Winter Concert Series Wraps Up
Oskaloosa, Iowa – The sounds of a full band were heard emanating from the Oskaloosa Art Center on Saturday evening as the Tru Bank Winter Concert Series wrapped up.
Kyle Ewing has a background in the music industry, and he worked in conjunction with the Oskaloosa Art Center and its board to help make the concert series a reality.
“The winter concert series was three shows, January, February, March, put together just as a way to kind of bring awareness to the art center and bring more people out who might not have either known that it existed or that otherwise just maybe wouldn’t have come out for a gallery opening, or something like that, or a class. Maybe now they will that they’ve been here and kind of seen what it’s like,” said Ewing.
“It all kind of started with, I was helping out with the art center to bring more music in. They were doing ‘Open Mic Night’, but they wanted to do more structured shows and more specific shows. So in September of 2018, we did kind of like a trial run of a show. We had a couple of smaller punk bands come in just to see if we could even have a live band in this setting. It was a little rowdy, [and] it kind of went well. It kind of showed us what we could do and couldn’t do. So in November and December of last year, we started putting things together to have the ‘Winter Concert Series’, figure out what we needed to bring in, and who we needed to bring in, and what we needed to do to make that happen,” explained Ewing.
On the final night of the concert series, the Decharme-Jones Band from Des Moines played on the stage at the art center.
“They are great. They’re performing right now,” said Ewing. “This is actually the first full band we’ve had for the Winter Concert Series. In January, we had a singer/songwriter guy named Adam Bruce, from Des Moines as well. Again, kind of that Americana Alt-Country vibe. In February we had the Cantafios!, a vocal jazz duo from Fairfield. So we’ve had kind of the stripped back, or stripped down stuff, and now we’re kind of experimenting with the full band, and I think it’s going really well.”
There were more than Ewing that helped to make the Winter Concert Series possible. The board from the Oskaloosa Art Center played an integral part.
“They’ve all been really welcoming and welcoming me in, and letting me kind of do my thing, and trusting me that we’re going to make the right decisions on using their space. We also had huge help from TruBank as the title sponsor for the series. It is the ‘TruBank Winter Concert Series’. They’ve been super helpful, providing free popcorn every time and putting it up on their sign along the roadway, promoting it and helping sponsor it. We had Osky Vision Center one night as a sponsor. Tara Rozenboom has been a huge help. She did all the place settings every night on the tables and put lights up, and curtains and all kinds of stuff just to try to make the room, not only look better but different every time as well. Also ‘The Alley’ was a huge, huge, huge help because they provided their tables that were in storage at the time while obviously, it’s winter outside. So we used their tables and chairs to kind of change up the atmosphere a little bit. They’ve been such a huge help in allowing us to do that,” said Ewing of everyone who was a part of the series.
For Ewing, he’s definitely already thinking of next year, and it’s possibilities.
“Yeah, we’ll definitely see what we can do. Try to go bigger and better maybe,” said Ewing.
