The 1930s Songbook with Maud Hixson and Rick Carlson

Maud Hixson and Rick Carlson are playing The Dunsmore Jazz Room at Crooners Supper Club on Saturday, October 17, for a show they're calling The 1930s Songbook. It's a vocal and piano duo, and the set stays focused on the Great American Songbook, with the 1930s as the through line.

The program threads together songs and stories from that decade, starting with Roosevelt's campaign anthem "Happy Days Are Here Again" and moving through "Stormy Weather," along with the music Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin, and others contributed to the era. It's a look at the songs that defined the decade, played by two musicians who've spent plenty of time in these kinds of standards.

Hixson is a Saint Paul-based vocalist whom All About Jazz once described as "gently virtuosic." She made her Guthrie Theater debut in the Noël Coward revue Coward's Women, appeared in Park Square Theater's The Soul of Gershwin, and earned a 2024 Bistro Award for Permanent Moonlight: Songs of Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, with the recording When Winter Comes released in 2025. Carlson has been playing with the Wolverines Big Band since 1980 and has performed alongside Butch Miles, Warren Vaché, Delfeayo Marsalis, Evan Christopher, and Wycliffe Gordon.

The show runs about an hour and a half and is open to all ages. It's on Saturday, October 17, from 7 PM to 8:30 PM, with doors opening at 6 PM for dinner and drink service. Tickets are $30 to $40, and the venue is The Dunsmore Jazz Room at Crooners Supper Club, 6161 Hwy 65 NE in Minneapolis.