Pandemic life: Lacey’s Winehouse plays for Central Washington students from Oly cafe

Octapas Café is open for takeout only, but Friday, it will once again serve as a music venue, hosting a concert by the Lacey-based indie-pop combo Winehouse.

It is — as you surely guessed — a virtual event, with the audience watching from home via Zoom. The free concert was organized by Central Washington University for its students, but when everything is happening remotely, it doesn’t matter that the band will be playing in Olympia, 148 miles from the school’s main campus in Ellensburg.

Winehouse’s jazz-inflected music won the band a spot at Olympia’s Music in the Park last summer, gigs at Benaroya Hall and the Triple Door in Seattle, and The Olympian’s Best of South Sound 2019 award for best local original band.

“Winehouse is amazing,” said Octapas co-owner Jamie Brayshaw. “I love their music. … They are definitely genre-bending, with a good dose of soul, rock and funk. They built a sizeable local following very quickly. I think, given a chance, their spark will travel far.”

The band got together in October 2018, released its first EP, “Hanover Drive” in February, selling out an album-release show at the Black Box in The Washington Center for the Performing Arts.

Though the half-dozen players are young — two of them too young to be served wine — Winehouse works hard to create a timeless sound, with a repertoire that includes such classics as “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You.”

“We’re all jazz improv musicians, and we try to bring in our ideas of mainstream and pop and those things,” lead guitarist and bandleader Chivan Kim told The Olympian. “Our music is cohesive. It’s easy listening, and it’s very diverse. In a lot of bands, just one or two people write the music. In Winehouse, everybody has input, and that brings in a lot of different flavors.”

Some of the more retro-feeling numbers call to mind the late Amy Winehouse, for whom the band was sort of named.

When the band got its first gigs, none of the members could come up with a name, Kim said. “When people auditioned, we used to have them play ‘Valerie,’ by Amy Winehouse, so it was like, ‘Why don’t we just call our band Winehouse temporarily?’

“We kept it … temporarily … for a while,” he said, laughing. “Months went by and it was like, ‘All right, I guess we are Winehouse then.”

The band got the university gig through singer Bailey Boeholt, who’s a student at the Pierce campus, currently taking classes online.

It’s Winehouse’s first major appearance since the pandemic struck, Kim said, though he, Boeholt and their fellow Winers — bassist Josh Hill, drummer D’André Mack, saxophonist Seth Reynolds and keyboard player Aiden Taylor — have done a few small livestreamed events.

“I can’t wait for live shows,” Kim said. Meanwhile, he’s excited to be doing this stream, which will be recorded by a film crew.

Brayshaw is happy to have Octapas’ performance space in use again, too.

“For the most part, it seems musicians are utilizing the nice weather and outdoor setting for livestreams,” she said. “But the seasons are changing, and we are still in this predicament. We want to continue to support local musicians as they adapt to the new way of doing live performances.”

Winehouse

• What: The Lacey-based band, which The Olympian’s readers voted South Sound’s best local original band in 2019, is livestreaming a free concert.
• When: 7 p.m. Friday, Sept. 11
• Where: Zoom
• More information: https://www.winehousetheband.com/

This story was originally published September 10, 2020 at 5:45 AM.