Bragg Jam celebrates its 25th anniversary

Since its birth 25 years ago, Bragg Jam has grown to a downtown music festival with more than 100 musicians performing live music at six venues including JBA, Serenity, Capricorn, the Capitol Theatre, Grant’s Lounge and Parking Lot Stage.

This year, the now formally known as the Bragg Jam Concert Crawl will be held on July 27.

The event started as a way to honor the legacy of musicians Brax and Tate Bragg, who lost their lives in a car accident in Texas while traveling back to Macon. The Braggs’ friends held an impromptu jam session in their honor.

Olivia Walter, the president of the Bragg Jam board, said every year the board tries to get “up and coming” musicians from around the United States, including local artists.

“We just want to make sure that there’s a diverse lineup, that you have different genres, different age ranges, ethnicities, everything that you could possibly imagine,” Walter said.

Along with it being Bragg Jam’s 25th anniversary, the band headlining the concert crawl, Digable Planets, will celebrate their 30th anniversary.

A Macon-born artist, TORRES, will also perform for the first time in Macon, Walter said.

“It still lives on today as a thing for [the] community to come together and support each other and support the music scene,” she said. “The main thing that Bragg Jam is trying to do is support fair wages to musicians locally.”

Ashlynn Kilcrease is the rhythm guitarist for Ash Tuesday, an alt-pop-rock band that will be performing at JBA during the crawl. Bragg Jam was her and her friends’ yearly “pilgrimage” and she’s also a “ride or die JBA fan.”

Kilcrease, who grew up in Macon, said she was inspired to start making music by Front Bottoms, a band that has previously headlined Bragg Jam. Now, being able to perform at Bragg Jam for the first time has her “very honored.”

“It’s just a lot of full-circle serendipitous moments for me,” she said.

General admission tickets cost $40 and give access to all of the venues, while VIP tickets are $125 and give access to a VIP lounge. All tickets can be purchased online or in person at The Blacksmith’s Shop on Poplar Street.

A handful of events will happen before and after the crawl, including a “The Night Before the Thing” at Grant’s on July 26, and the new Bragg Brunch at Fall Line Brewery on July 28.

“It kind of shows the exact feeling of Macon,” Walter said. “It started with a group of friends and it still lives on today as a thing for the community to come together and support each other.”