2025 Summer Artists:
June 12 | Denise La Grassa
With Denise La Grassa’s release of her 9-song album “Sundown Rising,” it’s easy to look back now on how poem-songs she wrote as a wee child foreshadowed a late-blooming full-time blues music career. Those songs were just a warm-up for the spunky 5-year-old, who went door- to-door in her suburban Chicago neighborhood offering to sing and sell them to neighbors – right on their doorstep – for 25 cents apiece.
Denise later landed in Chicago and stumbled upon the comedy and improv enterprise The Second City. She quickly worked her way into the touring company, traveling the country performing improv and her favorite segment “Make a Song,” where she would make up a song on the spot from audience suggestions.
“Sundown Rising” moves La Grassa further into what she calls “my take on the blues.” The title is a not to historical ‘sundown towns.’ Though no longer officially ‘a thing,’ she argues that the poor and marginalized, disproportionally people of color, are still cast aside in a country of abundance.
June 19 | Marcella Simien
Marcella Simien was born into one of the first Creole families to settle in St. Landry Parish. A ninth generation Louisiana Creole, daughter of two-time GRAMMY™ award-winning Zydeco luminary Terrance Simien, Marcella was practically born onstage and grew up immersed in sound and performance. Visits to the family home from legends such as David Hidalgo of Los Lobos or Taj Mahal, who once sang her “Happy Birthday,” were not uncommon.
Simien founded and serves as bandleader in Marcella & Her Lovers—a hybrid of classic Memphis soul with the freewheeling swagger of New Orleans funk. Featuring an ensemble cast of Memphis musicians, Simien emerges as an undeniably powerful frontwoman. With each angelic holler and pump of the Creole accordion, she reinvents the mold of Memphis music while giving a wink and a nod to her ancestors. In addition to Marcella & Her Lovers, Simien performs with Marcella & Les Vagues, Magnolias, and Terrance Simien's Krewe De Monifique.
June 26 | Natty Nation
For over twenty-five years, the Madison, Wisconsin-based group has purely and fearlessly followed its inner artistic continuum. Along the way, Natty Nation has burst through genres while retaining a distinct roots reggae core.
Through it all—whether it’s onstage conducting its shamanistic live show, or in the studio pushing the scope of its musicality while honing its sharp songcraft—Natty Nation has remained dedicated to one mission: spreading light. On March 11th, 2016 Natty Nation issued its brightest beacon yet, Divine Spark (iNatty Records), which debuted at #3 on the Billboard reggae chart.
Natty Nation’s unique pedigree of a Midwest home base and artistic openness has helped the posse foster a signature sound. The group describes themselves as hard roots rock reggae because, in addition to their honest and authentic root reggae foundation, their embrace of soul, rock, and funk is undeniable. Natty Nation is also influenced by such diverse geniuses as Michael Jackson, Jimi Hendrix, Living Colour, Earth Wind and Fire, Fishbone, and Bad Brains. Since 1995, Natty Nation has had fluid membership of esteemed and visionary musicians.
July 10 | Josué Estrada Band
Josué Estrada: trumpeter and sound architect, born from Mexican immigrants, draws from a deep well of existential themes that he brings to bear across myriad artistic settings. Josué’s music draws from both his jazz background and his having toured half the globe, performing in projects rooted in bossanova surfpunk (Bellafonte) and then later, Dixieland-punk-bluegrass (Carrie Nation and the Speakeasy.)
As realized in the original music played by the Josué Estrada Band, he has now found a wide audience for the transcendent “Chicano jazz” that only he can make: honoring the masters through time, incorporating inimitable style from his OG’s, avant-garde to boleros, and pulling spiritual jazz greats from the past into the present. Josué has recently recorded The Josué Estrada Band’s highly anticipated debut EP at Blackbird Studios in Nashville, and in the meantime will be releasing two new singles expected to come out in May.
July 17 | Shawn Holt and the Teardrops
Shawn Holt is the son of blues legend Magic Slim. The high energy, hard-driving sound of The Teardrops is still alive and well and if you like what Magic Slim and The Teardrops did for the last 35 years, you can continue to enjoy that unique sound and energy with Shawn Holt, a chip off the old block, fronting his dad’s band.
Shawn started playing the blues at the age of 17, when he went on the road with this father and Slim’s brother, uncle Nick Holt, and The Teardrops. Shortly after that tour with his father, Shawn realized his genetic destiny (all the Holt’s are talented musicians) and formed his own band. He has been watching, learning, and playing blues ever since.
Shawn Holt & the Teardrops won a Blues Music Award for their debut album Daddy Told Me in the ‘Best New Artist Debut’ category in 2014. They additional won a Blues Blast Music Award for New Artist Debut Album’ that same year.
July 24 | The Mighty Pines
They are the band that puts the wildcat guitar in the jazzgrass, the electric mandolin in the country-reggae, the three-part harmony in the zydeco-folk, and the contrapuntal bass in the jump-blues jamboree. It’s The Mighty Pines, the butt-kickingest band in Americana that has made national splashes by way of the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, NBC’s The Voice, collaborations with the legendary Michael McDonald and Yonder Mountain String Band’s Allie Kral, and their own booming roots-music festival, Pines Fest.
The Mighty Pines have barnstormed the country with their almighty musicality, gorgeous ambrosial melodies, pass-the-chillum string shredding, consciousness-expanding grassedelica, and electric roots-rock fire.