$15 at the door (cash preferred) Doors open at 6pm, all ages

We’ll be in the back room away from the televisions…The Pub has a huge menu and a parking lot!

Please support the Old Market Pub music series by purchasing your food and beverage during the event at the back room bar

Ben Rice might be described as quiet and unassuming—until he picks up a guitar. A three-time Blues Music Award nominee, Rice has built a reputation as one of the most expressive and versatile artists in today’s roots and blues scene. While he began in traditional blues, over the years he’s expanded his sound with soul, R&B, folk, and country, creating a welcoming front-porch atmosphere where every listener feels at home.

Raised on a mix of vinyl treasures—his dad’s Steely Dan, Bob Marley, and Marshall Tucker alongside his mom’s Al Green, Barry White, and George Benson—Rice discovered the guitar at age seven and never looked back. His early thrift-store finds introduced him to Mississippi John Hurt, Bukka White, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Robert Cray, influences that shaped his fearless, inventive, and powerful guitar style. Whether on a steel resonator or his custom electric, Rice’s intensity and originality consistently turn heads.

Audiences are equally drawn to his heartfelt songwriting and evocative vocals. “My goal is to reach people in a way that they need to be reached,” Rice explains. “To say things they may not get to say or hear things they may not normally get to hear.” In performance, he treats every song as a story, channeling the emotion of its characters and inviting listeners to find their own meaning within the music.

Over the years, Rice has shared stages with blues and soul luminaries such as Curtis Salgado, Johnny Rawls, and Vanessa Collier, further cementing his standing in the American roots community. In 2023, he unveiled a bold new chapter with his horn-driven ensemble, Ben Rice & The PDX Hustle. With its blend of horns, vocal harmonies, piano, and organ, the group captures the raw energy of Rice’s live show and delivers it with a groove that has been igniting audiences across the Pacific Northwest and beyond.

With his new album Fallen Angel (2025), Rice showcases not only his fearless guitar work and emotive voice but also his evolution as a songwriter and bandleader. The record is both a tribute to his late drummer Chandler Bowerman and a testament to resilience, creativity, and the deep joy of making music.

Ben Rice’s journey has already brought him acclaim, collaborations with legendary artists, and international tours. But it’s clear that his greatest triumphs are still ahead.

Taylor Kingman

In a time drenched in escapism, where an unceasing barrage of synthetic shine promises comfort and relief from facing the complexity of our natures, Taylor Kingman’s new album Hollow Sound is an antithetical long night in a solitary cave, with nothing but a small fire and a hard look inward to keep you company.

Between his work fronting TK & The Holy Know-Nothings and his 2017 solo debut Wannabe, Kingman is no stranger to the darkness. But here he transcends the desolate rock bottom, as Hollow Sound whispers, then howls us into that place beyond brokenness where breathing begins again. To listen deeply to these songs is to lay down naked on the wet, unforgiving earth, pushing the ground through your fingers; it is to be soothed by the wholeness of who we are, filth and all. Kingman pulls no punches with his writing, and requires us to listen with the same honesty.

It’s been hard for me to look at myself naked

(from “Dead Bird’s Wing”)

First, though, you’ll notice the sounds. At once primordial and historic, Kingman has honed a guitar sound so impressively wrangled and so distinctly his own, that it makes your hair stand on end. Moving like a side-choir of voices, each bend and slide dances around his words such that you often mistake its notes for lyrics.