How often do you hear bluegrass, Bach, and Radiohead played at the same show? The answer is never unless of course you are talking about the Punch Brothers. In an almost two hour show at the Northampton’s Calvin Theatre, the five piece band dazzled with a musically adventurous mix in which they melded classical, jazz, folk, and rock into their progressive bluegrass sound.
The Infamous Stringdusters traffic in a particularly gripping style of bluegrass, and listening to their new album, Silver Sky, is like sitting on the edge of your seat at the end of a great suspense flick.
After passing the last three weeks playing in the south, Yonder Mountain String Band set their sights on returning to their comfort zone: the mountain towns out west. In Flagstaff, Yonder holds a history of playing their brand of high-energy bluegrass to electrified crowds and this Orpheum show was no different. Yonder arrived on stage around 8:30 pm as Jeff Austin greeted the crowd enthusiastically. “Nice showing Flagstaff, and it's a Tuesday!”
As much of a pleasure as it is to be able to witness such brilliance in a warm intimate setting, any of the attendees (whose number never topped 50) might wish it was pure choice, as a respite from larger venues and bigger crowds, rather than necessity on the part of the artists: a hat was passed in lieu of admission charge. Be that as it may, the purity of the music was right in tune with the air of the clear starry night outside, an unofficial soundtrack for the winter season if there ever was one.
Handguns, the 4th studio album from Greensky Bluegrass, is one of the most stirring acoustic releases of the year. The five-man Michigan band has taken strands of bluegrass, country, folk, and engineered a lyrically blunt, musically sophisticated strain of acoustic art. The songs have an honesty that harkens back to the glory days of confessional country music as perfected by Willie Nelson, Loretta Lynn, and the like.
When an annual musical event crosses over the “decade” line of yearly operations, it moves from to the status of a festival to the status as a summer music institution. The Northwest String Summit, which takes place at Horning’s Hideout near Portland Oregon from July 21st-24th, is about to cross that threshold to become an institution and solidify its’ status as a must see event for any fan of bluegrass music and a great time.
Paper Airplane, like the rest of Alison Krauss and Union Station's albums, is meant to please their diverse musical needs and equally diverse fan base. Nothing on this album is going to satiate their fans’ desire for the old stuff, but even after seven years away from the studio, the band’s reputation as country music’s most unpredictable jukebox is intact.
There’s a beautiful logic to Jerry Garcia’s rediscovery of his roots in these late Eighties recordings that belies Sandy Rothman’s casual tone in writing “The Definitive History” of The Jerry Garcia Acoustic Band. The initial recording Almost Acoustic hasn’t been available for over two decades, but now newly remastered, it’s easy to hear where Garcia learned the precision that informed his guitar (and pedal steel) work with the Dead and JGB. No sequel was ever released until recent archiving exhumed a collection of live tracks, Ragged But Right, that display the same collective joie de vivre as its predecessor.
Sam Bush is best-known for his prodigious skills on the mandolin and the fiddle, but it would be a mistake to label him simply a bluegrass musician. Throughout his years with the New Grass Revival, the Nash Ramblers and Strength in Numbers, he’s explored a wide swath of traditional American music, and his cross-genre blending has continued with the many iterations of his solo band over the years.
It is a marvel how bands with virtually no radio play can come to town and fill a venue with fans who know every word to their songs. Obviously I underestimate the internet and to a lesser extent non-commercial FM stations. Whatever the source of their connection, the Carolina Chocolate Drops; Dom Flemons, Justin Robinson, and Rhiannon Giddens, fit that description.
