Menlo Park's Guild Theatre has been livening up the Peninsula performing arts scene since opening as a concert venue in 2022. With its new Local Sound Series, the nonprofit will be shining its spotlight on Bay Area musicians in particular. The hope is that the community will be inspired to come out and support local musicians, even if they're not yet familiar with them.

Eventually, "the goal is to try all types of genres of local artists; to try something from each and every scene," said the Guild's talent buyer Molly Butera.

The theater has hosted sporadic local nights before but is making it more official with its new series, which kicked off earlier this month and on Jan. 18 will feature the acclaimed Americana artist Miko Marks (based in Oakland) and the Belle Haven-raised bassist and blues vocalist Frank Thibeaux. Both acts are associated with East Palo Alto's Redtone Records, which founder Justin Phipps described as a nonprofit collective of Bay Area artists making "soulful music with a classic sound."

"We are committed to ensuring that great music and culture thrive throughout this region, and the Guild is a fantastic partner in that mission," Phipps told this news organization in an email.

Marks first worked with Phipps and musician/producer Steve Wyreman when she was starting her musical career, back in 2003.

"A few years ago, the timing just lined up with a dream I had one night that the three of us were making music together again," she recalled in an email Q&A with this news organization. The team has written and produced her most recent three records for Redtone: "Our Country," "Race Records," and "Feel Like Going Home."

"The Redtone collective has been an amazing musical community to be a part of," Marks said.

Marks' music has evolved over the years. While she's best known as a country artist, she now feels more aligned with the Americana scene, "as that feels the most inclusive of the styles that make up my sound," including blues, gospel, rock and soul, she explained.

"I faced significant challenges in the early 2000s when I was trying to make it as a Black woman doing straight-ahead country in Nashville. Since that time, the country music scene has been eager to showcase its growing diversity, shining a light on more Black and female artists in particular, so much so that it has actually been difficult for me to successfully redefine myself as an Americana artist," she said. "I appreciate any support, and I am so thrilled to be looking ahead to my third Grand Ole Opry performance, and so grateful to have an exhibit in the Country Music Hall of Fame. But at the same time, when people keep hearing 'country music artist Miko Marks' and then come to my shows and get some Duane Allman-style guitar and some Little Walter-style harmonica and some Mavis Staples-style singing, I don't want them saying, 'Well, this isn't country' and thinking that I'm the one defining myself that way."

After all, "back in the early days, it was all the same music anyway, really. Black, white, Indigenous, Latinx, musicians and artists all hearing each other, all influencing each other, all just playing local music," she said. "Genres only came about for marketing. 'Who are we gonna sell this to? If Jimmie Rodgers sings this 12-bar blues we'll call it country and sell it to white folks. If Robert Johnson sings it we'll call it a race record and sell it to Black folks.' Even though it might be literally the same song."

Marks' work with Redtone "has been focused on reaching back to all of my musical roots, not just country. I've tapped into another side of my voice, bringing in the sounds from my old church days, singing with more power, more spirit," she said.

At their Guild performance, Redtone house band The Resurrectors (including Phipps and Wyreman on keys and harmonica, and lead guitar, respectively) will be backing both Thibeaux and Marks.

"It's Resurrector night. We're going to be resurrecting the ancestors of the blues and country world," Thibeaux said.

A longtime member of the local music scene who currently lives in San Jose, Thibeaux reflected on how the area has changed over the course of his life and career.

"When I was growing up in Belle Haven and East Palo Alto, it was predominantly Black, and there was a singing group or a band almost on every corner," he said. "That's gone. There are hardly any Black people left in that community." As a child, he said, being immersed in that music-rich environment inspired him.

"It was the competitiveness of it that made me really want to be better. There were so many great singers and musicians and players," he recalled. "Something was always going on. It kept me engaged."

He formed his first singing group, The Junior Temptations, around the third grade, performing at school lunch times. "We sucked but we thought we were great," he laughed, his voice distinctively deep and raspy. "By the fifth grade, my voice started to change. They basically kicked me out of the group because I sounded like I sound now!"

When a friend lent him a six-string guitar with two broken strings, that became his first bass guitar and the rest is history.

"The bass is an instrument where it requires you to listen to everybody and it requires you to hold everything down; you're the foundation," he said. "If your bass player sucks your band sucks. That really inspired me to take the lead. I've been a leader ever since I started." He also discovered a knack for songwriting, and musical interests that defy genre, incorporating blues, funk, R&B, rap, rock and beyond. His long musical career boasts many highlights, including his band Precision's four months touring Japan in the 1980s — "Kids from Menlo Park, East Palo Alto, being in Osaka Japan; it was like a fairy tale," he said — and his working with all sorts of big names, from Herbie Hancock to MC Hammer.

More recently, at an East Palo Alto block party, Thibeaux was performing on the sidewalk with his blues band when he caught the ear of Phipps.

"Maybe five years ago I got a call, 'I got this song for you.' I've been hanging out with Redtone ever since," he said.

He's released two Redtone singles and is currently working on a "strictly blues" album with the label (under the name Frank Thibeaux, to distinguish it from his multi-genre work under the name Tebo). "To be affiliated with a record company that believes in me still at this age, I think that's awesome," he said.

The Jan. 18 show will be Thibeaux's first performance at the Guild, a venue he's been hoping to be booked by since it opened, and especially meaningful because of the recent loss of a close friend, who, as he was battling cancer, repeatedly told Thibeaux "You've got to play the Guild!"

"I know he's smiling in Heaven," he said of his late friend. "It should be an awesome show. I hope my people come out."

According to Marks, audiences can expect a high-energy and spirit-filled evening.

"We leave it all out on the stage. It'll be joyous, raucous, fun, but you also might see me fighting back the occasional tear on certain songs. Every time we've ever performed we've always had at least one person (and usually more) come up to me at the merch table with a tear in their eyes telling me how much they needed that experience, how uplifting and healing it was," she said. "That's the power of music. That's why we do this. This is where we uplift and heal ourselves and hope to pass that on to the audience in the process."

Miko Marks and Frank Thibeaux, Jan. 18, 8 p.m., The Guild Theatre, 949 El Camino Real, Menlo Park. Tickets are $28-$66. All ages. guildtheatre.com. n