Enjoy an evening of stunning lyrical folk music in a double-header performance from Darryl Purpose and Hana Zara!

Schedule:

6:30 p.m.: Doors open

7:00-7:50 p.m.: Darryl Purpose

7:50-8:10 p.m.: Intermission

8:10-9:00 p.m.: Hana Zara

Tickets are on a pay-what-you-can sliding scale from $15-$30.

This event is part of the "Songs, Stories, and Social Good" performance series, hosted in cooperation between Cruces Creatives, the Unitarian Universalist Church of Las Cruces, and other local partners. The mission of the performance series is to have each performance both support the arts in Las Cruces (by bringing global performers to the city or by showcasing local talent) and serve a “social good” theme that advances other charitable missions. The social good themes for this event are peace (inner and outer) and environmentalism.

About the Artists:

Darryl Purpose

A master of the narrative folk tradition, Purpose has earned a reputation as a top-shelf songwriter and performer with a keen eye for detail and an uncanny knack for subtle twists that engage his listeners through his unusual, beautiful melodies and personal stories. 

Purpose’s love for telling stories is almost as compelling as the life he’s made for himself. As a teenager, he hitchhiked to Las Vegas and began a legendary career playing blackjack. A few years later he joined a “March for Peace” that began in Los Angeles and walked across the country to Washington, DC. He then continued on to walk in the then-Soviet Union. He began performing music on the marches, including participating in the first ever outdoor stadium concert in Russian history, produced by the legendary Bill Graham and featuring Santana, James Taylor, Bonnie Raitt and others. 

In his thirties, Purpose began his current vocation as a performing songwriter. He has released 8+ albums of original material. His most recent full album, Still The Birds, spent weeks at #1 for airplay on Roots Music Report. His 2021 single release, Dave Carter's “Gentle Arms Of Eden,” was the #1 played song in the world on the FolkDJ list for July 2021.

Hana Zara

Song spinner Hana Zara weaves subconscious imagery and rivulets of melody into a place somewhere between narrative and stream-of-consciousness, transporting audiences with her into dreamscapes that illuminate waking reality—and just might change it, and us, for the better.

In her own words, “I just want to keep writing albums that break down the distance between people, make people feel like I understand them or they understand me in a way that we don’t often get to experience in an everyday interaction . . . music is my medium, and writing, but my main goal is just to break down barriers between individuals and to keep dissolving the space between people who are brought up in a world that’s ‘us and them,’ ‘me and you’.”

Press

"Hana’s style is so hypnotic, and her content so compelling and deep, that I found myself holding my breath when I first heard her sing. For her poetic mastery, old-soul wisdom, beguiling presence, and the hammer in her heart that makes it all go, go, go, Hana is easily one of my favorite new artists on the scene." -Tracy Grammer (https://www.tracygrammer.com/)

"High class storytelling from unsung hero of US counter culture. Not for long. Purpose is one the key new chroniclers of modern America."

- Rob Beatie, Q Magazine

"Darryl Purpose once made his living as a professional Blackjack gambler, and like all gamblers, he knows how to tell a good tale. That, plus his sharp eye for detail, his instinctive feel for hard-living, unsentimentalized characters, and his battle-hardened, but ultimately optimistic view of the world makes "A Crooked Line" one of the best recent collections of contemporary story songs."- Dirty Linen