The Infamous Stringdusters & Sara Watkins

Infamous Stringdusters
Stringdusters represent the cream of the crop of young bluegrass musicians. With Andy Hall on Resonator Guitar, Travis Book on bass, Chris Pandolfi on banjo, Jesse Cobb on mandolin, Jeremy Garrett on fiddle and Andy Falco on guitar, the band pulls together skill and experience well beyond their years. They boast a combined resume that includes collaborations with artists like Dolly Parton, Leftover Salmon, Earl Scruggs, Bering Strait, Ronnie Bowman and Levon Helm. Their Sugar Hill debut, Fork In The Road, was one of the most highly acclaimed bluegrass releases of 2007. It has been praised by fans of traditional bluegrass and newgrass alike, proving that the young Nashville-based band offers something for everyone. The disc features a diverse selection from the Stringdusters vast repertoire, with hard driving original instrumentals like 40 West along with more contemporary arrangements like Tragic Life The band has performed at some of the country's biggest acoustic music festivals (including Telluride Bluegrass, Merlefest, Grey Fox, and many more) as well as large concert halls, intimate clubs, and everything in between.
Untangling the threads of the Infamous Stringdusters origin is nearly impossible, thanks to the breadth of professional associations and friendships that brought its members together in various combinations. Still, a few highlights are worth noting, from the joint tenure that Andy Hall, Jeremy Garrett and Jesse Cobb shared in three time IBMA Male Vocalist of the Year Ronnie Bowmans band, The Committee, to the initial encounter between Hall and Chris Pandolfi in Boston, where Hall had graduated from the Berklee School of Music not long before Pandolfi became the first student there admitted with the banjo as his principal instrument, to the lengthy search that resulted in Colorado jamgrass mainstay Travis Books joining the band, and the old friendships that led them to Andy Falco. Indeed, the six musicians resumes cut a swath across the bluegrass mainstream and beyond:
Sara Watkins
You could say that Sara Watkins' solo debut has been a lifetime in the making. The 27-year-old singer-songwriter and fiddle player spent nearly two decades-all of her teenage and young adult life-as one-third of Nickel Creek, the Grammy Award-winning acoustic trio that used contemporary bluegrass as a starting point for its no-genre-barred sound. Along the way, she's hinted at her desire to do a project of her own and even organized some exploratory sessions in Los Angeles about six years ago. Now, with Nickel Creek on indefinite hiatus, she is releasing her self-titled solo disc, recorded in Los Angeles and Nashville and produced by former Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones. It features an impressively wide range of backing players and old friends, including itinerant alt-country duo Gillian Welch and Dave Rawling, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench, Elvis Costello drummer Pete Thomas; fellow travelers from the bluegrass world like Tim O'Brien, Chris Eldridge, Ronnie McCoury and Rayna Gellert; and her Nickel Creek bandmates.
Listening back to the finished record," Watkins says, "it felt very natural. It is authentically me. I know that has so much to do with the process, with the years that I had been playing with all these guys, with the relationships I've made. I come from bluegrass and I wanted that to be part of the record. On the other hand, I've spent most of my life playing things that were not bluegrass, but maybe related to it, so all of the instrumentation and all of these players mean something to me. There are a lot of Nashville musicians on the record that I grew up performing with and players from L.A. who are musical heroes of mine. Even though not all of the songs on the album are my songs, it's still really personal because I lived with this material for so long and I've played a lot of this music with the performers who are on it.
Watkins' debut has an air of easygoing virtuosity. She displays her skill as a multi-instrumentalist, playing the guitar and ukulele as well as the fiddle, and proves herself to be just as versatile, and breathtakingly mature, as a vocalist. Watkins segues gracefully from the lighthearted country and western swing of Jimmie Rodger's "Any Old Time," to the world-weariness and spiritual yearning of Norman Blake's "Lord Won't You Help Me," to the romantic wistfulness of Jon Brion's "Same Mistake." Though she still considers herself a neophyte as a songwriter, her own work is as evocative as any of the material she's chosen to cover. Her wordless fiddle tunes are exuberant, foot-stomping pieces, while the songs for which she wrote both music and lyrics have a heart-meltingly lovelorn quality. There's honesty and empathy on tracks like the sweetly soulful "My Friend," the brooding "Bygones," and the rueful album closer, "Where Will You Be." Watkins is newly, and very happily, married, but she knows how to channel the plaintive emotions of classic country and timeless pop in her own work.
http://www.sarawatkins.com