Jesse Elliott & Rachel Ries: The Green Room

Event Description

Ticketing: This event is FREE and open to the public. This event is general admission and subject to capacity. We encourage you to arrive early as lines will form. RSVP does not guarantee entry to event. We kindly request that you RSVP so we can gauge community response.

Please RSVP here.

More Info: Jesse Elliott
More Info: Rachel Ries

Description

“Music offers us that ancient, yet cutting edge campfire, and also the deep space to find ourselves and to find each other. Music offers us the places we seek.  It also asks something of us: to come back to our world with open ears.” – Jesse Elliott

Jesse Elliott, Director of the Music District, is a lifelong champion of collaborative creative efforts, social entrepreneurship, and the power of music and storytelling. He is the founder and songwriter of two rock and roll bands, These United States and Ark Life, who have released 6 albums and performed live 1,200 times in the last decade, from SXSW and Glastonbury to Lollapalooza and your favorite local dive. Before music recaptured his heart, Elliott wrote books and speeches with economist Richard Florida, co-founded a community nonprofit at the University of Iowa, helped shoot a documentary on water rights in southern Mexico and Guatemala, and ran an Italian deli on the Jersey Shore.

The Music District brings together the art, business, and community of one of humanity’s longest-standing sources of inspiration, communication, and collaboration. Equal parts creative laboratory, industry incubator, and town hall, the 57,000 square foot campus serves as a bridge between city and university, mountains and plains, in the free-wheeling innovation cauldron of Fort Collins,
Colorado. Touring artists, scrappy start-ups, seasoned technologists, global scholars, forward-thinking investors, and the hungriest music fans in the country will all find a home at the Music District. Seeded by Bohemian Foundation, which also puts its love, money, and people into other community, civic, and global causes,
they will then bring that home to the wider world. Great songs, companies who care, and a commitment to the social fabric that makes life worth living are all at the heart of the District’s ambitious mission.

With his company Range Music Ecosystems, Elliott and his co-founder Dr. Bryce Merrill researched and wrote the music strategies for the City of Denver and the State of Colorado, and brought together international thinkers on music and community for the City of Austin, the Denver Music Summit, the Biennial of the Americas, and others. In 2015, Elliott began consulting on the Music District, and on Bohemian Foundation’s larger music ecosystem, which includes a free public 100,000 person festival, 4 music venues, a music-themed hotel, an outdoor concert series, nationwide funding of youth music education, grants for nonprofits, touring programs, international convenings, and more. Deeply enamored of the
Foundation’s and the wider community’s commitment to music as a powerful social, economic, and creative force, Elliott moved to Fort Collins to open and direct the Music District in 2016.

With Rachel Ries, songwriter, performer, and community choral leader. HER CROOKED HEART is the new music of Rachel Ries – multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, producer, rock & roll choir director, sideman, singer. Her Crooked Heart’s debut EP, To Gentlemen, and forthcoming album, To Love To Leave To Live, feature members of Bon Iver, Shane Leonard and string arrangements by the inimitable Rob Moose.

Along with numerous and diverse collaborators through the years – including Hadestown mastermind, Anaïs Mitchell – Rachel has proven herself ever-curious to expand her sound, her scope, and sail on past the confines of ‘singer-songwriter.’ After all, sometimes what the heart wants is poetry and a syncopated horn line; a string section and a bass synth – all leaving exultation and devastation in their wake. But one thing has remained true since RR’s first homespun release: her sly and compassionate voice, excavating the depths of an all-too-human heart, armed with levity and a pen. It’s the messy humanity that’s of interest here. The trying and failing; the loving and losing and loving again. The choosing to be brave even when you’re shaking in your tattered boots.

About The Green Room:
How does one community get smarter…
Employ that knowledge to uplift the lives of its residents…
Join with other cities and towns across the country…
And collectively change the world?

If you’re interested in finding answers to these questions, join us this fall for The Green Room, a University of Iowa Honors Program course and community-wide educational experiment open to all residents of Iowa City.

Taught by David Lynn Gould, The Green Room will meet at 7 p.m. on select Monday nights in August through October at The Englert Theatre. Find your community, share your thoughts, and join us for this one-of-a-kind, multi-dimensional learning experience. This event series is FREE and open to the public.