The Mint (Venue Partner)
6010 W Pico Blvd
323.954.9400
This event has passed.
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Ryan Montbleau Band
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- When
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Friday Oct 23, 2009 (7:30pm–1:30am)
- Where
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Directions: Pico Blvd near Crescent Heights
- Price
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$10 adv / $15 door
- Links
Ryan Montbleau Band @ 10:30pm, Jonah Smith @ 9:00pm and Jacob Jeffries Band @ 8:00pm
Averaging over 200 gigs per year for the past few years, Ryan Montbleau Band has generated the kind of buzz that only surrounds a talented artist on the verge.
Ryan Montbleau is a pure soul singer. Not in the traditional sense. His voice — although a sweet, passionate instrument — isn’t packed with Memphis clay like Al Green’s or greased with urban sophistication like R. Kelly’s. Instead, Montbleau sings purely from his soul in a voice every bit as honest, open hearted and original as the stories he tells in his songs.
Whether he’s playing a club around his Boston home base or a big stage at the Gathering of the Vibes or the High Sierra Music Festival, the young leader of the Ryan Montbleau Band is a one-man antidote for an era of irony. His lyrics about romance, joy, pain and loss care nothing for the barriers of image and style. He is unabashedly romantic, wistful, a soul-searcher looking for the Holy Grails of Love, Virtue and Hope at a time when headlines and the rapid pace of life often make those causes feel lost.
Of course, the love Montbleau has already found is music, and the Ryan Montbleau Band’s new album Patience on Friday spotlights its creators and their dazzling array of sounds in full mutual embrace. The singer-guitarist and his A-Team of bandmates — drummer James P. Cohen, keyboardist Jason Cohen, bassist Matt Gianarros and violist Laurence Scudder — weave a tapestry of folk, blues, rock-steady, country, cocktail music, rock, gypsy jazz and psychedelia that’s exciting, elegant and sometimes even elegiac.
By the time the Ryan Montbleau Band’s first group album One Fine Color was released in 2006, they were playing more than 200 dates a year, coast-to-coast, and the CD quickly sold 10,000 copies. "My touring’s not going to slow down any time soon," vows Montbleau. "I really enjoy going out and meeting people and performing these songs with the guys in the band, who are my closest friends. And when we’re on stage together, the people in the audience are right there with us, so even a sad song can become uplifting. We’re all in it together. When you strip away all the goals I might have as an artist and a working musician, what I really want to do with my life is uplift people," Montbleau says. "My favorite thing in the world is looking out from the stage and seeing smiling faces."
