Wednesday, July 3, 2013
7:00 PM at the Martin Hotel

Purchase your $10 tickets Now! On-line from The Martin Hotel

Mike Beck is well-known for his memorable ballads that capture old California, and the cowboy way of life. He has performed in numerous foreign countries, and throughout the United States. Mike recently returned from doing some shows in Norway and Sweden.

Two of Mike Beck’s songs were listed in the “13 Best Cowboy Songs of All Time” in the April 2009 issue of Western Horseman Magazine (“In Old California” – a song about Jo Mora – and “Don’t Tell Me.”) His song, “Patrick” was listed as one of “The Top 15 Roadworthy Cowboy Songs” in the July 2008 issue of Cowboys & Indians Magazine. His song, “Amanda Come Home” was featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition, and is dedicated to all of the women who served in Iraq. In the Spring 2010 edition of The Cowboy Way, Bill Reynolds writes, “His love of the ways of the vaquero and the Pacific Slope region of the West comes through his songs in superb guitar work.”

Born and raised in Monterey County, California, at age 13, Mike Beck went to the Monterey Pop Festival and liked what he heard. He picked up a guitar and never looked back. Since that time, he has been composing and performing a wide array of folk, rock and Americana music. Mike’s songs reflect his life as a professional musician and a working cowboy in Montana and Carmel Valley near Big Sur.

According to Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, “Mike Beck plays the guitar like a Byrd. His strings do things that mine could never do. They obey the slightest finger-touch commands like a fine reining horse.”

Beck is riding high after being recognized by Western Horseman magazine in a recent article naming “The 13 Best Cowboy Songs of All Times” along with songs written by luminaries such as Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Allison Moorer, Lucinda Williams and Ian Tyson.

“I had two songs on that list, which was kind of cool,” said Beck. “to be alongside some of the other people on that list, like Tom Russell, Ian Tyson. I thought, that’s nice company. That was nice of them to say that.”

Visit Mike online http://www.mikebeck.com

Partnership brings Utah Repertory Dance Theatre to Winnemucca

Performance Open to the Public
Friday, May 3, 2013
7:00 PM – Lowry High Auditorium
Doors open at 6:15

The Utah Repertory Dance Theatre will visit Winnemucca and Elko April 29 through May 4 as part  of the Sense of Place touring initiative, coordinated by the Nevada Arts Council, and supported by Barrick Gold of North America.
The local partners, Great Basin College in Elko, and Great Basin Arts & Entertainment in Winnemucca, worked with members of the Salt Lake City dance company to schedule community-specific activities. These include workshops for students and senior citizens, movement classes, school lecture-demonstrations, collaborations with local dancers, full-length performances and related visual arts exhibits.

“These initiatives provide access to quality arts experiences for citizens that reside in the state’s rural counties, and offer students the opportunity to explore the creative process under the guidance of professional artists,” said Susan Boskoff, executive director of the Nevada Arts Council.  “It’s all about creating a sense of place in communities across the state to enhance the quality of life for everyone.” The Arts Council will produce video vignettes of residency activities in Winnemucca that will be shared with the public on the agency’s website this summer.

Utah’s Repertory Dance Theatre was founded in 1966 as a professional modern dance company through a cooperative effort involving the Salt Lake City community, the University of Utah and a major grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.

“We are really happy to support RDT’s tour through rural Nevada,” said Lou Schack, Barrick’s director of communications. “Along with our focus on access to education, bringing high-quality arts experiences to the places where our employees live and work is an important part of our overall commitment to Nevada.”

RDT has toured to more than 300 cities in the United States, Canada, and Europe; and has performed for diverse audiences from Utah to Vienna, Austria, in schoolrooms and opera houses, from gymnasiums to the Kennedy Center. RDT’s mission is to broaden the public’s understanding of the art of modern dance through a variety of community-based programs; and it acts as a resource center and laboratory for dancers, choreographers, visual artists, writers and composers. The company offers annual summer workshops and year-round classes to train aspiring professionals and inspire the creative potential in people of all ages.

As a result of Barrick’s generous support of this fabulous event, we are using the opportunity to raise money for a grief support program we are trying to launch in Winnemucca.  The “Hope Tree” project, once set up, will provide local grief support groups for children, teens, and families.

 

We’re suggesting a minimum donation of $5 for adults and $15 for a family, but we hope people will dig deep and be extra generous for this much needed project to support youth in their time of grieving. – Bill Sims, Chairman, Great Basin Arts and Entertainment

Tickets for the Winnemucca Performance are available in advance at Nature’s Corner, Global Coffee, and The Martin Hotel. If we don’t sell out, there will be tickets available at the door.

For schedule details in Winnemucca, please contact Bill Sims, Great Basin Arts & Entertainment at contact@gbae.org.

For schedule details in Elko, please contact Christine Young-Gerber, Great Basin College at christine.younggerber@gbcnv.edu.

For information about RDT, please visit rdtutah.org, or contact Rick Nobis, Booking Coordinator at booking@rdtutah.org.

THIS PROJECT IS CO-SPONSORED BY THE NEVADA ARTS COUNCIL, A DIVISION OF THE NEVADA DEPARTMENT OF TOURISM AND CULTURAL AFFAIRS, AND IS SUPPORTED BY BARRICK GOLD OF NORTH AMERICA.

Buckaroo Poet
Winner 2012 Nevada Heritage Award

7:00 PM, Saturday, December 29, 2012

The $15.00 tickets are on sale now at the Martin Hotel, Nature’s Corner, and Global Coffee. You can also buy them online at themartinhotel.com.

“I can’t ever remember ‘finding’ cowboy poetry,” Waddie Mitchell says of the entertaining and enduring art of storytelling. “It was always there. The cowboys sure never called it poetry. I know I wouldn’t have liked it if they would have. Seems like an oxymoron, don’t it!?”

From his earliest days on the remote Nevada ranches where his father worked, Waddie was immersed in the cowboy way of entertaining, the art of spinnin’ tales in rhyme and meter that came to be called cowboy poetry, a Western tradition that is as rich as the lifestyle that gave birth to it. Within his stories, old in a voice that is timeless and familiar, are the common bonds we all share, moments both grand and commonplace, the humorous and the tragic, the life and death struggles and triumphs that we each recognize. And yet, Waddie presents his material with personal insights and the lessons learned during his life spent as a buckaroo.

“All the time I was growing up we had these old cowboys around,” he says. “When you live in close proximity like that with the same folks month after month, one of your duties is to entertain each other, and I suppose that’s where the whole tradition of cowboy poetry started. You find that if you have a rhyme and a meter to start that story, people will listen to it over and over again,” Waddie states in his down-to-earth description of its beginnings.

“When my imagination first got let out of the gate, it was from an old-time cowboy, with a story set to rhyme,” he says in his second recording from Warner Western, Lone Driftin’ Rider. By the age of 10, he was reciting poetry himself; at 16, he quit school to follow his heart and went to making his living as a
cowboy.
There came a time though, which he relates in his poem Where To Go, when he had to choose between being a full-time cowboy (he managed a 36,000 acre ranch in Lee-Jiggs, Nevada) and the art form that he loved so much. In 1984, he helped organize the internationally recognized Elko Cowboy Poetry Gathering and gave his first public performance. Although Waddie didn’t think anyone would be interested, (he thought it would be a pretty good party for the weekend) the first Cowboy Poetry Gathering was set for a cold, snowy weekend in January. This was one of the only times Waddie and his fellow cowboys were free from ranch duties. More than 2,000 people showed up, and Waddie was off and running.

In 2012 Waddie Mitchell received the prestigious Nevada Heritage Award from the Nevada Arts Council.  He continues hosting and performing at festivals, private gatherings, rodeos, corporate events, concert halls and an extraordinarily wide variety of functions. The Reno Gazette-Journal published a list from a panel of writers, historians and other notables, who selected the Top 20 Artists, Authors and Entertainers To Influence Nevada in the 20th Century. Sure enough pards, there was Waddie!

US National Fingerstyle Champion

7:00 PM Wednesday, November 7, 2012

The $10.00 tickets are on sale now at the Martin Hotel, Nature’s Corner, and Global Coffee. You can also buy them online at themartinhotel.com.

Critics call his guitar playing “breathtaking,” “haunting,” and “rich.” Guitar magazines describe his compositions as “spectacular,” “elegant,” and “exquisite,” and praise his twelve-string work as “revelatory.” Media reviewers trace the roots of his style to folk, jazz, pop, and classical music, categorize his playing as “Baroque Folk,” and “Instrumental Americana,” and compare him to Leo Kottke and Michael Hedges.

Another reviewer ventured this analysis: “What to call his unique melange of styles? There’s an aspect of Americana in the echoes of Appalachian and old-timey styles that are apparent in just about every track, but there are also elements of jazz, Celtic folk, and a dash of blues in here somewhere. What Proctor does is create guitar music that reflects the whole heritage of the instrument and still has his own distinct stamp — a tall order, but he’s up to the job”

These luminous and diverse quotes characterize the media’s efforts to describe Chris Proctor’s solo, 6 and 12-string guitar concerts and recordings. Two additional comments typify the first-time listener’s reaction: “Wow- I didn’t know that acoustic guitars could sound like that,” and, ” It seems as if there are three guitarists up there on stage, not just one.”

Here’s more of what critics, listeners, presenters and concert audiences say about Chris Proctor:

• He is an acclaimed composer of original music and a wonderful arranger for the 6 and 12-string guitars.
• He is a performer with a gift for communicating the tremendous variety, vitality, and accessibility of his music.
• His amazing variety of guitar sounds and textures, and the rich tapestry of bass, melody, and inner voices, bring an orchestral quality to his music that surprises and delights audiences who haven’t heard him before.
• His compositions and arrangements shine with folk, jazz, pop, classical, and ethnic influences.
• He is a superlative workshop, master class and residency/outreach leader, author of numerous instructional articles in the guitar press, and producer of two world-class instructional videos for 6 and 12-string players.

Gecko Drive from Chris Proctor on Vimeo.

Ass Kickin’ Redneck Stringband Music
7:00 PM Saturday, November 3, 2012

The $15.00 tickets are on sale now at the Martin Hotel, Nature’s Corner, and Global Coffee. You can also buy them online at themartinhotel.com.

Foghorn Stringband is the shining gold standard for American stringband music, with seven albums, thousands of shows, over a decade of touring under their belts, and two entirely new generations of old-time musicians following their lead. Through all this, they’ve never let the music grow cold; instead they’ve been steadily proving that American roots music is a never-ending well of inspiration. From their origins in Portland, Oregon’s underground roots music scene, the core duo of Foghorn Stringband, Caleb Klauder, whose wistful, keening vocals and rapid-fire mandolin picking have always been the heart of the band, and Stephen ‘Sammy’ Lind, perhaps the best old-time fiddler of his generation, have spread the old-time stringband gospel all over the world, but they’ve also brought in new influences and inspirations from their many travels and fellow bandmates. Vintage country and honky-tonk became a staple of Foghorn Stringband thanks to Klauder’s intense passion for the music, and frequent visits to Louisiana have inspired the group to bring Cajun songs into the repertoire.

As the music has changed, the band has changed and reformed as well. Canadian singer and bassist Nadine Landry, from Québec via the Yukon, joined the band in 2008, bringing a wealth of experience as an internationally touring bluegrass musician. New member, singer and guitarist Reeb Willms, came down from Bellingham with a suitcase of old, vintage country songs and a powerfully beautiful, pure voice born in the farmlands of Washington State. It’s a new Foghorn Stringband these days, but the music is as furiously compelling as ever. For the group that first broke the good news about Southern old-time music to new generations, a new album and new tour dates are both a return to form and a fresh new start.

Wowing audiences across the country and across the pond playing over 200 days a year, Foghorn is one of the most sought after acts for festival stages and music camps, and are band mates for world renowned master old-time musician Dirk Powell and Cajun legends Joel Savoy and Jesse Lége. Recent festivals and venues they’ve played include San Francisco Bluegrass & Old-Time Festival, Pickathon, Sioux River Folk Festival, The Old Town School of Folk Music, California Bluegrass Association’s Father’s Day Bluegrass Festival, Freight & Salvage, Bristol Rhythm & Roots, Austin Stringband Festival, and many more, including extensive tours of the UK and Ireland! They were selected as Official Showcase Artists at the 2011 IBMA Conference.

Foghorn Stringband play the old way, the way you’d have heard stringbands play on Southern radio stations back in the 1930s. They don’t fancy up the music to make it more modern, instead they reach into the heart of the songs, pulling out the deep emotions that made them so enduring in the first place. Performing live, these multi- instrumentalists gather around a single microphone in the middle of the stage, expertly balancing their sound on the fly, and creating the rarest of music: songs that are at once wildly virtuosic and intimately hand-crafted. Foghorn Stringband play American roots music of the finest order.

Familiar Old-Time Embraced by the Strange
7:00 PM Friday, October 26, 2012

The $15.00 tickets are on sale now at the Martin Hotel, Nature’s Corner, and Global Coffee. You can also buy them online at themartinhotel.com.

“Grounded in tradition, old-time string band music and mountain blues but with open horizons that take them, subtly, to other parts of the planet, they have a haunting spookiness, an organic pulse, and most importantly a clear vision…Instrumentally they’re truly inspiring, getting original textures out of conventional stringband instruments and mixing them with (in this context) oddities like bass ukulele, harmonium, mbira, cello and Vietnamese jaw harp and bau zither. Vocally, they have that lonesome white blues sound which has its ancestry in Dock Boggs and the Carters but again they take it somewhere else…a consistently startling and addictive album.”
– The Crooked Jades “Shining Darkness”  Reviewed by Ian Anderson
in UK magazine f ROOTS

Performing driving dance tunes and haunting ballads with an amazing array of vintage and eclectic instruments, The Crooked Jades are modern innovators in the old-time Americana world, creating a cinematic sound based on Americana roots infused with the diverse musical influences of Europe and Africa.On a mission to reinvent old world music, they bring their soulful performances (brilliantly suprising arrangements of obscure old tunes mixed with beautiful original compositions) to clubs, concert halls and festivals around the united States and Europe.

Based in San Francisco, founded by leader Jeff Kazor and nurtured by the vibrant West coast, California and Ba Area bluegrass and old-time music scenes, the Crooked Jades play with a thrilling and hyponotic energy which has inspired director Sean Penn to include a turn from World’s on Fire ih his most recent film Into the Wild, fans on their feet dancing and critics comparing them to everyone from the New Lost City Ramblers and The Pouges to Nick Cave, Tom Waits, and Gillian Welch.

Appealing as much to the pierced generation as to their great-grandparents, this is sepia tones, bent angles, unexpected accents, unanticipated sounds.  It’s banjo ukeuleles, minstrel banjos, plucked fiddles, bowed basses, Hawaiian slide guitars, harmoniums and Vietnamese jaw harps together in fiery, artful, harmony.

7:00 PM, Saturday, September 29, 2012

The $10.00 tickets are on sale now at the Martin Hotel, Nature’s Corner, and Global Coffee. You can also buy them online at themartinhotel.com.

Colin Ross is a singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist with deep American roots. His shows feature a tremendous variety of original music combined with a hip blend of vintage styles. He mixes virtuosic free-style piano technique with rollicking blues and boogie, liquid 12-string guitar, greasy delta slide, and wry lyrics to make his own brand of Americana.

He is a jammer folks. No two performances are ever going to be the same. He gets into his zone, and just lets it fly.

Colin was born in Little Rock Arkansas and grew up on the banks of the Mississippi in the little town of Elsah in southern Illinois. He started playing piano at the age of 5 and began collecting recordings, instruments, music and art books. His interest in Americana began with a fascination with Woody Guthrie, and developed with immersion in bluegrass folk and roots music. His influences are as varied as Bach and the Grateful Dead.

September 29th Colin returns to the historic Martin Hotel for an exciting, intimate “unplugged” show.

Alternative Country Rock
7:00 PM, Thursday, September 13, 2012

The $15.00 tickets are on sale now at the Martin Hotel, Nature’s Corner, and Global Coffee. You can also buy them online at themartinhotel.com.

This may turn out to be the happiest incident of serendipity yet this year. Great Basin Arts and Entertainment has managed to snag one of the most compelling performers traveling the roads of America, to play at show at the Martin on Thursday night.

Dave Alvin, is a Grammy award winning guitarist, singer and songwriter, and a proponent of Americana music. He is a former founding member of The Blasters, who are often credited with helping launch the American roots rock scene in the early ’80s. Combining the revved-up energy of punk rock with an enthusiastic embrace of classic American sounds, the Blasters became a sensation in Los Angeles and won an enthusiastic cult following across the United States and Europe. Dave went on to play guitar in the famed Los Angeles punk band X, and with members of X formed the alternative county outfit the Knitters. Alvin and his current road band the Guilty Ones will perform at the Martin at 7:00 PM on Thursday.

Dave Alvin, who Rolling Stone Magazine calls “an under recognized guitar hero”, is steeped in Americana – not just the genre but a deep river of American myth that keeps giving him characters to write about. Alvin is an acute observer of the human condition and he fills his songs with small towns, highways and losers we imagine he’s encountered on countless tours. He sings in a throaty rumble reminiscent of Hoyt Axton and Greg Brown about love and loss and ghosts of things past.

In 1989, Dwight Yoakam scored a hit on the country charts with Alvin’s song “Long White Cadillac,” In 2000, Alvin recorded a collection of traditional folk and blues classics, Public Domain: Songs from the Wild Land, which earned him a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album.

When not busy recording his own music, Alvin has also worked as a producer for several other roots-oriented acts, including Tom Russell, the Derailers, and Big Sandy & His Fly-Rite Boys, and he has collaborated with rockabilly legend Sonny Burgess. As a sideman, Alvin has recorded sessions with the likes of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Little Milton, Katy Moffatt, and Syd Straw.

Dave Alvin and the Guilty Ones will perform at 7:00 PM on Thursday, September 13, 2012 as part of Great Basin Arts and Entertainment’s Music at the Martin series. $15 tickets are available at Nature’s Corner, Global Coffee and at the Martin Hotel.

 

Blues Guitar Legend Returns to the Martin
7:00 PM, Friday, September 7, 2012

The $10.00 tickets are on sale now at the Martin Hotel, Nature’s Corner, and Global Coffee. You can also buy them online at themartinhotel.com.

The great Roy Book Binder is set to play a concert at the Martin Hotel on Friday, September 7th. Something of a national treasure, Book Binder plays blues in the Piedmont style, a very old East Coast tradition based on ragtime and multi-part gospel guitar techniques.

Besides being a musical giant with unexceeded technique, Book Binder is known as a crowd-pleasing entertainer with deft comic timing, an encyclopedic knowledge of American roots music history, and an inexhaustible supply of tales collected over a lifetime of traveling and performing with greats like Brownie McGhee, Sonny Terry, Rock Bottom, Fats Kaplin, Doc Watson, Bonnie Raitt, and Ray Charles.

Book Binder emerged alongside pal Dave van Ronk in the New York City coffeehouse scene of the mid-60s, the beginning of the so-called “folk revival.” And, his repertoire includes “Bookaroo” songs, played in a folk style reminiscent of Rambling Jack Elliot, and Don Edwards.

Book Binder’s real bailiwick, though, is blues in the East Coast or “Piedmont” style, named for the plateau that stretches from Richmond, Virginia to Atlanta, Georgia. The style evolved in the 20s, 30s, and 40s, when ragtime, parlor, and gospel guitar players like Blind Blake, Blind Boy Fuller, and Reverend Gary Davis began applying polyphonic finger-picking technique to the blues. Book Binder perfected his Piedmont technique as Davis’s protégé, working as the blind virtuoso’s driver and side-man during the late 1960s.

Book Binder has recorded seven albums, most in a “hillbilly” blues style that includes plenty of colorful banter between the tracks. Often, the stories and jokes stretch back to Book Binder’s formative years on the road with the Reverend Davis. Though based on old-time techniques, his songs sound fresh and relevant, often featuring original lyrics re-spun to reflect contemporary themes.

Book Binder continues to perform solo shows around the world, the last time we saw him he was about to leave for the Blues Festival in Hell Norway where he appeared along with Ramblin’ Jack and many other greats. He also teaches at MerleFest and the Fur Peace School, and keeps an entertaining travel “blog” on his website, RoyBookBinder.com.

So, if you’re in town over the weekend, don’t miss the chance to see one of the great bluesmen of all time, up close and personal, right here in Winnemucca. The show starts at 7 PM on Friday, September 7th, at the Martin Hotel on Railroad Street.

Broadway Returns to Winnemucca
7:30 PM, Friday, August 31, 2012

Victoria made it to town, and she’s staying with her dad, but she has come down with laryngitis, so the show tonight is CANCELLED.

Victoria deeply regrets that this has occurred, and offers her profound apology.

If you purchased a ticket to the show, just come down to the Martin between 6:00 PM and 7:30 PM tonight, and you will be provided with a full refund.

On August 31^st Broadway musical theater actress Victoria Matlock returns to the Martin Hotel with another show, once again sponsored by jointly by Great Basin Arts and Entertainment and White Sage Theatre.

Almost exactly three years ago Miss Matlock presented an evening of Broadway songs to a sold out audience at the Martin Hotel.  Since that performance there have been numerous comments made about her performance, most of which can be summarized as, “When is she coming back.”

During the past three years Miss Matlock has been performing in the Broadway show “Million Dollar Quartet.”  She was in this new musical for 901 performances: 523 on Broadway and the remainder when the show moved off-Broadway.  She played the part of Dyanne, Elvis Presley’s girlfriend and the only female in the show.  The show’s heavy production schedule of eight shows a week has prevented her from returning to Winnemucca.

In the performance at the Martin Hotel she will be performing the songs she sang in the show as well as a medley of other songs.  In addition she will open the floor for questions, especially for questions from young people who may be thinking of an acting career.

Miss Matlock graduated from the University of Northern Colorado in 1999 with a degree in musical theater and a minor in computer science.  The computer science education was to enable her to have an alternate career if the theater didn’t work out.  Since graduating she has been almost continuously working in the theater and has only used her computer background to prepare web sites for herself and a few friends.  Her web site is located at www.victoriamatlock.com.