Pokey LaFarge at SPACE (2 Lower Capacity Shows)
Schedule
Wed Jun 30 2021 at 07:00 pm to 08:30 pm
Location
Evanston SPACE | Evanston, IL
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@[100044514246296:2048:Pokey LaFarge] at SPACE in Evanston, IL // 2 LOWER CAP SHOWS // Doors: 6pm | Show: 7pm // $45“The man singing these songs isn’t exactly the same man who wrote them,” says POKEY LAFARGE of his new album Rock Bottom Rhapsody , his eighth studio release. “This album is about the story of who I used to be.”
Musically, LaFarge continues to mix and match a wide variety of styles and traditions, while never losing track of his own vision. “I listen to a lot of Latino music, and I listen to a lot of French music, whether it comes from France or Africa, and I listen to a lot of rocksteady — you know, fifties and sixties Jamaican music. I’ll mess with rhythms and try to come up with stuff that sounds almost more traditional in certain genres, and then keep playing it and try and get it into something that I’ll want to sing every night. This record is kind of like Roy Orbison and Bob Dylan hanging out with chanson singers and French jazz bands in like the forties, but I was never trying to make it sound like a particular person. It was more like, ‘If it sounds too much like this person, I need to make it sound more like me.’”
Ever since his first record, 2006’s self-released Marmalade, LaFarge has been a difficult specimen to pin down, indeed. Though he was raised on a healthy diet of blues, bluegrass, ragtime, Western swing and old-time country — and though he has consistently demonstrated a decided affinity for pre-1950s menswear — the Illinois native is by no means a throwback or a museum piece. Timelessness, and refined good taste, is LaFarge’s raison d’être, and his influences are as multi-hued and wide-ranging as the rhythms that buoy his starkly poetic songs — rhythms that are steeped in the very essence of jazz.
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Where is it happening?
Evanston SPACE, 1245 Chicago Ave, Evanston, United StatesEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
