The Ark presents: Django Reinhardt (Jan. 19); Heywood Banks (Jan. 20)

DJANGO REINHARDT BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION

Friday, January 19, 2024, 8:00pm
Tickets: $20
Join Djangophonique and friends in celebrating the Django Reinhardt

Djangophonique is an award-winning band led by guitar player Andrew Brown. With over a decade of national touring experience, Brown is no stranger to the stage and delivers every performance with personality and enigmatic charm. A true disciple of the style, Brown has spent countless hours immersing himself in the language of Django Reinhardt’s jazz manouche, and he’s joined on stage by bandmates that match his skill and passion for the material. The core group includes Tyler Rindo on clarinet, Nick Martin on rhythm guitar, and Jorian Olk-Szost on upright bass. In 2023, Djangophonique began collaborating with vocalist Katie Smith, whose playful charm and soulful delivery channel the mystery and appeal of an unplaceable era of aching and entrancing nostalgia. Djangophonique, having already achieved the tricky feat of bringing an instrumental style of music to large stages and events, is excited to reach even broader audiences, bridge generational gaps, and find greater musical heights and depths with the addition of Katie’s effortlessly light yet deeply expressive voice. The result is a sound that’s unmistakable to fans of the music, and alluring to the uninitiated—a sound that can bring the lively energy of a parisian dance hall to the quietest listening room or captivate a buzzing festival audience with a shimmering ballad.

https://djangophonique.com/

HEYWOOD BANKS

Saturday, January 20, 2024, 8:00pm
Tickets: $30
Musician, poet, comedian, icon

Heywood Banks is simply one of a kind, almost impossible to describe, with a style his very own. Equal parts genius and buffoon, this songwriter-comic-singer-poet-musician has become a cult hero and a pop icon, with a show that appeals to college students, stoners, businessmen, yuppies, rednecks, punks, kids or your grandmother. Heywood intersperses his humorous observations of life with twisted, inventive, bizarre songs, sung and played in a variety of styles, from folk, to country to rock to pop, and way beyond. You have to be pretty sharp to get Heywood at his deepest level (he demands a high level of pop culture literacy), but you can also enjoy him just for his vocal style impersonations, expert musicianship and just plain silliness. Stuart Mitchell, the creator of Heywood Banks, tells us that his character was born on a mountaintop in Tennessee and lived for many years in a log trailer. Heywood’s biological parents, Hank and Heyena Banks, were killed in a freak revolving restaurant accident back in the Sixties—someone had hit the Puree Button by mistake … grisly! Eventually raised by mathematical parents, Heywood was working in a Kroger bagging groceries when he was hit in the head with a can of lunchmeat, giving him spamnesia. This caused him problems for years as he became afraid of the dark, but couldn’t sleep with the light on. “Did that ever happen to you???”

https://heywoodbanks.com/

Category: Comedy/Spoken Word

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