Jalopy Theatre and School of Music

The Jalopy Theatre and School of Music is a home for music and music-makers: a multi-faceted arts space celebrating traditional folk music through live performances and communal learning. We showcase folk, roots, bluegrass, country, blues and traditional world music at our live concerts and music festivals, and through our record label, Jalopy Records. We also offer classes and performing ensembles for youth, outreach in local schools, and group instruction and workshops for adults. We support folk artists by providing not only a stage for performance, but also employment: folk artists teach our classes, work in the Theatre as sound engineers and bartenders. We also offer learning opportunities to high school and college interns from across New York City who are interested in traditional arts and the music business. Husband and wife team Geoff and Lynette Wiley founded Jalopy in Red Hook, Brooklyn, in 2006 with the hope of fostering a community around a shared appreciation of traditional roots music. Jalopy Theatre seeks both to support local and traveling artists, and to educate students and audiences new to this music and culture. Jalopy Theatre recently joined forces with Living Traditions, a nonprofit organization, founded in 1994, dedicated to preserving, promoting and perpetuating traditional folk music. For thirty years, Living Traditions produced the wildly successful KlezKamp, a beloved annual Yiddish folk arts gathering in the Catskills. Living Traditions’ own programming ended in 2014, and we are proud to be taking up their mission as our own. Through this relationship, Jalopy Theatre is now able to operate as a nonprofit organization, which offers us new opportunities to connect with our community, strengthen our organization, and continue to evolve as we begin our second decade. The stage has welcomed scores of notable performers, including Alice Gerrard, Robert Crumb, Spider John Koerner, Wayne Henderson, Happy Traum, Wayne Hancock and Sam Shepard. Some of the greats from the last folk revival, like John Cohen and Baby Gramps, play alongside up-and-coming artists like Alynda Lee, Jerron Paxton, Gill Landry and Dom Flemons, who make up the flourishing young folk scene we have helped foster in New York City. At Jalopy Theatre we prize the handmade, the analog, the authentic, the face-to-face experience. We offer music experiences that are grass roots, non-corporate, and participatory. We provide opportunities for musical traditions to be transmitted across generations, in a communal learning environment that supports joy in music making for people of all ages and abilities. We seek to be a home for the artists, audiences, and students who form and contribute to our community. We invite you to come on down to the Jalopy Theatre for a concert, to take a class, to make friends, and to share with us your love for traditional roots music.