Since 2011, Jalopy Records (which operates out of the Jalopy Theatre & School of Music in Brooklyn) has been devoted to preserving and promoting the soulful essence of folk, traditional, and vernacular music. Get ready to be enthralled as four esteemed artists from the Jalopy Records label take the stage at KCA! Experience Jerron Paxton’s mesmerizing blues and ragtime, Nora Brown’s exquisite banjo and vocals, Jackson Lynch’s raw Americana, and the enchanting Ukrainian Village Voices.

ARTIST BIOS

Jerron Paxton is an American musician from Los Angeles. A vocalist and multi-instrumentalist, Paxton’s style draws from blues and jazz music before World War II and was influenced by Fats Waller and “Blind” Lemon Jefferson. According to Will Friedwald in The Wall Street Journal, Paxton is “virtually the only music-maker of his generation — playing guitar, banjo, piano and violin, among other implements — to fully assimilate the blues idiom of the 1920s and ’30s, the blues of Bessie Smith and Lonnie Johnson.”

Nora Brown started learning music at the age of 6 from the late Shlomo Pestcoe.  From his tiny studio apartment in Brooklyn, Pestcoe instilled in her the belief that music is meant to be shared. Nora plays traditional music with a focus on Southern Appalachian banjo and guitar playing.  Along with mentors in the northeast like the late John Cohen she also has traveled and learned directly from master musicians including Alice Gerrard, George Gibson and the late Lee Sexton and Art Rosenbaum.

Born in Ireland, Jackson Lynch moved to New York City’s East Village at a young age. Formerly residing in New Orleans he remains an integral part of the music world there with his band The Janks.Now living in Red Hook, Brooklyn, Jackson Lynch plays solo, with The Janks and with his string band The Down Hill Strugglers, hailed by Amanda Petrusich in the New Yorker as, “the very best interpreters of traditional material presently going.”

Ukrainian Village Voices sings in the polyphonic village style and its repertoire is constantly evolving, frequently focusing on seasonal celebrations, ritual songs, as well as lyrical music. We often sing songs recorded by ethnomusicologists from the oldest dwellers of villages in Ukraine. As of 2018, these songs include those we heard ourselves while on expeditions to various villages in the following oblasts in Ukraine: Sumy, Chernihiv, Poltava, Kyiv, Zhytomyr, Rivne, Ivano-Frankivsk. We pay homage to the ancient spirit of these songs while also naturally bringing a unique North American feel to the music.