[dcab-l] Stephen Wade and The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Book Publication and Banjo Diary Album Release Concert (9/27)

FYI for the group - mark your calendars for this special event at the Birchmere on Thursday, September 27 featuring Stephen Wade and an excellent band including Mike Craver, Russ Hooper, Danny Knicely, James Leva, and Zan McLeod.

On September 27, 2012, at 7:30 pm, The Birchmere presents Stephen Wade in a rare, one-time concert marking national publication of his new book, The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience (University of Illinois Press) and the release of his new album, Banjo Diary: Lessons from Tradition (Smithsonian Folkways).

This signal event, a narrated, multimedia, musical stage performance, features Stephen Wade, accompanied by veteran instrumentalists and singers Mike Craver, Russ Hooper, Danny Knicely, James Leva, and Zan McLeod. The concert brings together two endeavors, deeply entwined both historically and personally. Stephen's Banjo Diary: Lessons from Tradition takes its inspiration from the very recordings explored in his book The Beautiful Music All Around Us. The stories there, like the sources for this album—and the contents of this evening's program—foreground the music against its backdrop in life.

Innovative and often surprising, Banjo Diary: Lessons from Tradition explores knowledge older musicians have bequeathed to younger players. Inspired by past banjo masters of frailing and two- and three-finger styles, the album mines new creative possibilities with pump organ, piano, mandolin, fiddle, guitar, Dobro, washboard, rhumba box, and bass.

The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience takes as its starting point thirteen iconic performances captured on Library of Congress field recordings between 1934 and 1942 in locations reaching from Southern Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta and on to the Great Plains. Through decades of research and detective work, Stephen Wade tracked down surviving performers and their families, fellow musicians, and community members. Weaving together loving and expert profiles of these performers with the histories of these songs and tunes, Stephen brings to life largely unheralded individuals—farm laborers, state prisoners, schoolchildren, cowboys, housewives and mothers, loggers and miners—whose music has become part of the wider American musical soundscape. Book/CD signing follows the show.

Listen to Banjo Diary: Lessons from Tradition: http://goo.gl/fQxmd

 

Watch video about The Beautiful Music All Around Us: http://youtu.be/debETxZWoPQ

 

Tickets are available at all Ticketmaster outlets, Ticketmaster.com, or to charge by phone, call (800) 745-3000. The Birchmere is located at 3701 Mt. Vernon Avenue, Alexandria, VA. 22305. More info: www.birchmere.com