By Walter Tunis
Contributing Writer

When you have engineered a triumph, one that impacts and impresses a community, a single burning question presents itself.

What do you do for an encore?

For Matthew Gibson, director of the University of Kentucky’s Singletary Center for the Arts, the grand act was his 2025-26 season of performance programming – a bounty of diverse, predominantly musical offerings booked into the venue’s mammoth Concert Hall and its more intimate, and increasingly utilized, Recital Hall.

During the previous season, Gibson brought in artists ranging from vanguard jazz guitarist Mary Halvorson, indie rock champion Yo La Tengo, and champion multi-genre instrumental band Tortoise, to the jazz-meets-chamber-fueled Turtle Island Quartet, jazz renegades The Bad Plus, and the metal-meets-fusion brigade The Messthetics with James Brandon Lewis. 

Gibson has been working toward this kind of adventurous programming in recent years. But witnessing these acts in performance, sometimes with as little as a week separating concerts, affirmed a new cultural reach and awareness for the Singletary that seemed unlikely as little as a decade ago.

“Last year’s special programming was the strongest we have done in a number of years,” Gibson said. “I was just so encouraged by the response we got. I was able to identify some really exciting artists that people weren’t expecting to come to Lexington. We hit that right combination of artists that are really engaging and ones where audiences are taken delightfully off guard by the fact that they’re even coming here.” 

But that was last season. What do you do for an encore?

The answer is another extensive and engaging season of 12 performances that will begin in just over a week and will run through late March. The events touch on jazz, free jazz, classical and electronica along with artists honoring free improvisation and heroes of minimalist music. And right in the middle will be a concert that directly bridges the new season with the stylistic breadth and daring of the last one.

“We’re trying to break down the perception of the Singletary Center as a super formal place or that any degree of cultural exclusivity goes on here. We want to serve a lot of different types of audiences. We want people to feel welcome here.”

Returning names, new adventures

Several performers heading to the Singletary in the coming months are returnees from previous seasons, although their newest outings will hardly be reruns.

Chicago saxophonist, clarinetist and free improvisation torchbearer Ken Vandermark, who performed at the Singletary Center in 2024 with his Edition Redux band, will be back with mentoring saxophonist Joe McPhee and Chicago drummer Chris Corsano to open this year’s Singletary season. Similarly, the heralded guitarist Mary Halvorson, who kicked off last season with her Amaryllis sextet, will return in February as a longstanding member of the Tomeka Reid Quartet along with Amaryllis drummer Tomas Fujiwara. Back also will be French electronic music artist Franck Vigroux, who last performed at the Singletary in 2025. His March return will highlight an entirely new performance program titled “Cascades.”

New to the Singletary stages will be performances by the guitar-led Eli Winter Trio (in September), Cape Verde singer Lucibela (a co-presentation with GreenRoom Exchange in October), Russian trumpet great Sergei Nakariakov with pianist Maria Meerovitch (February), and the Los Angeles improvisational troupe SML (March).

The act serving as a direct conduit to last season will be celebrated jazz saxophonist Joshua Redman. He was originally set to play the Singletary in January 2026, but last winter’s crippling snow and ice storm forced postponement to October.

All of these performances will be staged in the Singletary’s intimate Recital Hall, which seats 381 patrons. Four additional performances – a multimedia lecture by one-time Radiolab host and MacArthur Fellow Jad Abumrad (in October); a Lexington Singers collaboration with banjoist Timothy Sharp and the bluegrass-minded Grass Cats (November); a program focusing on works by minimalist pioneers Steve Reich and Philip Glass by the Bang on a Can All-Stars (also in November); and a guest soloist outing by violin sensation Augustin Hadelich with the University of Kentucky Symphony Orchestra (March) — will be presented at the Singletary’s larger Concert Hall, which seats approximately 1,500.

“There have been times in the Center’s past where most of the things we were presenting were these really large-scale productions almost exclusively in the Concert Hall,” Gibson said. “It would be that way for, like, a whole season.

“We did a lot of remarkable and excellent shows that way, but digging a little deeper under the cultural surface and, in some instances, scaling down gives us the opportunity to take more risks and more chances and also do a greater quantity of events. This lets us reach out to the really interesting, creative corners of music. So, some of the stuff we’re doing now is not quite so big and obvious, but I think for people who are really curious and adventurous, there are a lot of different adventures you can take.”

From Economics to Art

Though he became director of the Singletary in 2022, Gibson has been working with the Center since 2014. His connection to Lexington and the University of Kentucky is far more extensive.

A native of Franklin, Gibson earned a bachelor’s degree in economics in 2003 and subsequently worked as a financial advisor.

 “I could not envision myself doing that career for long, so I gave up that first professional job and moved back to Lexington.”

New studies at UK in arts administration coincided with out-of-classroom work at WRFL-FM and CD Central that befitted Gibson’s fondness for music – live music, especially. Subsequent booking duties for musical acts at WRFL’s Boomslang festival and Natasha’s Café carved a path for what he would eventually undertake at the Singletary.

Gibson’s “long transitional period” at the Center included duties as director of operations during the year when the venue could only present pre-recorded and livestream broadcasts due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Following a year as acting director, he became the Singletary director in the fall of 2022.

“Through my participation at WRFL, I had the chance to work on the Boomslang festival (which ran from 2009 to 2013). That was a learning experience I couldn’t parallel with anything else. The festival was a tremendous undertaking and a whole lot of work. But as a student, it gave me the type of professional experience that I’m still using. From there, I was doing booking at Natasha’s, but also organizing live music for the Land of Tomorrow Art Gallery.

“Something just clicked with that work. I felt it in both generating excitement for the performances, but also in meeting and taking care of the artists and creating all these relationships that still serve me now. There were agents and artists I was working with in the Boomslang days that I’m still connected with all this time later. It’s just this fantastic, interpersonal network of folks, particularly amongst independent musicians, that is so satisfying to be a part of.”