Isaac Schneider and Backbone Road book Rose Music Hall for Dec. 11

A newly announced Friday bill lands in one of Columbia's most storied small rooms, with tickets at $13.40.

The second Friday in December is when Columbia starts to empty out — finals wrapping up, students heading home, the downtown bars a little quieter than usual. It's also exactly when a small-room show like this one tends to be at its best.

Isaac Schneider has announced a show at Rose Music Hall on Friday, Dec. 11, with Backbone Road on the bill. The show starts at 7:30 p.m., and tickets are $13.40 through Ticketmaster. The date went up on Oct. 21, and the room holds about 300, so this is a show that can sell out on word of mouth alone.

At that price, it's an easy yes for a Friday night out, and a low-risk way to hear what a bill of this size sounds like in a room built for exactly this kind of show.

The room deserves a word of its own. Rose Music Hall started life as Mojo's, the smaller sister to The Blue Note on the same stretch of downtown. Richard King bought Mojo's in 1999, and it booked acts like Arcade Fire and The Black Keys before most people had heard of them (Wikipedia: The Blue Note); COMO Magazine). King sold both venues in 2014 to Matt Gerding and Scott Leslie, and at the turn of 2015 Mojo's became Rose Music Hall.

It's a small room named for a local musician, which is about as Columbia as a venue gets.

The name honors Forrest Rose, a local musician and longtime columnist for the Columbia Daily Tribune, who died in 2005 after playing a show in Arizona. The park next door was named for him in 2008, and under the new owners it gained an outdoor stage that now hosts some of The Blue Note's summer programming (Vox Magazine). Today both rooms are operated by FPC Live, and Rose Music Hall still fills the role Mojo's always did: the place where you see a band up close, before or instead of the bigger stage (KBIA).

It's a small room named for a local musician, which is about as Columbia as a venue gets. A bill like this one, with tickets priced under fifteen dollars, is the kind of night the place was renamed to honor.

When to get tickets: with 300 spots and a mid-December date, sooner is smarter than later. Rooms this size don't leave much of a walk-up window on a Friday.

Grab a couple, bring someone who's still in town for the break, and start the holidays the Columbia way: in a crowded room, close to the stage.

Sources: The Blue Note (Columbia, Missouri) – Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org); A Loud and Lively Legacy (COMO Magazine) (comomag.com); Rose Park, one year later (Vox Magazine) (voxmagazine.com); The Evening Blend: The Blue Note & Rose Music Hall (KBIA) (kbia.org); Tickets – Ticketmaster (ticketmaster.evyy.net); JamBase listing (jambase.com)