WYSO's Tiny Stacks Reimagined is a day-long festival that brings together past Tiny Stacks performers to celebrate the legacy of Tiny Stacks while experiencing artistic collaboration, community, and movement throughout the Library. It's happening July 18th, 2026 at the Dayton Metro Main Library. WYSO Music Director, Juliet Fromholt joined WYSO Weekend Host Jerry Kenney to talk about the day-long event.
This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity:
Kenney: It is an absolute pleasure to have WYSO's music director, Juliet Fromholt, back in the studio with us to talk about something that's ahead for the music department and really the whole Dayton area to enjoy. Let's talk about Tiny Stacks in its fifth year.
Fromholt: Yes, year five of Tiny Stacks. I cannot believe we've already been doing it for this long. Tiny Stacks is a collaboration between WYSO, Dayton Metro Library and DATV, and we bring live music into the library, not just in a quiet, subdued way, but we like to get loud in the library. And this is our fifth year of doing it.
Kenney: So correct me if I'm wrong. I think I heard that in the first four seasons of Tiny Stacks; you hit all the library branches.
Fromholt: We did, yeah. Our goal initially was to visit every branch in the Dayton Metro Library system, and we did that including the Bookmobile, which was our final concert of last season.
"We believe that our public service goes beyond the airwaves."
And this year, since we've gotten through all the branches, we thought before we start another round and revisit all of our branches, let's do something a little different, a little fun.
We are doing what we're calling Tiny Stacks Reimagined on Saturday, July 18 at the Main Library and it's going to be an all-day celebration of Tiny Stacks, of local music and of this beautiful community collaboration.
Kenney: All right, so that's an all day or a half day event. People have plenty of time to get down there and enjoy lots of great music.
Fromholt: Things get started at 11 a.m. We're going to have two main performances and then some fun stuff in between. Our first performance will be at 11a.m in the main library in downtown Dayton on 3rd Street. And that performance will feature Serin Oh, Matthew Bruce, and Amber Heart. What we've done this year is we've invited some of our prior Tiny Stacks artists back and we're putting them on stage together this time. The idea is that Serin, Matthew, and Amber will play some of their own material solo, but they'll also collaborate or harmonize with each other, do kind of a songwriters in the round style thing.
Kenney: Well, that's nice. It's kind of freeform.
Fromholt: It is, yeah, yeah. We so often get to work with an individual artist or an individual band and spend a lot of time with them. And we know there are so many cool collaborations that happen in the community. We thought we wanted to honor that this time around. So that's at 11. That'll be a little over an hour of live music. And then you'll have a stretch where you'll be able to check out the main library if you haven't already, maybe take a walk around downtown Dayton, grab some lunch. There is the new cafe in the main library so you could grab some food right there.
Throughout that time, we will have videos of all of our prior Tiny Stacks performances going in the library. So if you want to grab a book for the little ones, grab a cup of coffee for yourself and settle in and watch and experience for a little bit, that'll be available to you during the day between the two performances. And then our second performance starts at three o'clock and that'll feature K. Carter, TINO and Feyth. K. Carter and TINO are both solo artists, but they also work together as Safe Money. So we of course wanted to put them together. They've both collaborated with Feyth before as well. So that should be really fun to see those three artists working together.
Kenney: That's really cool. Speaking of collaboration, it's a lot to execute. And so credit to all the partners involved.
Fromholt: Yeah, this has been just the most beautiful collaboration. You know, we have our library team headed up by Tanela Hicks, who's the head of programming at Dayton Metro Library. Our wonderful colleagues at DATV capture the video. And then our WYSO team, myself, Evan Miller, and Barry Leonard, we take care of all of the sound mixing, both for the live performance, and then our mix ends up being the audio that goes on our finished video product. So, it's a huge collaboration, we love working together.
All of us are nonprofits, two of us our nonprofit media organizations. So it's great opportunity for us to kind of bring our strengths to this and do something that's a little unusual and a whole lot of fun.
Kenney: Anything else we should know about this Tiny Stacks concert or festival? And then I've got one more question I'm going to put you on the spot with.
Fromholt: Yeah, it's free. It's open to the public. It is family friendly. So this is a great opportunity to bring those young music fans out and let them experience some things that are happening in our local scene. You know, everybody from zero to 100 plus should have something that they'll enjoy as part of this day.
Kenney: All right, it's kind of a lofty kind of a question, but tell us how all this fits into the philosophy that you have brought to the music department as director.
Fromholt: Yeah, absolutely. It's kind of twofold. So we believe that music is public service. It sounds really obvious when you say it out loud, but I don't think we can say it out loud enough. Music is public service. It helps us connect with one another. It helps us process our feelings. It is a relief. I often say music is something you can sing along to, dance along to, cry along to. It does so much for us and really a healthy community is a community with art and with music. So I firmly believe that creating art and music in this community is important to the health of our region The second way that it really contributes to our mission is that we believe that our public service goes beyond the airwaves. We love playing music for you here in our beautiful studios.
We love having bands in and having them play on the radio, but we also love being out in the community with you, experiencing live music with you. We love the chance to connect with new audiences, to connect music fans with their new favorite artists, and to introduce people to the vibrancy of our scene. So you get to do that at Tiny Stacks. You get to that at a lot of events that we'll be at this summer, and we really hope that you'll come join us.
Kenney: I think that mission comes through in all the WYSO music shows, but personal kudos, and I often text you at Wednesday nights at 11 telling you how fantastic what you're doing with Kaleidoscope and the live local music there, and the great mix of CDs from artists that you're playing. So I think really comes across. Again, just thank you so much for the musical elements that you bring to WYSO production.
Fromholt: Yeah, thank you so much, Jerry. A quick plug for something new we're doing. We are starting to dabble in some video sessions because we've got this beautiful studio, Barry Leonhard, host of Club Cuts, our music department coordinator has been doing an amazing job capturing some of our live performances. Check them out on YouTube or check them out the Novaphonic app. We have three new ones posted right now with several more that we've filmed and that you'll be seeing rolling out in the coming days.
