Time: 8 p.m.

Cover: $20 members, $25 non-members

http://raybonneville.com/

Ray Bonneville calls himself a North American. Born in Canada, he moved to the Boston area in his early teens where he started playing guitar and harmonica. His last 30 or so years have seen him seeking adventure and playing music throughout the world. Being a dual citizen allows him the freedom to live between Montreal Canada, and Austin Texas.

Bonneville is a distinctive artist, a man who cooks up a deep groove, blending a unique percussive electric guitar style, a weathered voice, and soulful rack harmonica into image provoking songs that can be believed. His thumb pulses and thumps, his index finger hooks and brushes out a melody, and his hand slaps the guitar for a snare-like effect. He sometimes uses a slide, always plays through a Fender tube amp, and brings his foot down on an amplified piece of plywood on the floor for added percussion. It is a powerful and visceral sound with a lot of forward momentum.

“When I first heard good blues and country music I was very young, but I felt a deep stirring excitement within, which told me right then what to do with my life,” says Bonneville, remembering his introduction to roots music in the Boston area during the early to mid 1960s. Over the next decade, Bonneville honed his sound up in the Northeast, Colorado and Alaska, and then moved around between Seattle, New Orleans, and Paris, France in the 1980s. He recorded his first album, On The Main, in 1993, and now has five albums out; his sixth is on the way.

In the streets and clubs of New Orleans during the eighties, is where Bonneville soaked up the prevalent back-side of the beat attitude that ran through a lot of the music being played down there. “There were so many great drummers to learn groove and time from, great piano and guitar players to be influenced by, and man, the singers and horn players just made your heart go wild with excitement! This was the place that influenced me the most,” he says. “It was infectious. I learned that solid, but laid back rhythm is like a tightrope on which the notes and words can do their dance.”

Ray won a prestigious Juno Award, the Canadian equivalent of a Grammy, in 1999, for his third album, Gust of Wind. His next release, Rough Luck, and his fifth album, Roll It Down, were also nominated for the coveted award.

Ray continues to tour and write, and is currently working on a new recording, his seventh, slated for release to the world on the Red House Records label in the fall 2010.

Says Bonneville: “I’m deeply in love with playing live music. It’s the time and place where I really live, where I feel the most alive. When a show is over, I can’t wait to get down the road to the next one, always looking to get back onto another stage and seek out another groove.

Little Birdie www.sonicbids.com/littlebirdie or http://www.myspace.com/weelittlebirdie

With her "songwriting pearls" and "siren's voice" (Montreal Mirror), Orit Shimoni is an artist not to be missed. Performing her own material since she was sixteen, in Calgary, Alberta and then in Jerusalem, Israel, this theologically perplexed prairie girl, (please, no Kinky Friedman references), is as unique as they come.

In 2003, Orit moved to Montreal, where she formed Little Birdie with side-man Andre Kirchhoff. At a gig, Little Birdie was approached by Mark Goodwin (Lil'Buck, Lazarus Moan), who offered to produce their debut album. Since the 2006 release of Cinematic Way, which received award nominations, international reviews and radio play, and top 3 album ranking on CBC radio, the band has played Canadian Music Week and Mariposa Folk Festival, among many other shows, concerts, and showcases.

Orit has spent the last few years writing, recording, and touring, playing with fine musicians such as Billy Jones, Ronnie Hayward, Noah Zacharin, and more...

Little Birdie has released a second album, I Left the City Burning, in Canada, (Also nominated for a GAMIQ award), and soon to be released on German-based label Cannery Row.

Orit now lives in Berlin part-time where she is working on a third album, and playing several shows, with touring plans in Europe this spring and back in Canada in the next fall.

Read more: http://www.myspace.com/weelittlebirdie#ixzz10UH9mSEG