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When Kyle Bradley walks onstage at the CCNB Amphitheatre at Heritage Park the weekend of Oct. 20, he’s going to be playing one of the biggest shows of his career.

Bradley, a rising singer-songwriter originally from Texas but now based in Georgia, is a part of the Greenville Country Music Fest, a sprawling, three-day event featuring new country stars. But there are also legendary, multiplatinum headliners such as Brooks & Dunn and Travis Tritt, musicians who are legends in the country music business.

The prospect of sharing the stage with artists like that gives Bradley a combination of nerves and excitement.

“You’re excited because this is just what you’re born to do: play music,” Bradley said. “And it’s a great time. I get to go up there with my friends and play the songs that I’ve written for people and hopefully they like them. But the nervousness sets in. You start stressing all the minor details of everything. But ultimately, I’d say I’m mostly just excited.”

But the fans at Greenville Country Music Fest are in for a bit of a musical curveball when Bradley performs. Yes, his voice is pure country, but on his two recent singles — calling cards for his 2024 debut album — Bradley liberally mixes in soul music, blending it perfectly with the country twang.

“I’ve always loved the tradition of country music,” Bradley said. “There’s a strong storyteller aspect to it. But I really like old soul music too. It’s just one of those things where you start listening to old soul and old funk music, and there’s so much expression and there’s a lot of harmonic richness that doesn’t exist in country music. And I think that it’s the best of both worlds. You can take a lot of the musical components from the soul and R&B and funk music and bring it together with some of the storytelling aspects of country music.”

And if the fans aren’t quite ready for Bradley’s soul-country hybrid, he’s just fine with that.

“I guess the way that I think about the audiences is that I try to connect with people,” he said. “And if they like it, that’s great. And if not, that’s fine too. I get it.”

Want to go?

What: Greenville Country Music Fest, with more than 20 artists

When: Oct. 20-22

Where: CCNB Amphitheatre at Heritage Park, 861 S.E. Main St., Simpsonville

Tickets and info: gvlfest.com

GREENVILLE – After operating food trucks and restaurants in the St. Louis area for several years, Oscar and Ainara Farina are bringing the unique flavors of Argentinian food to Greenville, IL. Their restaurant, the Buenos Aires Café, will open Tuesday, October 3, in the first floor of the SMART Center in downtown Greenville.

It will be open 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, serving dine-in or take-out food that includes empanadas, rice bowls, salads, and several flavors of gelato. “We’re excited to bring our passion for Argentinian food to Greenville,” said Ainara, a native of Spain who moved to Florida at the age of 6. “This is a family operation – not a franchise – and we want people to sense the personal touch in our food. All our sauces are homemade, and our gelatos are made on-site.”

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Though they knew each other in high school, Oscar and Ainara began their food adventure together while serving in the U.S. Army. Their early focus was on Argentinian food trucks, which they operated on the weekends during their military years. Ainara transitioned to a recruiting position with the Coast Guard, a job that brought them to St. Louis in 2020. She retired from active duty in 2022 and joined Oscar and their three sons in operating restaurants in the City Foundry, on Washington Avenue, and in Fairview Heights. The staple of the new Greenville restaurant is the empanada, a crescent-shaped pastry that can contain a variety of fillings – beef, chicken, pork sausage, vegetables, Guava fruit, or even Nutella and bananas. Also popular are Latin rice bowls topped with flank steak, shrimp, tuna, pulled pork, or chicken. Seasonal soups,salads, and sandwiches round out the menu.

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And for dessert, the café will offer eight flavors of homemade gelato. “In our food, we use a lot of spices,” said Oscar, a native of LaPampa, Argentina. “But that doesn’t mean it’s always hot. We use cumin and chimichurri sauce (made from parsley, garlic, and olive oil). That gives our food a traditional Argentinian flavor. In fact, we chose the name – the capital of Argentina – to tie it to Argentinian foods. Buenos Aires is famous for its street food.”

Greenville University is an accredited Christian liberal arts university with more than 1,000 students, including traditional undergraduate, graduate, and adult degree completion students. Founded in 1892 and affiliated with the Free Methodist Church, the University is in Greenville, IL, 45 miles east of St. Louis, Missouri. For more information, visitwww.greenville.edu.

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Eastside Guitars & Drums Keeps Greenville Musicians Playing

Marketplace Greenville

Terry Green has had one job in life: music.

For 29 years, Green sold guitars and drum kits to fellow Greenville musicians at his store, Eastside Guitars and Drums on Woodruff Road.

During the store’s 30th year, Green is still selling musical instruments, talking about music, and providing space for music lessons – at a new location on Pleasantburg Drive.

The lease at Woodruff Road was up for renewal. But Green wasn’t ready to close. He has been part of the Greenville music scene since he was a teenager.

“This is all I’ve ever done,” he says. “I started working at a music store while I was in high school at 17. I did one semester at Greenville Tech and decided that I already knew what I wanted to do.”

He headed back to the music store and later took a job as a sales representative for a guitar company.

“Then I got back into retail and opened my own store.”

There was one short stint … “I was out of the music business for maybe three months,” he says. “I had a real job.” It didn’t work out. “I've done just this for 55 years now.”

This summer, Green set out to find a new space for his store in a more accessible location.

“My customers complained about me making them drive to Woodruff Road. They wouldn't buy anywhere else because they are my friends,” says Green, a Greenville native.

On Labor Day, Eastside Guitars and Drums moved to 420 N. Pleasantburg Drive, a strip of stores just south of Lowndes Hill Road called 291 Plaza. Once home to Dragon Den Asian restaurant, Irashiai sushi and a church, the anchor tenant is now Asian Pacific Supermarket.

Green’s new store has plenty of space for three full-time, veteran teachers: Tony Christopher, a drum instructor at Eastside for 23 years; Sam Burgess, who has taught guitar, bass and ukulele at the store for more than 16 years; and Niel Brooks, who has taught guitar and songwriting at Eastside for 15 years.

Repairs are handled off-site by Austin Brashier.

That leaves Green and store manager Bobby Bass to serve customers who drop in to say hello; discuss music, musicians and musical instruments; and make purchases.

Bass followed Green’s path to the job.

“He started shopping with me when he was 14, and he started asking for a job when he was 16. Finally, about eight years ago, he came in at the right time. He’s 42 now,” Green says.

Green was only 8 years old when he first picked up a guitar. It was a circus that changed his focus.

“I went to a circus, and we sat next to the orchestra. Instead of watching the circus, I watched the drummer the whole night. It was the first time I'd seen a live drummer. I was fascinated,” he says.

The rhythm, the noise, the shiny drums and cymbals … “That was it for me. I switched to drums and never picked up the guitar again.”

He joined a band at 14. And by 16, he was playing in bars with musicians four or five years older.

“They had to promise his mother that they'd look after him,” says Green’s wife, Gerri.

Terry still performs locally with a cover band, The Substitutes. And every Monday, he gets together with bandmates from a progressive rock band, The Bosco Bee Band, that played gigs in Greenville from 1969 to 1981. They still write original songs, play music, reminisce, and play the occasional reunion concert.

Some of Eastside’s customers are musicians Terry has known since high school.

The atmosphere is like an old-time barbershop, says Gerri – who performed for 15 years with her own band at resorts, casinos, hotels and honky-tonks in the United States and Canada. She met Terry in 1998 while selling ads for a local radio station. They married in 2002.

Now in her third career, Gerri paints, sells and exhibits her artwork full time.

She’s still the store’s biggest fan.

“Terry specializes in guitars that he knows are good quality at every price point. When your kid comes in to buy a guitar, you're going to get a good, quality guitar in the price range that is appropriate for a beginner,” she says.

Terry cautions against buying a guitar online.

“You need to play a guitar in person. It's something you should touch. Even if you have 10 of the same guitars, they will have different weights, the wood will resonate differently,” he explains.

The store sells acoustic and electric guitars, plus amplifiers and the gear that goes with them.

“If you want a guitar that costs $99, I don't have it. A $99 guitar is junk,” Terry says.

The store’s specialty guitar is the Paul Reed Smith, known as the PRS. Rock artist Santana has used the brand since 1985. John Mayer plays the brand exclusively, Terry says. There’s a John Mayer signature model – one version built in the United States, and one built abroad.

The price of an acoustic guitar at Eastside starts at about $200. An electric guitar for a beginner costs about $250, though it will also need an amplifier and accessories. “You'll end up spending around $400,” Terry says.

The most expensive guitar in the store is $4,500. “Paul Reed Smith guitars go all the way up to almost $20,000. We don't keep those in stock. You have to special order one,” Terry says.

Beginner drum kits cost about $500, and a professional-grade set starts at $1,500.

Terry says his prices are competitive with other stores and online sellers.

Service after the sale is what sets Eastside apart, he says. “We take better care of you before and after you buy something.”

“The difference between Terry's store and every other store in town now is that he's got the most experience and has been around the longest,” Gerri says. “It's a nice, clean shop with responsible and nice people.”

Tara Greer learned chess when she was a toddler, a process the new mother admits is hazy now.

Her father, Mike Games, taught her and her sister as a hobby for the family. He decided to share his love of the game with more than just his children when he launched the Greenwood Chess Club in the early 2000s.

The club gathered both chess lovers and newbies to play, yet it struggled to find a permanent home. The lack of location security, mixed with Greer and her sister transitioning from chess to focus more on theater, led the club to fizzle.

In hopes of leaving a legacy for her 3-month-old son, Greer is bringing the club back to Greenwood alongside her father.

“I want to give to my son what my dad gave to my sister and me, which is just the joy and the challenge of chess,” she said.

Greer is not alone in her attempts to foster community in South Carolina around one of the world’s oldest strategy games.

There are at least 21 chess clubs in the state with eight listed in the Upstate, per the South Carolina Chess Association.

Though chess’s popularity has ebbed and flowed throughout history, the game has been on the rise for the past few years. The pandemic, mixed with Netflix’s miniseries “The Queen’s Gambit” in 2020, led to a surge in interest.

That excitement toward the ancient game still can be felt today at Upstate chess clubs as well as online for those without an in-person option.

Online platform chess.com announced late last year it reached 100 million members, and daily traffic is so high its servers struggle to keep up.

“It seems there was a surge, and then a bit of a decline, and then another surge,” Greenville Chess Club president Gene Nix said. “It seems like it’s just climbing again from what I can see by attendance at the club.”

Local chess clubs’ leaders may structure their meet-ups to appeal to different age and skill levels, but the intention is the same: to create a space to play a game they love.

While Greer’s husband was deployed during her pregnancy, she turned to chess.com to help pass time and quickly realized she missed the mental stimulation and connection of the game she learned years ago.

When her mother then convinced her to move back to Greenwood for extra support when the baby was born, it was all but checkmate in her mind. She called her dad with a plan: Restart the chess club.

He was on board. He dredged up club documents from the early 2000s to help guide the reconstruction. The father-daughter duo went back and forth for months ironing out the details.

When Greer’s dad, Games, asked where the reboot club would meet, this time Greer had found it a home, the new local games store, Polaris.

A few meetings in, the new club welcomes advanced players and newbies to come to play ladder-ranked chess, a more casual classification system than rated chess.

“We’re doing more casual club play for all ages,” Greer said.

Greer and her dad tag-team teaching the newbies — which so far include a couple, the mother of a middle-schooler, and a 7-year-old trying to learn to play his friend. In the future, once the duo become certified directors, they may host rated tournaments for those interested. Still, their weekly meet-ups would remain low-key.

The club meets on Thursday evenings. Challengers sit across from each other in front of checkered boards and, promptly at 7:15 p.m., clocks start and 20-minute games begin.

Nearly 60 miles northwest of Greenwood, Thursdays nights are also when Greenville-area chess players come together for play less geared toward instruction and more toward rising in the ranks.

Players get rankings, ranging from 400 to 2,200, when they register with the United States Chess Federation or the International Chess Federation. A player can move up or down in ranking by winning or losing in official tournaments sanctioned by the governing bodies.

Nix has played the game off and on since his grandfather taught him moves at 4 years old. He truly fixated on the game when the 1978 World Chess Championship between Anatoly Karpov and Viktor Korchnoi hit the news.

“When I knew that there was such a thing as a world championship and that grown adults played the game seriously, and it was a newsworthy item, that really caught my imagination,” Nix said.

The Greenville Chess Club has been around longer than Nix has been a member, and its origins are elusive to him. He started attending during college in the mid-1980s.

When he retired from the military, he stayed with the club and today serves as its president and the treasurer of the South Carolina Chess Association.

The club meets weekly at Boardwalk, a games store near the Haywood Mall. Each meeting usually attracts 20 mostly adults but the occasional middle- or high-schooler. Ten of the players are regulars and the rest drift in and out.

“It’s just remarkable to me how many people I’m always announcing, ‘This new person is playing their first-ever tournament,’” he said.

Players start showing up around 6 p.m. and pay an entrance fee of $5. At 7 p.m., players shake hands, start their clocks and play three rounds of 30-minute, quick-rated chess until the shop closes at 9 p.m.

The group has talked in the past about introducing instructional elements to the club meetings but, ultimately, the consensus is that the majority desire rated games.

“I’ll give the people what they want,” he said.

Similar to Greer, Vincent Iorga learned chess as a child living in Romania alongside his father. He still remembers on Saturday when his father beat him at the game well over a dozen times.

When Iorga finally won a round, his skills grew quickly, and he was playing any chance he got.

When he moved to the U.S. nearly 11 years ago, he struggled to find a competitor in Anderson County, eventually teaching a friend how to play at a more advanced level so he could have a mate.

The lack of chess options in the area was part of the reason he started the Knights of The Upstate two years ago.

“It was nothing like that around us,” he said of the club. “And, I didn’t have (a place) to play. For example, now I have four or five persons to play in the club that are a real challenge for me, so I’m happy. I don’t need to go somewhere else to play a good chess game.”

He started by only teaching two children before scaling his efforts to host meet-ups at a church, attracting about 10 players. Interest continued to grow and the club moved to Pendleton High School to accommodate the then-25-plus attendees.

Today, the club meets at the downtown Anderson Library on Saturdays from 9 a.m. to noon and Tuesday evenings for more advanced players to have extra game time.

Since a lot of Iorga’s club members are beginners, he often teaches a lesson at the start of his Saturday meetings, and afterward, members play friendly, non-rated games. On June 3, Iogra’s meet-up hit a personal attendance record: 37 players.

“It’s growing crazy in South Carolina, at least around us,” he said. “Probably everywhere in the United States but for sure around us.”

Follow Stephanie Mirah on Twitter @stephaniemirah

GREENVILLE, SOUTH CAROLINA, UNITED STATES, September 29, 2023 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Maya Ratcliff, founder and CEO of Hawaii Fluid Art, announced the opening of a new franchise location in Greenville, South Carolina.

WHERE: 1022-B Woodruff Rd., Greenville, South Carolina 29607

WHAT: Hawaii Fluid Art offers unique art classes that bring people together for a one-of-a-kind experience.

ON-SITE CONTACTS: Suzi & Joel Overstreet | suzi@hawaiifluidart.com, joel@hawaiifluidart.com

For anyone looking for a fun way to de-stress and reconnect with their inner child, Hawaii Fluid Art is the place to be.

Open seven days a week, Hawaii Fluid Art, Greenville offers art classes, retail shopping, an art gallery and more. The art classes are fun, fast, and easy. Fluid art is the perfect activity for all ages and skill levels, and the studio offers classes in acrylic pour painting, resin beach scenes, resin tumblers, glass painting and rock painting. Individual and group classes are available for birthday parties, corporate events, Girls’ Nights Out, date nights, fundraisers, family fun nights, and team-building events.

According to the Overstreets, “There is nothing like it here. The local art, atmosphere and creativity that flow from each person, and the joy that it brings make the Hawaii Fluid Art experience stand out from the rest.”

”From the moment you walk into one of our studios, you will feel loved, supported, important, empowered and capable,” adds Ratcliff.

Classes and private events can now be booked online at www.hawaiifluidart.com. Walk-ins are always welcome.

About Hawaii Fluid Art

Founded in 2020, Hawaii Fluid Art delivers a unique blend of entertainment and professional art instruction. Hawaii Fluid Art students are proud to display their unique creations in their homes and offices. Since going public with the franchise in April 2022, more than 200 units have been sold, with more than 35 studios opening in the next six months.

Current open locations include Coppell, TX, Waikoloa Village, HI, Boulder, CO, Kansas City, MO, Oklahoma City, OK., Frisco, TX, Lubbock, TX, Franklin, TN, Tinley Park, IL, Flower Mound, TX, Mansfield, TX and Cedar Hill, TX.

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