Pop band Ivan & Alyosha settle in for a long winter's residency at Fremont's High Dive

On Saturday, local band Ivan & Alyosha begins a monthlong residency at the High Dive in Fremont. Every Saturday for the next three weeks, an opener will take the stage at 5 p.m., followed by an hour of Ivan & Alyosha's buoyant, timeless pop, ending around 7 p.m.

The events celebrate the release of "The Verse, The Chorus," Ivan & Alyosha's debut EP on Cheap Lullaby Records. (The duo is also headed to the SXSW festival in March in Austin, Texas, along with several other Seattle bands.)

The residency concept is not new, but it's relatively untested in Seattle.

"We wanted to do something more creative, something that stood out where we could make some noise in a small amount of time and get some fans exposed to our music," says I&A's Tim Wilson. "The idea is to keep having better shows."

Weekly performances will allow the band an unusual degree of casualness and familiarity with its audience and material, and vice versa. Fans attending all three weekends will witness the band develop its material live on stage as well as hear rarities and covers that might otherwise go unplayed at a headlining gig.

"The idea is to do something special every time, a new jam or a Christmas jam, and have our friends playing with us," Wilson says. "It's like old-model show business: You might go to a club back in the day when it was jazz vocalists or jazz bands and it's the same guy singing every Friday night and that's how people would get their start."

Greg Garcia, talent booker at the High Dive, understands the growth potential in hosting a residency. As the only booker willing to sign on to what was initially the band's idea, he sees it as a twist on the usual three-band, late-night bill.

"Artists are trying to be creative and do different types of shows rather than one show every six weeks," he says. "So we're doing a show every week and making a big deal out of it. There's a lot of cool local bands, and this is a good way to build their following. People end up hearing about these types of things."

"Certainly if it's good, people will keep coming," says I&A's other half, Ryan Carbary. "As opposed to if it wasn't."

"This is a big step," Wilson says. "Elvis did it and Celine Dion did it. We're just doing it at the beginning of our career instead of the end."

Jonathan Zwickel: zwickelicious@gmail.com