Reviews

Since the days of his youth, Tim O’Brien has sought out the open road of roots music with an open mind. After leaving is home in Wheeling, West Virginia in the 1970s to explore the west of America in old used cars and by thumbing to California, he eventually landed in Colorado where he made…

Over the course of five albums and a little more than a decade, Natalya Zoe Weinstein and John Cloyd Miller have developed an inspired union of two disparate yet surprisingly compatible musical styles: bluegrass and klezmer. (Their musical journey is detailed in the May 2023 issue of BU.) Bluegrass, of course, needs no explanation here,…

It’s fitting that the 50th anniversary project for Lost & Found is literally an album that’s been lost for more than a decade.  In 2013, the seminal group was working on a project for Mountain Fever Records when health issues for Allen Mills put the project on hold. The “lost” hard drive was recently found…

Robbie Fulks is a bluegrass guy who started his career in bluegrass, but then waited until his 16th project to do a full-blown bluegrass album. Listeners of his Bluegrass Vacation will likely say it was worth the wait after one spin through the player. Fulks has spent decades in the music business, best known as…

West Virginia-born Greg Blake, a remarkable singer, accomplished flat picker and long-time member of the band, Special Consensus, has been playing music nearly his entire life. But for three decades his singing and picking played second fiddle while he served as a pastor at various churches in the Midwest and West. Now that he’s retired…

Leftover Salmon’s genius is how they take the old and reimagine it into something new.  Over their thirty-year career they have toyed with the fabric of bluegrass and roots music, stretching and pulling it into something uniquely their own, yet something that still maintains the integrity of where it was born.  Their latest album, the…