Steep Canyon Rangers w/Steve Martin & Edie Brickell NYC 6/25/13

[Ronny Stecher]

Beautiful "Bluegrass" at The Town Hall in Times Square, NYC. Nice!!! The Steep Canyon Rangers with Steve Martin & Edie Brickell brought their "B" game to NYC on 6/25 and what a gorgeous musical offering it is. The vocals were shared and harmony laden. Woody sings the lion's portion of the SCR's vocals and Steve sings a few offsetting Edie's brunt of the new disc's material. They play a good mix of new and old material including some nice instrumentals.

The SCR's infuse the richest tones from the bluegrass platforms to the barbershops to the A cappella street corners. They rival some of our finest vocal groups from across the genres. The vocals are tight, accentuating, & complimentary. The band could carry the stage without their "celebrities" to pun one of the many Martin tossed in jokes.

The new disc by Steve Martin & Edie Brickell w/the SCR is well represented in the show. It's soft yet solid with a "meant to be" feel and flow to it. It has great depth with the variety of strings involved and that also makes it home run live for me. Edie has a beautiful calmness that flows in her vocals.

Nicky can dominate the leads and fills on fiddle and man he does it well. Mike on mando & Graham on banjo do well with their face time spots, but Steve is the "banjo boy" for the most part displaying his longtime love of the instrument. He interweaves his quips between songs and it's a crowd pleaser. I saw him recently and heard some 15% of the material and still laughed with the crowd's response. Charles III brings the low end on stand up bass. Woody also handles the acoustic playing for the band. Much of the percussion is chops on either the violin or mando, but small spots has a sit-in percussionist (sorry not sure?)contributing on everything from hand claps, drum kits, & wood blocks. It's a complete offering with musicianship being my personal high, it's a full sound of quality Americana. See these folks if you can, Great stuff!



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[Ronny Stecher]

Nice lil' video....

http://gardenandgun.com/media/back-porch-session-steep-canyon-rangers

[TonyP]

thank you so much for the video link! That was great. It points up what I've always loved about this band. How they can have original material that's so accessible. Somehow new, but familiar enough to love it at first hearing.

This vid should be a must watch to all who are trying to do minimum PA with LDC's and no monitors. It totally points out how just a little bit away from the mic, and turn your head, and the vocals fall back enough as to not be present enough to catch the words. This is vitally important as most are trying hard to hear the story, and when you lose the vocals, you lose the story. Overall this was a real gem of a vid, I'm fwd'ing to all I pick with. If I was going to pick which band I'd most like to emulate, it would be SCR. I say emulate, not copy. SCR has taken over where Nashville Bluegrass Band used to be for me. Way to go boys.