Roar Shack Live!: Dr. Bittinger

Featuring Juba Kalamka (vocals), Travis Andrews (guitar), Andy Meyerson (drums), and Van Jackson-Weaver (bass), Dr. Bittinger is a rocked and wrapped and rhythmic blues-fused confrontational Black queer ancestral reckoning with reappropriated time traveling, pitch-shifting jaunt at magnificent speeds around the universe.

Dr. William Price Bittinger (1898-1982) was a general practitioner in Summerlee, West Virginia (unincorporated Fayette County) from 1924-1976. Juba Kalamka's father was one of the 90% of (mostly Black) Summerlee-born children that Bittinger delivered in that period. Kalamka's dogged research has led to strong suspicion that Bittinger was a bone-collecting Black music afficionado - a zoological timelord and a Phil Spectorish/Brill Building wannabe svengali/ringmaster who's particular focus led to the (unintentional) happenstance of recording and curation of numerous blood relations of Kalamka's familial , musical and artistic lineages before, during, and after ther aforementioned Summerlee context that served as a cover for his activities.

This show is the beginning of a reclamation, celebration, rematriation and reintroduction to threads of of conversations on lost and found expressions and experiences of love, queerness, joy, terror, Black joy, antiBlackness, afropessimism, diaspora, faith , survival and much more that we hope and hoped to see tween the "can't see" and the "can't see". Take it or leave it alone, as the old fokes would say.