“Cielito Lindo” isn’t exactly about social unrest. The lyrics vary from singer to singer, but the song is ostensibly about a pretty girl with dark eyes. When it’s performed for someone who hates Latinos, however, the song has power.
“It was so beautiful,” Garcia says. “And it was so profound, because ‘Cielito Lindo’ is one of the most benign songs there is, but when they all sang it in that context, it had power, and power to make a point in a very non-violent and very profound way.”
With that spirit in mind, the United States’ third-longest running Chicano theater company is putting on a virtual Resistance Jam on Inauguration Day, January 20. Musicians of all stripes are invited to perform in a round robin-style show that will be broadcast over the Internet. Garcia says the Resistance Jam events started in 2017 and has taken place live in less plague-ridden years.
After fourteen years of booking shows in the underground electronic-music scene and building up Denver as the bass capital of the world, Nicole Cacciavillano says that her latest venture, the Black Box, at 314 East 13th Avenue, isn t going anywhere. Not even after losing revenue and being saddled by debt: She s not going to surrender to COVID-19.
But she knows that she and everybody else in the local music scene who make it through the pandemic will have a tough time getting back to the economic success they enjoyed before March 2020. Our industry has been so significantly impacted that everyone is in debt, Cacciavillano says. We’re going to be working for years to get out of the debt this pandemic has put people into. . If I have to sell my house, I m selling my house and I m living in my car. Luckily, we haven’t gotten there yet.
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There s less oxygen at higher elevations, which forces a different approach to playing that isn’t at all about perfection, Reiner notes. And Half Pelican’s extreme performances seem to bring joy to everyone who sees and hears them.
Reiner first dabbled in ski-fiddling in 2013, after years of simultaneous ski trips and music tours around the West. He took a fiddle down the slopes that year because he’d gotten tired of concert-goers jokingly asking if he ever had. In the years since, Reiner has moved beyond proving his ability to ski and play; now he just does it for fun. He and Adams have performed while skiing multiple slopes, including those at Loveland, Silverton and Arapahoe Basin, treating visitors to traditional tunes, excerpts from the