'It’s the vibe': A musical experience at the Cherry Pit
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By Fatima Rahman | Carbon Sound
It started, as all great musical ventures do, in someone’s basement. The Cherry Pit, one of the Twin Cities’ most promising musical experiments, aims to bottle up that energy and move it from venue to venue.
Each live show is lamplit, walls adorned with tapestries and curling vines. Performers urge audience members to take off their shoes, grab some blankets, maybe curl up on one of the venue’s provided couches. It’s a house party, transported, and it begs the question, what exactly is the Cherry Pit?
“The Cherry Pit initially was just the name of the space,” founder and creative director Leo Dreis said around a laugh over the phone. “We started out in my parents’ basement in Madison, which was this disgusting, unfinished place that I cleaned up. After decking it out with lights, carpets, tapestries … it literally felt like you were on the inside of a cherry.”
Born from a moment of pre-pandemic serendipity, a series of late 2019 jam sessions with friends evolved into far more, and Dreis recalled inviting an increasing number of friends to not just play, but watch.
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“Over the months, it grew into this community where people would come to share their original music, to improvise songs on the spot, to share short films they made. Even just to talk.”
After a brief COVID-induced interlude, Cherry Pit came back full force with a steady stream of Madison shows, hopping from venues like Cafe CODA to Bur Oak.
Last summer, Dreis, better known by stage name Marvelous, made the move to Minneapolis and the Cherry Pit followed: “My friend [and local musician] Ada Magdalena and I had a house party where we invited friends of friends, and just had another jam session. It felt exactly the same, but it was an entirely new group of people. The idea stayed alive on its own.”
Now, one could posit, the Cherry Pit is more of an umbrella term. In homage to its humble origins, one half of the night remains an open, improvised group jam, while the other is an entirely new, cohort-based creation.
“Each month we build a new band from scratch, then put on a show,” Cherry Pit manager Anna duSaire shared over a phone call. “It’s mainly artists who haven’t worked together before, sometimes people who typically wouldn’t work with a live band. It’s about bringing the community together and creating something original and new.”
This band, hand-selected by Dreis, is usually composed of friends of friends, or local artists stumbled upon at other shows. In no small feat, a slew of local talent, including Xina, Mike Kota, Henry Breen, and papa mbye, have taken part, with even more to come. A monthly live music series that defies set venue, performers, timing — who would’ve thought?
Sunday’s show
Live music is categorically difficult in the winter. The logistics of layering up while still conveying an aura of casual concertgoer, of how to best reach the venue in spite of the snow, of figuring out a graceful way to shed said layers inside — Minnesota is unforgiving. At a temperate -7℉, the walk to last Sunday’s Cherry Pit installment was shaping up to be no different, icy winds cutting at our cheeks and numbing our hands.
Housed in downtown St. Paul’s Minus 60 Studios, January’s live showcase proved a welcome respite from the fearsome outdoors. In fact, the turnout for a late Sunday gathering was almost shocking: Upwards of 100 people crowded in, all despite the cold.
Though over a dozen artists performed, the 20 song setlist felt lean and skewed intriguingly genre-agnostic, pivoting from downtempo R&B to theatrical, operatic pop. Shrouded in indigo mood lighting, performers swapped out seamlessly — RZ Shahid, Chakari, Essjay the Afrocentric Ratchet, Euphoria’s Room, Svanoe, on and on.
5th House, an electric guitar/bass duo, had met only a month prior at last month’s Cherry Pit, and performed a tight, punk-influenced batch of tunes.
“I gotta get out of here at a reasonable hour,” musician Sahn said before his set. “I have high school tomorrow. Yes, I’m 17.” A gasp arose from the crowd, then surprised laughter.
Loose vibes belie a meticulously crafted show. “[Since arriving at Minneapolis] I’ve been trying to meet as many musicians and artists as I possibly can. I wrote everybody down in a notebook and started drawing lines in between them like CSI Miami,” Dreis noted wryly in our interview.
“For example, I went to shows and saw like, oh my God, Xina has this incredible, angelic sound, who can I pair with that? Okay, my friend Ivan Cunningham is an avant garde saxophone player, and he composes all these really strange pieces. I think his strangeness will bring out something new in Xina, so I’m going to put these two together. I kind of go through this thought process every month.”
After these pairings comes a month-long intensive rehearsal process, artists forced into a quick camaraderie after sharing demos, brainstorming themes and visuals, and setting dates. All the while, “[the Cherry Pit board] is scouting venues,” space designer Inayah El-Amin said. “We’ll do tours, suss it out. Then we figure out how we want to set it up … we want to create a futuristic atmosphere, you know, this comfortable, new world that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the city. So there’s a lot of thrifting furniture and lighting, bought mostly with our own funding coming from our pockets.”
A collaborative social media effort takes place in tandem, with promotional material primarily championed by digital artist Skye MacCoon and photographer Derrick Gichaba.
“I think the reason [the Cherry Pit] has gained so much traction is because of the really pure intentions of the group,” community connection specialist and performer Hannah Svanoe confided over the phone. “It’s not ego-driven, it’s really love and support driven.”
El-Amin concurs: “It’s a non-dominating, all inclusive space. There’s mindfulness all around. Even with the jam sessions, it really breaks down the barrier between performer and audience.”
Gichaba speculated much of the rise is due to community building, saying, “You have new artists coming in all the time, and they bring their own fan bases. A lot of the spread is word of mouth, and so many people have approached me asking if I’m going to the next Cherry Pit. I have to remind them, I’m part of the team, y’all!”
So what’s next? With an upcoming March 4 show at the Green Room, the Cherry Pit team plans to put on just a handful more shows before taking a bit of a summer interlude.
“We want to have a couple summer sessions, potentially outdoor events with food vendors, more focused on a jam,” designer Skye MacCoon shared. “Then we regroup in the fall.”
Aside from event planning, the team will focus on fundraising, building community resources for other musicians, and potentially even a documentary.
“Honestly, it’s the vibe in Minneapolis,” Dreis enthused. “That contributed to the success of the Cherry Pit to a large extent. There’s a commitment to kindness here I’ve experienced nowhere else. I’ve met such talented, expressive individuals here. It makes me feel like we can take on anything.”
