Category: Folk Music

Michael Cleveland and Flamekeeper Set Stage Afire in Sounds of the Mountains at Yadkinville Arts Center

Flamekeeper is an apt name for the band of award-winning bluegrass fiddler Michael Cleveland. It’s a band on fire and a man on fire, for sure. In the first concert of the Sounds of the Mountains series’ eighth season, the musicians all played as if they were on fire or about to burst into flames.

The Sounds of the Mountains series is an inspired collaboration between the Willingham Theatre at the Yadkin Arts Council in Yadkinville and the Blue Ridge Music Center near Galax, Virginia. The Music Center holds concerts in its amphitheater May through September. By partnering with the Willingham Theatre, they can keep giving fans the great bluegrass and Americana music that they’re missing when it’s too cold for music out of doors.

Cleveland and Flamekeeper warmed the 30-degree night right up, as they kicked off the three-concert series with two sets of tunes that managed to be both nostalgic and avant-garde simultaneously. I promise you that Cleveland’s mind-blowing rendition of “Orange Blossom Special” opened up new pathways in my brain. I’ve never heard anything like it.

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Rhiannon Giddens Returns to Charlotte and Leaves Plenty of Music in the Air

Since the long-anticipated world premiere of her new opera, Omar, at Spoleto Festival USA back in May, composer-singer-instrumentalist Rhiannon Giddens has hopscotched the worlds of folk, jazz, and classical music. Her Spoleto apotheosis down in Charleston was embellished with a sit-down interview event and an outdoor concert with multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi, her collaborator on They’re Calling Me Home, the 2022 Grammy-Award-winner for Best Folk Album. Among Giddens’ many gigs since then, she has headlined at the San Francisco Jazz Festival and Carnegie Hall before entering downstage at Belk Theater for a rendezvous with the Charlotte Symphony and resident conductor Christopher James Lees. As you might presume of a MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient, Giddens is not easily pigeonholed.

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For a Last Holiday Gasp, Jamie Laval Stages Unexpectedly Colorful, Varied, & Multilingual “Celtic Christmas”

Unless you were already aware that Fiona Ritchie’s widely syndicated radio show The Thistle & Shamrock originated at WFAE on the UNC Charlotte campus in 1981, you might have been surprised to see that Jamie Laval‘s “Celtic Christmas: Music and Stories for the Deep Midwinter” attracted a capacity crowd at Booth Playhouse on Sunday evening. Yes, long before WFAE became mostly news and talk, Charlotte was the cradle of the most listened-to Celtic music program on earth. As a 2015 concert at the Aunt Stella Center showed – and the Booth sequel confirmed – Charlotte remains a hotbed of Celtic music fandom.

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