Debra Devi + her band, along with The Pusher, at 503 Social Club in Hoboken on April 12th
Want to go to a live music show in Jersey City? Options aren’t what they once were. As real estate prices rise, alongside the lingering financial stressors of the COVID pandemic, the number of venues over the past handful of years has gone down considerably.
As the rock musician/singer and Jersey City resident who heralded the “Jersey City Rocks!” shows at White Eagle Hall, Debra Devi finds this dismaying.
“It’s a bummer because when I moved here this place was so cool, and there was so much going on and now on any given night I’m like, ‘Man, there’s really nothing going on,’” Devi said.
On Saturday, April 12, a stone’s throw away from JC over in Hoboken, Devi and her band – Kevin Jones on bass, John Roccesano on drums, and Brian Rigby on keys – will be doing a semi-acoustic show at guitar bar 503 Social Club (503 3rd St.). Also on the bill is The Pusher, comprising Junestar Blackman and Randy Haze. In short, it’s a lineup capable of wide range.
This has been Devi’s goal in the past, and it continues to be.
“Before COVID …. what I was trying to do was a smaller scale of what I had done at White Eagle Hall, which is Jersey City Rocks,” Devi said. “Maybe I did two shows at (now defunct) Headroom … We were trying to do the same thing on a smaller scale. Let’s have a bill that has four or five artists from different diverse communities in Jersey City and different genres all on one bill. I think I was calling it ‘Jersey City Rocks or ‘Debra Devi and Friends.’ But we were going to get that going and then COVID hit …
“I really haven’t found a new spot to do that with,” Devi said.
She noted one local spot and music organizer doing something much along the same lines.
“It was really nice to be to go to Art House (a theater/event space in JC) the other night and go to Mike Kuzan’s UNPLUGGED: Jersey City … But, yeah, we’re really starved (for venues). It’s sad because Maxwell’s in Hoboken birthed a whole musical scene. And a lot of musicians and bands came out of that Hoboken scene that became famous and toured. Some of them are still going today like Yo La Tengo. There just hasn’t been an opportunity here in Jersey City for our scene to coalesce and for any artists or bands to blow up, and they’re really deserving. It’s just a lot of talent crying for somewhere to go do their thing, you know?”
Devi will have copies of her book, “The Languages of the Blues,” on hand at the April 12th show in Hoboken. In researching the book, she went to Mississippi – birthplace of Delta blues and maybe blues in general.
As the state continues to struggle with poverty influenced in part by historical social inequality along racial lines, Devi took note of the particular way its residents were trying to combat it with the Mississippi Blues Trail, a collection of museums, trail-markers and more telling the story of its history in the area.
“The directors of these museums were uniformly Black and from Mississippi, and they were people who had gone elsewhere to get their master’s degrees and their PHDs and then to come back to Mississippi and try to help this cause of saving the state through tourism,” Devi said.
The April 12th show at 503 Social Club begins at 7 p.m. Tickets are $20 in advance — via eventbrite — and $25 at the door.