"Beginning players welcome." That's the entire pitch on the page Damm Music Center keeps live for its monthly bluegrass jam, and it means what it says. No audition, no membership card, no minimum number of chords you need to know before you're allowed to sit in the circle. You show up at 8945 W. Central Ave. on the first Sunday of the month, you find your way to what the shop calls the Stage Area, and at 1 p.m. somebody starts playing.
For a neighborhood built around a commercial strip of hardware stores, an auto shop, and a rotating cast of restaurants along Central and Tyler, this is an odd thing to find tucked inside a music retailer. Damm Music Center runs on a different clock, one built around rehearsal schedules, seasonal recitals, and a jam session that has nothing to sell you.
A Music Degree, a Storefront, and Twenty-Three Years
Kevin Damm started the business from scratch in 2003. He's a Wichita native who earned a Bachelor of Music Education degree from the University of Kansas, and the store's own description of its mission is less about moving inventory and more about keeping people playing. The shop sells and repairs guitars, drums, brass, woodwinds, and just about everything else with strings or a reed, but the instrument counter isn't really the point of this piece. The point is what happens on the stage after the register closes for the day, or on a Sunday afternoon when the store would otherwise just be another closed storefront on a quiet stretch of Central.
"positive benefits music adds to the lives of the people who make and enjoy music"
That's how Damm has described his reason for opening the place, and two decades in, the store's calendar backs it up. This isn't a side project. It's a second business model running underneath the first one.
The Jam That Doesn't Ask You to Practice First
The bluegrass jam happens on the first Sunday of every month, starting at 1 p.m., inside the store's own performance space. It's free. Beginners are explicitly told they're fine to come. For a genre that can feel intimidating from the outside, built on fast fingerpicking and tunes that regulars already know by heart, that open-door framing matters. You don't need an invitation. You need a Sunday afternoon and something with strings.
The jam has run for years alongside the Kansas Bluegrass Association, connecting it to a wider circuit of players around the state. It is part of a community of musicians who show up elsewhere in Kansas too, not just a single shop's retail calendar.
Four Ways Into a Band Without Owning a Garage
The jam is the walk-in option. For anyone who wants something more structured, Damm runs four seasonal performance programs, each built around weekly rehearsal and a real live audience at the end:
- Learning to Fly is the entry point for absolute beginners, no band experience required, with weekly group rehearsals built around basic ensemble skills.
- Rock Academy runs in three seasonal blocks each year, Spring from January through May, Summer from June through August, and Fall from September through December, meaning a student who wants in right now is joining after the current fall session has started.
- Jazz Academy meets Wednesday evenings and is aimed at younger musicians who want combo experience rather than solo lesson time.
- Adult Band is the only one with an age floor, open to anyone 18 and over, framed as a performance-based school of rock music where a rehearsal coach helps the group pick songs and get ready to actually play them somewhere.
Tuition runs $189 a month for programs that bundle in a weekly private lesson, or as low as $99 a month for a rehearsal-only track without the individual instruction. A single stand-alone private lesson runs $36. None of these numbers make Damm a charity. But they do mean the actual cost of showing up to make music with other people in this neighborhood is closer to a gym membership than a luxury hobby.
What It Costs to Belong to the Other Stage in the Neighborhood
Rolling Hills Country Club sits a short drive from Damm Music Center, on the banks of Cowskin Creek in the same southwestern pocket of Westlink, and it has its own long performance history, most of it on a golf course rather than a stage. Joining it is a different kind of commitment. A full regular membership at Rolling Hills requires a $2,000 initiation fee before monthly dues even start, according to the club's own membership page. That's not a criticism of the club. It's simply the going rate for one of the neighborhood's other established gathering places, and it puts the price of Damm's jam session, exactly nothing, into sharper focus.
Westlink doesn't have a lot of built-in public gathering space beyond its parks and its shopping center. What it has instead are private businesses that have chosen to double as something closer to a commons. Rolling Hills offers access through club membership and an initiation fee. Damm Music Center's jam is free, and visitors can walk in from Central Avenue without an application.
The Stage Fills Up Four Times a Year, Too
Beyond the jam and the rehearsal groups, Damm holds a Student Showcase once a quarter, typically the last weekend of the season, and every student is encouraged to get up regardless of how long they've been taking lessons or how polished they feel. It's the same stage the bluegrass players use on Sunday afternoons, just repurposed for a different crowd on a different schedule.
Add it up and that single room on Central Avenue hosts a walk-in jam twelve times a year, four seasonal band programs running in parallel, and four public recitals, all inside a strip of Westlink that most residents associate with hardware runs and drive-through coffee. The next first-Sunday jam lands on October 4. Nobody needs to RSVP.
If you've lived in Westlink for years and never noticed the stage inside that music store, you're not missing much you can't still catch. It's still there every first Sunday, still free, still fine with beginners.
For everything else happening around this stretch of west Wichita, Nancy Jo Statton keeps an eye on the neighborhood the way a longtime local does, one storefront and one Sunday afternoon at a time.
