Cha Wa

This show is presented in partnership with the New Mexico Jazz Festival.

The Santa Fe Plaza Concert series invites Santa Feans and visitors alike to gather and enjoy great live music together in the 400-year-old historic heart of Santa Fe.

• Feel free to bring chairs to the concert.
• This is an alcohol free event. 
• Bring your water bottle, as we will have water stations on site. 
• There is a city parking garage on West San Francisco Street across from the Lensic. 

Register for the event and we'll also send you updates if there are any schedule changes, as well as info on future free programs and events around Santa Fe and Albuquerque.

The Santa Fe Plaza Concert Series is made possible with the generous support of Falling Colors.

New Orleans brass band-meets-Mardi Gras Indian outfit Cha Wa radiates the energy of the city's street culture. My People, the band's follow-up to their Grammy-nominated album Spyboy, feels like pure joy, a distillation of generations of New Orleans expression. But it also never fails to remind us how hard-won that joy was and still is: not least in the tense, funky and explosive title track, with its declaration "My people, we're still here."

"Mardi Gras Indian songs are inherently songs about freedom," the band's drummer, Joe Gelini, says. "And that struggle is as relevant today as it's ever been." Popmatters describes the band as "a grand gumbo of singing, intoxicating rhythms, and deep funk grooves that are impossible to resist."

Alex Maryol's latest album, In the Meantime, is his eighth entry in a musical journey that began with him as blues prodigy. He's since matured into a critically-acclaimed alt-blues artist. His vocals exude a sweet grit, and, on guitar, Alex is a slow-burn virtuoso whose adept at conjuring muddy Mississippi river blues, gritty indie rock, buttery R&B, and sweat-soaked Chicago-style blues with an unmistakable swagger.

Alex has opened for a wide array of artists, including Etta James, G. Love and Special Sauce, Bo Diddley, Bonnie Raitt, Lyle Lovett, Leon Russell, Corey Harris, Blues Traveler, and Otis Taylor, among others. He's also made incendiary appearances at the Telluride Blues and Brews Festival and the King Biscuit Blues Festival.

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