Tag: The Green Room

Graber Gryass

Crosstown Arts presents Graber Gryass Album Release Show in The Green Room.

The Green Room at Crosstown Arts
Thursday, May 11, 2023
Doors open at 7 pm | Show begins at 7:30 pm
Tickets: $15 in advance | $20 at the door

PURCHASE TICKETS HERE

“If Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeros relocated to Tennessee and sold their Burning Man innuendo for something more wholesome and Renaissance,we’d get the scene and sounds of Graber Gryass.”— Glide Magazine

“Funky, grassy, trippy sort of style.”— Bluegrass Today

“Like a Wokingman’s Dead or Basement Tapes outtake.”— Rock ‘n’ Load Magazine

“An immersive journey into an original expansive, exploratory song catalogue.”— VENTS Magazine

Waking Up, the third album of all original songs by Memphis jamgrass band Graber Gryass will be released on May 11, 2023. Waking Up has nine songs, all written by Michael Graber. “We wanted to push the boundary limits even more on this one, staying song-centered,” says Graber.

The album begins with a rambunctious saga of pent-up domesticity, “All the Time.” The pensive meditation “Morning on the Water” follows with lead vocals by Kitty Dearing. “Taproot” starts with a 12-string, followed with saxophone and hand percussion, and features guests Hope Clayburn and Jesse Dakota. “Waking Up” is an “Astral Weeks in Memphis”-type of dream song, about waking up in all connotations. “Living on a Faultline” finds the band at their funky best. Then Kitty takes the microphone again to lead “Hardcore Heartbreak”. Two more folk pop structured songs follow: “Okay” and “Good to You”. “Faultline”, a Carter-family inspired song about living on the New Madrid Faultline closes the set.

Graber Gryass includes Michael Graber (Guitar and Vocals), Kitty Dearing (Vocals and Saw), Andy Ratliff (Mandolin and Vocals), Andrew Geraci (Bass), Clint Wagner (12-string and Fiddle), Randal Morton (Banjo), Caleb Ryan Martin (High-strung Guitar and Baritone Banjo) with these guests: Jesse Dakota (Percussion), Hope Clayburn (Flute and Sax), and Joe Mahanahan (Vibraphone). The album was recorded at High/Low, engineered by Pete Matthews, mixed by Matt Qualls, and produced by Michael Graber.

Graber Gryass is an all-original, acoustic jam-grass band from Memphis, Tennessee. Take an award-winning writer, have him craft songs, and then layer in some of the regions hottest players, including a Winfield-winning banjo champion, the musical director of Public Enemy, members of such bands as Rumpke Mountain Boys, and others—and you have Gryass. This six-piece band can sing harmonies like the Mamas and the Papas, stretch out and jam like the Dead or New Grass Revival all while keeping audiences moving and inspired.

The University of Memphis Jazz Singers

The Green Room at Crosstown Arts
Tuesday, April 25, 2023
Doors open at 7 pm | Show begins at 7:30 pm
Tickets: $10

PURCHASE TICKETS HERE

The University of Memphis Jazz Singers is comprised of 10 to 15 male and female vocal students. This group performs a wide range of music from traditional arrangements of jazz standards to more contemporary fusion jazz.

*SOLD OUT* Rachel Maxann with Cyrena Wages and Joe Restivo

THIS SHOW IS NOW SOLD OUT.

The Green Room at Crosstown Arts
Thursday, June 8, 2023
Doors open at 7 pm | Show begins at 7:30 pm
Tickets: $15 in advance | $20 at the door

PURCHASE TICKETS HERE

As a singer/songwriter, Rachel Maxann describes her style as vintage indie-rock and post-modern folklore. Originally from Ohio, Rachel has been deeply influenced by the music culture of every area where she has lived — North Carolina; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Memphis.

“In the same show, you’ll hear country influences, blues influences, rock and pop influences, and maybe even some musical theater,” she says. By the time she arrived in Memphis in 2020, Rachel was ready for the sounds she had cultivated to weave a tapestry of her own genre — a uniquely Memphis sound from an original voice. Black Fae is Rachel’s first album produced, mixed, and mastered in her new home here in Tennessee.

Band: Mike Hewlett, Daniel Wasmund, Alice Hasen, Tamar Love, and Mitchell Jones

Special Guests: Marcella Simien, Louise Page, Bailey Bigger, and Doug

Nubia Yasin: SHEENA

Crosstown Arts presents Nubia Yasin: SHEENA in the Green Room.

The Green Room at Crosstown Arts
Saturday, April 1, 2023
Doors open at 7 pm | Show begins at 7:30 pm
Tickets: $15 advance | $20 at the door

PURCHASE TICKETS HERE

Show Description:

SHEENA, a show curated and performed by Nubia Yasin, begs the question “What would make the pain of transformation desirable?” With a blend of original poetry and music, Yasin tells the story of her own transition from girlhood to womanhood against a backdrop of deep rooted shame. By walking through her own shame, she aims to allow the audience a chance to shine a light into their darkest corners, and say to what lives there “I see you. I don’t hate you.”

Artist Bio:

Nubia Yasin is a Memphis-born writer, multidisciplinary artist, and performer. She uses her experiences as a first generation Somali-American living in the South to tell stories about Black femmehood, with an acute focus on themes related to shame. Her writing has been featured in projects for Netflix, Apple Music, and more. She’s performed in galleries and museums across the United states.

Her first full collection of poetry, The Blood and Body, was published in August 2022 with HomieHousePress.

Crosstown Arts Resident Artist Talks

The Green Room at Crosstown Arts
Thursday, March 2, 2023
Talks begin at 6 pm
Tickets: Free

Crosstown Arts resident artists will give presentations about their work in the Green Room at Crosstown Arts. The event is free and open to the public.

Su-Yee Lin writes stories and poetry that grapple with issues of identity, memory, environment, and mythology. Her work often lies on the border between the real and the strange, and she is interested in the intersections between the surreal and the natural world. She was a Fulbright Fellow to China and has had work published in the Pushcart Prize anthology, Tor.com, Electric Literature, Bennington Review, Day One, Nashville Review, The Offing, and other literary journals, and short stories translated into Italian and Chinese.

Keith S. Wilson is an Affrilachian Poet and a Cave Canem fellow. He is a recipient of an NEA Fellowship, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, and an Illinois Arts Council Agency Award, and has received both a Kenyon Review Fellowship and a Stegner Fellowship. His book, Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love (Copper Canyon), was recognized by the New York Times as a best new book of poetry.

Edo Rosenblith (B. 1988 Tel Aviv, Israel) received a BFA in painting in 2011 at the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in Visual Art at Washington University-St. Louis in 2017. Edo is a compulsive draftsman who works in a variety of mediums: murals, painting, drawing, printmaking, and book arts.

Kelsey Harrison’s sculptural work has been shown in institutions nationally including The Jewish Museum, Abrons Art Center, and The Knockdown Center in New York, SOMArts in San Francisco, The Sullivan Galleries in Chicago, The College of William and Mary in Virginia, and the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art and the Utah Museum of Fine Art in Salt Lake City. Harrison received her BFA in Sculpture from Purchase College, State University of New York and her MFA in Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is Assistant Professor of Sculpture at the University of Memphis.

Brittney Boyd Bullock, an artist working in fiber, mixed-media, and abstraction, explores the tension between searching and finding, obsession and order, and lightness and darkness through two- and three-dimensional forms. Contemplative and personal, the process-driven works interrogate anxiety and wonder using materials in a new way, forcing her to make meaning in the arbitrary jumble.

Jennifer Sargent makes intricate drawings and handwoven tapestries. As an artist weaver she considers herself both a contemporary practitioner and a part of a longer continuum that is thousands of years old. This idea is both a comfort and a challenge. One of two elements is always present in Sargent’s work, either story telling or the natural world (whether wild or domesticated). Sargent creates an abstracted sense of these ideas or experiences through the layering of pattern and color.

Strictly Jazz: The Music of Bill Evans

Crosstown Arts presents Strictly Jazz: The Music of Bill Evans in the Green Room.

The Green Room at Crosstown Arts
Sunday, March 26, 2023
Doors at 6:30 pm | Show at 7 pm
Tickets: $15 in advance | $20 at the door

PURCHASE TICKETS HERE

The Crosstown Strictly Jazz Series, presented by Strictly Jazz Entertainment in collaboration with Crosstown Arts, is designed to salute classic jazz music as contemporary musicians perform the work of the legends.

This show features Gerald Stephens (piano), Art Edmaiston (tenor saxophone), Marc Franklin (trumpet/flugelhorn), Neal Bowen (bass), and Mike Assad (drums) with a special live painting experience by RODAN.

About Strictly Jazz:

Strictly Jazz Entertainment is committed to cultivating a growing community in the knowledge and appreciation of jazz. Strictly Jazz Entertainment facilitates dialogue and collaboration between the devoted supporters of jazz and the brand new constituents — those new to the genre — for the furthering of the jazz community. Strictly Jazz provides a bridge between leading artists and a community that typically does not embrace jazz by promoting concerts in various venues to generate an atmosphere that is viable for the absorption of pure jazz.