Past Bluegrass Related Events

The Ballroom Thieves - Calin “Callie” Peters (vocals, cello), Martin Earley (guitar, vocals), and Devin Mauch (percussion, vocals) - mine immense melodies and hypnotic hooks from personal stories on their 2018 EP, Paper Crown (Nettwerk Records). Under the cover of vintage jazz-style, the five songs reflect feelings of rootlessness from four nomadic years, bouts of depression, and the ever-looming specter of political unrest hanging over the country.

Tripping Lily opens the show. BBC Young Folk Musician award winner Jarlath Henderson is a singer, multi-instrumentalist, composer, producer and doctor. His debut solo album, ‘Hearts Broken, Heads Turned’, is an assemblage of traditional folk songs from across the UK and Ireland, collected by Jarlath throughout his musical life, and presented as they’ve never been heard before…Henderson has performed and recorded in such illustrious company as The Transatlantic Sessions, Jack Bruce, Lau, Capercaillie, Paddy Keenan, Salsa Celtic...

She started out singing in Chicago folk music clubs as a teenager. Then, barely out of high school, Lucy Kaplansky took off for New York City. There she found a fertile community of songwriters and performers—Suzanne Vega, Steve Forbert, The Roches, and others. With a beautiful flair for harmony, Lucy was everyone’s favorite singing partner, but most often she found herself singing as a duo with Shawn Colvin. People envisioned big things for them; in fact, The New York Times said it was “easy to predict stardom for her.” But then Lucy dropped it all.

Cited as an influence by recording artists as musically and generationally diverse as Dylan, Crosby, Stills & Nash and The Eagles to comedian and banjo player Steve Martin to contemporary artists such as the multi-Grammy® winners Mumford & Sons and The Avett Brothers, The Kingston Trio recently celebrated 60 years of entertaining audiences with the "Keep the Music Playing Tour". All three current members, Mike Marvin, Tim Gorelangton and Don Marovich, have intrinsic links to and experience with the original group.

Henry Acker is a fourteen year old gypsy jazz guitarist in the style of Django Reinhardt and with abilities far beyond his years. After playing for only five years, he has already shared the stage with jazz greats Bucky Pizzarelli, Frank Vignola, Julian Lage and Andreas Oberg as well as Gypsy Jazz legends Samson Schmitt, Mozes Rosenberg, Adrien Moignard, Joscho Stephane, Olli Soikkeli, Gonzalo Bergara, Stephane Wrembel and Jason Anick.

Now in their twelfth year, the Forever Young Band was originally conceived after Mark Cutler, John Fuzek and Dan Lilley performed the Neil Young classic “Powderfinger” as a group set closer for a show at Stone Soup Coffeehouse in Pawtucket, RI (March 2006). Forever Young is a group of performers that pay tribute to the SONGS of Neil Young. No one in the band tries to imitate Neil Young.

More than four decades have passed since Steve Forbert made his way to New York City from his Meridian, Mississippi birthplace in quest of a career in music. It was the most unlikely time and place for a folk singer to leap into the fray in a burgeoning scene where new wave and punk were emerging while he took the stage as a the archetypal folkie, armed with just an acoustic guitar and sheaf of very personal songs.

An acoustic band born in the land of tech innovation, Front Country was never going to be accepted as an authentic American roots band out of the gate. Cutting their teeth in progressive bluegrass jams in San Francisco's Mission District and rehearsing in the East Bay, they learned to play roots music their own way, with the tools they had on hand. One day in late February, the five members of Front Country were warming up for their record release show at the renowned bluegrass club the Station Inn, in their new home base of Nashville, Tenn. They'd never played most of these songs live before.It wasn't a given that these musicians would wind up in anything remotely resembling a bluegrass band. Singer Melody Walker got into world music and belted out roots-rock. Bassist Jeremy Darrow studied jazz. Leif Karlstrom trained as a classical violinist, and still prefers that title to "fiddle player." Mandolinist Adam Roszkiewicz studied classical guitar at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. The actual guitarist in the band, Jacob Groopman, did his share of exploring after college, too. "I was in an Afrobeat group for about five years, touring around in this 10-piece kind of hippie Afrobeat band," Groopman says. In the bluegrass world, musicians tend to define themselves by their relationships to tradition — specifically, the tradition of high-and-lonesome singing and a hard-driving sound. There are regional variations from Virginia to Colorado. The West Coast has its own freewheeling tradition, and that's where Front Country started out: at a monthly jam in San Francisco. Then its members heard about a band contest at a bluegrass festival. "And we ended up winning that band competition," Walker says. "The very next day, … Read More »