On The Fringe

Bands Blurring the Lines of Bluegrass For Pixie & the Partygrass Boys, one of the most important pillars of bluegrass is what drives the band. “Community is everything for us,” says Zach Downes. “It’s the reason we sit in a van for hours each day. To be able to connect with fans and different bands is why we keep doing what we do.” For a band that was started by a group of ski-bums in the unlikely locale of Salt Lake City, Utah, community and the ability to connect with fans and other musicians is at the core of what they do. That connection took root when the band formed in 2015, as Downes (bass), Andrew Nelson (guitar), Katia “Pixie” Racine (vocals, ukulele) and Ben Weiss (mandolin) were in between musical projects and hungering for something fresh and different from anything they had done before. “We wanted to do something acoustic that was high energy, kinda like punk rock, with lots of high speed improvisation, kinda like bluegrass, where we could stretch