Project Barley Brewery Lomita, CA
By Garrick Rawlings, Music Writer
Once a month at the Project Barley in Lomita, songwriter and guitarist Jodi Siegel presents the ongoing monthly Project Barley’s Pro Songwriter’s Showcase. This month’s show is Tuesday, June 20, 7 to 9 p.m. Born into a musical family in Chicago, Siegel’s musical theater father Sid Siegel is included in the recent and well-reviewed documentary, Bathtubs Over Broadway. Although very much a blues influence artist, widely known as a crack blues and slide playing electric guitarist, she was equally influenced by the classic singer/songwriters like Jackson Browne, James Taylor and Joni Mitchell as well as the Great American Songbook standards from her father, R & B, soul, jazz. Jodi’s approach to her own music is a synthesis of all this stating, “throw everything in the pot and take out what you like!”
Siegel has played and worked with an impressive list of artists including Albert King, David Lindley, Robert Cray, JD Souther, Robben Ford, Paul Barrere & Fred Tacket (Little Feat) – Maria Muldaur recorded a couple of her songs and the list goes on and on. Part of the inspiration to develop and produce the showcase was knowing so many artists. What a lot of people don’t realize is there are plenty of talented pros who are absolutely willing to perform at smaller, local venues, most have a lot more down time than tour time. Another big inspiration explains Seigel, “I really like a solo performer, in some ways I prefer one person because it really highlights the song, you’re not fascinated by the production or a video. Production is part of making records, I get that but why I started this songwriter night is that a lot of people don’t even know where these songs come from, they’re so used to hearing them [produced versions] they just assume the band that’s playing them is who wrote them. It’s cool to have a place where people can go and actually listen to it, hear it and they really start appreciating that this music was created out of nothing.”
Siegel lived and worked in Austin, Texas prior to settling in SoCal and now lives in the same Lomita neighborhood as Project Barley and on a hunch, looking for a place to play, she went in and checked it out. “I thought man, this is a cool venue and it turns out the guy who owns it is a really cool guy [Brent Reger], a musician as well and he has his own band [Barley] who play there as well as other places and I just asked him if he’d liked to have a songwriter night here, all-pro not open-mic and he said sure! It was that simple, it grew from there, musicians are always hungry to play their own songs. We gently encourage people to donate to these songwriters and seriously, people have been really generous and it’s got to the point where the songwriters can make some money playing their five or six-song set and make more than they would at a three set gig! They can sell their CDs and people get to hear them, the crowd comes to listen now. I’m just tickled that it’s turned into something so cool. We try and make it more like a concert than a bar, even though it’s in a bar.”
Another important proponent to this showcase is music enthusiast, promoter (Jacaranda Entertainment) and Rancho Palos Verdes resident, John Antich, who frequently partners up with Siegel, assisting on the curation of the show’s lineups, culling from a vast stable of artists he has developed relationships with and some who he books into his intimate, amazing outdoor summertime house concert series, Jacaranda Veranda, a very successful catered affair that sells out every summer. The Project Barley showcase was already underway when Antich’s wife, Suzanne Mayer, caught a show there and thinking this would be right up his alley, she recommended he come down to check it out.
Antich explains how he got involved, “Brad Colerick [who hosts the Wine & Song songsmith showcase in South Pasadena] was performing the first time I went and I liked the setup there and so forth. I went back another time and it began to occur to me that what she was doing is an important thing, she’s supporting independent musicians performing original music at a time when clubs that once catered to these musicians are either closing their doors or are going more towards tribute bands or cover bands. I began to go out there more and more, bringing people in and calling people from my guest lists that come to my home shows and they started to show up. One night when Jodi got in a bind when some musicians bailed out on her, I stepped in and brought in an artist at the last minute and it turned out to be a pretty good show. Eventually it worked into this deal where she asked me if I would co-host some shows with her and bring in the musicians I know.”
On a typical Showcase evening Jodi begins with her set followed by three more artists, always featuring different styles and instrumentation. This month’s show is ‘Pianorama’ night featuring TBear (Crosby, Stills & Nash, Doobie Brothers, Jeff Beck, Walter Trout); Becca Bryam (Lauryn Hill, Toots and the Maytals, Mary J. Blige, Keith Richards, Sheryl Crow); and Alfred Joahnson (New Orleans style player and co-writer of Company with Rickie Lee Jones).
https://jodisiegel.com
2308 Pacific Coast Hwy, Lomita, CA 90717 (near the corner of Cypress St. next to McKenna’s Pendelton shop)