bluegrass

Fairfield, a street musician who plays banjo, fiddle, and guitar and sings traditional folk songs as you would imagine they were sung when they were first written, is only just getting used to the idea of playing music venues alongside rock musicians. He is also an avid collector of 78 rpm recordings of American folk and mountain music and is working on plans to build his own spring motor gramophones.

A lot of band bios will begin with the line “with humble beginnings”.  This band bio begins with the line “with outrageously immodest and ambitious beginnings”.  With outrageously immodest and ambitious beginnings, The Tom Fun Orchestra sauntered into the Atlantic Canadian music scene the way an Italian funeral saunters through a mountain village.  That is, with many loud instruments, casks of wine and complete irreverence for everything happening around them.  Thus it went for the next five years. 

Bruce Molsky (b. Manhattan, New York, 1955) is an American fiddler, banjo player, guitarist, and singer. He primarily performs old-time music of the Appalachian region. He was born in 1955 at New York Infirmary in Manhattan, and grew up near St. James Park in The Bronx. His father, Milton, a mechanical engineer, was a first-generation American descendant of Jewish immigrants from Poland. As a young man, Bruce first became interested in blues music, but eventually became absorbed in old-time music while studying engineering at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York beginning in 1972.

JIm Lauderdale is a Nashville showman in the grand tradition. He's also one of the city's finest songwriters, as the Dixie Chicks, Patty Loveless, Mark Chestnut, Vince Gill and George Strait will be glad to attest. Beyond Music Row, Lauderdale is well known in bluegrass and jamband circles. He recorded two albums with the legendary Ralph Stanley, one with Donna the Buffalo and he collaborated with Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter on <i>Headed for the Hills</i>, his 2004 release on Dualtone Records.