Denver Comes Alive will return to the Mile High City for a two-day music marathon at Cervantes’ Masterpiece Ballroom and Cervantes’ Other Side on Friday, January 17th and Saturday, January 18th. Presented by Live For Live Music, the 2025 edition of the unique event will feature two stages for the first time, with fans invited to move between the venue’s two rooms at will throughout the weekend to witness performances featuring more than 30 well-known musicians including members of The Meters, The String Cheese Incident, Dumpstaphunk, Soulive, Wilco, Lettuce, Galactic, The New Mastersounds, Circles Around The Sun, Big Gigantic, The Motet, and many more [get tickets].
Both Denver Comes Alive and its East Coast predecessor, Brooklyn Comes Alive, were inspired by the fleeting magic of New Orleans Jazz Fest by dark, when the main festival Fair Grounds go dark but music fills rooms around the city, allowing revelers and musicians alike to drift between venues to take part in unusual and memorable live moments. As such, the Denver Comes Alive lineup is not your average list of bands: While the individual artist names on the bill may be familiar to many fans, the mix-and-match bands with which they’re due to perform are predominantly rare and unusual.
Related: Denver Comes Alive Announces Artist Lineup & New Two-Stage Format For 2025 Event
With that in mind, as Denver Comes Alive 2025 approaches, Live For Live Music will be putting a spotlight on each band lineup set to perform at the two-day event on January 17th and 18th. First up: Skerik, Stanton Moore, Wil Blades, Nels Cline.
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This fearsome experimental quartet perfectly embodies the flow of creativity at the core of Denver Comes Alive. Skerik (Les Claypool), veteran drummer Stanton Moore (Galactic), lauded organist Wil Blades, and extraterrestrial guitarist Nels Cline (Wilco) first played as a unit in New Orleans during Jazz Fest as part of Live For Live Music’s 2024 Fest by Nite series. That show was billed as a special New Orleans edition of L4LM’s Denver-born The Funk Sessions, but the music these four masters made on that fateful night in the Big Easy wasn’t exactly “funk”—laced with avant-garde compositions by Cline, Skerik, Blades, Tony Williams, Dr. Lonnie Smith, and more in addition to mind-bending improvisation, this set was something else entirely, something otherworldly, something we knew we had to share with our friends in Colorado. For their second-ever live performance as a quartet on Friday, January 17th at Denver Comes Alive, they’ll drop the Funk Sessions pretense and venture further into the unknown with a performance you won’t want to miss.
Get excited for Skerik, Stanton Moore, Wil Blades, and Nels Cline at Denver Comes Alive by revisiting our recap of the quartet’s debut at NOLA’s Toulouse Theatre during Jazz Fest 2024 here or watching a full video of the performance below.
Grab your tickets to Denver Comes Alive on January 17th and 18th, 2025 at Cervantes’ here. Scroll down to the full lineup and scroll through the individual artist cards for the event. Find details on each of the bands on the lineup here.
Skerik, Stanton Moore, Wil Blades, Nels Cline – Full Show – 4/27/24
[Video: FunkItBlog]
Denver Comes Alive 2025 Artists
George Porter Jr.
Eric Krasno
Ivan Neville
Jon Cleary
Tony Hall
Ian Neville
Deven Trusclair
Erica Falls
Alex Wasily
Nate Miller
Eric Benny Bloom
Skerik
Stanton Moore
Wil Blades
Nels Cline
Robert Walter
Eddie Roberts
Adam Deitch
Bill Nershi
Ross James
Jeremy Salken
Adam MacDougall
Garrett Sayers
Drew Sayers
Matt Jalbert
Jeff Franca
Joey Porter
Isaac Sinclair
Jimkata
