Looking for live music? Then head down to Millcreek Common every Monday night from 6:30 to 9 p.m. where you can watch, listen or join in with a group of musicians playing swing music.

Hot House West is a nonprofit that has put together this free Swing Collective workshop and jam session on Monday evenings. Musicians with their guitar, banjo, keyboard, fiddle and even a steel guitar show up for a weekly jam at the Swing Collective. 

Bart Cubrich is the director of the Swing Collective program. “Hot House West has been going on for about six months here at Millcreek Common. We are now a nonprofit organization. We have our orchestra and our Swing Collective program. The Swing Collective is really about building community through music and helping keep this type of music alive,” Cubrich said.

“We offer this free workshop for people of all levels and eventually we can put these people on gigs and on the bandstand mentorship. We have a newsletter that comes out every week that has a tune of the week so people can try to learn the song beforehand and we also try to bring in professors to teach the group,” Cubrich added. “We will do this indefinitely and we want to continue to teach workshops.”

The Swing Collective mission is built on the idea that swing music is community music. Jazz is a music of improvisations and the Swing Collective focuses on working to support each other and improve the individual’s craft, repertoire and improvisational skills through this type of music.

Cubrich performs every Saturday from 12 to 2 p.m. at Church and State Marketplace downtown which is free. “I encourage musicians to come sit in with the band if they play jazz. It isn’t officially part of Hot House West yet, but they are supporting it, and it is an event I would like to grow more. We encourage swing dancing, and also have a volunteer swing dance instructor,” Cubrich said. 

Alex Belanger, who brought his steel pedal guitar with him from Provo said, “I am trying to learn to play with other musicians.” 

“I started on the lap steel guitar about four months ago and then I bought this steel pedal guitar in August and I practice it from two to four hours a day because it is very complicated,” Belanger said.

“I was skiing with my friend Cale and he is a big jazz guitarist and we were listening to some SpongeBob music on the way to Snowbird when he asked me if there were any instruments I would want to learn how to play and I said it would be the steel guitar. Later that day we checked out lap steel guitars,” Belanger said.

Belanger started practicing on a lap steel guitar first. “I don’t play the lap steel guitar anymore. I prefer to play on the steel pedal guitar. It expands what you are capable of doing cordially compared to lap steel,” Belanger said.

In addition to the Swing Collective, Hot House West offers a similar program for bluegrass fans called Trash Moon Collective which meets weekly at Gracies.

Workshops, jams, dances, and performances are offered through Hot House West. For more information on Hot House West, Trash Moon Collective and the weekly Swing Collective visit their website www.hothousewest.com where you can sign up for their newsletter. λ