Who: Courteous Monk, w/ The GC Jazz Trio
Where: The Velo Fellow, 1 Augusta St. #126, Greenville
When: Saturday, March 30 at 10 p.m.
Tickets: Free

If you’ve seen the Spartanburg band Courteous Monk live before, their upcoming show at The Velo Fellow might come as a surprise. In their original incarnation, the trio of singer/guitarist Bristan Norton, bassist Ryan Ferguson and drummer Caleb Rogers were essentially an indie-rock trio with a touch of jazz improv in the mix. Right now, the band is, to say the least, in a period of transition. “There have been some changes, for sure,” Norton says. “The sound originally was alternative rock with a bit of melodic jazz but going forward I’m thinking more of an electronic sound. So right now it’s just me kind of doing the show like a mix of an electronic dance music and live instruments.” That might sound jarring but it’s something Norton has had in mind for a while. “I’ve been making beats the whole time I’ve been doing music,” he says. “I still love that indie rock sound, but I’m just kind of burned out on it. I’m attracted to synthesizers and the electronic drum beats, and I’ve wanted to go in this direction for a while, so I just recently decided to do it.”

Who: Polymath, w/ The Wormholes and Either/Or
Where: Radio Room, 110 Poinsett Hwy., Greenville
When: Thursday, April 4 at 8 p.m.
Tickets: $7

Very few bands get to script their breakup, but that’s what Greenville’s Polymath has done, scheduling their final shows and final EP release after four years. It’s a shame, though, not just because the Upstate is losing a great band that makes lush, evocative synth-rock, bursting with inventive arrangements and layers of shimmering electronics, but because Polymath is far more than the musicians; it’s a collective of players, photographers, videographers and artists that could create their product from start to finish. “We’ve been getting tied up in some other musical projects,” says bassist Joe Montore. “There are some guys who are finishing up school, where (guitarist) Tanner Corley and I graduated two or three years ago. We’re all in different stages of life, so we sat down a few months back and asked ourselves what it would look like to hang this up intentionally. We actually used the word ‘death.’ What does it look like to let Polymath die and let everyone know and be in on it instead of it being a surprise? Rather than do a show that we don’t know is our last one, why not make it a final party and make it a big deal?”

Who: Kenton Bryant
Where: Blind Horse Saloon, 1035 Lowndes Hill Rd., Greenville
When: Friday, March 29 at 8 p.m.
Tickets: $8

The only reason we’re hearing the music of Glasgow, KY’s Kenton Bryant now is that, back in 2010, he made the decision to move to Nashville and pursue his dream of country music stardom. He’d managed to land a meeting with an executive from BMI, one of the music business’ major song-publishing houses, and the exec told him that was only one place to go. “He said I had to move to Nashville,” Bryant says, “so I just packed everything up and moved and started working.” That strategy doesn’t always work out, but as a skilled singer, songwriter and guitarist with a knack for penning pop-country crossover-ready tunes, Bryant has been able to attract industry attention, signing with the Big Machine record label and releasing a self-titled EP in 2018 and a new single, “Following My Broken Heart,” last month. “I’ve been very lucky and had a couple of really good breaks and met some people along the way that that believe in me,” he says. “And it’s been a great ride so far. I believe in the songs we’re writing and the things we’re doing.”

A few years back, Upstate guitarist and performer John Durham was hanging around backstage at a benefit show, and while thinking about the number of area musicians who were also playing the show, he had a thought: What if bands could trade members like they were sports teams?

Durham ultimately settled on a way to mix and match Greenville’s musicians with a show called “Build-A-Band,” the first edition of which debuted on April Fools’ Day at Independent Public Ale House on Poinsett Highway, back before it became the Radio Room.

Here’s how it worked for the first four editions of the show: A few weeks beforehand, Durham randomly drew from a pool of over 30 Upstate singers, guitar players, keyboardists, drummers, and horn players to create six bands, all tasked with learning and performing five cover songs. The basic format was drums, bass, one or two guitars, and one or two singers, with room to expand or contract based on how big the pool of musicians was.

The idea was an expansion of Durham’s Local Green concept, which was a collective of Upstate musicians banding together to create greater opportunities for themselves, but the Build-A-Band shows were really about a large ensemble of local musicians playing their favorite songs in a multiband, festival-type atmosphere.

For the upcoming Build-A-Band 5.0 performance at Gottrocks on Sunday, however, Durham has changed things up a bit. He wanted to bring in some new faces and also make sure as few of the musicians had previously worked with each other as possible, meaning that this time, the band lineups weren’t quite as random.

“In previous years I drew the bands from a hat,” Durham says. “But when done purely by chance, you often end up drawing groups that already semi-exist. So for this one I constructed bands by trying to separate people who already frequently play together and creating combinations that I think will yield great results.”

Regardless of the process, the Build-A-Band rehearsals and shows have been exciting both for the veterans and newcomers.

The Veterans

“Build-A-Band took this already welcoming and insanely talented group of local musicians and made damn sure if you didn’t know each other before, you certainly will after,” says singer/guitarist Matt Fassas, who will be part of a seven-piece band at the show. “Build-A-Band was, to me, the birth of a new era in our music scene. It’s a show available to the public, but make no mistake, we do this show for us.”

“I feel like the whole process allows for another avenue of creativity,” says April Bennett, singer, songwriter, and guitarist for the Asheville, North Carolina, band April B. & The Cool, who has also been part of multiple Build-A-Band shows. “In all of these bands, we’re starting back at square one; nobody has any seniority over anybody else.”

“What I like most about Build-A-Band is that I get to work with so many different musicians that are involved in so many different types of genres of music,” says drummer Josh Forte, also of April B. & The Cool. “And it’s really cool to get a chance to play some covers that you always grew up listening to.”

The Newcomers

For drummer Gavin Glover, who will play Build-A-Band for the first time, the rehearsals have been an interesting exercise in combining different musical styles.

“It’s six different musicians with six different backgrounds,” he says, “so the way the song sounds onstage is going to be different from the recordings, and I really like that. It’s exciting in the respect that I’m experiencing all of these styles and genres.”

And Joe Tamburro of the Trapfire Brothers echoes Bennett’s comments about the new-band jitters that musicians might miss a bit in their full-time projects.

“I think we all get comfortable or set in our ways if it’s a group we play with regularly,” he says. “You lose that sort of giddy feeling you have in the early days, when you don’t know what kind of music is going to come out, or what’s going to happen. It’s exciting; you get that sort of kid-on-Christmas-Eve kind of feeling.”

What: Build-A-Band 5.0
When: 7 p.m. Sunday, March 31
Where: Gottrocks, 200 Eisenhower Drive, Greenville
Info: 864-235-5519, www.gottrocksgreenville.com

Before I get into the hows and whys of the “Singles Going Steady” podcast and the way it came into existence, I want to just bathe in the sheer music-geek awesomeness of it for a moment. If you’re a fan of late 1970s-early 1980s punk, post-punk, and New Wave music, it’s like mainlining pure sugar. And if you’re also a fan of the single — the old-school 45 rpm vinyl single — I’m essentially telling you the location of El Dorado in this column.

“Singles Going Steady,” which is available on iTunes and Spotify, is hosted by bandmates and all-around music geeks Steve McGowan (from Greenville) and Adrienne Meddock (from Durham, North Carolina). Back in the ’80s they created their own punk-ish band called The Beef People.

So far, they’ve devoted episodes to singles by the Go-Gos  (“Our Lips Are Sealed”), Joy Division (“Transmission”), XTC (“Senses Working Overtime”), R.E.M. (“Radio Free Europe”), The Replacements (“I Will Dare”), and many more, playing the songs and diving deep into what makes them great. It’s both a salute to the music they love and to the format that truly launched rock ‘n’ roll before it became “art” in the late 1960s, which made the full-length album the preferred method of expression.

Punk rock revived the idea that the three-minute single could deliver just as much power as an album, and McGowan and Meddock celebrate that late ‘70s-early ‘80s renaissance.

“Pete Shelley [of the seminal British punk band the Buzzcocks] had this idea that punk was music of action, not entertainment,” McGowan says. “And the single is the perfect way to put that across. An album is a great thing to listen to, but one really well-put-together song, in a good package with a great sleeve, can really get the idea across. It can be a perfect work of art. And when you think about punk and post-punk rock, it’s about the singles.”

McGowan is quick to point out that, while he and Meddock talk a bit about the respective songs and bands’ histories, their podcast “isn’t Wikipedia.”

“We love singles and we think singles are kind of a magical art form,” he says. “And this allows us to talk about songs and singles that we really liked. Usually they had some kind of influence on us.”

It’s personal, in other words, as it should be for a couple of friends who took the inspiration that many of these songs passed along and created not just a band, but an early-‘80s musical community in the Upstate.

“I formed The Beef People with Adrienne right out of college,” McGowan says. “It was DIY band in that we didn’t really know how to play, so we taught ourselves. While we were doing the band, we started booking other bands at Studio B, and we ended up booking hundreds of bands from The Flaming Lips to Naked Raygun to The Neighborhoods, and a lot of local bands, too, like The Blow Up and Popular Mechanics. There was a scene; there was a music scene in Greenville.”

In fact, it’s in the hopes of reviving part of that particular scene that McGowan and Meddock created “Singles Going Steady.” After their band broke up and they lost touch in the late ‘80s, the two of them have reconnected and regrouped as The Beef People, and they’ve begun preparing the 30 or so songs they wrote and recorded back in the day for their first-ever release, on vinyl no less. But they didn’t want to just drop an album out there.

“When we decided to reactivate all of this, we wanted to build a sense of community,” McGowan says. “So we started doing this podcast. The podcast is like you sitting in the living room talking to us about this music. We’re not trying to get you to buy anything; we’re talking about the music and explaining what it meant to us.”

GLOW Lyric Theatre has built its considerable reputation on producing classic music theater with contemporary resonance.

This year, GLOW’s 2019 festival season spotlights women in a male-dominated world struggling through doubts and vulnerabilities but living life on their own terms and refusing to bow to society’s expectations.

The three shows, running July 26-Aug. 4 at the Warehouse Theatre, are characteristically eclectic: Bizet’s “Carmen,” Lerner and Loewe’s “My Fair Lady” and Carol Hall’s “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.”

The shows feature “brave, strong women navigating their worlds

in an authentic and risk-taking way,” said Jenna Tamisiea, GLOW’s artistic director.

“In many ways, they’re not well-behaved women,” she added. “They don’t subscribe to what society thinks they should be. But they’re women with dreams and aspirations.”

Some may balk at the idea of serious intent in “Best Little Whorehouse,” but look closer, Tamisiea said, and you’ll find a raucous musical about a female entrepreneur (brothel-owner Mona Stangley) who is public-spirited and clear-eyed about how to succeed in a man’s world.

“The show reveals the hypocrisy of the South when it comes to politics and religion, but it does so in a charming, hilarious way,” Tamisiea said.

Tamisiea, who is also director of the Opera Theatre at Converse College, will stage GLOW’s three shows while her husband, GLOW’s executive director Christian Elser, will handle music direction.

‘Loverly’ dreams

The classic “My Fair Lady” centers on the Cockney working-class girl Eliza whose life is transformed through a chance meeting with the pompous phonetics professor Henry Higgins.

What’s sometimes overlooked, Tamisiea said, is how much Eliza wants to better herself, Tamisiea said.

Consider her first song, “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly,” where Eliza expresses dreams “above and beyond where she is now,” Tamisiea said.

“She knows what she wants and pursues it,” she said. “She even tries to pay Higgins at one point. I think it’s shortsighted to see her merely as a character who is acted upon.”

The show features other classic songs such as “I Could Have Danced All Night” and “On the Street Where You Live.”

The title character of “Carmen,” meanwhile, is one of opera’s great femme fatales, a woman with agency. The opera’s vibrant score has made it one of the most-often produced works in the world’s opera houses.

“Carmen” will be performed in French with projected English translations.

Both “Carmen” and “My Fair Lady” require fairly large choruses. Elser expects to have 35-40 voices bountifully filling the relatively intimate Warehouse Theatre space.

Spotlighting women

GLOW’s 10^th anniversary seemed a perfect season for celebrating women, Tamisiea said.

“It’s been my dream to be able to have a season that is women-centric,” she said. “I’ve wanted to feature shows that not only have female roles but ones that were very complex and robust. I was inspired to pursue this because I am a woman who deals with these issues. As a female director, I work in a male-dominated field.”

Another inspiration for GLOW’s summer season is the national #MeToo movement against sexual assault and harassment.

“I’m not sure you can find any woman in our country who hasn’t been in some way affected by the #MeToo movement,” Tamisiea said. “Certainly that is something that has been in the back of my mind. If I see an important issue, I’m going to address it with what I love to do – opera and musical theater.”

Paul Hyde, a longtime Upstate journalist, writes about the arts for the Greenville Journal. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter: @PaulHyde7.

If you go

• What: GLOW Lyric Theatre’s 2019 Festival Season, July 18-Aug. 3
• When: “Carmen” (July 26, 28, 31, Aug. 3); “My Fair Lady” (July 20, 21, 25, 27, 28, 30, Aug. 2); “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” (July 18, 19, 20, 24, 27, Aug. 1, 3, 4)
• Where: Warehouse Theatre, 37 Augusta St.
• Tickets: $38-$48
• Info: 864-558-4569