Kelly Hunt & Lee Rizzo, featuring Brandon Day at the ZACC

Doors @ 7:00 pm

Kelly Hunt & Lee Rizzo, featuring Brandon Day at the ZACC in Missoula Thursday at 7:30 pm.

Memphis-raised singer-songwriter Kelly Hunt paints stories as old and offbeat as her Depression-era tenor banjo and parlor guitar, reimagining traditions of folk, blues & old-time music in a style that hovers beyond the constraints of genre à la Anaïs Mitchell & Gillian Welch. Hunt’s debut album, Even The Sparrow, was released in May 2019 and named as a finalist for the International Folk Music Awards “Album of the Year.” Her sophomore album, Ozark Symphony, was recorded with Grammy-winning musician & producer Dirk Powell and released on Compass Records in October 2023. Kelly has toured nationally and internationally since 2018 and has opened for the likes of Josh Ritter, Pokey LaFarge, Sarah Harmer, Great Lake Swimmers, John McCutcheon, and The Gibson Brothers.

“Kelly Hunt sings with the lilting cadence of a folksinger born somewhere far away, sometime long ago.” — ROBERT CRAWFORD [ROLLING STONE COUNTRY]

“Standing shoulder to shoulder with contemporaries like Gillian Welch and Rhiannon Giddens…folk music harking back to the stripped-down sounds of Leadbelly, Robert Johnson and Woody Guthrie.” — JOHN VAITES [AMERICANA UK]

Lee Rizzo is a humanist folk artist based in Missoula, MT. She released her debut solo album Moon Light Moon, June 2022.

“Music is so many things of my spirit and my flesh and it is none of these things. It is something else entirely. Something that cannot be known, where no thought can harness its mystical arithmetic. It belongs to us all and to no one. I am always singing, sometimes the singer and sometimes the song. Singing has been an essential aspect of my connection to my humanity, my story, and to my world. I have been making songs since I was a child. Chanting around my house, making rhymes while walking to and from school. I tried to sound like others and still try to be with my own sound. I could never say for sure how music would be for me, It just was. I avoided studying hard and didn’t like being told what to do. I was a student of life and my impulses. I followed rules barely when my life depended on it. Music lives in me this way too. It shows up when it wants and stays as long as it wants and as far as I know I have little say in the matter. I have a lot to say on a lot of matters and so writing just happened. Starting without paper and a lot of talking to myself. I love to rhyme and I speak the language of metaphor. Eventually my mental wanderings became journaling, then poetry and song. I have compiled this work from the last 16 years of my life as a student of a most intimate love. There is no way to sum up its meaning here in these words. I invite you to listen.”

https://www.leerizzo.com

For further information, accessibility, and inquiries please visit https://www.zootownarts.org/meet-the-zacc/about/.

Related Events

• 

  Monday Night Bluegrass Jam at The Old Post

  January 6 @ 5:30 pm – 8:00 pm
• 

  Monday Service Industry Nights at Plonk

  January 6 @ 6:00 pm – 10:30 pm
• 

  NW Country Swing Dancing at The Sunrise Saloon

  January 7 @ 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm