Scene SC

In this week’s installment of the I Love My Friends sessions, holy pine — Daniel Machado, Marshall Brown, and Michael Crawford — perform “Pain and Joy.”

“I’m not cool enough for this,” Machado remembers thinking when he brought his violin to Aaron Graves’ house in 2015 to record on “How to Cook Everything” with Graves and Chris Gardner.

“A few months later I was tuning up in an appropriately cramped F.R.O.G. [finished room over garage] with Jessica, Aaron, Chris, Pat and Amy, feeling very, very welcome,” Machado says. “The My Bones Are Singing album release at NBT was a life-affirming blast, and the Columbia music community is wonderfully full of similar stories of being lifted up by The Whales and Fork and Spoon crew.”

That feeling of being welcomed into the room runs through Machado’s reflection on Aaron, Those Lavender Whales, and the community that continues to gather around the I Love My Friends sessions.

“When Aaron’s brain tumor returned and we lost him in 2019, his bandmates assembled that community to honor his memory and the music he invited us to make with him on the very same NBT stage,” Machado says. “Even in loss and grief Aaron’s people gave a gift.”

For Machado, “Pain and Joy” is “a song about a place where a person experiences their final goodbyes and first meetings with the most important people in their lives.”

“Hunter-Gatherer became a similar kind of place in Columbia,” Machado says. “True to their nature, the Fork and Spoon folks have turned this loss into another permanent community event.”

Mark Rapp, a leader in the Midlands jazz community, says it best in the intro to this week’s session, reflecting on the legacy of Skipp Pearson, South Carolina’s Ambassador of Jazz and a longtime fixture at Hunter-Gatherer’s weekly jazz sessions.

Joined by Amos Hoffman, Ben Eidson, Sam Edwards, and Brendan Bull, Rapp performs “There Is No Greater Love” in Pearson’s honor. The song was one of Skipp’s favorites, making the session both a tribute to Pearson and a nod to the musical history that filled the former Hunter-Gatherer building.

Ross Swinson’s memories of Hunter-Gatherer go back to the Columbia he came up in as a teenager and to his earliest days playing music.

It was where he played the first album release show for his first band, and where he saw shows that stretched “from instrumental metal to jazz.”

“Before the big brewery boom of the 2010s I always felt like it was cool that there was a spot in Columbia that had been brewing beer for the love of the game for decades at that point,” Swinson says. “It felt like a staple in the community.”

Swinson says he’s glad Hunter-Gatherer still has its Hangar location, even if the South Main Street space is now part of memory. “I’m happy that they still have the hangar but sad I’ll never set foot back in the south Main location,” he says.

His connection to Aaron Graves, Those Lavender Whales, and Fork and Spoon Records runs through that same sense of community. As a teenager in Columbia in the 2000s, Swinson says that circle meant a lot to him and the community around those people and bands was something he hopes continues in Columbia and the surrounding areas.

For this session, Swinson performed “Learning to Fall” by Flower Shopping, from the 2024 EP Going Anywhere. He chose it because it shares themes he absorbed from that community, including growing and taking care of each other.

Catch Flower Shopping live at Art Bar on Saturday, May 23 at 9 p.m. with MIDS, Burrito Wolf, and MIDIMarcum.

“The first time I went to the Hunter Gatherer was on a Sunday, and it was technically closed,” Jessica Oliver writes.

She had only been in Columbia a few months when she and her friend Adam Cullum rode past the brewery on their bikes and noticed something happening inside. They parked, stuck their heads in, and found a party.

“The room was full of this buzzing energy,” Oliver writes. “People were yelling, music was playing, and there was a hotdog eating contest going on.”

That accidental visit became one of those memories that gained traction over time because so many connections came from it. It was the day Oliver first saw Henry Thomas, who worked at Hunter-Gatherer and would eventually join People Person, along with “lots of other faces who would over time become dear and familiar to me, and who make of the fabric of the community I now happily call my home.”

A year or so later, Can’t Kids played Hunter-Gatherer with Neapolitan Children, the band of Oliver’s now-husband, Joe Chang. More nights followed on that block, along with many more memories.

“I locked my keys inside my car on numerous occasions and sat inside talking to Marty and Erica and the other staff while waiting on the locksmith,” she writes.

Around that same time, Cullum introduced her to Aaron Graves and the wider Fork and Spoon family through the potlucks that became central to so many friendships and memories.

“Aaron and the Whales crew taught many of us about community,” Oliver writes. “We bonded over music, food, and shared joy.”

For her I Love My Friends session, Oliver chose “Looking American” by The Choir Quit, written by one of her favorite Columbia musicians, William Starr Busbee.

“I’ve loved ‘Looking American’ and every version of it since I first heard it,” she writes. “It’s smart, a little despondent, comically grandiose, and a total bop.”

Brett Nash — Dalmatian Rock

Cubs- Ballad of the Straight Chump

Josh Dunn — Don't Look Away

Homemade Haircuts — Great Lakes