Joachim Cooder at St James Community Square 

8:00 pm - 10:00 pm

Friday, March 1st, 2024

Facebook: Joachim Cooder at St James Community Square

Artist: Joachim Cooder

Joachim Cooder is a drummer, percussionist, composer, and keyboardist. On his most recent Nonesuch debut, Over That Road I’m Bound (2020), Joachim uses the plain-spoken songs of country-music progenitor Uncle Dave Macon as the jumping-off point for an album that feels more like a compellingly soulful reverie than a scholarly excavation.

Family is at the heart of the project—as an impetus and as a theme. Cooder enlists family members to join him as he explores and expands upon tunes that his father had played for him and that Cooder now sings to his young children. He tinkers with lyrics and reworks banjo melodies for his own chosen instrument, an electric mbira, a variation on the African thumb piano. Culling material from a vast catalog, Cooder locates a gentleness and a plaintive quality in these songs; the novel arrangements he fashions often owe more to ambient or world music than to country. It’s an unexpected —and utterly original—take on the music Macon had performed.

Tickets: CAD 30 online, CAD 35 door 

All ages. 
Tickets non-refundable.