09/07/2026
Have you reserved your ticket yet? This will sell out so grab yours while you can!
https://okrootsmusic.org/event/a-celebration-of-native-music-cuisine/
Join OK Roots Music for an evening of Native music & cuisine. Singer-songwriter PENNY PITCHLYNN of LABRYS plays Saturday, September 19th, 2026, at Burning Cedar Sovereign Wellness (49th & Peoria).
CHEF NICO WILLIAMS will be dishing up complimentary traditional Native food & beverage samples. Take home a free commemorative glass. Tickets $32 advance/$40 door. Doors at 6:30, event from 7 – 9 PM.
LABRYS is a music project forged by PENNY PITCHLYNN (Choctaw), an alternative singer-songwriter rooted in Oklahoma City. Combining a graveled low end, ruminative vocals, and vulnerable lyrics, LABRYS wields a heavy yet agile sound, evaporating experiential stones into smoky apparitions of self-reflection. As a full band, LABRYS highlights the sludge-tinged grooves that underscore its arrangements. As a solo performance, the project bares a backbone of candid emotional strength.
Fans of Lucy Dacus, Jack White, and PJ Harvey will find familiar stripes in LABRYS, and those aware of Penny Pitchlynn’s role as one-fourth of acclaimed indie band BRONCHO will spot a knack for riffy bass lines. Furthermore, LABRYS has been featured on the soundtrack to Peabody award-winning TV show Reservation Dogs and was a featured subject of the documentary Love and Fury. The recognition also carries to music journalism, as Pitchlynn was distinguished as “one of the most effective and laser-focused songsmiths on the scene” (Fieldcamp, OKC Free Press) in 2023.
This reputation comes not from overnight sensationalism but from years of development. LABRYS carries with it untold days and nights away from the spotlight spent crafting musical entities, calcifying into a growing body of studio work. Pushing forward across an unpredictable landscape, LABRYS is an emotional nomad, a perpetually evolving ecosystem of expression, drawing language from meditative listening and birthing sound from silence (iamlabrys.net).
NICO WILLIAMS (Cherokee Nation) Founder and Executive Director of Burning Cedar Sovereign Wellness, is a chef, caterer and student of traditional Indigenous cuisines based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She began her culinary education growing up in California and Arizona, spending time in her mother’s garden and in the kitchen preparing family meals. After relocating to Northeastern Oklahoma, Nico embraced her return to the post-removal homeland of her mother’s people as a calling and opportunity to reestablish a relationship with her Cherokee community, first and foremost through the language of food. Her journey to learn traditional Cherokee ways, dishes and the wild and cultivated ingredients involved in their preparation grew to encompass the Indigenous cuisines of tribes from all parts of North America, and led to her involvement in Indigenous food revitalization and food sovereignty.
Nico’s efforts to expand her knowledge of traditional ingredients and techniques continue through research and collaboration with Indigenous chefs and traditionalists from all Nations. She is the recipient of the 2021 Greater Tulsa Indian Affairs Commission Dream Keeper’s Award for Leadership in Business, the 2022 Cherokee Phoenix Seven Feathers Award for Culture, and she serves as a culinary diplomat for the US Department of State Arts Envoy program, representing North American Indigenous foodways in international spaces. Her work has been featured regionally and nationally by Food Network Magazine, USA Today, Hulu, Smithsonian Institute, BBC, Cherokee Nation’s OsiyoTV, King Arthur Baking Co, Atlas Obscura, PBS, PRX, Gilcrease Museum, and Philbrook Museum among others.
