A husband and wife walk into a grocery store and head to the bar, where a musician is loudly infiltrating the place as he performs a spot-on acoustic-guitar version of Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive.”
This isn’t the preface of some warped joke, dear readers. The scenario actually happened on an early March evening when Mike Ingram rocked the second-level area of Harvest Market, also known as Music in the Mezz, and yours truly caught the last thirty minutes or so of the performance with Jill, my wife.
I’ve read about Ingram numerous times over the years thanks to his many musical exploits in Champaign-Urbana and because he’s an active community member in other realms. But I’d never seen the guy perform, and I liked his sound and vibe right away.
Ingram enjoys bantering with the crowd, and his musical tastes match my own. He demonstrated that free speech is still alive and kicking in the U.S. when he informed the fuller-than-usual Mezz crowd that he attended a Richard Marx show in Chicago the previous night. I like Richard Marx also, but I didn’t know you could still publicly admit that.
Kidding aside, Marx is a gifted songwriter who has had a number-one single in each of the last four decades, tunes from both himself and ones he’s written for other diverse, well-known artists. Ingram said Marx has chopped off the mullet and looks and sounds great at 60 years old.
With his closely cropped hair, dark T-shirt and pants, and, most impressively, flashy golden high-top shoes, Ingram also looked the part of the cool rocker on stage. He told the audience that he teaches at the Illinois Summer Youth Music (ISYM) camp, offered by the School of Music at the University of Illinois. Ingram does this with his New Souls bandmate Brandon T. Washington.
As an extension of his work with ISYM, Ingram was asked to assist with an after-school program at Academy High in Champaign, an effort that extends the work of ISYM over the course of a semester. He told the audience it was surprising that the students want to learn and play songs he listened to in high school from bands such as Weezer and Nirvana, but he also knows it’s the natural cycle of music and life. After all, Ingram said, he was listening to the music his parents liked when he attended high school.
Ingram had a poignant take on today’s young people, who oftentimes “catch a really bad rap” from overseeing adults and parents who forget how they acted when they were younger. What makes music education so enjoyable for Ingram is the commonality and purpose in learning songs together.
“It’s just a really small microcosm of, like, if we all had a thing in common that we can work on, the world might be a little bit better,” Ingram told the crowd. “Basically, every day, I get to hang out with a bunch of kids who remind me that things aren’t quite as terrible as they sometimes seem.”
After playing “Californication” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Ingram closed his set by looping in drums, bass, and guitar on his nifty Boss RC-30 Loop Station, a process I’d never seen before and was kind of enthralled by. The result was a rootsy, sprightly version of David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance,” which I felt bested the legendary singer’s song from 1983.
After seeing Ingram live, I hope to someday catch New Souls, a trio that also includes Cii La’Cole Stewart.