On a Monday evening in late July, Commercial Street is alive with people on bicycles, parents toting children, purpose-driven townies, dawdling tourists, and be-wigged drag queens on scooters. Brian Calhoon closes his eyes and taps out a few notes on his marimba: a five-octave, eight-and-a-half-foot-long instrument with keys of polished Honduran rosewood.
Calhoon is not a street musician. He’s an innkeeper. And he’s rolled his instrument onto the porch where his husband, Tom Westmoreland, sits at his drum set. “It’s Marimba Monday,” says Calhoon — “not quite a federal holiday, but it is a weekly event” — and the two are warming up.
A few people have arrived early to claim good spots on the lawn. “The people are demanding marimba,” one of them says.
Calhoon and Westmoreland bought the inn five years ago when the 180-year-old building was the White Wind Inn. They named it Brasswood for their combined love of the trumpet, Westmoreland’s main instrument, and the marimba, which is Calhoon’s. The two met in Boston but now live in Provincetown and run the inn with the help of Calhoon’s parents.
Last winter, the inn, which has 12 rooms, each named after one of the couple’s favorite American musicians — Duke Ellington, Leonard Bernstein, Aretha Franklin, Ella Fitzgerald — underwent renovations including the addition of stage lights on the ceiling, fixtures the color of brass (inspired by Westmoreland’s trumpet), and wooden benches stained the same color as Calhoon’s marimba.
Renovations also included widening the hallway of the inn, says Calhoon, so that the marimba would fit through. The floor in the hallway used to have a two-inch bump in it, which made it very difficult to roll the marimba smoothly. They fixed that, too. The double doors at the front of the inn allow the instrument to be rolled onto the porch and into the spotlight.
When it’s not on the porch, Calhoon’s marimba stands in the living room, directly across from the bar and the check-in desk. During the renovation, says Calhoon, there was the option of adding more seating in that space. Instead, “the marimba stayed.” He practices right there in the living room. Sometimes guests wander down from their rooms to listen.
Both Calhoon, who grew up in Los Altos, Calif., and Westmoreland, who is from Pulaski, W.Va., earned master’s degrees in Boston — Calhoon in percussion performance at Boston Conservatory, and Westmoreland in music education at Boston University. Both graduated in 2009 and went to work in music-related jobs. Calhoon worked in admissions at the conservatory, and Westmoreland taught music and directed the band at Lynnfield High School and later in Somerville.
Realizing that they’re not old enough to have had midlife crises, Calhoon says that they quit their jobs and bought the inn during a “a tertiary-life crisis” in 2020. Their idea was “a musical bed and breakfast.”
When he was a teacher, Westmoreland would lead the high school band on trips to the town’s public library and to the senior center, and twice to New Orleans to perform. He says he had a slogan: “Bringing the music to the people.” The porch concerts, every Monday at 7 p.m., are a continuation of that — a way to invite the public onto the porch without anyone needing to pay for a ticket — or a room.
They once hosted a songwriting workshop during Trans Week and are a host home for the Cape Cod Songwriters Retreat. And their porch concerts don’t feature just themselves. They invite musicians from off Cape — sometimes on marimba and sometimes not.
A great blue heron crosses the sky beneath the crescent moon; there’s the crash of glass recycling thrown into a bin; a mailman hands Westmoreland, at the drum set, an envelope. Calhoon, unperturbed, sings into a microphone: “Times Are Hard for Dreamers,” from the musical Amelie, Patti Page’s “Old Cape Cod,” Patsy Cline’s “She’s Got You,” an arrangement of Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For?”
“Brian’s the star, let’s be honest,” says Westmoreland. “I’m just the snarky sidekick on the drums.”
A man strides purposefully up the street with a coffee-to-go cup in his left hand and a bottle of wine in his right. He pauses for a moment to listen, then moves on. Calhoon doesn’t mind performing for a transient audience. “You learn not to take it personally,” he says, “when someone leaves in the middle of your ballad.”
On the steps of the inn, Gary Holder and Todd Whitley, from New York City, seem enraptured by the music. They’re getting married in September at Race Point. Calhoon and Westmoreland are marrying them. Whitley and Holder don’t just love the music, says Whitley. “We love the whole vibe.”
Calhoon’s voice is powerful on the theatrical songs and tender on the ballads. The marimba’s mystical timbre pours onto the street, its soft diction part of the soundscape of the night.
He sings “Blackbird,” and a passing cyclist rings her bell at the exact right moment; it sounds like the chirp of a bird.
