Crosstown Arts Spring 2024 resident artists will present artist talks.
After living in the United Kingdom for more than two decades, Emily Barker – the prolific, award-winning contemporary singer-songwriter best known for composing and performing the theme for Wallander, the BBC’s hugely successful crime drama starring Kenneth Branagh – returned home to Western Australia to begin a new musical chapter with her latest single, “Wild To Be Sharing This Moment”, out today through Everyone Sang/Kartel Music Group and embarking on a national tour with UK artist, Frank Turner.
“I’m an advocate for keeping conversation alive across divides,” Emily stresses, “for trying to approach each encounter as an opportunity for connection. We must find our common humanity in order to make the world a safer, better place for us all to live in.”
The upcoming concert at The Green Room will showcase Edmaiston on saxophones along with master rhythmatist Ra Kalam on drums/percussion/gongs in various instrumental configurations with an eclectic mix of talented guests.
The Crosstown Strictly Jazz Series, presented by Crosstown Arts in collaboration with Strictly Jazz Entertainment, is designed to salute classic jazz music as contemporary musicians perform the work of the legends.
With a core in the music experience of the Black Church, The Knights salute the contributions of traditional jazz artists and composers. The eclectic and seasoned audience members that enjoy impassioned blues and hearty R&B are embraced. The soundscape produced stirs the soul and rouses the hands and feet.
Jazz Times magazine states that “Patrice Williamson isn’t a singer, she’s a one-woman jazz sampler. — She is a woman of many voices, each distinctly intriguing, all distinctly her own.”
Those Pretty Wrongs enter their tenth year as a band having just toured the U.S., UK, and Australia in support of their best-reviewed album yet, Holiday Camp, which Mojo called “irresistible” for its “celestial harmonies and dealing with wrangled emotions” while Uncut hailed the album for its “dreamily autumnal mastery of the power pop form”.
Elizabeth King, the Sacred Soul Queen of Memphis, will release her new album Soul Provider with this special record release concert at The Green Room at Crosstown Arts. A special performance by the Jubilee Hummingbirds will open up the evening.
Steve Masakowski is an award-winning jazz guitarist, educator, and inventor. He invented the guitar-based keytar and the switch pick, and has designed three custom-built seven-string guitars. He developed an approach to playing the guitar by using his pick design, allowing him to switch from fingerpicking to flatpicking.
Cyrena Wages fell in love with music on the country backroads between Millington and Shelby Forest, two small towns just north of Memphis. Her upcoming debut album, Vanity Project, is both an exercise in rebellion against years of conditioning, as well as a way of processing her own struggles, healing, and growth. As much as Memphis shaped her positively, there were aspects of growing up as a woman in the South that didn’t align with who she wanted to become. Cyrena tapped producer Matt Ross-Spang (Charley Crockett, St. Paul and the Broken Bones, Margo Price) to helm Vanity Project at Southern Grooves Studio in Memphis.