Quickly blazing a name for themselves with their progressive approach to American folk music, Fireside Collective delights listeners with memorable melodies and contemporary songwriting. Formed in the mountain city of Asheville North Carolina, the band plays original songs on stringed instruments, intended for a modern audience. Following the release of their debut album “Shadows and Dreams”, the band hit the road seeking to engage audiences with their energetic live show built on instrumental proficiency, colorful harmonies, and innovative musical arrangements.
Well what do you call it?
“Bluegrass, Newgrass, perhaps Progressive folk…” These are some descriptions mandolinist and songwriter Jesse Iaquinto chooses to identify with. “Depending on where you come from and your experience with folk music, you may think we’re very traditional, or on the other hand, consider us a progressive act. We appreciate both ends of the spectrum and may lie on a different end on any given night.” While roots music lies at the core of the Collective’s songs, a willingness to explore the boundaries and present relevant new material remains fundamental.
The band burst onto the scene in early 2014 following the release of “Shadows and Dreams.” The album weaves bluegrass, funk, rock, and blues influences into a refreshing representation of modern folk music. From the opening track “Poor Soul” with it’s energetic bluegrass overtones to the closer “Shine the Way Home”, the album takes listeners on a journey through simple love songs to complex themes such as metaphysics and coexistence. The album, recorded in Asheville at Sound Temple Studios, features guest musicians from Asheville’s rich acoustic music scene alongside members of the Fireside Collective.
When Texas Folklife and the Festival of Texas Fiddling honored Belen Escobedo with the 2017 Texas Master Fiddler Award, they praised her for “single handedly keeping alive” the tradition of conjunto fiddle, “a rare and beautiful style of Mexican-American fiddling which has almost disappeared despite once being very widespread in the borderlands.” Today, Belen Escobedo is the foremost practitioner of this fiddle-led art form that expresses the deep roots of Tejano (Texas-Mexican) culture.
Conjunto (“group” in Spanish) emerged in the late 19th century when European instrumentation met Spanish and Indigenous borderlands tunes in the lively dance music of the Tejano working-class communities in southern Texas. By the early 1930s, modern conjuntos were almost exclusively led by the accordion, whose outsized volume stood out over electrified backing bands. However, the earliest versions of Tejano conjunto were strings-only affairs.
Belen Escobedo grew up in South San Antonio in what she calls a “real mestizo” family, where Tejano music on the radio was the soundtrack for daily life. When she entered fourth grade, her school offered free music lessons and a loaner violin, and Belen seized the opportunity. In school she excelled at music theory and orchestra; at home she absorbed traditional fiddle tunes, learning by ear the songs her grandfather, Panfilo Padilla, would whistle from his memories of the string-led conjuntos he loved in his youth. In her teenage years, a famous local mariachi singer admired Belen’s playing at Sunday Mass. At his invitation she embarked on a career as a mariachi, a historically male-dominated musical tradition, which paid her way through college and graduate school. For 30 years she taught orchestra and band in the San Antonio Independent School District in addition to mariachi work, and she led the Texas State Guard band on her second instrument, the French horn.
As a professional mariachi fiddler, Escobedo had to master music from across countless Texas-Mexican musical genres, but it was later in her career that she finally found other musicians who shared her abiding love for the borderlands fiddle-led conjunto of her grandfather’s whistlings. For Escobedo, playing the music of her heritage is a lifelong passion: just as she remembers the joy she felt as a child when her parents and grandparents danced to her fiddling on the banks of the Guadelupe River, she feels privileged now to play for community elders who ask to hear her conjunto in their final days. Belen says, “I want to bring happiness to people even in the hardest of times.”
Backing up Escobedo’s lyrical fiddle at the 80th National Folk Festival are her husband, Ramon Gutierrez, on tololoche, the Tejano upright bass, and Stevie Ray Vavages on bajo sexto, the twelve-string guitar. Gutierrez, a multi-instrumentalist and a singer of uncommon expressive power, is one of San Antonio’s finest traditional bassists; Vavages, a member of the Tohono O’odham Nation, is the South Texas Conjunto Association 2018 Bajo Player of the Year. The name of her trio, Panfilo’s Güera, honors her grandfather’s influence on her, the grandchild he called his güera, or “blondie.”
Together they’re The Growling Old Men, individually they are Ben Winship and John Lowell, and they’re two first rate musicians in every sense of the word.
Lowell, a flat picking acoustic guitarist of the highest order with a stunning, smooth vocal style that can inhabit all kinds of genres has forged a 30 year career based out of Livingston, Montana. He’s performed at the Grand Targhee Bluegrass Festival stage for several years with his band Kane’s River, the Telluride stage with Loose Ties, and at the Vancouver Folk Festival with the John Lowell Band along with hundreds of other performances in the last 30 years in locations from Shetland to San Bernardino.
Ben Winship, an award winning mandolinist/mutli-instrumentalist, vocalist and songwriter hails from Victor, Idaho. Winship’s version of string band music is an exploration of crossroads; where raw meets refined, original meets traditional, weird meets familiar, organized meets free ranging. The Boston Globe called his sound “A further leap from traditional hill country music.” While Tim O’Brien refers to him as “One of the acoustic music scene’s best writers.”
They are back!!
When virtuoso Irish playing jumps the pond running naked through the wide open fields of bluegrass/Americana JigJam is born. Bluegrass and American Folk music originated from their homes and now JigJam are here to take it back!
This Offaly and Tipperary born band have started The first wave of attack in the new Irish invasion of Americana with two new members from Glasgow injecting the magic of Scottish folk music!
‘Foot stomping’, ‘high energy’ and lots of badass is what you’re in for when you see this musical powerhouse live in concert.
Founding members from Offaly Jamie McKeogh (Lead singer and guitar) and Daithi Melia (5 String Banjo and Dobro) were joined by Tipperary born Gavin Strappe (Mandolin and Tenor Banjo) in 2016. This year they are joined by two Glasgow boys in Calum Morrison (Double Bass) and Danny Hunter (Fiddle) to make up this iGrass (Irish Bluegrass) quintet.
Described as ‘The best Irish band in bluegrass’ and ‘sparkling, infectious’ these lads have been hailed as ‘Ireland’s answer to New Grass Revival’
Bluegrass has it’s roots in Irish music and Irish immigration. iGrass and JigJam is what happens when the Irish find their prodigal son.
Rupert Wates was born in London and studied at Oxford University. He has been a full time songwriter since the late 1990s, when he signed a publishing contract with Eaton Music Limited. In London he worked with some of the best performers in the city. Moving in 2001 to Paris, Wates formed his own quartet and began playing live regularly. In fall 2006 he came to the US. He is now based in New York City and Colorado. Since coming to the US, he has won more than 50 songwriting and performing awards (www.rupertwatesmusic.com/awards).
His music is an eclectic mix of acoustic, melodic art/folk, with flavors of jazz, vaudeville and cabaret. He has released nine solo CDs. They have received outstanding reviews in the international online press and tracks from them have been played on radio all over the world. In addition, Wates’ songs have been covered by other artists in the UK, Canada and the US. Two full length tribute CDs to his material have been recorded: ‘Crazy Puzzle’ (2015) by Nashville-based performer Roxie Rogers, and ‘Wide Open Heart’ (July 2017) by Los Angeles vocalist Susan Kohler. Both these CDs were initiated and funded entirely by the artists themselves, and comprise exclusively songs taken from Rupert Wates’ back catalog.
Despite Wates’ British background, and underpinning the universality of his music’s appeal, Folk And Acoustic Music Exchange has called him “a prime figure in American music” (www.acousticmusic.com) and goes on: “This is one gifted sonofabitch… If you’re not hip to this guy yet you’re missing out.”
Audiences everywhere respond to Wates’ brand of melodic art/folk—haunting songs that ring true.
Caleb and Reeb bring their full country band back to the Longstaff House featuring Mike Bub, the best bass player in the business. The show will start at 7:00.
The Lonesome Ace Stringband is an old-time band with bluegrass chops that play some righteous folk and country music. There’s a depth of groove and sense of space not often heard in bluegrass today, a level of instrumental interplay and vocal blend uncommon in old-time, and an on-stage rapport that transcends all of this.
Back again, one of the best shows ever!!!
Three Canadians lost in the weird and wonderful traditional country music of the American South, the band members Chris Coole (banjo), John Showman (fiddle) and Max Heineman (bass) are each journeyman musicians and veterans of some of Canada’s top roots music acts (New Country Rehab, The David Francey Band, The Foggy Hogtown Boys, Fiver).
Instrumentation alone instantly sets LAS’s sound apart: consisting of just fiddle, clawhammer banjo, and upright bass, the band moves freely between having a sound so powerful that it doesn’t seem like it should be coming from a trio, to a sparseness and fragility that draws the listener in and refreshes the ear. All three are compelling lead singers, each with his own character and range. This allows for the vocal texture to shift depending on how the song needs to feel – and what the song has to say. When those voices come together the power of the harmonies is unshakable. It’s clear to anyone who’s heard LAS that they just don’t sound like any other band.
One must, however, look at the roots of LAS to understand where the sound comes from. Starting in 2007, the band took up residency in Toronto’s legendary Dakota Tavern routinely playing 10 sets of music every weekend. LAS spent 7 years as a house band before ever taking the show on the road or recording a note. In these days when new records and buzz-bands come at us like a jacked-up news cycle, this workaday approach hearkens to another era. Those years were a gestation period that allowed for a type of looseness and intuition to develop, something that can only come from experienced musicians clocking hundreds of on-stage hours together.
As of 2021, the band has toured internationally, been engaged at some of the largest festivals in North America and Europe (including Merlefest, Rockygrass, Wintergrass, Winnipeg Folk Festival, Vancouver Folk Festival, Gooikorts, John Hartford Memorial), and recorded 4 albums. On the first two albums, Old Time (2014), and Gone For Evermore (2016) the band leaned heavily on the traditional old-time cannon to express what it needed to say musically. In 2018, with the release of When the Sun Comes Up, the band showcased its songwriting and studio savvy, offering up a more progressive interpretation of old-time music, and taking it’s sound to new places. All three albums have been embraced by both fans and critics alike.
The 4th album “Modern Old-Time Sounds for the Bluegrass and Folksong Jamboree” was released in November 2019. It showcases the band’s musical range – especially its interpretive skills in adapting repertoire from outside the genre. Bluegrass Unlimited describes the album as “unorthodox enough to be brilliant“.
A traditional band with a truly worldwide reach, Téada has appeared as a frequent headliner at major music festivals throughout the US, Canada, Mexico, Europe, Africa, Russia, Israel and Australia. Highlights include a 30,000-capacity stadium concert in Brittany, along with performances at Rainforest World Music Festival & Penang World Music Festival in Malaysia, Edmonton Folk Festival in Canada, Harare International Festival of the Arts in Zimbabwe and World Music Festival Taiwan. In 2014 the band performed to 40,000 people during an extensive 7-week tour of Japan / Taiwan.
Spring 2022 will bring the release of Téada’s sixth album on the Gael Linn label, featuring the brilliant vocals of Séamus Begley along with the band’s customary re-energising of rare tunes from the tradition.
Perhaps the premier trad Celtic band around coming to our living room!! What a score.