Slip Silo Farewell Show w. River Breitbach | The Mill | $6 | March 21, 8:30 p.m.
Since forming in 2008, electric jazz group Slip Silo has played well over a hundred shows around Iowa City and across the Midwest.
Even if you’ve never had a chance to see them perform, it’s likely that you’ve stumbled upon a flyer or two if you’ve spent any time outdoors in the last half-decade. These flyers, these shows have all been part of Iowa City’s local music landscape for longer than most bands can boast, and tomorrow night at The Mill, Slip Silo will bring this four-piece legacy to a close with one final show.
“While my departure from the region is bittersweet, there is nothing sweet about leaving this band behind,” guitarist and vocalist Matt Logan wrote in an interview conducted over email.
Touting a master’s degree in music therapy and working as a board-certified music therapist by day, Logan recently accepted a job offer from a children’s hospital based in Oakland, California. There, he will be using music to interact with children and their families to promote both physical and emotional healing.
“I am very fortunate that my day job also revolves around music,” Logan wrote. “Because of this, I am provided with constant reminders and ample evidence that music is indeed a very powerful force.”
Put simply, this new opportunity to help others through the positive influence of music puts the “sweet” in “bittersweet.” Having to leave the city he’s called home the last eight years, however, is not so simple for Logan.
“[Iowa City] is a town that has supported me and allowed me to build a life around music,” Logan wrote. “For this, I am very grateful, and I will always feel connected to this little oasis in Iowa.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQVK9qr6F6M
Referring to to his fellow bandmates as his “brothers,” Logan mentions that the chief mission of Slip Silo–as far as he saw it–was to fully experience the range of emotional possibilities within a musical environment, and to take listeners with them on this exploratory journey. Interestingly enough, Slip Silo is one of the few bands that can actually back up this sort of ideology with a master’s degree. Convenient, no?
“Some nights were seemingly otherworldly,” Logan wrote, recounting evenings where he and his bandmates seemed to be tapping into what he describes as a “transcendent and universal creativity source.” Logan points out that finding a group of musicians that are able to connect on this level is very rare.
“I hope they continue on in that mission,” he wrote.
Indeed, it’s his hope that his fellow bandmates, Justin LeDuc (drums, SPD-S), Drew Morton (bass, keys, vocals) and Brian Lewis Smith (keys, trumpet), will continue to write music together and evolve as a group. The quartet already plans to write music virtually by sending tracks back and forth to one another, in fact.
Though tomorrow’s show is being billed as Slip Silo’s farewell performance, from what Logan indicates, we may be seeing some inspiring things from the remaining Iowa City-based trio in the not-too-distant future. When asked if, moving forward, the band’s remaining members would take up a different name, Logan wrote, “I kind of hope they don’t.”
In the mean time, come on down to The Mill tomorrow night at 8:30 p.m. and wish Matt Logan the best of luck, and raise your glass to the whole of Slip Silo for bringing us five years of terrific music.
