Sunday, January 7th

Congress Cookout Presents: Angel Diamond & the Rhythm Jax

Doors 3:30pm

$10

($40-$45 tickets) What do you get when you combine seasoned jazz professionals from all over the country and put them together in different combos?
You get great, spontaneous, jazz music played at the highest level with amazing energy. This setting speaks to the very essence of jazz and its inception. You will be captivated and mesmerized through several sets of music on the patio of Hotel Congress. Join us from 12-5pm and just drop in for any amount of time that you want. This is a scene you will want to be part of…..the TJF Jazz Jam.

Join us for our annual FREE festival event, the Downtown Jazz Fiesta. 3-4 stages, inside and out, light up the day with music featuring the best local and national artists. Local food trucks and artisans also line the streets to make this a fun-filled event for music lovers and families of any age.

This year, TJF Artist in Residence – Ken Peplowski will be joining the University of Arizona Studio Jazz Ensemble as one of our headliner events for the day. Mr. Peplowski is considered one of the best saxophone players of his generation and is not only an amazing player, but an amazing teacher. He will be inspiring local students through many masterclasses ahead of this signature performance.

There will be dancing. There will be singing. There will be smiles. All we need is you to join us. The fun starts at 11am and goes into the night. We look forward to seeing you there.

Doors 7pm

$25 Advance, $30 Day of Show

— LIZZY & THE TIGGERMEN –Dubbed “10-piece jazz sensations” (LA Weekly) and “one of the hottest swing bands in LA” (Good Day LA), Lizzy & the Triggermen is forging a path like no other.

Underneath the old school glamour is a captivatingly modern band who is just as at home selling out legendary venues like the Troubadour as topping the jazz charts (#3 iTunes) alongside heavyweights like Miles Davis and Kamasi Washington.

Part of Lizzy & the Triggermen’s “time traveling genius” (Music Connection) is their ability to thrillingly marry the old with the new, simultaneously transporting the audience back in time, and forward. Like the great tunes of the 1930s which so inspire them, their music boldly tackles our modern troubles and turns them into killer dance songs that fill the audience with joy the way only a wailing horn section can. As their debut EP succinctly states: they make “Good Songs for Bad Times.”

Doors 2:30pm, show 3:30pm

$25 Advance, $30 Day of Show

Black Market Trust bring their singing, swinging take on Great American Songbook classics & Gypsy Jazz to Tucson Jazz Festival!

Friday February 2nd

Doors 7pm

Reserved Premium Seating: $35 Advance tickets only

General Admission (Standing Room Only): Advance $25 | Day of Show $30

All Welcome

–The Brothers Brothers–
The Brother Brothers are the indie-folk duo of Adam and David Moss. The identical twins were born and raised in Peoria, Illinois, and originally based in Brooklyn, but have been ultimately and profoundly shaped by a life surrounded by travel and the web of community worldwide. They are the kind of people who have a story about everything, and more so, one you might genuinely like to hear.

American Songwriter once said, ‘no matter what musical context Adam and David Moss may come to put themselves in, what the duo wants to say through music will always come to show the beauty that exists—even in the deepest cracks—of human living.’ Proclaims No Depression, ‘the warm harmonies and silky melodies of identical twins David and Adam Moss evoke the kind of ’60s-era folk tunes that reverberated through dark, wood-paneled bars in the Village… If these brothers aren’t among the Americana Music Association’s nominees for Emerging Artist or Duo-Group, I want a recount.’

The Brother Brothers’ luminous touring career spans international headlining, support runs with the likes of Keb Mo, I’m With Her, Big Thief, Lake Street Dive, and Shakey Graves, as well as key plays at NPR’s Mountain Stage, FreshGrass Festival, Folk Alliance, Woodford Folk, Nelsonville Music Festival, and Edmonton Folk, among others.

Friday February 2nd

Doors 7pm

Reserved Premium Seating: $35 Advance tickets only

General Admission (Standing Room Only): Advance $25 | Day of Show $30

All Welcome

–The Brothers Brothers–
The Brother Brothers are the indie-folk duo of Adam and David Moss. The identical twins were born and raised in Peoria, Illinois, and originally based in Brooklyn, but have been ultimately and profoundly shaped by a life surrounded by travel and the web of community worldwide. They are the kind of people who have a story about everything, and more so, one you might genuinely like to hear.

American Songwriter once said, ‘no matter what musical context Adam and David Moss may come to put themselves in, what the duo wants to say through music will always come to show the beauty that exists—even in the deepest cracks—of human living.’ Proclaims No Depression, ‘the warm harmonies and silky melodies of identical twins David and Adam Moss evoke the kind of ’60s-era folk tunes that reverberated through dark, wood-paneled bars in the Village… If these brothers aren’t among the Americana Music Association’s nominees for Emerging Artist or Duo-Group, I want a recount.’

The Brother Brothers’ luminous touring career spans international headlining, support runs with the likes of Keb Mo, I’m With Her, Big Thief, Lake Street Dive, and Shakey Graves, as well as key plays at NPR’s Mountain Stage, FreshGrass Festival, Folk Alliance, Woodford Folk, Nelsonville Music Festival, and Edmonton Folk, among others.

Sunday, February 18th

Doors 6 pm

Reserved Premium Seating: $35 Advance tickets only

General Admission (Standing Room Only): Advance $25 | Day of Show $30

All Welcome

–MARSHALL CRENSHAW– Born in 1953 in Detroit, Michigan, Marshall Crenshaw learned to tune a guitar correctly at age ten and has been trying ever since. His first big break came in 1978 playing John Lennon in “Beatlemania”, first as an understudy in New York, then in the West Coast company followed by a national touring company. Removing himself from that situation in Feb. 1980, Marshall settled in New York City. After crossing paths with the great and legendary Alan Betrock, Marshall recorded his debut single “Something’s Gonna Happen” (for Betrock’s Shake Records label), which led to a deal with Warner Bros. His debut album, Marshall Crenshaw, was acclaimed as a masterpiece upon its release in 1982 and established him as a singular songwriter, record maker, and guitarist. The album spawned the hit single “Someday, Someway,” and other classics such as “(You’re My) Favorite Waste of Time,” “Whenever You’re On My Mind” and “Cynical Girl.” Over the course of a career that’s spanned three decades, 13 albums, Grammy and Golden Globe nominations, film and TV appearances (Buddy Holly in “La Bamba”) and thousands of performances, Marshall Crenshaw’s musical output has maintained a consistent fidelity to the qualities of artfulness, craftsmanship and passion, and his efforts have been rewarded with the devotion of a broad and remarkably loyal fan base. Along with touring around the country and the occasional recording project, other current projects include a documentary film – in progress about legendary record producer Tom Wilson. Says Crenshaw, “This is a road that I never imagined taking before, but it’s been amazing.” “Although he was seen as a latter-day Buddy Holly at the outset, he soon proved too talented and original to be anyone but himself.” –Trouser Press

Saturday, February 24th

Doors 7pm

ADV $25 | DOS $30

All Welcome

—COCO MONTOYA—“’Just play what you feel, be real about it, and enjoy yourself.’ That’s what Albert Collins taught me,” says the award-winning guitar virtuoso and soul-deep singer Coco Montoya. The self-taught, left-handed Montoya mastered his craft under Collins’ tutelage. Incorporating lessons learned from his mentors, the iconic Collins (for whom he originally drummed), and UK legend John Mayall, Montoya puts his own stamp onto every song he performs. Since his first solo album in 1995 (which won him the Blues Music Award for Best New Artist), Montoya’s endlessly inventive guitar work and passionate, hard-hitting vocals have kept him at the top of the blues world. With his new Alligator Records album, Writing On The Wall (his sixth for the label), Montoya delivers what he is already calling one of the best records he’s ever made. For the very first time on Alligator, he decided to bring his road-tested band—noted keyboardist and songwriter Jeff Paris (Keb’ Mo’, Bill Withers), bassist Nathan Brown, and drummer Rena Beavers—into the studio with him. Between the camaraderie of the long-time bandmates and the sheer talent of all involved, the results have left Coco, in his words, “over the moon.”

Produced by Grammy Award-winner Tony Braunagel (Bonnie Raitt, Taj Mahal) and co-produced by Jeff Paris, Writing On The Wall is a tour-de-force of memorable, hook-filled songs, sung with passion and fueled by equally memorable, top shelf musicianship. The 13 tracks include five written or co-written by Montoya. The set opens with a signature, career-defining performance of the soul-baring I Was Wrong, written for Coco by songwriter Dave Steen. From the blistering Save It For The Next Fool to the enjoy now/pay later philosophy of Jeff Paris’ (I’d Rather Feel) Bad About Doin’ It to the riveting reinvention of Lonnie Mack’s Stop, Montoya delivers each song with heart-pounding emotion. Special guest Lee Roy Parnell adds his well-seasoned slide guitar to the smoldering A Chip And A Chair. And Coco’s friend, guitarist Ronnie Baker Brooks (son of late Alligator star Lonnie Brooks), joins in for some good-natured fun on the droll Baby, You’re A Drag and adds his blistering playing to the searing cover of Bobby Bland’s You Got Me.

“I am so proud of this one,” Montoya says of Writing On The Wall. “We recorded in Jeff Paris’ studio and everything just gelled together. And the band inspired me; they all gave extra effort at every turn. Jeff, Nathan and Rena played so great, they ended up making me play even harder. They made me sound better than I am!”

Henry “Coco” Montoya was born in Santa Monica, California, on October 2, 1951, and raised in a working-class family. Growing up, Coco immersed himself in his parents’ record collection. He listened to big band jazz, salsa, doo-wop and rock ‘n’ roll. His first love was drums; he acquired a kit at age 11. He got a guitar two years later. “I’m sure the Beatles had something to do with this,” Montoya recalls. “I wanted to make notes as well as beats.” But guitar was his secondary instrument. Montoya turned his love of drumming into his profession, playing in a number of area rock bands while still in his teens and becoming an in-demand drummer.

In 1969, Montoya saw Albert King opening a Creedence Clearwater Revival/Iron Butterfly concert at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. He was transformed. “After King got done playing,” says Montoya, “my life was changed. When he played, the music went right into my soul. It grabbed me so emotionally that I had tears welling up in my eyes. Nothing had ever affected me to this level. He showed me what music and playing the blues were all about.

I knew that was what I wanted to do.”

The next chapter of Montoya’s story was kick-started by a chance meeting in the mid-1970s with legendary bluesman Albert Collins. Montoya says, “Albert was coming through Los Angeles and needed to borrow my drum set, which I left at the club where he was going to be playing. I went down to see his show that night and it just tore my head off. The thing that I had seen and felt with Albert King came pouring back on me when I saw Albert Collins.”

A short time later, Collins hired Montoya as his band’s drummer. With Albert mentoring Coco on the guitar during the band’s downtime, Coco soon became Collins’ second guitarist. “We’d sit in hotel rooms for hours and play guitar,” remembers Montoya. “He’d play that beautiful rhythm of his and just have me play along. He was always saying, ‘Don’t think about it, just feel it.’ He was like a father to me,” says Coco, who often slept at Collins’ home. When Collins declared Montoya his “son,” it was the highest praise and affection he could offer. In return, Montoya learned everything he could from the legendary Master of the Telecaster.

Needing a more regular paycheck, Montoya left Collins’ band after two years and took a job tending bar, jamming on weekends at Los Angeles clubs. One day, legendary British musician John Mayall heard Coco playing Otis Rush’s All Your Love (I Miss Loving) onstage. Soon after, Mayall called on Montoya to join his famous Bluesbreakers. Filling the shoes of previous Bluesbreaker guitarists Eric Clapton, Peter Green and Mick Taylor would not be easy, but Montoya knew he could not pass up the opportunity to play with another legend. For the next ten years he toured the world and recorded with Mayall on seven albums, soaking up the experience of life on the road and in the recording studio.

Montoya’s recorded debut as a bandleader came with 1995’s Gotta Mind To Travel (originally on Silvertone Records in England and later issued in the USA on Blind Pig Records). The album became an instant fan favorite. Blues enthusiasts, radio programmers and critics sent praise from all corners. The album immediately made it clear that Montoya ranked among the best players on the contemporary scene. Two more Blind Pig albums followed, and Coco was well on his way.

In 2000, Montoya’s Alligator debut, Suspicion, quickly became the best-selling album of his career, earning regular radio airplay on over 120 stations nationwide. Montoya’s fan base exploded. After two more highly successful and massively popular Alligator releases—2002’s Can’t Look Back and 2007’s Dirty Deal—Montoya signed with Ruf Records, cutting both a live and a studio album. Returning to Alligator with 2017’s Hard Truth and 2019’s Coming In Hot, the guitar master continued to blaze his trail. “Montoya unleashes one career-topping performance after another,” declared the UK’s Blues Matters.

Still an indefatigable road warrior, Montoya continues to tour virtually nonstop, bringing audiences to their feet from New York to New Orleans to Chicago to San Francisco. Across the globe, he’s performed in countries including Australia, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Norway, England, Brazil, Argentina, Spain, Mexico, Ecuador, Italy, Poland, Russia, the Czech Republic and Canada.

Now, with the dynamic Writing On The Wall and a tour calendar busting at the seams, Coco Montoya is as excited as he’s ever been to perform the new songs live with his burning-hot band. Montoya’s well-earned reputation as an eye-popping live performer precedes him. Vintage Guitar states, “Coco keeps getting better and better. He plays with fire and passion rarely seen in this day and age.” Billboard declares, “In a world of blues guitar pretenders, Coco Montoya is the real McCoy. He exudes power and authenticity. Be prepared to get scorched by the real thing.”

Stars Aligned Tour featuring Reverend Horton Heat, Dale Watson, & Jason D. Williams

Friday, March 1st

Doors 7pm

ADV $30 | DOS $35

*Standing Room Only*

Thursday, March 14th

7pm Doors, 7:30pm Show

$20 Advance, $25 Day of Show

21+

–MICHAEL PALASCAK– is a comedian who grew up in Wabash, Indiana, began his career in Chicago and now resides in LA. He performed on both The Late Late Show with James Corden and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in the same year. In addition, his resume includes A Little Late with Lilly Singh, Letterman, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, Conan, has a Comedy Central Half Hour special, and was a Top 5 Finalist on Last Comic Standing where one judge claimed, “My first impression of Michael was a great likability. This is a guy that could star in a sitcom.”

Michael’s likability allows him to relate to his audiences in a real way which sets up the huge laughs he gets from his sharp, personal material. Consistently writing and performing, Michael recently released both a new album— The Internet Live through 800 Pound Gorilla and a new stand-up special on the Dry Bar app— 1984. Available for free streaming.

​Drew Hunt of The Chicago Reader wrote about Michael, “In a lot of ways, he represents the ideal antidote to the sort of unbridled cynicism that pervades much of contemporary stand-up.” Michael’s optimism continues in the new National Lampoon series — The Bright Side where he takes a positive stance on a negative topic streaming on YouTube.

Saturday, March 16th

Doors 6:30pm

ADV $30 | DOS $35

21+

— DEVENDRA BANHART—“This dewdrop world -Is a dewdrop world,

And yet, and yet…”

– Kobayashi Issa

Devendra Banhart’s Flying Wig, is a landscape of recurrent dualities; a can of paradoxes, a box of worms. What goes up, must come down, eventually. Battle-scarred by life and loss, Banhart found himself despondent, folded inwards; finding it difficult to speak, let alone sing.

“It’s about transmuting despair into gratitude, wounds into forgiveness, grief into praise” ruminates Banhart on his eleventh studio album. Gliding through the air, the whisper of two buoyant words symbolically and at times, literally appear — “and yet…” (inspired by ‘A World of Dew’ by 19th century Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa) — coloring in the melancholic outlines and replacing them with a bonded optimism. “The ‘and yet, and yet,’” Banhart explains, “is our ability to face despair with hope, to keep on failing and loving. My whole life has been filled with sadness. Everything I do in life is to help cope with that sadness.”

Turning his back on Los Angeles’ wailing sirens, he packed the bones that would become Flying Wig’s songs into a bag and took to the secluded woodland of a Topanga canyon. The album is the actualisation of a precious friendship with the acclaimed solo artist, multi-instrumentalist,

Mexican Summer stablemate and producer of Flying Wig, Cate Le Bon. The pair’s coming together is one prophesied by the mirror-image titles of their early solo albums (Banhart’s 2002

Oh Me Oh My to Le Bon’s 2009 Me Oh My) and a tenderness built on crude haircuts (“we finally met, soon after she was cutting my hair with a fork and that was that”) and home-made tattoos —but never previously translated into the recording studio. “She’s the only person I wanted to make this record with,” Banhart admits. “We set out to make a record sonically unlike anything I have made before – with a new creative partner at the helm. We definitely wanted a new sound, electronic yet organic and warm…we wanted to draw out and emphasize the emotional aspect of a synthesizer.”

The redwood and pine-surrounded cabin studio (once owned by Neil Young) where Banhart was “constantly listening to the Grateful Dead” somehow birthed something slick, city pop-adjacent and Eno-esque. The product of a ritualistic creative practice that melts down and re-casts as it mulls, the stuff of sadness beautified as it changes shape — culminating in a record that “sounds like getting a very melancholic massage, or weeping, but in a really nice outfit…if I’m going to cry”, Banhart mentions, “I want to do it in my best dress.”

Wearing, for much of the writing and recording, an Issey Miyake dress the color of the spring sky — a gift from Le Bon’s own wardrobe — and his grandmother’s pearls, Banhart found himself emboldened, protected; an experience “like returning to from where I started to sing when I was a kid” (as recently emulated onstage at an emotional homecoming gig in Caracas — Banhart’s first ever Venezuelan show). He elaborates: “I first started singing in my mother’s dresses when I was nine years old. It wasn’t about sexuality, just connecting with my feminine side and feeling that I had permission… It felt like a power. And that’s a very safe and comfortable place for me. I think a lot of the record is that – searching for hope, searching for a safe feeling.”

Nowhere more than in the album’s title is this sense of joyful abandon most strongly distilled. The real wig that inspired it was, explains Banhart, a birthday present from the artist Isabelle

Albuquerque. “I placed it on a mic stand and it just hovered there for months in the middle of my living room. Over time, it began to take on a playfully eerie presence and I started to imagine that while I was asleep the Wig would fly off into the night and hang out with all the other wigs and toupees that were flying around… It seemed like a lovely and haunting image, a symbol for freedom.” Combined with Banhart’s wry and jubilant list of other inspirations for the record — “the ballroom scene of the mid 80s, glamor, whales, the lonely employee at a dead-end corporate gig, the bloodshot eyes of the divorcee, the night nurse, the rebellious nun” — there is, after all, much up to be found with the down.

“I’m looking for a feeling / Hard to explain,” he echoes on Flying Wig’s opening track ‘Feeling,’ sibilant waves on sand, reverb pedals, elemental drones and mantric tones carrying a confessional intimacy to the fore as dusk falls. The album’s ten songs unfurl languorously into the embrace of the night: becoming trails of light on the mournful ‘Fireflies’, bathing in the glow of the new-risen moon on ‘Sight Seer’, and bearing witness to the strangeness of metropolitan solitude on ‘Sirens’ — the sound of panic the only company in a place filled with people.

Ever an intuitive producer, Le Bon reflects Banhart’s craft back on itself; arrangements of off-beat percussion, cascading piano and subtly wonky sax the looking-glass double of the softly-spoken dismemberment that suspends “blood outside the vein” on ‘Sight Seer’; conjures “an eye without a head” on the title track, and on ‘Nun’, finds Banhart “running / running / running / running / running out of legs.” The album’s contributing circle was kept small and familiar; its personnel drawn from both artists’ tried, tested and trusted list of collaborators (Nicole Lawrence on pedal steel and guitar, Todd Dahlhoff on bass, Greg Rogove on drums, Euan Hinshelwood on saxophone), with Le Bon playing a panoply of additional parts (synths, guitar, percussion, bass, piano) herself. The record’s finishing touches also came courtesy of Le Bon stalwarts, with mixing and engineering by Samur Khouja — “He and Cate have such a dynamic at this point,” notes Banhart, “that non-verbal communication, that psychic exchange that comes from proximity and time and trust” — and mastering by Heba Kadry.

Through it all, Issa’s spirit of the upside — that glimmering “and yet…” in an otherwise dark and fleeting world — pervades. The tough riff of ‘Twin’ serves as the iron bars that entrap its writer in the “Same desolate space / Same no way out / Same infinite doubt”, and yet…at its core, there is something cherished: “this precious thing / At the heart of everything you’ve wanted.

Stepping outside of himself to examine the unspeakable, Devendra Banhart is suddenly freer than a bird. He is as free as a wig that transcends the body, transcends the head, and makes for the clouds.

Friday, May 3rd

Doors 7pm

ADV $25 | DOS $28

All Welcome

*Caroline Rose’s The Art of Forgetting VIP Screening:*
*- Invitation to a pre-show screening of “The Art of Forgetting” short film*
*- Limited edition lyric booklet signed by Caroline Rose*
*- $10 merchandise coupon** and merchandise shopping opportunity before doors open to the public*
*- Commemorative Movie Laminate*
*- Priority entry into the venue*

***merchandise coupon is only redeemable at this show only***