First Fridays Art Walk Bellingham
2024-06-07 08:00 - 17:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | WA
First Fridays Art Walk in Bellingham is a monthly celebration that showcases local artists and galleries, places to dine and sip, late night shopping, events, live music, and more! First Friday of every month from 6:00pm – 10:00pm.
First Fridays provide opportunities to engage with Downtown Bellingham and discover the city center throughout the year. Dozens of businesses host artists, feature signature dishes, become a stage for musicians, and more!

Bingo Night!
2024-05-21 19:00 - 21:00 | Cheba Hut, 306 W Holly St., Bellingham, WA, 98225, United States
Join us for a hilarious night of “Bongo”…I mean Bingo! Themed word bingo keeps things fresh, along with our fresh “toasted” subs, salads, and full bar offerings! Free to play, prizes for the winners!

Aslan Depot Jazz Night
2024-05-21 20:00 - 22:00 | Aslan Depot: Barrels & Blending, 1322 N State St, Bellingham, WA, WA 98225, United States
Every Tuesday evening is Jazz Night at Aslan.

Joe Pug
2025-04-10 20:00 | Wild Buffalo House of Music, 208 W Holly St, Bellingham, WA, 98229, United States
Joe Pug is an American singer-songwriter from Greenbelt, Maryland. He has released two EPs, as well as the albums Messenger, The Great Despiser, Windfall, The Flood in Color, and The Diving Sun.
While working as a carpenter in Chicago after dropping out of the University of North Carolina, Pug wrote and recorded what would eventually become his debut EP, Nation of Heat. Its literate lyrics received widespread acclaim and Pug’s unorthodox promotional strategy of distributing free CDs to anyone interested in sharing his music resulted in the EP selling over 20,000 copies. After touring with Steve Earle in 2009, Pug was signed by Nashville indie label Lightning Rod Records and released Messenger in 2010. After moving to Austin, Pug released The Great Despiser in 2012.
Pug’s acclaimed narrative songwriting has led critics to draw comparisons between his work and that of John Prine[3] and Bob Dylan.[4] His stated influences include John Hiatt, Warren Zevon, and Beck,[5] as well as literary figures such as John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck,[6] Raymond Carver and most notably, Walt Whitman.[7]

Ghost Note
2025-04-12 21:00 | Wild Buffalo House of Music, 208 W Holly St, Bellingham, WA, 98229, United States
Wild Buffalo Presents

Ghost Note
with special guests
Saturday, April 12th 2025
Wild Buffalo
8pm doors
9pm show
21+

“I feel like mustard stinks. I feel like onions stink. You put the two of them together … it’s just funky,” says drummer-keyboardist Robert Sput Searight, co-founder and co-producer of groove titans Ghost-Note alongside percussionist Nate Werth.
Indeed, the 15 tracks on Mustard n’Onions — the band’s third LP, first new album in six years and debut for Artistry Music/Mack Avenue Music Group — further Ghost-Note’s mission to provide rhythm-hungry crowds with, per Sput, “a mind-blowing healing sensation.” From the Soul Brother No. 1 tribute “JB’s Out! (Do It Babay),” through the masterfully funky “Bad Knees,” a co-write by the group’s visionary bass player, MonoNeon, the psychedelic-soul-tinged “Grandma’s Curtains,” and “Nard’s Right,” one of R&B/jazz hero Bernard Wright’s final recorded appearances, Mustard n’Onions delivers Ghost-Note’s supremely danceable goods. The 10-piece band’s performances — as befitting veterans of Snarky Puppy, Prince, Kendrick Lamar, Herbie Hancock, Marcus Miller, Kirk Franklin and other icons — are bracing in their virtuosity, affecting in their soulfulness and inspired in their sonic choices.
But the album also presents a story of an ensemble maturing and solidifying and finding an identity. On the band’s freewheeling 2018 release, Swagism, the lineup was still developing and, as Sput explains, “We didn’t have a sound; we didn’t know what we were gonna sound like.” The music on Mustard n’Onions, he says, reflects the firmed-up character of a unit whose “camaraderie and chemistry” have accrued over countless gigs. What’s more, nearly every band member has at least one writing credit on Mustard n’Onions. Sput remains Ghost-Note’s primary writer and de facto musical director, but he’s now shaping his music for and with his bandmates.
Though it was tracked primarily on tour breaks, during fun, hang-style sessions at a house/studio facility in Southern California, Mustard n’Onions finds Ghost-Note carefully honing that sense of collaborative songcraft — wrangling the jammy openness of Swagism into Sput’s arrangements of striking clarity and precision, and using pockets of vocals to ramp up the house-rocking vibe. “It was authentic the way the recording happened,” Sput says, “but we were more strategic about it this time.”
Along for the funky ride is a who’s who of groove-music greats. Most moving is the presence, on three tracks, of Bernard Wright (1963-2022), a musical genius who led a nomadic life and who stayed with both Sput and Werth at various points. “It was like a celebration whenever he would show up,” Werth says, before Sput calls his time with the much-sampled sage “an opportunity to take care of your mentor — and to learn from him.” Mustard n’Onions also features, among other guests, Karl Denson, founding Robert Glasper Experiment member Casey Benjamin, Snarky Puppy standouts Mark Lettieri and Jay Jennings, pedal-steel luminary Travis Toy, and electric-bass GOAT Marcus Miller, whose funky melodicism is the perfect fit for the strings-accented “Yellow Dan” — titled for its evocations of Yellowjackets and Steely Dan.
One of Sput’s “all-time favorite” guitarists, blues-rock god Eric Gales, wails on the single “Grandma’s Curtains,” which Sput wrote in the image of his ’70s soul favorites — Tower of Power, Sly and the Family Stone, and Parliament-Funkadelic. (He also mentions a bit of Hendrix as an inspiration, and with Gales’ explosive guitar work, that association isn’t far from mind.) The tune is fever-pitch funk, with an atmosphere of sweet, personal nostalgia just underneath: “When this music was being created in the ’70s,” Sput explains, “I was pulling at my grandma’s curtains when she was babysitting me, ’cause I wanted to look out the window.”

And while these fiery guest spots remain highlights, so many of the most extraordinary moments throughout Mustard n’Onions belong to the core Ghost-Note players, and stem from the band’s nearly nonstop life on the road. Take “Where’s Danny?,” with its tour-de-force solo by the group’s youngest member, trombonist Danny Wytanis: The title, a band in-joke, came about after Sput, feeling the effects of psychedelics, couldn’t find his surrogate little bro at a music festival. “We lost Danny for two hours!” Sput chuckles today. “I was like, ‘I haven’t met his parents yet! It would be horrible for me to tell them I lost their kid!’”
Every element of Ghost-Note exudes togetherness — not least those house/studio sessions for Mustard n’Onions, where, as Nate Werth recalls, “quite often the rhythm section would be practicing — Sput would be teaching us a new song section by section — and in the kitchen the horns would be cooking up dinner.” But familial vibes should be expected in a band that began with a life-changing brotherhood.
Well over a decade ago, Sput and Werth found themselves gigging together in the Texas-rooted fusion powerhouse Snarky Puppy — Werth on his creatively, globally curated percussion setup, and Sput on keys and, later, drums. What developed, rapidly, was a great mutual respect and a musical kinship that seemed to border on telepathy. “I started to get a kick out of anticipating what it was going to feel like to play with Nate the next night,” Sput recalls. The two musicians’ hookup began to rhythmically define Snarky Puppy’s groundbreaking work, making both men multiple Grammy Award winners in the process.
At a certain point during Snarky’s ceaseless tour schedule, Sput’s nightly improvised solo began to signify a new pathway. “I got bored taking drum solos,” Sput says, “so I asked Nate to join me. It was like we were finishing each other’s sentences. We did it so well to where fans started coming up and asking, ‘What was the name of that song you and the percussion player were quoting?’” An idea for a beat CD was hatched, which quickly flowered into a new group — one that would function less as a “collective” à la Snarky Puppy and more as a dedicated squad.
“We bonded in life as brothers and in making music,” Sput says. Now, Ghost-Note have become OGs or elder statesmen in a way, influencing newer generations of “frustrated jazz musicians,” to borrow Sput’s favorite description of his bandmates: That is, state-of-the-art jazz-trained musicians who worship the groove but not genre limitations.
With its more focused approach to funk and vocal performances like those on “JB’s Out!,” featuring current lead singer Mackenzie, and “Grandma’s Curtains,” showcasing Sput and Dominique Xavier Taplin, Mustard n’Onions can also be heard as a “sign of what’s to come” for Ghost-Note: more vocal-led tunes, a greater emphasis on songwriting. This is, after all, a band that simply cannot stop evolving, that seems to grow and learn with every year, every tour, every gig.
Still, you can be sure that whatever the next phase brings will remain, as Sput puts it, “positively, unapologetically funky.”

Laura Jane Grace & The Mississippi Medicals
2025-04-23 20:00 | Wild Buffalo House of Music, 208 W Holly St, Bellingham, WA, 98229, United States
Laura Jane Grace is a major figure in today’s rock scene as both a solo artist and the front person of Against Me!, which she founded in Naples, FL in the late 1990s. As a working artist, she has released six solo offerings and seven albums with Against Me!, and in 2012 went public with her gender transition in the pages of Rolling Stone. In her music, she continues to detail her journey all while staying true to her earlier themes of outspoken political critique – environmentalism along with personal and social liberation – with a base in American music including country and folk-rock, with a penchant for noise and anarchy. Laura Jane will be joined by her band “The Mississippi Medicals” featuring Matt Patton of Drive-By Truckers (bass), Mikey Erg of The Ergs (drums) and Paris Campbell Grace (vocals, percussion).

Dirtwire
2025-05-09 21:00 | Wild Buffalo House of Music, 208 W Holly St, Bellingham, WA, 98229, United States
Wild Buffalo Presents

Dirtwire
with special guests
Friday, May 9th 2025
Wild Buffalo
8pm doors | 9pm show | 21+

Dirtwire stands poised between ancient Mother Earth and modern technology, a blend of ethnomusicology and the psychedelic trance state, gut-bucket delta blues and what the band variously dubs “back-porch space cowboy blues, swamptronica, and electro-twang.” It’s a sound informed by Dirtwire’s travels and performances around the globe, where East meets West and North joins South. From the favelas in Brazil, Femi Kuti’s Shrine in Lagos, Tokyo’s bluegrass clubs, Ayahuasca ceremonies in Central America, Gamelan performances in Bali, desert festivals in the Australian Outback, and the 20th anniversary of Kazakhstan’s modernized new capital Astana, the band spreads its message by building bridges across musical cultures in their own unique way.
Dirtwire plays an array of instruments both ancient and modern, including West African kamale ngonis, jaw harps, space fiddles, whamola basses, Rickenbacher electric 12 string guitars, bowed Banjos and mouth harps from around the globe, all interwoven into modern laptop beat creation. Hailing from the underground west coast electronic bass music scene Dirtwire finds itself at the forefront of experimental electronic music production mixing in their wide array of world instruments with sampled beats and 808’s. Dirtwire’s live shows are a communal psychedelic journey, ranging from down home boot stomping get downs, to bass and blues electronic mashups, to ethereal cinematic beat driven soundscapes. Woven into each is the exploration of where live instruments meet computer production, and where tradition meets experimentation.
