Swallow Hill Music Introduces Free Vinyl Listening Club, Sips & Spins

Swallow Hill Music has always been more than a live-music venue to the people of Denver. Since officially forming in 1979, the nonprofit has welcomed and nurtured countless creatives by providing a steady stream of music classes and concerts through the years, as well as simply offering a place to mingle among like-minded peers.

Community marketing manager Barry Osborne knows this, which is why he’s excited about some new programming on tap for 2023, particularly the Sips & Spins record club. The group, which is open to the public and free of charge, will meet for the first time on Thursday, March 30, from 7 to 9 p.m. in Swallow Hill’s Quinlan Cafe. Osborne, a banjo player himself, will lead the initial discussion and listening party.

“This is the beginning of some new programming. We’re still in the early stages of it, but in the early winter, we reconfigured the space in our cafe to be amenable to hanging out,” he says. “We’re trying to get back to this idea that we can be a meeting place. We can be a place where people can just hang out before or after a class.”

Swallow Hill has been in its current location — a former church nestled near the corner of East Yale Avenue and Broadway — since 1998. It is a charmingly “funky space,” as Osborne puts it, which makes it conducive to more outreach activities outside of concerts. “We know people like to hang out here, so we want to try to give them opportunities to come to the cafe for events like this; it doesn’t have to be just for a concert or class,” he explains.

The idea for the Sips & Spins club came about during casual conversations among co-workers, including Swallow Hill concert director Bruce Trujillo, who “loved the idea,” Osborne notes.

“I'm excited we're able to grow our relationship with music in a way that we haven't before. A record club is intimate — not only for the person choosing the music, but for those who come to listen,” he says. “Hosting it in our Quinlan Cafe feels like we're inviting friends over to share our favorite music.”

Osborne adds that the new club is partly an homage to past programming.

“What I really like about it is that Swallow Hill started in 1979 [as] an outgrowth of the Denver Folklore Center, and if you look back at programming at Swallow Hill in the ’80s and ’90s, we used to have a library, movie nights, different clubs,” he explains. “While we’ve always done concerts and classes — and that’s still the majority of what we do — we’ve also wanted to be a bit more of a meeting [and] community space. I think there’s a desire to do a little bit more programming in that vein, and that’s what the Sips & Spins record club grew out of. It’s new, but it’s also kind of calling back to things that are in Swallow Hill’s DNA.”

Plus, gathering with friends and listening to albums is something that Osborne fondly remembers doing regularly during his younger school days: “Some of my happiest times in high school or college were afternoons when you’re just hanging with friends playing music. I still like to do that now. We thought maybe we could [bring] some of that feel and vibe into the cafe at Swallow Hill."

He and a group of his buddies also once started a record and whiskey club, during which someone would pick an album to play and talk over, including which spirit paired best with the featured release. Last year, Osborne hosted a listening party among friends when the new Björk album, Fossora, came out. Simply put, music has always had the power to bring people together.

“It’s kind of fun to see music in this pop-culture vein; maybe in the ’60s you got together with friends to listen to 45s, and then in the ’80s that morphed into cassette mixtapes, which morphed into mixes on CD-Rs," Osborne says. "Now it’s mixes that you share via streaming platforms. It’s kind of full circle that people always want to share music, and maybe we’ve gotten away from the face-to-face element of that. But maybe there’s a hunger to do that again.”

Osborne plans to share his affinity for "old-time music" before digging deeper into his record collection during the March 30 get-together.

“We wanted to focus on whoever is hosting it, their individual record collection, so a little bit of their personality comes through,” he explains. “I have a lot of records by contemporary artists who maybe perform in this old-time folk vein. Maybe not household names, but bands like Black Twig Pickers to more established, better-known artists like Gillian Welch. They’re calling back on this recorded tradition from the 1920s and 30s. A lot of my personal record collection is based off of that. I want to play some of those artists.”

After March, the club plans to meet the fifth Thursday of June, August and November this year. No one has been tagged for those nights at the moment, but Osborne explains that the initial idea is to “highlight various people in the Denver music community.”

“I can see in the future it being other Swallow Hill staffers or other Denver-based musicians. Maybe we have cool community members, whether they’re DJs or somebody from Wax Trax or Angelo’s or Twist & Shout,” he says, adding that there may even be a desire to share Spotify playlists based on the club. “I know Swallow Hill is just a community of music nerds in the best possible way. I’m sure some of our members and students have some amazing album collections of their own.”

Since ramping up live shows after the pandemic, Swallow Hill has rebounded nicely, including selling out most shows in the 100-seat Tuft Theatre and 300-capacity Daniels Hall.

“We’re really encouraged. It’s so interesting. Our first in-house concerts were in the fall of 2021 when we came back. We would sell out some shows, and then other shows, people would buy tickets and maybe not come out,” Osborne recalls, adding that the two recent Magnetic Fields shows sold out quickly. “We’ve just seen people willing to come back through our doors.”

An upcoming show that Osborne and the Swallow Hill crew are stoked for is David Starr and Erik Stucky. Both performers have played the space a few times, but it’s been several years since they shared a stage together at Swallow Hill.

A Western Slope native, Starr has released ten albums throughout his career and opened for acts such as America, John Oates and Travis Tritt. Oates, one half of legendary pop-rock duo Hall & Oates, is among Starr's many fans. “His music is authentic, his songs are honest, full of emotion and truth. A voice you will never forget,” Oates has said.

Stucky, meanwhile, is also from western Colorado and has been mixing country, soul, bluegrass and jazz since his 2017 debut, Stray Clouds.

Osborne points to the ongoing collaboration between Starr and Stucky as an example of Swallow Hill’s musical spirit and the camaraderie it can create between musicians. “We’re excited that artists like that can come together and grow together,” he says.

The early-April calendar also includes several community “jams”: There are Irish (Sunday, April 2) and tabla (Saturday, April 8) jams, as well as a vocal improv class (Thursday, April 6) and a performance by Laurie Lewis in Tuft Theatre (Saturday, April 8).

That type of diversity is nothing new, but for people who may not have visited Swallow Hill spaces or taken advantage of the organization’s calendar recently, Osborne believes now is as good a time as ever to do so.

“This is just a fun time to be at Swallow Hill. We feel like now is a time to experiment with new and different programming,” Osborne says. “What’s old is what’s new. We know we’ve had things like this at Swallow Hill in the past, so we’re reviving that sense of community.”

Sips & Spins, 7:30 p.m. Thursday, March 30, Swallow Hill Music's Quinlan Cafe, 71 East Yale Avenue. To learn more about  upcoming events, visit swallowhillmusic.org.