Step back in time and experience the future at OLD TOWN HALL BALL — a celebration of 150 years of our jewel of Easthampton. This epic building turns 150 years old and guests are invited to an evening with music performances, dancing, and historic installations. Dance to Brooklyn’s Baby Soda Jazz Band and local favorites, Ch’Chunk. Enjoy tasty vittles from Myer's Catering, La Veracruzana, and The Log Cabin. Wash it down with a craft beverages from Abandoned Building Brewery, New City Brewery, and Big E's Supermarket.

The dress code is time machine elegance, which means you choose the time period and then dial up the glam - past, present, or future.

Dance to Brooklyn’s Baby Soda Jazz Band and local favorites, Ch’Chunk. Enjoy tasty vittles from Myer's Catering, La Veracruzana, and The Log Cabin. Wash it down with a craft beverages from Abandoned Building Brewery, New City Brewery, and Big E's Supermarket.

Serving up New Orleans style street jazz, Baby Soda was formed in 2007 in Brooklyn New York, by musicians who met playing traditional jazz in Washington Square Park and the NYC subway system. The group has grown and changed over the years, to include a large family of talented New York musicians, many coming here to realize their musical aspirations.

For 150 years, Easthampton’s Old Town Hall has been an integral part of the history, civic life, culture, and entertainment of Easthampton. Since 2005, CitySpace has worked to restore, manage, and preserve Old Town Hall as a center for the arts in Easthampton. This year marks the inauguration of its campaign to bring it’s second-floor upper hall back to life where formerly dances, town meetings, theater performances, and community events were held. Bring out your dapper selves and revel in Easthampton yesterday, today, and tomorrow. All are welcome to Old Town Hall Ball.

If there’s anything good at all that came out of the conflict in Northern Mali, then its audible in the defiant guitar licks of Songhoy Blues. After being forced to leave their homes in Timbuktu by Islamic extremism, the young quartet formed in Bamako in 2012 and began to navigate their refugee condition and celebrate their birthright through music — the arid, hypnotic desert blues of the Songhoy people.

Their high-voltage live performances in Bamako paved the way to international stardom — The band already counts such luminaries as ‪Nile Rodgers‬, ‪Gary Clark Jr‬., ‪Run the Jewels‬, ‪Iggy Pop‬, Nick Zinner, Matt Sweeney & ‪Will Oldham‬ as fans — and for a band still in their 20s, thats some really good buzz. One thing’s for sure — Ali Farka Toure never got this funky. Bamako these days is electric and alive with Western music, and Songhoy Blues is a modern groove machine in the effusive spirit of James Brown or Sly Stone. The hypnotic trance rhythms of classical Malian music are threaded with classic rock and funk riffs in provocative fusion.

VIDEO: https://youtu.be/puZrrI1bA5k

“Picture what would happen if Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin met Ali Farka Touré in a garage in West Africa. . . . The band is Songhoy Blues.”—World Café, NPR

Talk about a Planetary Party — Brooklyn's own Nikhil P. Yerawadekar & Low Mentality is also on deck for this one, delivering personal and uplifting original songs suitable for dancefloors, car stereos and headphones worldwide. The group plays organically cultivated styles drawing from Nikhil’s wide range of experiences, from his formative years as a teenage hip-hop junkie in Queens, NY, to later in his life when he found himself working closely with artists such as Hailu Mergia (Awesome Tapes From Africa), Zap Mama, Tony Allen, Cedric “Im” Brooks and Khaira Arby, and performing all over the world with Antibalas and collaborators such as Santigold, Sharon Jones, Billy Gibbons, Nels Cline and Esperanza Spalding.

VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yB1qw64FIPw

“Nikhil P. Yerawadekar and Low Mentality make some of the best music coming out of NYC. Not the best Afrobeat, not the best post-highlife, not the best South African psychedelic disco. Some of the best music, period.” -Saxon Baird, AFROPOP WORLDWIDE

Its the first Friday night Planetary Party at New City Brewery since April, so don’t sleep on tickets for this one! Celebrating world-class music from everywhere and made possible in part by Dean's Beans Organic Coffee Company. Zero-Fee $15 advance tickets are available at www.laudable.productions . $20/door. $10 student tickets available with student ID at the door thanks to our sponsor!

After eight years in Colombia working as a DJ, promoter and music journalist, trumpeter Etienne Sevet returned home to Lyon, France to form the Afro Caribbean band The Bongo Hop. The rich tone of their take on Afro-Caribbean dance music is the result of many influences including Sevet’s time in Cali where he met frequent collaborator and folkloric vocalist Nidia Góngora, and the African rhythms he encountered at home among the African diaspora, as well as his many travels around the world. This is the Bongo Hop's debut US tour.

If you've been a fan of our other Afro-Latin joints these past two years (Rio Mira, Betsayda Machado, Combo Chimbita), this is another sweet one for you. Sevet's DJ ear is carefully tuned to what gets people moving, so get ready for a universal-feeling dance-party, complete with funky horns and an international buffet of grooves. Think of the Bongo Hop as an Afro-Caribbean equivalent of the Greyboy All-stars. This fairly new project is already turning hips and heads in Europe.

PLUS! Its a Saturday night, so the Peace & Rhythm crew will be on the turntables with a highly relevant selection of vinyl -- before, between, and after.

The Planetary Party! Celebrating world-class music from everywhere and made possible in part by Dean's Beans Organic Coffee Company. Zero-Fee $15 advance tickets. $20/door. $10 student tickets available with student ID at the door thanks to our sponsor!

It’s the last Planetary Party of the year and we’re doing it proper with a double-header of creative, trippy, groovy, LatAm music from Venezuela, Argentina and Colombia … via Brooklyn. LOCOBEACH is back (finally!) with their signature mix of cumbia pop, Latin disco, surf, chicha, and spaghetti western. They share the stage with LOS CUMPLEAÑOS, a team of tropical party-starters who are NOT AFRAID to get weird, people. Take some dubbed-out Afro-Colombian rhythms and picture them swirling around inside a lava lamp.

LOCOBEACH joined us twice last year — for Collider #3 and again for the 2018 Millpond season opener, but mostly they’ve been laying low in Brooklyn, playing local gigs, and putting the final touches to their debut record, Psychedelic Disco Cumbia. Its out at the end of October on Valley-based Peace & Rhythm records and folks, it is outstanding. The NYC supergroup is comprised of José Luis Pardo (Los Crema Paraiso, Los Amigos Invisible), Neil Ochoa (Chicha Libre, Los Crema Paraiso), Joshua camp (Chicha Libre, C.A.M.P.O.S., One Ring Zero), Edward Marshall (La Muy Bestia Pop), and Fernando Valladares (Guaco). Its dance music for your brain.

When we ask Brooklyn musicians who *their* favorite party band is, quite often their answer is LOS CUMPLEAÑOS. The tropical-psych quartet, featuring virtuoso percussionist Nestor Gomez (Colombia), drummer Lautaro Burgos (Argentina), and Alex Asher (trombone) and Eric Lane (keyboards) from the US, is bringing their underground sound out of the city for our season closer.

If you like WEIRD and FUN and CUMBIA all in the same sentence, this gig is essential. Peace & Rhythm spin between sets! Tickets are $12 ADV // $15 at the door. Children 12 and under free.  Thanks to our series sponsors Dean’s Beans, there will be $10 student tickets available at the door with ID.  *Very* limited seating.

Planetary Party | Music From Everywhere is made possible in part by our series sponsors and go-to coffee roasters Dean’s Beans Organic Coffee Roasters.