Roots Salon, Art That Digs Deep

ROOTS SALON AN ARTIST GATHERING SPACE PRESENTS – ART, MUSIC, READINGS, CONVERSATION, LISTENING, LESSONS, COMMUNITY – HONORING A CENTURY-OLD O’REILLY FAMILY LEGACY

Winter Roots. Sat. Feb 25, next Salon “Deep Ballads and Odd Blues,” with Beau O’Reilly, Willa Moore and Ed Reardon. Read and hear more.

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Roots Salon is a self-supporting enterprise. Audiences are exposed to a fine line-up of talent.

“When I speak of the white fire, I mean more than music. I mean the creative faculty, the spirit. I don’t know why it is that something catches us, every one of us, and throws us back.  Life swamps and rolls over us…but the next generation, Dorothy, that is you.  You have it, my dear.  The white fire is in your hands.”   (-Aunt Mame to niece Dorothy, in 1925)

“All we need is a few good pots, some good books and some good bedding”. Jamie’s Great Grandmother Mary Ann Murphy O’Reilly once told daughter Nell

My family artifacts?  Books, with flowery dedications to a long dead relative penned on the cover page.  Sheet music, yellowed with age, with fading pencil marks that reminded my mother, and then me, about vocal dynamics and phrasing in a song. A wine bottle housed in a crumbling leather valise from numerous Shakespeare plays my father performed.  A folk-art rendering of Our Lady of Guadalupe, pictured in a mosaic, created by my Great Uncle on my mother’s oak ironing board in the 1950s…

My family history, sprinkled with an interesting story here and there, is of a proud, talented people, with a passion for justice and a love of family and the arts. The Roots Salon is dedicated to them.  To the white fire that fuels us, with gratitude.  - Jamie O’Reilly, 2011

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Conversations In the Salon

Women’s Salon

They offer her fragments of story
to take home to the other side,
stories already cut into pieces,
ripped down the middle,
large parts condoned off with razor-wire.
(from Working on The Border, Maureen Flannery)

“Women’s Salon” is a group of writers from a broad spectrum of life experiences sharing conversation on the theme of The New World.

Painted Gourd, Loretta Line

 

Beatriz Badikian, Marilyn Campbell, Maureen Connolly, Maureen Flannery, Catherine Gallogly, Kristin Lems, Loretta Line, Anne Schultz, June Shellene and Jamie O’Reilly, Salonnaire

 

 

 

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RootsFest Summer Music Festival

The Annual Roots Underground Fest features a headliner,
includes myriad family members, and other performers from the soirees hosted throughout the season.

 

Drawing by Bernie McGove

 

 

 

 

 

Roots UnderGround Fest
“Under Pressure”
Saturday, August 27
5 – 10 PM

Comfort Food Folk Duo, Jamie and the Voices of the Roots Salon: June Shellene, Willa Moore, Crooked Mouth, Paul and Michael Amandes, Michael Smith, Midnight Moxie

 

Want to know more about Roots events?
Get on the e-mailing list. roots@jamieoreilly.com
And become a fan of Jamie O’Reilly, Musician on Facebook

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Mission What is Roots Salon?

The Roots Salon, An Artist Gathering Space continues the century-old salon tradition of the O’Reilly clan, artists, activists and intellectuals in Chicago.  The Salon began in 2006 with a performance series hosted by Jamie and brother Beau, answering the need of Chicago artists seeking an intimate venue. Located in Jamie’s private residence, events at Roots are word-of-mouth happenings, presenting music, visual art, poetry and theater, with caroling at Christmas, and the Roots UnderGround Fest in August.

Roots is a rehearsal, recording and performance space. It is a creative development space – a greenhouse and an incubator for ideas. It is an informal gallery, showing accomplished painters, photographers, and illustrators.

Jamie O’Reilly is an arts producer, consultant,
singer, and teaching artist with a long history of arts activism. She advises and coaches freelance artists. With the Salon as office, Jamie and her clients develop creative projects in one-on-one sessions. She teaches singing lessons as well. (see Singing page), and is Salonnaire for “The New World” Women’s Salon.

The Roots House Bands are The Jamie O’Reilly Trio with Jamie on vocals, cellist Bob Weber, and guitarists Michael Smith and Peter Swenson, and Midnight Moxie, the doo-op rock band made up of Sarah Chang, Meg and Nia O’Reilly Amandes.

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HISTORY. How did Roots Salon come about?

Hosting the Roots Salon is an appropriate mission for
a cultural artist with a lifelong love of art & music!

In the early 1990s, Jamie found old letters and artifacts in a family archive housed at the University of Illinois Library,  when doing research for “A Season and A Time”,  a program she and Tom Amandes were creating for the series “1890s, A City Comes of Age” at the Chicago Historical Society. The O’Reillys, a vivacious clan of Bohemians, were newspaper writers, poets, activists, musicians and theater-folk who came to Chicago at the end of the 19th century.

Jamie’s Grandfather James, an electrician, had two sisters Mame and Nell, who were labor union organizers. Mame was a teacher. Nell was a a dancer and a poet.  She was also one of the first students of the School of the Art Institute, and married Irwin St. John (“Friar Tuck”) Tucker,  a newspaper man. Tuck was a close friend of Studs Terkel. Tuck and Nell were Pacificists.

Uncle ‘Tex”, Edward O’Reilly,  a newspaper man, rodeo rider and mercenary soldier was the subject of Lowell Thomas’s biography. ‘The Greatest Living Soldier of Fortune”. Imagine the political discussions!

1910s. The O’Reillys hosted late night soirees where political refugees: Fenians hiding out, Russians fleeing the Czar, and colorful characters recited poetry, played music, drank wine, and shared stories of “the four heavens and the fours hells,” in the family home on Evergreen Street in Humboldt Park, Chicago.

1940s-2010. Later Tuck and Nell brought the soirees to their Rogers Park Home. Their son Dan, dear “uncle”, guiding light of Jamie’s musical life, passed away in 2010. Dan and his wife Margaret hosted “musicales” for years at their home in Evanston.

2006. Jamie creates Roots Salon in her 100 yr old home.

Musicians
(sample list) Midnight Moxie, Michael Smith, Anne Hills, Jon Spiegel, June Shellene, Peter Swenson’s Baroque ensemble, Paul Amandes, Jenny Magnus, Beau O’Reilly, Crooked Mouth, James Lee Stanley, Al the Liar, Sad Brad Smith, The Jamie O’Reilly Trio

Poetry and Theater:
The Women’s Salon Harvest Dinner, Catherine Gallogly and Rhonda Wehner, “Final Blessing, Stories and Songs, Conversation on End of Life”. Poets include: Maureen Connolly, Cecilie O’Reilly,  Anne Schultz, John Starrs, Zoe Keithley, Kathy Kelly-Hahn, Carolyn Kelley-Williams. For the Rhino Theater Fest: Beau O’Reilly, Julie Caffey, Matt Dylan Wilson, Scott Barsotti, Billy Goat Experiment, The Prince Myshkins

Artists On the Walls
Roots has an informal gallery showcasing such artists as Iwona Biedermann, Nia O’Reilly Amandes (photography) Arie Marguerite (watercolors),  Bernie McGovern (illustration), Willem O’Reilly (photography), Tom Melvin (miniature acrylics), Cristina Silvestri (mixed media, oils), Danny Powell (abstracts).

Every sense and mind agree, an artist lives in all of these, one who knows intrinsically such things are finely done.   (Michael Smith)

Give us bread, but give us roses

The year before his death, the great violinist Isaac Stern was asked,
“Did you have a favorite place to perform?”
“Russia”, was his reply. “Because to the Russian people, music is as necessary as bread.”

 

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(Read the Roots article)

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