Wednesday March 30, 2016

• 6:30-7:00 Dinner
• 7:00-7:30 Awards
• 7:30-8:30 Speaker

When Beau Jennings set out to make a new album, he intended it to be about his experiences in his current home, Brooklyn. What he ended up with on The Verdigris was something far richer, stretching back to his childhood hometown in Oklahoma.

Reaching back to his roots, Jennings was drawn to a childhood hero of his, Oklahoma legend Will Rogers. The Verdigris River, which weaves between his hometown of Inola, OK and Rogers’ hometown in nearby Oologah, OK, both gave Jennings the name for his album, and set him on a journey to retrace the steps of Rogers’ life, from his birthplace in Oklahoma to his death by plane crash in Alaska. That is, Jennings literally traveled to the major locales in Rogers’ life, recording new songs he’d written along the way, drawing inspiration from the places he visited, using field recordings of the nature around him to layer the tracks.