Sunday, October 16th, 4:30 & 5:30 pm (two sets)
Suggested donation $10 per adult
kids always free!

Parlor Tricks
Industrial Ragtime Band

which way west?
Sunday concert series

Imagine a New  York Sunday morning in the spring of 1904, the electric streetlights winking off and Reverend Edward Martin Waller making his way from the maternity hospital to the church as the happily weary denizens of the city’s Saturday night syncopated frenzy trail home to bed.  Newborn Fats Waller suckles happily at his mother’s breast, a zeppelin floats across the horizon, all seems right with the world… for the secretaries and the clerks, the warehouse workers and factory mechanics, all that’s needed is a good day’s sleep, and come Sunday night, the bars and clubs spring right back to syncopated life, the bubbly starts to flow again… and its time for a few Parlor Tricks!  Watch a few here!

It’s a thrillingly new and newly modern world this band inhabits!  The 19th century has accelerated into the 20th.  Steam power — that formerly modern lurch into an entirely new pace of life — has given way in turn to a new magic as tentacles of vast electrical distribution systems riddle the cities and creep out into the countryside, powering the nickelodeons and the electric streetcar lines.

And syncopation becomes the new way of experiencing rhythm, speed, stomp and swerve, driving us all into new deliriums of pleasure and excitement.  Liquor is still legal and the party never stops!

We’ll never be the same again!

Parlor Tricks is:  Eddie Scher, National resonator guitar; Melina Selverston, sultry vocals; Jeff Bruner, contrabass and Jasen Mars, tympani.  Doing for syncopation what Led Zepplin did for the theremin and what Lady Gaga did for bubbles!  We implore you to read still more here!  Better yet, just come to the show!