“I will shush you,” Trey Burnart Hall warns when we get together to discuss his role as committee chair for the Parallel Listening Series, a new public event that pairs writers, musicians and other artists together in a gallery setting. “If I shush you, it’s an act of love,” he adds.

Formerly called Gallery5 Listening Room, the free events happen every other month and are steadily evolving as Hall works out the kinks. There are no scripts or rehearsals, but Hall has developed a process with valuable input from early participants. He says the last event in March was just shy of capacity, revealing a healthy public appetite for more cross-pollination of the arts in Richmond.

Past performer Sam Christian, who is also a committee member, says by email that their number one goal is to listen to the community and keep fostering a transformative experience for the participants: “To keep the space feeling open and creative.”

How it works

Two weeks before the event, musicians receive two written pieces that they will accompany like an impromptu soundtrack, as each work is read by its respective author. Hall encourages the musicians to read these texts in preparation only so they’re familiar with the material—but otherwise come in cold, he says.

There are two acts and an intermission. Each act features three performers: two writers and a musician in three, 15-minute installments (these could encompass anything from sound designers to multi-member bands of any variety). First a writer reads with musical accompaniment, then the music continues unaccompanied by a reader, before being joined by a second author.

This process is followed by an intermission and programming that further plays with genre and form; All the Saints Theater and Edgar Allan Poe impersonator, Dean Knight, were past acts for this portion. The second act follows the same template as the first act, with three different artists.

Hall—who fronted the Dharma Bombs until tearing his vocal cords during a 2015 show at Strange Matter—says Parallel Listening is the most difficult event he’s done. “Everyone is anxious, but that’s also part of the beauty. This is a truly liminal experience,” he explains. “Everyone is hearing everything for the first time, and we do not know if it will ever happen again.”

Since injuring his voice, Hall has been championing other local artists, whether through his Vocal Rest Records imprint or hosting Old Time Jams at Earth Folk Collective. He’s also found time to return to Virginia Commonwealth University for a master’s degree in poetry and nonfiction.

“[With this series] We’re just trying to create a microcosm of a universe that has probably always existed, but I haven’t seen it in Richmond,” Hall says, noting that he missed Jonathan Vassar’s acclaimed listening room series at Firehouse Theater before moving here in 2012.

He also credits past art movements and figures whose work has bridged otherwise siloed artistic pursuits, including: The Black Arts Movement; Bob Dylan bookends, from the early Greenwich Village folk scene to his Rolling Thunder Revue; rock and country music’s poet laureates Patti Smith and Terry Allen, up to the present-day poet and jazz musician JJJJJerome Ellis—who will perform at this month’s show.

Asked why Parallel Listening is important now, Hall doesn’t miss a beat.

“Every day under fascism it’s easier to control people who feel alone. And so connecting through art across mediums and across communities to me is a political act,” he says. “Joy as an act of resistance.”

National Book Award finalist featured

Joshua Galarza, a 2024 National Book Award finalist for his debut novel, “The Great Cool Ranch Dorito in the Sky,” will share the stage with Ellis this weekend. Galarza is a graduate student at VCU and notes via email that what he loves most about the series is how it fosters community among creatives in different disciplines.

“I’ve spent a lot of my life as a writer and visual artist in academia … [and] I’m forever having to shift between departments, leaving one community behind for the other, rarely finding balance and the easy mingling that could and maybe should exist,” he writes, adding that he is excited to work with JJJJJerome Ellis this weekend. “I’m planning to incorporate some of my printmaking work that directly illustrates the story in my personal essay, an excerpt from my creative nonfiction thesis at VCU.”

Since our interview, circumstances have grown more dire for the arts and artists, across the board, amid rescinded federal funding.

Cast in this light, one can see how trivial it is to rigidly differentiate between art forms rather than fostering their existence. Hall is hitting on this sentiment now with Parallel Listening. Prick up your ears and partake while you still can.

The next Parallel Listening Series is Sunday, May 18 at Gallery5. It features writers Josh Galarza, Rabeetah Hasnain, Matthew Wimberley, Divine Okechukwu with performers JJJJJerome Ellis and Beatrice Kelly. There is a happy hour at 6 p.m. and the event begins at 7 p.m. Free to the public.