New JAMBALOO fest celebrates North Texas music. Here are 5 acts to check out.

A musician playing keyboard and keytar on stage
We Them Grays’ Kwinton Gray on stage for the annual Disney show. Photo: Jessica Waffles

It’s nearly time for JAMBALOO, a free, week-long event set to begin this weekend and unfold across multiple North Texas cities.

Billed by its co-creators — long-time North Texas booking agency Spune Productions and the law firm Mullen & Mullen — as “a community-driven initiative designed to uplift the local music scene during challenging times,” JAMBALOO will blend discussion around industry trends, challenges and strategies and celebration of live music with a series of concerts at four different venues (Club Dada, Tulips, Andy’s Bar and Ferris Wheelers).

“One thing I know is smaller venues nationwide, are having some issues,” Joseph Morrison of Mullen & Mullen told KXT last year. “Shane [Mullen] and I — we battled big, giant insurance companies for a living, and so we’ve always been fans of the little guy, and some of these smaller venues spoke to us. Frankly, they’re just places that either need support or deserve support.”

Although JAMBALOO is in its infancy, Morrison and Corey Pond, Spune’s general manager, another co-founder of the event, are not skimping on ambition, with designs on making the week-long happening “one of the premiere, if not the premiere, free music week in the country,” as Pond put it.

“The easiest way I could explain it is, if in year two or three, we have a significant number of people [attend] who are not from DFW, who are coming here because it sounds awesome to them, then that’s a win,” Pond told KXT last year. “That’s what we want. We want it to be a national-level event.”

Here are five acts to consider catching — out of the more than 100 scheduled — across JAMBALOO’s inaugural week. You can find a complete listing of showcases and participating venues at jambaloo.live.

Gracen Wynn (Feb. 2 at Club Dada)

Singer-songwriter Gracen Wynn is fast rising to the front ranks of local musicians, on the strength of arresting singles like “Stop the Car.” Of her latest track, my KXT colleague Jessica Waffles wrote: “Gracen continues to connect with her audience through her vulnerability and transparency in her songwriting, as well as her powerful, yet calming voice.”

We Them Grays (Feb. 4 at Club Dada)

The trio known as We Them Grays — Kierra, KJ and Kwinton Gray — might be the best-kept secret in North Texas music. A true family band which embraces unique showcases like Disney-themed nights, its musical skills are bolstered by Kwinton’s background in jazz, funk and soul, found in abundance on his 2018 full-length debut, Leap of Faith.

MJ Lenderman (Feb. 7 at Tulips)

One of the breakout stars of 2024, North Carolina singer-songwriter MJ Lenderman turned plenty of heads with his fourth studio album Manning Fireworks. While the vivid, incisive lyrics grabbed attention, so did Lenderman’s facility with the guitar, marking him as a 21st century guitar hero — and one who’s already booked a return trip to North Texas later this year, at Tannahill’s Tavern & Music Hall.

semiwestern (Feb. 7 at Andy’s Bar)

Dallas-based multi-instrumentalist Ty Bohrnstedt, Daniel Gonzalez  Jeff Morisano, Chris Semmelbeck, Tom Little and Preston Smith together comprise semiwestern, a project described in press materials as possessing “a charmingly unpolished and emotive sound that is heavily informed by DIY ethos.” The band members, apart from Bohrnstedt, are scattered across the country, so consider this a rare opportunity to see the fascinating group in one place in the flesh.

Quaker City Night Hawks (Feb. 8 at Ferris Wheelers)

It’s easy to take such reliably phenomenal performers like Quaker City Night Hawks for granted. Indeed, when the band retrenched a bit in 2024, and scaled back its live appearances, its absence was glaring. The quartet is happily back in the spotlight now, and according to the band’s Sam Anderson, in a more sustainable way. “As we roll everything back out, we’re trying to set it up — we’ve always wanted to be a little more conducive to how we want to present ourselves, rather than certain packaged ideas and stuff that we honestly never really seem to kind of squeeze into that well,” he told KXT last year.

JAMBALOO, multiple venues, Dallas, Denton and Fort Worth. Feb. 2-8. Admission is free, but attendees must RSVP for their preferred shows.

Preston Jones is a North Texas freelance writer and regular contributor to KXT. Email him at [email protected] or find him on X (@prestonjones). Our work is made possible by our generous, music-loving members. If you like how we lift up local music, consider becoming a KXT sustaining member right here.