Time: 8 p.m.

Tickets: $25 for members, $27.50 non members, $30 at the door

Gurf Morlix—www.myspace.com/gurfmorlix or http://www.gurfmorlix.com/

Gurf Morlix is one of the best guitar players and producers of Americana music in the whole world. He is also a great singer songwriter. You might know that he once a guitar player and producer for Lucinda Williams.... Born 1951 in a small town of 8,000 near Buffalo, New York, and grew up with Peter Case. Gurf is now living in Austin, Texas. He didn't come from musical family like many other professional musicians, but he took interest in music in his childhood and started lessons on the bass when he was in elementary school. In the mid 60's, the Beatles came to the States and changed rock music forever. Later, many British bands invaded the States. This was called the British Invasion. It made million of teenagers crazy and effected Gurf, too. He grew up listening to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and a lot of other British bands. He also started to play guitar at around 13. And he started his professional career when he was only 16 years old at little night clubs and biker bars in the local area.

Gurf had played such places for many years. And he started to discover various music other than rock'n roll such as country, folk and blues music. Soon Buffalo's scene was not big enough for him. He couldn't find musicians to play with. And he asked Commander Cody what he should do and he said, "Austin or Boston." Gurf choose Austin and moved there in 1975. He started to play in Austin and Houston for years but later moved to Los Angeles and found a circle of friends who played country-based Americana music. He met a lot of great musicians like Buddy Miller, Jim Lauderdale, Duane Jarvis and Lucinda Williams. Gurf went and forth between Austin and Los Angeles, but settled down in Austin finally. In 1981, He started his recording career as a bass player on Eric Taylor's record called Shameless Love. Then in 1988, he produced and played on Lucinda Williams' that third record. Gurf had worked with her for a long time and his talent had become known but he decided to part ways with her in 1996. As a result, he has been in collaboration with a lot of musicians.

Gurf started his own studio called Rootball in Austin around the end of 1999. His first record was the first album made there, but Broke Down by Slaid Cleaves was the first one to be released. Gurf's surprised first record Toad of Titicaca came out in 2000. He then made his own records called Fishin' in the Muddy (2002) and Cut 'N' Shoot (2004). Gurf has mainly been working for a lot of musicians as a producer, engineer, mixer and instrument player in his studio. As a producer, he brings out the best in musicians. He always tries to stay everything is just simple. In fact, there aren't big systems in his studio. But he makes great records.

Sam Baker www.myspace.com/sambakermusic   or sambakermusic.com

Sam Baker’s is a hard-hewn grace, transcendentally wrought with grit, brutally chiaroscuroed by a weary deliverance sought in common lives. If the local songwriter's first album, 2004's Mercy, grasped for a deeper understanding of the dark tragedies beyond our control – a return to the Peruvian train rent by a bomb that nearly killed him in 1986 – then Pretty World (2007) was its reconciliation, a turn outward with grateful eyes renewed by contemplation. Persistent in Baker's vision is an empathetic evocation of treading life's stilled waters, beauty welled in the dirt of daily endurance. His characters, drawn with the insight of Townes Van Zandt and John Prine, toil unglamorously, overlooked save for Baker's rough, sing-talk psalms giving them fitting voice. Cotton likewise finds its muse on the outskirts: the Mexican immigrant of "Mennonite," the roadside pleads of "Signs," the girl, tired and worried yet calmly knowing, in "Not Another Mary." These tales labor under the heavily shouldered harness of history, Baker's Texas a parabolic culmination of inescapable genealogies, from the tent revivals of twin tracks "Palestine I" and "Palestine II" to the handcrafted inevitability of "Bridal Chest." His familiar intertwining of traditional fare roots the tales with inescapable inheritances, the album's opening strains of "Dixie" breaking upon the title track's grounded blues as female voices rise against Baker's hard drawl. Cotton's biggest shift is the fuller accompaniment that empowers Baker's ballads, especially Steve Conn's piano and the electric guitar growl of "Palestine I," but his poignancy emerges best in the soft lullaby of "Moon" and unshakable loss of "Angel Hair." Closing with the thematic counterpoint to the toil of "Cotton," "Snow" finally gestures toward a momentary redemption in patient penitence, a complete, if fleeting, renewal: "First light city streets are white pristine. They are waiting." - Doug Freeman