Wonder Ballroom

Jamila Woods is a musician, poet, and multidisciplinary artist from the South Side of Chicago. Her critically acclaimed debut album HEAVN – an ode to Blackness, girlhood, and home – was released by JagJaguwar Records in 2017. Her sophomore project, LEGACY! LEGACY!, features twelve tracks named after writers, thinkers, and visual artists who have influenced the creator’s life and work – including James Baldwin, Nikki Giovanni and Frida Kahlo. Her most recent album, Water Made Us, is a genre-blending song cycle on love and the wisdom of surrender.

Jamila has been featured on NPR’s Tiny Desk, CBS This Morning, and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. She has shared stages with Corinne Bailey Rae, Rafael Saadiq, Bonobo, Common, Chance the Rapper, Brittany Howard, Macklemore, and many others. An award-winning poet, Jamila’s work often blurs boundaries between poem and song. As cultural critic Doreen St. Felix writes, “It makes you wish all singers were poets.”

Jalen Ngonda honours soul music’s rich history while pushing it forward into new territory, an artist who’s both archivist and explorer, a disciple of the greats actively shaping the future of music. Having spent the last three years growing this new soul vision from small clubs to arenas and festivals across the world Ngonda stands poised to become the new spokesman of authentic soul with the release of his second album Doctrine Of Love.

Doctrine Of Love is an instant classic of an album, a long player alive with a confidence and swagger that seals the young singer’s reputation as not only the spiritual heir of soul’s great leading men but a one-off songwriting talent stepping far out from the shadows of his artistic ancestors. The title track ‘Doctrine Of Love’ sets both the emotional tone and musical template for the rest of the album, “I wrote that track when I was trying to do anything to get out of the studio” remembers Ngonda. “I was listening to a lot of James Brown at the time and that was an inspiration – Doctrine to me was a word no-one ever uses, I took it to be like a certificate, the ‘Certificate of Love’ – look, I think maybe I meant ‘doctorate’, but we wrote it and recorded it and now it’s a whole thing.” The Doctrine of Love is multi-faceted of course – yes, it can be a cool word that fits the song, it can be a code, a philosophy, words to live by, words to love by, words to write some classic music by. ““I just write the song,” Ngonda enthuses, “the listener can interpret it however they want.”

Something organic has been blooming from Asbury Park, New Jersey, and is now making its way around the world. Dogs In A Pile, a band of five twenty somethings with old souls and limitless chops, is waking people up to the timeless and ineffable joys of psychedelic-tinged jazz-funk rock n’ roll.

This is one of the busiest touring bands of today, averaging 130 live shows per year since 2022. The road has become their creative engine, generating a rapidly growing catalog of original tunes. Distroid, the band’s newest album, is a 10-song collection featuring long-awaited studio versions of some of the Dogs’ most beloved repertoire.

Dogs In A Pile is guitarist Jimmy Law, guitarist Brian Murray, keyboardist Jeremy Kaplan, bassist Sam Lucid, and drummer Joe Babick. In addition, the Dogs In A Pile community includes the Dog Pound, the group’s extended family of fans across the country.

Besides being a lyric from the Grateful Dead song, “He’s Gone,” the name “Dogs In A Pile” is an apt description of the five-piece band’s stylistic breadth. The sonic image it conjures is a heap of storyteller Americana, bluegrass, jazz improvisation, eccentric instrumental excursions, pop-rock sophistication, and deep-pocket grooves, ranging from funk to Latin to reggae and beyond.

Distroid features material that has already become staples of the band’s live show. These studio renditions have afforded the group a chance to present the compositions just how they envision them. Distroid offers a cross-section of the Dogs In A Pile essence, tight and tuneful four-minute funk and jazz informed psych-rock songs, and then sprawling 15-minute compositions with intricate unison lines, agile genre-jumping, and dazzling improvisation.