The Community Exchange serving up community meal and a free concert

The Community Exchange in Altona is hosting its ever first Bands Night on Saturday, January 27th.

"The goal of the evening is two-fold," says Carol Braun, who, together with her son Andrew, is coordinating the concert. "One is a little bit specific to musicians and performers: the idea that there's a local opportunity to perform and we want to get a picture of all the different kinds of opportunities for music that connects people in our community. The second is that we want to provide the larger community with that opportunity to connect through music by going and listening to who is all out there and what do they do for music and how does it sound and how does that connect me to the person that's sitting beside me." 

Braun offers more on the motivation behind the music.

"We wanted to provide an opportunity at The Exchange for performers across the ages and across different cultural groups to have a place that they could perform that would be safe and fun and give an expression for the variety of music that we have in our community."

The post-dinner entertainment will consist of three bands. 

"We will have The Sixagons, a group of young people who started up about a year ago. They play the kind of songs that they like. It tends to be old rock songs is how I would categorize it. I don't think it's that's an official genre or anything," adds Braun with a laugh. "And then we have Promise & Tuesday, a young newcomer couple to Altona. Tuesday has told me that basically they started out singing gospel songs and they would be doing some of those. And then the third band is AlterLimitz, a Filipino band and they also play covers."

This is the first of three concerts The Exchange is hoping to stage between now and summertime, all made possible by a provincial grant said Braun.

"This particular grant was Artists in the Communities through the Manitoba Arts Council. The goal there was that we would have access dollars to be able to pay the performers for their performance. The concert is free and in order to do that, we access this grant to pay the performers."

The evening begins with the community meal from 5:00-6:30 pm followed by concert at around 6:45 at The Community Exchange, located at 116 Main Street in Altona.

~With files from Zack Driedger~