(OCEAN GROVE, NJ) -- Split Level Concerts, a long running concert series that has relocated from Union County to the Jersey Shore, promised a strong inaugural season bringing nationally and internationally touring Americana and contemporary folk musicians to The Jersey Shore Arts Center (JSAC) and they have delivered. The 2024-2025 season includes concerts by Steve Forbert, Brian Dunne, Griffin House, Jill Sobule, Maia Sharp/Antje Duvekot, Michael McDermott, and Rod Picott/Anya Hinkle.

Saturday, October 19, 2024 at 8:00pm - Steve Forbert. Tickets are $35.  Years before Americana music earned its own category at the Grammy Awards, Steve Forbert helped pioneer the genre's mix of folk, roots-rock, and richly delivered storytelling. He's been a torchbearer of that sound for more than four decades since, navigating the twists and turns of an acclaimed career that's taken him from gold records to Grammy nominations, from New York City's CBGB to Nashville's Bluebird Cafe, from his 1978 debut album to 2022's vital and versatile Moving Through America.

Saturday, November 16, 2024 at 8:00pm - Brian Dunne. Tickets are $27.  Brian Dunne is not your grandma’s antiseptic, pseudo baby boomer singer songwriter. Known for his laugh-to-keep-from-crying, darkly humorous lyrics, Dunne’s work reconfigures the limiting nature of the genre into something less cotton candy young love, more burn down the banks. This DIY ethos, born from a healthy New York cynicism self-conceptualized, funded, and dragged to every willing venue, found an easy home at Kill Rock Stars along the likes of The Decemberists, Jeff Hanson, and Sleater- Kinney. Releasing his fourth album in early 2023, his first on KRS, Dunne is bending the sounds of American rock into masterfully composed, existentially poignant, wildly catchy renderings of being alive. He is also part of the Fantastic Cat super group.

Saturday, December 21, 2024 at 8:00pm - Griffin House. Tickets are $30.  Griffin House is an American singer-songwriter and storyteller.  Touring and making records for over 20 years, House has a discography that includes over 13 albums.  His debut record  “Lost and Found” (2004) was featured on CBS Sunday Morning by music critic and then VP MTV/VH1, Bill Flanagan, who named House one of the best emerging singer-songwriters of our time. After forging a loyal fan base through years of grassroots touring as an opener for acts such as John Mellencamp and the Cranberries, House broke through as a national headliner in 2009 with an appearance on Late Night with Craig Ferguson and the release of his underground hit “The Guy That Says Goodbye to You is Out of His Mind.”

Saturday, January 25, 2025 - Jill Sobule. Tickets are $25.  Jill Sobule  has released a dozen of albums spanning three decades of recording, tackling such topics as the death penalty, anorexia nervosa, shoplifting, reproduction, the French Resistance, adolescent malaise, LGBTQ issues, and the Christian Right, to name a few - with her trademark wit and aplomb. The Denver-born songwriter/guitarist/singer's work is at once deeply personal and socially conscious, seriously funny and derisively tragic. While her songs cover expansive thematic ground, they benefit greatly from Jill’s subtle intelligence and skillful light-handedness. No sloganeering flag-and-fist waving here, but rather portrait-&-story songs about human beings, real and imagined, which allow us to step back from the issues they tackle, be they individual or societal, and to relate to them as we would to a close friend.  On stage, she entertains, amuses, provokes, and more often than not, takes her audiences on an emotional roller coaster, from comedy to pathos in a few bars of music, often within the same song.

Saturday, February 22, 2025 - Maia Sharp / Antje Duvekot. Tickets are $30. Maia Sharp has had her songs recorded by Bonnie Raitt, The Chicks, Trisha Yearwood, Keb’ Mo’, Cher, Edwin McCain, David Wilcox, Art Garfunkel, Lizz Wright, Paul Carrack, Lisa Loeb, Terri Clark, and many more. And through it all, Maia has continued to record her own albums including: nine solo releases, one collaborative project with Art Garfunkel and Buddy Mondlock, and her duo project- Roscoe & Etta (with writing/production partner Anna Schulze).  Each release has been embraced by press and radio and has led to extensive touring and appearances on Mountain Stage, Acoustic Cafe, World Cafe, NPR’s “All Things Considered,” CBS Early Morning, and the Today Show to name a few.  Maia performs solo (or with a band when it’s appropriate) incorporating some of the songs you may have heard from the artists mentioned above and tells the stories behind those songs. Her new album, “Reckless Thoughts” was released in August, 2023 and features the singles “Kind,” “Old Dreams,” and “She’ll Let Herself Out.”

Antje Duvekot is a compelling live performer and has been invited to play some of the top festivals including The Newport Folk Festival as well as the Mountain Stage, Philadelphia and Kerrville Festivals. Internationally, she’s headlined the The Celtic Connections Festival in Scotland and the Tonder Festival in Denmark. She’s the winner of some of the top songwriting awards, including the Grand Prize in the John Lennon Songwriting Competition, the prestigious Kerrville (TX) “Best New Folk Award” and, in one of the nation’s top music markets, the Boston Music Award for “Outstanding Folk Act”, three of the top prizes in the singer songwriter world.

Saturday, March 22, 2025 - Michael McDermott.  Tickets are $30.  Music makes a deep connection when it strikes that delicate nerve separating the personal from the universal. If the listener can use the songs as mirrors, then the musician has succeeded in communicating their art. Chicago-based singer-songwriter Michael McDermott has spent decades riding that artistic balance, and he does it again with fresh potency on St. Paul’s Boulevard, on Pauper Sky Records. McDermott knows a thing or two about heartbreak and arrested development. Back in the early ‘90s, McDermott was the new toast of the major label recording industry with his debut album, 620 W. Surf. But in typical chew-them-up and spit-them-out style, McDermott had seemingly been tossed in the never-been bin by the end of that decade. He persevered, though, and built a career fortified by more than a dozen studio albums and critical acclaim from Rolling Stone, The New York Times, CNN, and The Washington Post, to name a few. Even Stephen King, the master of the best-selling horror novel genre, called McDermott “possibly the greatest undiscovered rock and roll talent of the last 20 years.”

Saturday, April 26, 2025 - Rod Picott / Anya Hinkle. Tickets are $30. Rod Picott  Over twenty-three years, twelve albums, three published books and a few thousand shows Rod Picott has worked; powered by the fuel of the blue-collar world he was born into. The son of a hard drinking welder and a homemaker, Picott’s youth set him on a road of self-reliance and fierce independence that at fifty-eight years still runs through his blood. Raised in the small town of South Berwick Maine, Rod Picott was a restless and rebellious youth and after high school, a construction worker by trade until moving to Nashville TN. in 1994. He turned down the one record deal he was offered at the start of his career and did not look in the rearview mirror; choosing instead to cut his own path and lay a bet on his own hard work.

Anya Hinkle Anya Hinkle is an Americana singer-songwriter, winner of Merlefest’s 2019 Chris Austin song contest and 2023 USA Songwriting Competition; she was 2022 International Acoustic Music Awards runner-up. She has recorded five studio albums with former bands Dehlia Low Rebel Records) and Tellico (Organic Records). No Depression says of her 2021 release Eden and Her Borderlands “..one of roots music’s gems so far this year.” She “effortlessly delivers…” (Pop Matters) with “…vivid songwriting and transportive vocals…” (Folk Alley).

Split Level Concerts began as a house concert series in 2000 and grew to eventually present shows at the JCC of Central NJ in Scotch Plains and the Union County Performing Arts Center in Rahway. Over the years, Klemow curated more than 125 shows. For more on Split Level Concerts, click here for an article on moving the series to Ocean Grove.

The Jersey Shore Art Center is located at 66 South Main Street in Ocean Grove, New Jersey.  Follow both the Jersey Shore Arts Center and Split Level Concerts on Facebook and Instagram to stay up to date on all the concert happenings, on-sale dates, etc.