American Acoustic: Punch Brothers I Watchhouse featuring Sarah Jarosz
Doors Open: 4:30 PM
Punch Brothers are mandolinist Chris Thile, guitarist Chris Eldridge, bassist Paul Kowert, banjoist Noam Pikelny, and violinist Gabe Witcher. Their accolades include a Grammy® for Best Folk Album for their 2018 release, All Ashore, and praise from the media, including The Washington Post, which said, "With enthusiasm and experimentation, Punch Brothers take bluegrass to its next evolutionary stage, drawing equal inspiration from the brain and the heart."
In November of 2020, when the world felt so full of uncertainty, Punch Brothers did the one thing that they could rely on: they stood in a circle, facing one another, and made music. A weeklong recording session, after quarantining and minimal rehearsal aside from a few Zoom calls, had culminated in their new record, Hell on Church Street -- a reimagining of Bluegrass great Tony Rice's landmark album, Church Street Blues -- out on Nonesuch in January 2022. Hell on Church Street is a potent work by a band realizing their own powers and returning to the foundations of their music.
Watchhouse (formerly Mandolin Orange):
With harmonies so easy they sound like kitchen-table talk, Andrew and Emily sail through “New Star,” an ode to the self-sacrifice and renewal of trying to create something, like a child, that might make the world better. Revolutionary kindness, social responsibility, collective understanding: These simple but staggering ideas are the unseen threads of Watchhouse, a miraculous expression of measured domestic protest. In our era of recalcitrant typecast sand incessant cultural churn, it is rare to witness anyone press ahead into the unknown while holding fast to what’s best about their past, too. That’s what Watchhouse have done with their self-titled debut. Emily and Andrew have discarded neither their tenderness nor thoughtfulness; instead, they’ve enriched those essential qualities by submitting to the risks of new sounds, structures, and inputs. They’ve embraced surprising notions that make their steadfastness stronger.
Sarah Jarosz, already a four-time Grammy Award-winner and ten-time nominee at the age of thirty, is a Texas native who started singing as a young girl; she became an accomplished multi-instrumentalist by her early teens. After releasing her full-length debut Song Up in Her Head at eighteen years old, she went on to deliver such critically lauded albums as Follow Me Down, Build Me Up from Bones, and Undercurrent, in addition to joining forces with Sara Watkins and Aoife O’Donovan to form I’m With Her. Jarosz’s fifth studio album, World on the Ground, produced by John Leventhal, won a Grammy award for Best Americana Album. In 2021, she released the Grammy-nominated Blue Heron Suite, a song cycle that she composed after receiving the FreshGrass Composition Commission. She will continue to tour in 2022 in support of both releases.
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Woodland Park Zoo will comply with the applicable county and state public health mandates effective at the time of the concerts; if applicable, details will be available on the website closer to the concert dates.