Greg Hennes talks about his new project renovating the Jennings Hotel on Joseph's Main Street. He's converting it for short stays and maker space.

The life of Astoria painter Christos Koutsouras sounds like it was ripped from a classic adventure novel. Born in 1957 on the island of Samos, the birthplace of people like Epicurus and Pythagoros (you know, the guy with the theorem), Koutsouras forged his father’s signature at age 18, got a sailors book, and climbed aboard a ship bound for Mozambique. And he hasn’t stopped since, traveling the world and making a name for himself as a painter.

Now Koutsouras calls Astoria home and paints big, tumultuous landscapes of Fort Stevens. His newest exhibition, “Accessible to All,” opens at Imogen Gallery and a pop up retail space in downtown Astoria during the Second Saturday Art Walk on August 8 and runs through September 8.

We got mixed up with some seriously talented people this week:

Visual artist Christos Koutsouras talks about his compulsion to paint, and new work on view at Imogen Gallery.
A quick preview of Jason Isbell's upcoming show in Portland.
opbmusic's Dave Christensen and Jerad Walker share some faves from Pickathon.
KHMD's Derek Smith chats up saxophonist Kamasi Washington, who's having an "Epic" year.
Artists we met at Pickathon tell us what songs are turning them on this summer.
Jumpdrive Studios opens up the crowd-sourced development process that hatched its new game.
Rinker Buck re-traces the pioneers' Oregon Trail experience in a covered wagon for OPB's Think Out Loud.
A new play premiers at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival: SWEAT by Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage.

Developers at Portland's Jumpdrive Studios give us the skinny on the radical crowd-sourcing that's shaping their first title, XO. It'll be available on STEAM next year.

A half dozen actors run through a scene in one of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s rehearsal rooms. The setting is a bar in Reading, Pennsylvania, after the financial crises. A group of steelworkers are talking about the factory that locked them out.

“This is the first time I’ve been out of my apartment in a week,” reads actor Terri McMahon. “Do you know what it’s like to get up and have no place to go? I am a worker. I’ve worked since I could count money. That’s me!”

And writing plays about work, and how our work defines who we are, is very much in tune with Lynn Nottage, who has won just about every honor a playwright can win: Pulitzer, Macarthur, Guggenheim awards. There’s the seamstress in her best known work, “Intimate Apparel,” who expresses herself through fabric. There’s the high-powered African American publicist in “Fabulation,” who loses her money and must return to her working-class roots. And there are the Congolese women in Nottage’s Pulitzer-winning play, “Ruined,” who have survived horrendous war crimes, only to have to make their living in a brothel.

And “Sweat,” which opens on August 2 and runs through October 31, explores America’s de-industrialization, asking what happens when the jobs we measure ourselves and our community by disappear.

“With this play, I think Lynn is following in the footsteps of Arthur Miller's ‘The Death of a Salesman’ or (Clifford) Odet's ‘Paradise Lost,’” says the play’s director, Kate Whoriskey, who has worked with Nottage on several plays over the past 15 years. “She's really exploring the new economic paradigm and how it affects ourselves as individuals and the community.”

This week, a tasty sound sandwich consisting of two ingredients:

1) We've got advance coverage of the Seattle Art Fair with a Think Out Loud discussion on the Pacific Northwest's foray into the high-end art fair market. If you're just tuning in, art fairs have become a driving force in how artists and gallerists move new work. Seattle dealers are trying to connect with high-level patrons with their own four-day event. We hear from Portland gallerist Elizabeth Leach and art critic Jen Graves of The Stranger.

2) Also we revisit a special show guest-curated by KMHD's program director Matt Fleeger, one of our favorite guys in the building. While he shapes the sound of Portland's jazz radio station, he's actually somewhat of a reluctant jazz guy. He'll share some top spins on his radar this year, talk about artists he thinks are breaking boundaries and show us some new ways to think about a traditional American form.
• 13:35 - We talk about jazz past, present and future with bassist and composer Chuck Israels, drummer Chris Brown, and drummer and writer Tim DuRoche.
• 35:58 - Matt shares some of the bands he's most excited about right now, including Coco Columbia, Grammies, 1939 Ensemble and Roberto Rodriguez.
• 41:48 - Record producer Tucker Martine talks about the sonic qualities of jazz recordings, and how he incorporates them into the seminal indie pop records he’s produced as well as Grammy-nominated records for Bill Frissell.

This is it, folks: we’re in the peak heat of the summer music season. PDX Pop Now is this weekend. Pickathon plucks through Happy Valley next weekend. Then there’s MusicFestNW, the Britt Festival, Sisters Folk Festival. It’s a never-ending cavalcade of lawn chairs and beer gardens and singers backlit by spectacular sunsets.

Which is why we’re going to spend the hour hearing from some of the bands who’re currently ruling our playlists and also happen to be touring through this summer.

1:21 - Last week, we traveled to Joseph to record a show from the writers’ festival, Summer Fishtrap. In preparation, we started looking at some of the amazing artists linked to the area, and one in particular stood out. The band Joseph is made up of three sisters: Allison, Meegan, and Natalie Closner. Unlike many musical siblings, they didn’t grow up singing together, but you can't tell from their pristine harmonies.
10:40 - The band Calexico is named after the border town of Calexico, California, and their music is all about crossing borders, mixing Americana, indie rock, Tex-Mex, jazz, and Latin rhythms. This month, opbmusic caught up with them before a performance at McMenamins Edgefield.
17:46 - Edna Vasquez first made her name in the male world of mariachi music, but now her fingers strum through bands and genres as easily as they do chords. There’s a solo project, a four-piece called No Passengers, and frequent collaborations (watch her opbmusic session).
24:28 - Oregon Art Beat produced this story about Luz Elena Mendoza. She's best known for her band Y La Bamba, which caught the national ear with its infectious blend of mexican folk and indie rock, and her newest project, Tiburones, was voted one of the city’s best new bands in Willamette Week last year and has an album slated for November. And rejoice, all ye Y La Bamba lovers: two and a half years after disbanding the group, Mendoza is picking the mantle back up with a new lineup. She is currently crowdfunding to record a new Y La Bamba album.
32:35 - Lost Lander broke onto the Portland scene in 2012 with the album “DRRT.” It was one of those dreamy local collaborations — singer-songwriter Matt Sheehy and producer Brent Knopf, the acoustic and the electronic. As Lost Lander toured, it evolved into a four piece.
37:18 - Historically, The Helio Sequence has disappeared into its studio for months — if not a year — to fine tune its albums, which is why the duo only has five albums under its belt after nearly 18 years playing together. But the band changed the rules of the game for its eponymous sixth album. Forget polishing in secret; they decided to take on a little challenge called the 20-song game and then let their friends vote on the tracklist. They told us about letting go during an opbmusic session.
41:18 - We close the show with a goodbye to someone who breathed joy into Portland’s music scene. Dave Camp was a renaissance artist, Portland style. He played and sang with a slew of bands. He was a central figure in the colorful, art rock project the Nowhere Band, which performed the Beatles White Album every Christmas. He had his own band, a psychedelic, disco glam extravaganza, Stereovision, and was in the middle of writing a graphic novel trilogy with the same name. And by day, he composed music for commercials and documentaries like “Andy Warhol’s Factory People” and “The Wanted.”
Camp had one of those prolific Facebook feeds that reads like the intimate musings of a modern mystic. It was there where he described his months-long struggle with stomach cancer in posts of extreme candour and grace – posts that rallied a community around him and continue to deeply affect friends and strangers both.

For concert dates and videos of most of these performances, see our show page:

Last week, Portland lost someone who breathed glittering joy into the local music scene. Dave Camp passed on July 15 after a months-long, profoundly public struggle with stomach cancer that rallied a community around him.

Camp was a renaissance artist, Portland style. He played and sang with a slew of bands, especially some of the more colorful, art rock projects like the Nowhere Band, which performed the Beatles’ ‘White Album’ every Christmas with seasonally themed hijinks, in addition to other concept albums. He composed music for commercials and documentaries like “Andy Warhol’s Factory People” and “The Wanted” through his publishing company, Lift. And he had his own band, a psychedelic, disco glam extravaganza, Stereovision, with his business partner, Nancy Hess.

“Dave was the person who said yes to everything, and then figured out how to do it,” said Hess. “Nike wanted a song that sounded like a ‘20s big band horn section. I was horrified, and he was like, ‘no problem.’ He pulled out his guitar and whipped out some chords. It was the kind of thing where he could play guitar, and you’d be like, right, he’s a great country guitarist. Then he’d play drums, and it’s right, he’s great disco drummer.”

Every summer, writers from all over the country head to the base of the towering Wallowa Mountains for Summer Fishtrap, a conference about writing and the West. This year, they celebrated the 100th anniversary of the birth of one of the festival's founders, the journalist and historian Alvin Josephy, with the theme “Hidden From History: Stories We Haven’t Heard, Stories We Haven’t Told.”

We couldn't resist the draw of a roadtrip to the mountains, so we invited a number of Fishtrap founders and visiting writers to join us for a live show at the Josephy Center for Arts and Culture.

A round table with festival founders Kim Stafford (writer and Lewis and Clark professor) and Rich Wandschneider (former longtime Fishtrap director and now head of the Josephy library), as well as festival board president Rose Caslar, a Wallowa County native who took her first Fishtrap class at 15. They talk about Josephy's influence, the place of Western writing, the reaction to hanging a four-point buck rack in a Lewis and Clark College dormitory and the area's troubled relationship with its original inhabitants, the Nez Perce.
13:30 - Josephy Center director Cheryl Coughlan tells us about how the center helps to culture a creative life in a rural community.
17:56 - Keynote speaker Timothy Egan discusses reporting on stories hidden in plain site. Best known for his National Book Award–winning “The Worst Hard Time,” chronicling Dust Bowl stories, Egan has also written about the photographer Edward Curtis, the wildfire that gave rise to the U.S. Forest Service and western issues of all types for his regular op-eds in the "New York Times."
25:10 - We venture to Fishtrap's lodge for a youth workshop on writing hip-hop theater with poet Myrlin Hepworth.
29:10 - Roberta Connor, the director of the Tamastlikt Cultural Institute whose family includes Nez Perce, Umatilla and Cayuse ancestry, was invited to Fishtrap to talk about what happens when Native stories are told by white writers and to share some of the hidden stories that speak most deeply to her.
36:57 - We close with a discussion with two of this year's most rambunctious workshop leaders, writers Erika Wurth and Sherwin Bitsui. Wurth, who is Apache, Chickasaw and Cherokee, most recently published "Crazy Horse's Girlfriend" and is working on a novel about Native gangs. Bitsui is a Diné from the Navajo Reservation in White Cone, Arizona, and his most recent poetry collection, "Floodsong," won the American Book Award and the PEN Open Book Award.

The music in this week's show comes from Tony Furtado's newest album, "The Bell." Furtado has a slew of Oregon shows coming up, including one near the Wallowas at Enterprise's OK Theater on July 30.

Seattle native Timothy Egan talks about his work digging for hidden narratives in American history. He delivered the keynote at this year's Summer Fishtrap. For more writers at the conference, check out our show this Saturday.
(Photo cred. Mike Midlo, Fishtrap)