Live & Local: Daruma On Tour Spring and Summer 2025

This portion of the interview above has been edited for length and clarity:

Steve Chavis: So, let's talk about the Colorado leg first. The context for this conversation is that to be a collection of young people with good, strong musical ideas and a jazz foundation, and to take this music to the country and get out there over the spring and summer and actually live on your music props.

Shane Dähler: It's definitely not easy, but we're trying to make it happen. We work at it every single day and we work at our craft, our instruments, and the business admin side to get these dates scheduled. So yeah, we're going to be touring Colorado (and) New Mexico. We'll do Dazzle in Denver on April 17th - That's a Thursday night show at 7:00 p.m. And then the following weekend we're going to be in New Mexico, which we're really excited about. This will be the band's second time in New Mexico. We're going to be playing at a brand-new venue and club that was sort of spearheaded by a great musician there, John Trentacosta..

SC: Is that Albuquerque?

SD: That is Santa Fe. It's called Unit B, and it's kind of like a Dazzle vibe or if anything, the last location at Baurs. It's connected to a restaurant called Chocolate Maven, so it's like a fancy restaurant vibe, but then they have a whole jazz club with a stage and a grand piano. It's really nice! That's Saturday, April 19th. And then we drive up back towards Colorado and we play in Taos for a brunch on Sunday. That's at noon. And that's in partnership with the Taos Bebop Jazz Society. It's like a nonprofit out there, and they do the Taos Jazz Festival every year, and they have these Sunday brunches.

SC: Shout out to the nonprofits that keep the music alive. Before we just mentioned a couple of things in the Midwest and back east, one of the things you get, as improvisers , is you get to play the music, your music, a lot of different ways. You get to step in and do some creative things. They say jazz players never play it exactly the same twice.

SD: Yeah, that's true. That's one thing that we talk about all the time in rehearsals (is) like, how can we keep making this specific tune better, or when we bring in a new tune, it's like we'll play through it one way in rehearsal, and then that might be the only time we ever played it that way, because you're also always just going with a vibe in the energy of that moment, which is what's so great about this art form.

SC: Shane Dähler drummer with Daruma hitting the road, a spring tour in Colorado and New Mexico, and then in the summer, back east! You mentioned a spot in Arkansas, which is a cool place. You have to go through Arkansas to get there.

SD: Yeah, well, it's like we're all the way out in Denver, so that's such a difficult part of the routing. How can we get from Denver all the way out to the East Coast and still fill shows in markets that don't traditionally have things happening in them? It just takes a little bit of creativity and resourcefulness. We're playing in a town called Blytheville, Arkansas. It's like 12,000 population, and they've got this cool historic Ritz Theater. It's about a 400 seat theater, so we'll play there after playing in Wichita. So that's like the piece of the puzzle. First hit Kansas, then Arkansas. And then we're going to go to Atlanta..

SC: See, that's the way it used to be done - Piling them cars and the van and hit the road.