Informance?  It is a performance + information. (Performation sounded too much like Perforation so they went with the other option.)

Listen to the Quapaw Strings Quartet perform and discuss their music today.  The program contains works by Darius Milhaud, William Grant Still, Fanny Mendelssohn, and Osvaldo Golijov.

Bring your lunch and enjoy it or come lunchless–the choice is up to you.

The program takes place at Byrne Hall, 2417 N. Tyler St. This event is FREE!

Clarinet Quintets Old and New tonight at St. Luke’s Festival of the Senses.

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Five musicians from the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra will play a free Festival of the Senses concert at 7:00 p.m. on Tuesday, January 14, at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church.

Clarinetist Kelly Johnson, violinists Andrew Irvin and Meredith Maddox Hicks, violist Katherine Williamson, and cellist Stephen Feldman will play Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet in A Major and contemporary Syrian composer Kinan Azmeh’s “The Fence, the Rooftop, and the Distant Sea.”

The concert, which is free and open to the public, is the fourth in the 2019-20 season of the Festival of the Senses performing arts series sponsored by St. Luke’s and will be followed by a reception in the church’s parish hall.

Written in 1789 and sometimes called the Stadler Quintet, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s only completed clarinet quintet is one of his most admired works. His Clarinet Quintet in A Major, K. 581, has four movements: Allegro, Larghetto, Menuetto, and Allegretto con Variazioni.

Image result for the fence the rooftop and the distant sea“The Fence, the Rooftop, and the Distant Sea” by Syrian composer Kinan Azmeh is a work in five movements inspired by memories of his Damascus birthplace in a distant view of the Syrian coastline seen from a rooftop in Beirut. Azmeh has achieved worldwide fame as a clarinetist and composer with a distinctive voice across diverse musical genres.

A graduate of the Julliard School with a doctorate in music from the City University of New York, he has taken his music around the globe as a soloist, composer and improviser.  His album “Uneven Sky” with the Deutsches Symphony Orchestra won the OpusKlassik Award in 2019, and he is a member of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silkroad Ensemble, whose 2017 Grammy Award-winning album “Sing Me Home” features Kinan as a clarinetist and composer.