5 February 2016

Cricket Tell the Weather & Monica Rizzio and Old Kings Highway

CANCELLED DUE TO WEATHER

On Friday, February 5, 2016 we serve up a heaping helping of Americana and bluegrass cheer as we welcome back the much buzzed about dynamic young string band Cricket Tell The Weather. With timeless-sounding songwriting and formidable musical chops, this band has turned heads and won accolades at every festival they’ve played with their fresh and non-traditional take on bluegrass, old-time, and folk standards from the American songbook. ¶ Cape Cod-by-way-of-East Texas’s Monica Rizzio & Old Kings Highway will be the first delightful course in this feast of roots, folk, country and bluegrass.

Concert starts at 8:00 pm

Cricket Tell the Weather

At first listen, Cricket Tell The Weather is an acoustic string band that plays traditional bluegrass, old-time and folk, but listen closer and it’s pretty clear that this Brooklyn-based group doesn’t fit neatly into any box with its contemporary take on this uniquely American music. Cricket is the four-year-old brainchild of fiddler and songwriter Andrea Asprelli, the child of an Italian-American and an Indonesian immigrant. Asprelli, who was immersed in European classical music, made an abrupt detour when she befriended and played with English musicians who were immersed in American folk and roots music during her year abroad at England’s University of Kent. As she told the Boston Globe in an interview last year, “I thought that maybe I would play more English or Irish folk music, but they were totally about American folk music, which I didn’t really know about. I gave them street cred. They didn’t know it well enough to know I didn’t know what I was doing.”

Fast forward to 2012 when Asprelli met guitarist Jason Borisoff in Syracuse, New York, with whom she wrote “Remington,” a tune which won the songwriting award in 2011 at the Podunk Bluegrass Festival in Podunk, Connecticut. Banjoist Doug Goldstein joined the band after Asprelli met him in an impromptu hallway jam at the annual Joe Val Bluegrass Festival in Framingham. After Borisoff left the band, guitarist Jeff Picker joined and Sam Weber on bass rounds out the group.

The New York Music Daily raved recently about Asprelli’s down-to-earth, honest vocals and Jeff Picker’s and Goldstein’s chill-inducing solos. When they are not featured at large national festivals such as Falcon Ridge, Del Fest, and Joe Val, the musicians give back to the community through bluegrass workshops to students of all ages under their “American Roots Revival” workshop series. With a steady touring schedule mostly here in the Northeast and a solid debut album under their belt, the band hopes to cross the pond soon and spread their freshgrass sound to the rest of the world.

. . .

Monica Rizzio

Monica Rizzio brings her country-roots-Americana-flavored music to the mix at the me&thee. She has long been known as the front woman of Tripping Lily, a New England-based Americana-pop string band. After a decade with this revered band, Rizzio has changed her direction, southwest to be exact, drawing on her East Texas roots for a sound that is more country and bluegrass-flavored.

Rizzio, who grew up on a ranch in East Texas, with its flat and rolling terrain and endless piney woods, now hangs her hat in Cape Cod, with its windswept dunes hugging the Atlantic, where this chameleon-like singer-songwriter dazzles audiences with everything from folk to jazz to Americana. When she is not playing with Old King’s Highway or writing songs like the winning alt-country-flavored love song ‘Luckier Than You,’ Rizzio is also an owner of a roots-based music school in Dennisport.

Rizzio will perform tracks from her newly-recorded debut Walkashore Cowgirl. Very telling of Rizzio’s talent is this quote by the legendary Tom Rush: “I made the tactical error of inviting Monica Rizzio to share the stage with me at Symphony Hall and she went and stole the audience right out from under me! Monica is a talent to be reckoned with — she plays, writes, sings, puts it all together in a great performance AND captures it all in the studio. If some of these songs don’t give you goosebumps you should go straight to the ER.”

  • [Cricket Tell the Weather] is an acoustic quartet that draws inspiration from a handful of sepia-toned styles, but plays original songs aiming to showcase a contemporary voice. . . . Though the players’ instrumental chops are in evidence, Cricket’s self-titled debut LP, released last year, is very much a song-based affair. The child of an Italian-American and an Indonesian immigrant, [fiddler and songwriter Andrea] Asprelli makes no claims to austere authenticity beyond the honesty of her own creative voice. But her contemporary spin on inherited forms is very much part of the American musical tradition. Jeremy Goodwin, The Boston Globe
  • [Asprelli’s] down-to-earth, unaffected vocal delivery is refreshing, and both Jeff Picker’s and Goldstein’s solo[s] will give you chills. New York Music Daily
  • . . .
  • I made the tactical error of inviting Monica Rizzio to share the stage with me at Symphony Hall and she went and stole the audience right out from under me! Monica is a talent to be reckoned with — she plays, writes, sings, puts it all together in a great performance AND captures it all in the studio. If some of these songs don’t give you goosebumps you should go straight to the ER. Tom Rush
  • Monica Rizzio’s songs feel both rustic and refined, and she delivers them in a compelling voice that’s equal parts tenderness and sass. She reminds me of a slightly duskier Nanci Griffith. Mark Erelli

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