Barbaro’s Adventurous + Expansive Vision Of Pastoral Americana Comes Into Focus On New Album About the Winter Out October 20 on StorySound Records

Watch The Cut-Up Collage Video For Lead Single“Gardens”

“one of the Midwest’s most in-demand acoustic acts” — Bluegrass Situation

Announce US Tour Dates, Full Dates Below

Today, Barbaro — the burgeoning Minneapolis-based roots group who have become “one of the Midwest’s most in-demand acoustic acts” (Bluegrass Situation) — announces the October 20 release of About the Winter, their debut album for StorySound Records. About the Winter is a beautiful introduction to Barbaro, comprised of Kyle Shelstad (vocals and guitar), Rachel Calvert (vocals and fiddle), and Jason Wells (vocals and bass).

As the band explains, About the Winter reveals “the sacred transfiguration of our many personal and musical influences into something greater than the sum of its parts” and provides a confident expression of Barbaro’s musical evolution. Its pastoral Americana sound feels both traditional and progressive — though they incorporate roots instrumentation, Barbaro’s compositions value texture and gesture over technical prowess. The band works in concert to deliver indelible moments: emotional gut-punches, moments of clarity, and submissions to beauty in the face of overwhelming odds.

Alongside the album announcement, Barbaro shares “Gardens,” a song that pairs Shelstad’s vulnerable and urgent vocal with the refined, slow-blooming instrumental interplay of his bandmates. Shelstad says: “This tune is one of those that was written quite easily in one sitting about 3 years ago. The goal for the song was for it to be a long crescendo from start to finish.” With his band gathering momentum amid a steady lead instrumental melody, Shelstad takes aim at the powers that reinforce an acquisition-centric, colonial mindset: “The empire is seen, edge of their lawns / hoping all their gardens grow."

The music video for “Gardens” was created by Lewis Klahr, a Los Angeles-based collage artist who uses found images and sound to explore the intersection of memory and history. Watch the official “Gardens” music video here.

Barbaro — named after the beloved, tragically euthanized Kentucky Derby champion horse — recorded About the Winter during the winter of 2022 with Brian Joseph (Bon Iver, Sufjan Stevens, yMusic) at his The Hive studio, a refurbished barn outside of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Joseph played a pivotal role in the album, engineering, mixing, and co-producing the album with Shelstad. Josephs helped the band craft a distinctive, enveloping sonic landscape that combined their acoustic instruments with a rich bed of synthetic sound — they cite electronic musician Jon Hopkins as a particular influence.

The songs on About the Winter alternate between Shelstad and Calvert on vocals, which lends Barbaro the ability to inhabit different characters whose ongoing dialogue propels the album forward with natural, almost play-like progression. From the shimmering album overture “Apples To Apples” on through the ghostly bluegrass throwdown “Ike’s Farewell,” Barbaro conjures up a varied and engaging inversion of roots music orthodoxy.

Shelstad founded Babaro as a duo in 2017 alongside Isaac Sammis, who, before departing the band after the birth of his second child, played on the sessions for About the Winter. Calvert joined at the end of 2017, and, after some shuffling of musicians, Wells arrived in early 2019. Although coming from an almost exclusively classical music background, Wells was intrigued by what he heard in Barbaro, and was sold immediately after his first gig with them. Calvert, who also comes from a classical background, likens the band’s approach, through the song dynamics and their musical interactions, to playing in a classical quartet.

In 2018, Barbaro released their first EP and began to build up a local following, winning the John Hartford Memorial Festival Band Contest and the Minnesota Bluegrass and Old Time Music Association’s Americana Roots Band Contest. The group's debut full length — 2020’s Dressed In Roses — was warmly received as well. The Bluegrass Situation commended them for “brightening the Midwest bluegrass scene,” while The Minneapolis Star-Tribune praised the “elegant yet understated violin and banjo parts alongside singer/guitarist Kyle Shelstad’s Mumford-meets-Paul Simon type of songwriting.” Mike Pengra of Minnesota Public Radio says that “Barbaro budge beyond the bounds of bluegrass…I find myself leaning into the sound, trying to figure out where this unique blend came from, and where it’s going next.”

This fall, Barbaro will take their music on the road throughout the United States on a headlining tour, culminating in a hometown performance on December 2 at the Cedar Cultural Center. The full routing can be found below.

Barbaro Tour Dates

Wed Nov 1        Des Moines, IA             XBK 

Thu Nov 2         St. Louis, MO                Off Broadway 

Fri Nov 3           Nashville, TN                The Basement

Sat Nov 4          Atlanta, GA                   Eddies Attic 

Sun Nov 5         Asheville, NC                The Outpost

Tue Nov 7         Philadelphia, PA            MilkBoy Philly

Wed Nov 8        New York, NY               Mercury Lounge

Thu Nov 9         Boston, MA                   Cafe 939 

Fri Nov 10         Albany, NY                    The Linda 

Sat Nov 11        Burlington, VT               Radio Bean 

Tue Nov 14       Toronto, CAN                Monarch 

Wed Nov 15      Pittsburgh, PA                Club Cafe

Thu Nov 16     Kalamazoo, MI                Bell’s

Fri Nov 17         Chicago, IL                   Judson & Moore 

Sat Nov 18        Chicago, IL                   Judson & Moore 

Sat Dec 1         Minneapolis, MN           Cedar Cultural Center

No Depression’s Best of July 2023 Playlist

The song "Old Forty" featuring Ana Egge is included on No Depression's Best of July Playlist.  Too Sad for the Public Vol 2. - Yet and Still, Traditional American Folk Song-Stirring from Dick Connette is out now.

Too Sad For The Public — the project helmed by StorySound Records founder Dick Connette, announce Vol. 2 - Yet and Still, out July 28 on StorySound Records.

Featuring a wide range of collaborators — including yMusic’s Rob Moose (Paul Simon, Phoebe Bridgers), Chaim Tannenbaum (Loudon Wainwright III, Kate & Anna McGarrigle), Steve Elson (Gov’t Mule, David Bowie), Steven Bernstein (Levon Helm, Rufus Wainwright), Billy Martin (Medeski Martin & Wood) and heralded StorySound folk artist Ana Egge — Yet and Still finds Too Sad For The Public boldly recontextualizing an array of traditional American musics, drawing out unexpected elements and radically uprooting songs to isolate unique portions of their DNA. Moments of sublime serendipity abound.

Lead single “Railroad Bill (pt2)” — which features vocals from Chaim Tannenbaum — originally came to life as a remix and reframing of another version of the American folksong that appears on this record, sung by Ana Egge, the album’s principal lead vocalist.

Says Connette about the track: “While I was recording and mixing Ana Egge’s version of “Railroad Bill,” there were several parts I especially liked that I didn’t use - Ana’s rhythm guitar, Chaim Tannenbaum’s harmonica solos, and Bill Ruyle’s clackety sticks on the rim of a bass drum. Plus somehow I got the idea to create a harmonica choir and wrote and recorded 24 parts over the basic form, which I spread across the first half of the song. As it happened, “Railroad Bill” was also a particular favorite of Chaim’s, so I left it to him to spin the story different — that of a boastful, triumphant, unrepentant and unreconstructed bad man.”

“Railroad Bill (pt2)” gives a modern and hypnotic spin on a train robber ballad. Its galloping rhythm and harmonica choirs bring to mind a rustic, folklorically-minded version of NEU! — more naturalistic and rough-hewn but equally entrancing. Watch the video for “Railroad Bill (pt2),” directed by LA-based collage artist Lewis Klahr, HERE.

As a whole, Yet and Still explores authorial elasticity in the American traditional and popular music, reveling in the gradual content shifts that songs undergo as they pass from performer to performer, generation to generation, audience to audience. This has long been a fascination of Dick Connette’s, going back almost 40 years to when he shifted his focus from the developments in NYC’s downtown avant garde composition scene to researching and performing traditional American music.

Through his research, he compiled his own personal Rosetta’s Stone: He calls it the Greatest Hits of Folk Music, and it comprises 35 cassettes, 15 CDs, and 7 mp3 playlists  of both commercial and field recordings that he personally finds most striking — lyrically, melodically, harmonically, and instrumentally. This compilation played roles in all sorts of projects Connette undertook, from his production of Geoff Muldaur’s Bix Beiderbecke tribute Private Astronomy, his work on Loudon Wainwright III’s GRAMMY-winning Charlie Poole project High Wide & Handsome, and his own output with singer Sonya Cohen in the group Last Forever. When Sonya died in 2015, Connette carried on with Too Sad for the Public.

On Yet and Still, Connette takes his findings and draws out altogether new shapes. The project transforms through-composed bluegrass symphonies into elegiac string quartets (“Uncle Bunting,” originally built off of an old Uncle Bunt Stephens fiddle record recording from 1923); jazzily shifts the harmonic structures of Elizabeth Cotten’s “Shake Sugaree” to lend it a more ominous shadowing; and cannily casts traditional New Orleans music both in a more minimalist rhythmic rendering and all-out street band mayhem (respectively, “Hey Now (pt2)” and Hey Now (pt1)”).

Throughout, Yet and Still is a celebration of the inventive permutations and idiosyncratic processes of American musics —as well as Connette’s own imaginative approach to interpretation.

Vol. 2 - Yet and Still Tracklist:

1. Uncle Bunting (pt1)
Rob Moose - mandolin, violin, banjo, guitar, bass

2. Shake Sugaree
Ana Egge - vocal, guitar, Dick Connette - piano. Lorenzo Wolff - bass, Ethan Eubanks - drums

3. Hey Now (pt1)
Steven Bernstein - trumpet, vocal, Frank Greene - trumpet, vocal, Curtis Fowlkes - trombone, vocal, Jeffery Miller - trombone, vocal, Michael Blake - tenor saxophone, vocal, Erik Lawrence - baritone saxophone, vocal, Marcus Rojas - tuba, vocal, Billy Martin - drums/percussion, vocal

4. G. Burns in the Bottom (pt1)
Ana Egge - lead vocal, guitar, Lucy Wainwright Roche - backing vocal, Suzzy Roche - backing vocal, Dick Connette - harmonium, Dan Levine - euphonium, Lorenzo Wolff - baritone guitar, bass, Bill Ruyle - footsteps, cymbal pair, bass drum

5. Uncle Bunting (pt2)
Chaim Tannenbaum - lead vocal, harmonica, Ana Egge - backing vocal, Rayna Gellert - backing vocal, violin, viola

6. Old Forty
Ana Egge  - vocal, guitar, Dan Levine - trombone, Dick Connette - synth, Lorenzo Wolff - synth, bass

7. Railroad Bill (pt1)
Ana Egge - vocal, guitar, Dick Connette - piano, maracas, Lorenzo Wolff - baritone guitar, bass, Ethan Eubanks - shakers, drums

8. Uncle Bunting (pt3)
Steve Elson - piccolo, baritone sax, tenor sax, Curtis Fowlkes - trombone, Marcus Rojas - euphonium, tuba, Ethan Eubanks - orchestral bells, drums

9. Hey Now (pt2)
Ana Egge - lead vocal, Lucy Wainwright Roche - backing vocal, Suzzy Roche - backing vocal, Lorenzo Wolff - bass, Kory Grossman - percussion, Jeff Kraus - percussion, Paul Pizzuti - percussion, Ethan Eubanks - tambourine, drums

10. Railroad Bill (pt2)
Chaim Tannenbaum - vocal, harmonica, Ana Egge - rhythm guitar, Lorenzo Wolff - lead guitar, rhythm guitar, synth, bass, Dick Connette - cymbal crunch, synth, Ethan Eubanks - shakers, Bill Ruyle - bass drum rim clicks

11. Train Your Child
Rayna Gellert - vocal, violin, Kieran Kane - guitar

12. G. Burns in the Bottom (pt2)
Jacob Garchik - trombone, euphonium, Clark Gayton - trombone, euphonium, Dan Levine - trombone, euphonium, Marcus Rojas - tuba, euphonium, Jerome Jennings - tambourine, drums

yMusic, 'Cloud'

An airy trumpet and vocalese groove propels the piece

They say every dark cloud has a silver lining, but there's nothing threatening about "Cloud," from the upcoming album by yMusic. The piece is all shiny, fluffy lightness — a perfect pop song length track to hum along with as spring comes into bloom.

Disregarding genre pigeonholes, the new music sextet shares stages with pop stars like Paul Simon and John Legend and commissions music by today's top composers such as Caroline Shaw, Nico Muhly and Andrew Norman.

"Cloud" offers glistening, metallic strings to open, followed by puffy bass chord beats from the cello, airy trumpet lines and a vocalese groove that propels the piece to cumulonimbus heights before landing safely. With its sunny outlook and sturdy construction, the song, produced by Valgeir Sigurðsson (Björk, Sigur Rós, Ben Frost) wouldn't sound out of place on a Feist album. It's a good reminder that amid pandemics, politics and violence, we could all use a light-filled serenade sometimes to uncloud our heads.

◈ Watch the video for "Cloud"
◈ Stream "Cloud" by yMusic

300 Years On, Dan Tepfer Builds New Improvisations and Narratives Within Bach’s Inventions

Way back in 1723, Johann Sebastian Bach composed his Two Part Inventions to serve as keyboard exercises for his eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach. Since then, Bach’s Inventions has become a rite of passage for generations of keyboard players. It’s an essential building block for millions of musicians as they refine their mastery of harmony, rhythm, and technique. It’s no exaggeration to say that much of our modern understanding of music is built upon these exercises.

300 years later, Dan Tepfer — ”a remarkable musician” (The Washington Post) with “a wide-open sensibility as tuned into Bach and Björk as to Monk and Wayne Shorter” (The New York Times) — has taken the architecture of these exercises and used it as a jumping-off point for a new project out March 17 on StorySound: Inventions / Reinventions, an album featuring performances of each of Bach’s beloved 15 Two Part Inventions interleaved in sequence with nine of Tepfer’s own free improvisations in the “missing” keys to create a new full, and fully transporting, 24-key cycle.

Today, Tepfer shares “Improvised Invention In Db Minor.” Says Tepfer: “The first thing I think of when I think about the Inventions is the idea of a conversation between the hands, an idea that turns up a lot in this improvisation. The theme that I heard when I started playing begins in my right hand, but moves quickly to my left, and gets passed continuously between the hands as the improvisation develops. The second thing I think of when I think of the Inventions is rhythm, which supports everything Bach does; yet this improvisation has a 12/8 rhythmic feel that owes more to the Jazz tradition I grew up in than to European classical music.”

Listen to “Improvised Invention In Db Minor” here.

Pre-order Inventions / Reinventions here.

Recorded in nighttime sessions that Tepfer engineered himself in an intimate salon next to the Paris apartment where he grew up, Inventions / Reinventions is not his first foray into improvisation that builds upon Bach’s oeuvre. His 2011 recording Goldberg Variations / Variations saw Tepfer play Bach’s Baroque masterpiece in full and as improvised variations of his own creation. It was an ambitious undertaking that garnered widespread acclaim, with The New York Times calling it “riveting and inspired” and New York Magazine deeming it “elegant, thoughtful, and thrilling.”

On Inventions / Reinventions, Tepfer takes an entirely different creative route, embracing the unique narratives coursing through Bach’s work. Tepfer explains: “With the Goldbergs, my improvisations were essentially playing over chord changes, which is what jazz musicians do every day, but with the Inventions, I’m reacting to something more abstract, to the way Bach engages with storytelling.

Bach’s Inventions are a beautiful example of the difference between surface and subsurface, in that they seem like modest pieces on the surface, but the mechanism underneath is so powerful. And that’s what this project is all about: the subsurface of Bach, the mechanisms at play deep below.”

As audacious as that all sounds, the beauty of Inventions / Reinventions is readily apparent — at no point does it feel contrived or weighed down by its lofty conceptual threads. That this project flows so freely is a testament to Tepfer’s imagination and his creative kinship with Bach. The only thing more impressive, perhaps, is Bach’s continued ability to inspire musicians 300 years on, whether they’re burgeoning students or an intrepid trailblazer like Dan Tepfer.

Says Tepfer: “It’s worth remembering that Bach was most known in his lifetime as an improviser. People traveled long distances, often by foot, to hear him extemporize at the organ or harpsichord. Despite the perfect compositions he left behind, in which it’s difficult to imagine changing a single note, improvisation was at the core of his being. And I hope, 300 years after he composed these pieces for his children and students, that Bach wouldn’t be too offended by a modern improviser making up some new musical stories in the windows he left open.”

DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli, in for Terry Gross. The singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright is known for his intensely autobiographical writing. So it's not surprising that when he recently turned 75, he decided to make a new album that is about trying, and mostly failing, to age gracefully. It's called "Lifetime Achievement." And rock critic Ken Tucker says the album contains Wainwright's characteristic bluntness and honesty, this time about being older.

"Folk music's great confessor"

"Having turned 75, there's an autumnal air to his songs, or perhaps I should say a winter chill.  He's more serene than usual, contemplating mortality"

"Aside from Al Green and Bob Dylan, I can think of few living performers who have thought about life, death and what comes after with as much rigorousness, resignation and gratitude."

Listen to the FULL REVIEW HERE

At age 75 and with 30 albums to his name, singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III could just call it a career — and he kind of thought he had.

But on his birthday last year he thought, “75 is a big number,” and decided he still has more to say. That statement on aging, the state of the world, and much more is coming to our ears on Aug. 19 in the form of his 31st album, Lifetime Achievement, via StorySound Records.

The album’s 15 songs kind of snuck up on him in recent years, according to a press release, and come from a man who found that he still has a little more legacy to leave.

“I remember when I made my first record for Atlantic in 1969. I was always saying, ‘I want it to be a record — not only a recording, but a document that captures a moment.’ I was 21 and very serious, and I thought I’d be dead in four years,” Wainwright says in the announcement. “So I wanted to make something that would last. A testament. Now, fifty years later, I guess I still want to make a testament. I want to write a group of songs and get them down in the best possible way. And I like to think they might last a while.”

The first single from Lifetime Achievement is “Town & Country,” about Wainwright’s return to pandemic-era New York after spending time in the country. With his signature wit, he sings the praises of his city even as he pokes at its flaws.

READ the Article.