Crooked Still, a folk and bluegrass band from Boston, will be in concert at 7:30 p.m. Thursday in the Empire Arts Center in Grand Forks.
The show by one of the East Coast's hottest bluegrass bands is due, in large part, to timing. Crooked Still will be in Winnipeg on Wednesday night and is scheduled to play in Minneapolis on Friday, said Mark Landa, director of the Empire Arts Center.
Tickets for the band that played the 2006 and 2007 Winnipeg Folk Festivals to a great response will be $15 for adults and $8 for youth 3 to 18. They are available through the Chester Fritz box office and Ticketmaster.
A new chapter
The band, hailed by the Boston Globe as the most important folk group to emerge from Boston since the early 1960s, announced in November that its cellist Rushad Eggleston was leaving the group. After five years of touring, playing such events as the historic Newport and Telluride music festivals and earning rave reviews, the band found itself beginning a new chapter.
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Today, the band includes Aoife O'Donovan, vocals, guitar, baritone ukulele, piano and glockenspiel; Brittany Haas, five-string fiddle; Gregory Liszt, banjo; Tristan Clarridge, cello and fiddle; and Corey DiMario, double bass and tenor guitar. Its first album since the reconfiguration, "Still Crooked," was released on Signature Sounds in June.
"Still Crooked" balanced unknown traditional material with three new tunes from the band, along with "Did You Sleep Well?" by fellow old-time musician Nathan Taylor and a Mississippi John Hurt standard, a news release said.
"When Rushad left, we wanted to move in new directions," O'Donovan said in a news release. "Brittany adds another female presence to the band; I can hear my voice in her fiddling. Tristan has a refined cello tone, with a powerful, restrained energy. They bring a fresh outlook to the arrangements that keeps the music exciting."
DiMario said it was hard to pin down Crooked Still's music.
"We play improvised old-time music, bluegrass, folk and our own songs within the broad context of a string band," DiMario said. "Like a lot of today's bands, we have modern and traditional influences that confuse the boundaries. We want to keep blurring those lines to make something all our own."
