Non-profit venue starts hosting live shows again next week

By Jay McKinney

When Swallow Hill Music was founded in 1979, the nonprofit organization had a simple mission: Bring the joy of music to life every day. After an extensive hiatus spanning more than 500 days, Swallow Hill will deliver on its mission with the return of live performances this fall.

Located in the Rosedale neighborhood of Denver, Swallow Hill is a musical campus that has three concert venues onsite. The Tuft Theatre and Quinlan Cafe are two modest venues that seat 90-100 people and offer a more intimate experience, while Daniels Hall is the premier stage that can host 300 patrons.

All three of the venues will be hosting live music, with banjo virtuoso Tony Trischka headlining Daniels Hall for the first concert on Sept. 10. Trischka has been referred to as the father of modern bluegrass, and he will kick off the fall concert lineup with a bang. In the coming months, Swallow Hill will feature artists who were set to perform before the pandemic along with others who have been added to the schedule. Some of the performers that will play in Daniels Hall include Steve Forbert, Oct. 1, Julian Lage, Oct. 2, and Tony Furtado, Oct. 22.

“After a summer of hosting some truly amazing outdoor shows with our partners at Denver Botanic Gardens and Four Mile Historic Park, everyone at Swallow Hill is excited to open the doors to our community and finally host live music after 18 months,” Newly appointed Concert Director Alicia “Bruce” Trujillo says.

In addition to hosting live music and promoting local artists, Swallow Hill is also a major hub for music lessons, and the organization is dedicated to providing music education to under-resourced communities. The COVID-19 pandemic may have negatively impacted Swallow Hill in the short term, but the organization accepted the new reality and got innovative.

“We did a few things real early on, we kicked in with live stream shows,” says CEO Paul Lhevine. “We started with Swallow Hill Live every night at 6 p.m. you could catch us on Facebook Live and we did 180 of those shows back-to-back.”

The viewership and contributions they received were tremendous in the initial months of Swallow Hill Live but by August the engagement seemed to hit a wall and people were itching to do anything other than sit in front of a computer screen. The live stream concerts were scaled back to just a couple of nights a week, but Lhevine says the organization learned a lot in this process and it has shifted its view about live streaming music shows for the future.

“We think there’s going to be an aspect of concerts, way into the future that’s going to be a live stream component,” Lhevine says. “If we sell out 300 seats here at Daniels Hall, we’ll probably want to open that up for people to buy a reduced-price streaming ticket and we know that there’s going to be an appetite for that.”

Lhevine believes an online component to the organization will be an attractive option for people who like the music offered but may be living in more remote areas of the state or even outside of Colorado. And it doesn’t stop with live streamed concerts. Swallow Hill has also added an online music school that has been more successful than they imagined.

“We always believed that Swallow Hill built community by bringing people together,” Lhevine says. “It was the pandemic that forced us into a different way of thinking to say there’s another way to build community, virtual platforms absolutely build community if you do it in the right way.”

This paradigm shift will eliminate the barrier of geography and allow Swallow Hill to reach a wider audience as it brings the joy of music. Even with all these silver linings revealed, there’s no substitute for in-person interaction and Swallow Hill’s staff is thrilled to get back to a sense of normal with this fall’s upcoming lineup of concerts. The tickets are selling quickly and the full list of concerts can be found here. For COVID-19 protocols and guidelines, click here to plan accordingly.

Jay McKinney is a Colorado native who recently graduated from Metro State University of Denver with a bachelor’s degree in communications. He loves spending time outdoors, playing golf and hiking.