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State House music venue draws from diversity to better reflect New Haven

  • Carlos Wells, pictured, and his co-owner Slate Ballard opened the...

    Melanie Stengel / Special to the Courant

    Carlos Wells, pictured, and his co-owner Slate Ballard opened the 250-seat performance music venue in n the former Horowitz Brothers warehouse at 310 State St.

  • DJ Reach, aka David Shipiro, provides pre-band music at the...

    Melanie Stengel / Special to the Courant

    DJ Reach, aka David Shipiro, provides pre-band music at the State House. The Vinyl happy hour on Wednesdays runs from 4:30 to 7 p.m.

  • Concerts at The State House are consistent for Friday and...

    Melanie Stengel / Special to the Courant

    Concerts at The State House are consistent for Friday and Saturday nights and are booked on weeknights as needed. Playing on a recent Friday night was multi-instrumentalist Nathan Bowles.

  • A recent Friday-night lineup at The State House included the...

    Melanie Stengel / Special to the Courant

    A recent Friday-night lineup at The State House included the Weeping Bong Band, from left, Wednesday Knudson, Clark Griffin, Anthony Pasquarosa, and PG Six.

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New Haven, a city known for multiple decades as a bastion of live music and a breeding ground for talented local musicians, has a new venue on the scene. But The State House isn’t your usual rock club. While you’ll find indie and alt rock shows, for example, dotting its robust calendar, the name of the game is diversity for co-owners Carlos Wells and Slate Ballard.

“I feel that there’s already a good amount of rock clubs that will do things like indie rock or blues rock, but this is a very diverse town, and I felt that a lot of the programming wasn’t really catering to the diversity of the town,” says Wells.

“It was definitely our plan from the outset. We wanted to present something new and get new audiences together. After years of doing punk shows, if I book a punk show, say on a Tuesday, I know who I’m going to see. This set up has given us the ability to see all new faces at shows as often as possible.”

New Haven is a fairly diverse city with more than 35 percent of its population identifying as African American, and more the 27 percent as Latinx in the most recent census. Those numbers aren’t always reflected in the musical choices of talent buyers at the various venues that dot the downtown landscape. This isn’t a problem endemic of just New Haven though, and as more cities across the country try to diversify their downtown business cores, The State House has stepped up as an example of how to potentially fill an entertainment void in Connecticut’s second-largest city.

“We’re trying to work with different genres and step outside our comfort zones,” says Wells. “I’ve always booked sort of psychedelic or punk shows. Now we’re working with bands from places like Mali and Zimbabwe. There are salsa bands playing with Afrobeat bands, there’s spoken word, EDM from South Africa. It’s been a lot of fun and very interesting so far.”

Opening any type of brick and mortar establishment in an age of online dominance and overall economic despair seems counter intuitive. Opening a new music venue in a small city that already boasts a ton of them seems even more counter intuitive, especially to those who may not understand the ecosystem of entertainment districts. But there was never any doubt that this is what Wells and Ballard wanted to do or where they wanted to do it.

Carlos Wells, pictured, and his co-owner Slate Ballard opened the 250-seat performance music venue in n the former Horowitz Brothers warehouse at 310 State St.
Carlos Wells, pictured, and his co-owner Slate Ballard opened the 250-seat performance music venue in n the former Horowitz Brothers warehouse at 310 State St.

Originally conceived more than four years ago, Wells (who was working around the corner at Firehouse 12 at the time) and Ballard were originally offered the space at 310 State St. and poured themselves into it for months. Unfortunately, this first incarnation would never see the light of day. A change in property ownership would obliterate the original concept. However, after multiple years of inactivity on the property a conversation between Ballard and the new property owners would ignite a second go-round. This time it would stick.

For Wells it was a homecoming of sorts after having spent the last couple decades booking shows and running a record label almost exclusively out of New Haven. He finally had a venue of his own to call home. When asked if he ever considered taking his ideas somewhere else, he was quick to answer.

DJ Reach, aka David Shipiro, provides pre-band music at the State House. The Vinyl happy hour on Wednesdays  runs from 4:30 to 7 p.m.
DJ Reach, aka David Shipiro, provides pre-band music at the State House. The Vinyl happy hour on Wednesdays runs from 4:30 to 7 p.m.

“New Haven has been where I’ve been hanging my hat for over 20 years,” he says. “I grew an appreciation for a lot of different cultures and scenes here. It just made sense.”

Early reviews of The State House have been overwhelmingly positive. Its high ceilings and modular stage make it a fit for just about every type of entertainment imaginable, including movie screenings, lecture series, dance nights, and a popular Vinyl Happy Hour series that is running on Wednesdays at least through November (no cover). Wells and Ballard even had the foresight to design the room to make it accessible to all-ages shows, with a bar nestled across the room from the bathrooms and easily separated from the rest of the space by a partitioned wall. Concerts are consistent for Friday and Saturday nights and are booked on weeknights as needed. Show tickets run between $8 and $20.

With a well-designed room, a full bar featuring local craft beer, local wine, and sake cocktails (but no food), and a laundry list of musical genres and entertainment already scheduled (some of the beers are Counter Weight, New England Cider Company, Relic, New England Brewing and Two Roads), The State House is also poised to be a destination for entertainment seekers from across the state. The significance of a new rail line connecting Hartford, New Haven, and several towns in between is not lost on Wells.

“We’re actually big fans of Real Art Ways in Hartford and how they do things and we’re trying to figure out how to bridge the audiences,” says Wells. “Now that we have a train that goes from Hartford to literally across the street from the venue there’s no reason we can’t blow this out and get more people here.”

A recent Friday-night lineup at The State House included the Weeping Bong Band, from left, Wednesday Knudson, Clark Griffin, Anthony Pasquarosa, and PG Six.
A recent Friday-night lineup at The State House included the Weeping Bong Band, from left, Wednesday Knudson, Clark Griffin, Anthony Pasquarosa, and PG Six.

The State House calendar is a virtual who’s who of local, regional, and national talent. Upcoming shows include reggae star Kabaka Pyramid & The Bebble Rockers (Nov. 20), a soup kitchen benefit on the night before Thanksgiving featuring the Hulls, Bilge Rat, & Sperm Donor (Nov. 21), gypsy rock legends Bella’s Bartok (Nov. 23), the record release show for long-running New Haven act Ports of Spain (Dec. 14), and the farewell show of Jose Oyola-Velez’s New Haven-based production company, Taco Hut Presents (Dec. 15). The entire lineup can be found on both The State House website, as well as The State House Facebook page.

The State House is at 310 State St., just southwest of the corner of State and Chapel toward Union Station. statehousepresents.com