Southland’s Tahlsound concert series keeps the music going all summer

Like so many other performing arts events during these pandemic times, the community music festival Tahlsound had to reboot a bit. But having done so, there is now more Tahlsound to go around.

Initiated over Memorial Day weekend of 2017, the event began as a mini-festival designed to invite Central Kentucky to visit the music-rich neighborhood known as Southland. From there it grew into a two-day event staged on a field behind the Oleika Shrine and neighboring businesses along Southland Drive. Tahlsound allowed rock, blues, reggae, Latin, Americana music and more to share stage space in an event built around community.

Then, of course, COVID-19 had to bust everything up, triggering a Tahlsound transformation from a single, weekend-long event into its current incarnation as a series of monthly concerts. The community intent and stylistic diversity is still stressed, but Tahlsound now plays out as a more manageable set of double-act concert gatherings. They will be staged on the final Sundays of each month at the Oleika Temple Great Lawn through September.

The June installment, featuring the jazz and groove music of Lee Carroll’s C the Beat and Kith & Kin, comes up this weekend.

“What we’re doing now is putting together a much more manageable event,” said Tahlsound festival director Seth Murphy. “We’re still very much a volunteer-based organization, so for us to put together a three-hour concert, albeit six times a year, is a lot more manageable than a two-day, 10 hour-a-day festival managing 20-plus bands, two dozen vendors and a whole ticketing system. To be able to spread that out throughout the year might be a little more work if you added everything up cumulatively, but the fact that it’s spread out means we are better able to put on a better quality event and maintain our sanity.”

Oleika Shrine field became concert venue

This marks the second summer of Tahlsound’s move from a festival to a concert series. But it was during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, when most summer music events were called off, that the transition began. In one of Lexington’s first awakenings from the COVID lockdown, Tahlsound shifted gears and began presenting socially distanced concerts on a makeshift stage in the parking lot of the Southland shopping center that serves as home for the Oleika Temple.

“We responded as best we could to the community’s desire to get back together in some way that was safe and was following the guidelines from the CDC. So we looked at that, talked to our neighbors and figured out the best way to do that would be to host shorter outdoor concerts in a socially distanced manner.

“We built a stage there that was pretty small. That was our just-making-it-happen, bare bones, DIY sort of ethos. But we featured great bands. Wolfpen Branch played. Small Batch played. Renato and Santiago’s Band played. We fit some wonderful music on that little stage.”

In 2021, Tahlsound moved back to the massive field – an area that featured a workable but previously dormant stage - behind the Oleika Temple that served as the event’s earlier home.

“This kind of gets back to the genesis of Tahlsound and us as neighbors and community members. I used to walk by there and be like, ‘What’s up with that field?’ It seemed like such an asset. It’s a wonderful space, but it just hadn’t been used, so we really created Tahlsound to use that space. We saw this as an opportunity to keep a green space with live music going for that community. After our exit surveys, we found that about one-third of the attendees just walk to Tahlsound, so there’s a big neighborhood crowd for sure.”

As a Southland resident himself, Murphy intended Tahlsound (an anagram of Southland) as a kind of musical welcome mat. His intention was to encourage the rest of Lexington, Central Kentucky and anyone else, for that matter, to experience his neighborhood.

Lexington music acts featured

“We’re coming off a big weekend in Southland with the return of Southland Street Fair after two years being off. Hopefully, this just starts bigger conversations for Lexington as a whole. We’re coming out of staying in our homes for two years. A lot of people, myself included, still have some of that homebody-ness in them. Maybe they think, ‘I’ll just go to what’s in my neighborhood.’ So to import/export culture from even the different neighborhoods of Lexington is needed.

“It sounds odd to say, ‘Hey, we’re bringing in this great act from five miles away on the North Side,’ but there are lot of people who walk to the concert series that just may not go to North Lexington or East Lexington or other areas. That’s why it’s more important now than ever to have those community voices going around.

“This past weekend at Southland Street Fair, people saw artists as varied as the Blue Eagle Band followed by Devine Carama. It was a very cool thing to see happen, to have those people co-mingling and excited about the arts.”

Murphy is in the process of applying for non-profit status for Tahlsound that will open the event up to funding possibilities. One of the other changes for the series this year, though, was utilizing a pay-what-you-can means of admission instead of making the concerts ticketed events. The switch, Murphy said, is paying off.

“We’ve been able to pay everybody and keep the microphones on.”

Remaining concerts for Tahlsound this summer will feature reggae stylists The Ark Band on July 24, a Latin music performance with a to-be-announced artist on Aug. 28 and an album release show by the indie-rock troupe Lylak on Sept. 25.

“We want people to come to the event and be a part of it,” Murphy said. “We’re not doing this as a job. We’re not a department putting together a thing. We’re community members ourselves. A lot of these relationships, programming ideas and partnerships came about in our daily lives from attending other arts events in an effort to welcome people who come to Lexington and to the space.”

Tahlsound Concert Series 2022

When: Last Sunday of the month through September. June 26, 6 p.m. Gates open at 5 p.m.

Who: Lee Carroll’s C the Beat Dance Party with Kith & Kin

Where: Oleika Temple Great Lawn, 302 Southland Drive.

Tickets: Pay what you can.

Online: Tahlsound.com