Feedback: Kendall Street Company plays 20 VA shows in 28 days.

Nathaniel Perry and John Casteen Poetry

Reading. Nathaniel Perry (Long Rules) and John Casteen (Mountain Laurel) read from their books of poetry. Free, 7pm. New Dominion Bookshop, 404 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. ndbookshop.com

Startup Studio’s Business Models for Vi-

sual Artists. Have you ever wanted to ask an artist engaged in a full-time career, “How did you do it?” Now is your chance to demystify the process of putting together all the pieces to create a successful artistic practice that remains unique to you. Free, 4pm. Online. startupstudiova.squarespace.com

Saturday 2/12

music

Berto & Vincent. Brunch with lively Latin guitar. Free, 11am. Tavern & Grocery, 333 W. Main St. tavernandgrocery.com

Charlottesville Symphony Masterworks

III. Works by Tchaikovsky and Copland. $8-45, 8pm. Old Cabell Hall, UVA Grounds. cville symphony.org Eli Cook. Live music at the indoor tasting room. Free, noon. Eastwood Farm and Winery, 2531 Scottsville Rd. eastwoodfarm andwinery.com Pat Anderson. Americana and rock. Free, 2pm. Glass House Winery, 5898 Free Union Rd., Free Union. glasshousewinery.com Ripe with The Connection. Boston-based band performs an unpredictable blend of rock, funk, R&B, jazz, and pop. $17-20, 8pm. The Jefferson Theater, 110 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. jeffersontheater.com Sue Harlow. Live music in the orchard room. Free, 2:30pm. Albemarle CiderWorks, 2545 Rural Ridge Ln., North Garden. albemarle ciderworks.com Susto. The band’s new album is an exploration of connection, loss, and transience. $1517, 8:30pm. The Southern Café & Music Hall, 103 S. First St. thesoutherncville.com

classes

Ripping & Repair with Ashon Crawley.

Join Second Street Gallery for a hands-on workshop with “Inside the Artist’s Studio” artist, Ashon Crawley of Otherwise Arts Lab. $5-10, 11am. Second Street Gallery, 115 Second St. SE. secondstreetgallery.org

Valentine’s Day Cheese & Charcuterie

Board Workshop. Dani Landi, owner of Kaas & Board Co., will walk you through her stepby-step process on how to assemble a beautiful date night charcuterie board. $90, 11am. Albemarle CiderWorks, 2545 Rural Ridge Ln., North Garden. albemarleciderworks.com

outside

Freeze Your Socks Off Fun Run/Walk. A 5K run with a smaller route for kids. Walkers welcome. $30, 10am. Darden Towe Park, 1445 Darden Towe Park. rmhcharlottes ville.org IX Farmer’s Market. Over 60 local vendors with fresh produce, prepared foods, artisan goods, and more. Free, 9am. IX Art Park, 522 Second St. SE. ixartpark.org Wine Lover’s 5K. The race starts and finishes at the winery and winds its way through quaint, country back roads in beautiful Nelson County. $42, 9am. Cardinal Point Winery, 9423 Batesville Rd., Afton. cardinalpointwinery.com

etc.

Bound (1996). A groundbreaking work of LGBTQ+ cinema from The Wachowski Sisters. $10, 4pm. Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, 5th Street Station. drafthouse.com

PUBLICITY PHOTO

Kendall Street Company hits the road for 20 shows in February, all of them in Virginia.

Virginia lovers

Kendall Street Company launches statewide concert series

By Shea Gibbs

arts@c-ville.com

What’s with the “company” in Kendall Street Company? If you know anything about the local band, an 8- to 9-year-old jam-rock outfit with a dedicated regional following, you know these guys are anything but stuffed shirts. Business casual for frontman Louis Smith and his colleagues doesn’t even come with socks and shoes.

No, Smith says the “company” in Kendall Street Company refers to the company the band keeps, the folks who follow the rockers from show to show and know the words to every song on their eponymous 2014 debut EP, as well as those who’ve shown up more recently.

Over the next three weeks, the band stands to learn a lot about its Virginia-based faithful. Smith and his mates have launched a five-city, 20-concert, in-state tour. In addition to shows in Blacksburg, Harrisonburg, Roanoke, and Richmond, the tour includes four shows at Charlottesville’s Rapture on the Downtown Mall. KSC will start its week on Tuesdays, and wind its way to C’ville on Friday nights, before concluding the state circuit in Richmond on Saturdays.

“We were thinking, we don’t want to plan this giant tour that is going to be going out to places hundreds of miles from home and potentially have cancellations,” Smith says. “We decided, let’s play in our home state, let’s put on some awesome shows for all these people in the state of Virginia.”

Playing four concerts in the same city in as many weeks isn’t without challenges. The big one? Filling the venues. Bands try to space out their bookings in individual locations to keep demand up—play too many times in the same place, and you’ll stop attracting crowds.

But the tour venues were selected with that in mind, and Smith’s confident in his band’s ability to pull off the weekly engagement over the next month. The KSC website says “no two shows [are] ever the same,” and those aren’t just corporate buzzwords. The band’s thick catalog of originals and covers is impressive for an act that’s only been formally touring for five years, and with lengthy improvisations dotting its setlists, Kendall Street Company knows how to keep it fresh.

The group is coming off a nationwide fall tour, which served as a proper promotional effort for 2021’s COVID-driven The Year the Earth Stood Still double LP. But even if fans caught one of the shows on the swing, which included highlight reel performances in Denver, Virginia Beach, and NYC, they’re in for at least one surprise. KSC’s original keyboardist, Price Gillock, will play the 20 shows alongside the band’s five current members: Smith (acoustic guitar, vocals), Brian Roy (bass), Ryan Wood (drums), Ben Laderberg (electric guitar), and Jake Vanaman (saxophones, keys).

So what can Charlottesville audiences expect during the weekly Rapture shows? Intimacy is the watchword, with the smallish venue bringing the band and its company close together. What’s more, KSC has dubbed the in-state tour “Kendall Street Is for Lovers,” and will play songs at least tangentially in line with the theme. That means, in addition to crowd-pleasers like “Wasted” (“your love is tearing me apart”) and onthe-nose title tracks like “Lady I Love,” showgoers will get “Rocky Raccoon,” The Beatles’ ballad about an ill-fated love triangle.

“We learned a bunch of covers and rehearsed over four days before the tour,” Smith says. “We are diving deep into the catalog.”

The band has come a long way in developing that catalog since its 2014 debut. Early on, it might have been easy to dismiss the group as a DMB knockoff. Horns, raspy lead vocalist, jazzy/folky Americana, jams/improvisations. Check, check, check, check.

And while Smith admits it was in part his love for Matthews that brought him to Charlottesville (to study architecture, physics, and music at UVA), KSC has evolved into something more. A Phish-like whimsy, a Widespread Panic-like sense of desperation—all mashed up to make the band one of a kind.

According to Smith, it’s driven by the music his parents listened to when he was growing up—Miles Davis, Talking Heads, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Herbie Hancock—and inflected by modern curios. Think Aussie indie rockers King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, soul singer D’Angelo, and former Roots drummercum-late night star Questlove.

Which brings us to where Kendall Street Company is today: a tight jam band, dependent on its members being closely in sync, quickly recovering from a brief pandemic-induced period of alienation.

“Like the first year or nine months, we didn’t get together at all really,” Smith says. “We did a livestream series on YouTube… those were fun, but it was definitely like grasping at something to do and keep creating the art and be the band we wanted to be.”

Smith thinks one of the upsides of playing Rapture and the other statewide venues once a week for four weeks is that KSC will get better and better. And with any luck, the band’s company will also start to feel it.

“We’re hoping the people at the shows are going to meet each other and bond over a love of jam music,” Smith says. “I feel like in Charlottesville, it’s been hard to find the scene, like what is going on? I’m sure it is similar in other cities, coming back and going to see shows. I just want to see live music flourish.”