Event

Jerry Joseph and Walter Salas-Humara

Jerry Joseph -

(Jerry Joseph and The Jackmormans)
Jerry Joseph is a musician who lives in Portland Oregon, but hes often gone. Hes been inducted into the Oregon Music Hall of Fame but is still rather obscure to a lot of people. He plays well over 150 shows a year in the usual places. Across America. Sometimes in Europe, Mexico, and Central America. Then theres these other places he playsLebanon, Israel, Kurdish Iraq, India, and Afghanistan. All over the Middle East, often in war zones and refugee camps.

In addition to his touring, Jerry has set up a non-profit called Nomad Music Foundation that acts as a sort of School of Rock for displaced teenagers in areas of conflict. So far, he has taken guitars and taught lessons in camps in Kabul, Afghanistan, and Sulaymaniyah and Dahuk, both in Kurdish Iraq. These life-changing missions have been written up in Rolling Stone, Relix, and PBS News Hour.

Walter Salas-Humara
A Cuban-American whose parents fled Castros Havana with him still in the womb, Walter Salas-Humara was raised bilingual just across the Florida Straits in Fort Lauderdale. College at University of Florida in Gainesville and a residency with the Vulgar Boatmen left him with a lifelong habit of Mudcrutch/Tom Petty-style crunchy guitar riffs. Chasing the punk prairie fire to New York just in time to sift through the ashes, he formed The Silos in 1985 with guitarist Bob Rupe and violinist Mary Rowell, plugging the main cable of American rock idiom into the jerry-rigged soundboard of Velvets-era feral experimentalism. The unlikely result, as evidenced by About Her Steps (1986), the seminal Cuba (1987) and their RCA debut The Silos (i.e., The One with the Bird on the Cover, 1990) was a loose-limbed conceptual country-rock that in turn influenced (if not outright inspired) the alt-country No Depression movement just around the corner. The band was voted Best New American Band in Rolling Stone Magazine's Critics' Poll of 1987 and appeared on Late Night with David Letterman in 1990.