Photo by: MK

My colleagues at Relix have been urging me of late to check out Akron/Family, as part of the rising psychedelic tide of the late mid zeroes. Their recent disc, Love Is Simple, doesn’t seem quite like rock ‘n’ roll so much as tribal jubilance, a bunch of people shouting and thumping and drumming and rejoicing vocally. Sonically clear and carefully produced, the Beatles on American Indian mysticism, instead of East Indian. Somewhere in there (“Crickets”) is the sound of summer in the humid temperate zone, peepers chirping and cicadas munching on leaves, and rubbing their legs together. Live, would they be crickets or guitars or drums or what?

Yonder Mountain String Band has always been about playing a strictly unorthodox brand of bluegrass. Almost a decade ago the Colorado string quartet introduced itself as a high-octane picking outfit with an affinity for stretching the boundaries of acoustic music. But on an autumn Saturday night at Chicago’s raggedly charming Congress Theatre,
the group unveiled a different Americana direction.

Photos by:  Ken Friedman

 2007 may just be the year that Hardly Strictly Bluegrass got too big. Or else maybe it’s just right. The free festival, now in its seventh year and second name (once it was Strictly Bluegrass) is held annually in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. It has grown from just a few acts on one stage to a three-day, five-stage, multi-band festival. And it’s all bankrolled by one man—billionaire financier Warren Hellman, a banjo picker himself, who played a set with his own band, the Wronglers—as a gift to the city and the world of bluegrass and fringe country.

Photo by:  Todd Wolfson

Another episode of Athenians earning their chatterbox reputations unfolded in front of Seattle-based troubadour Damien Jurado. In his black T-shirt and dark denim jeans, armed with his six-string acoustic, Jurado was the very definition of non-descript. His songs, however, are anything but.