SATURDAY APRIL 3, 2010
8:00pm
THE WOODS TEA COMPANY
With special guest MIKE AGRANOFF
$20 ($17 members)

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Wood's Tea Company is a musical group that defies categorization. Established in 1981, Woods Tea Company has played from pubs to Lincoln Center. They perform bluegrass, Celtic tunes, sea chanties, and folk songs with an equal ease and skill. In concert, the group draws on a wide variety of musical experience and expression. They employ as many as a dozen different instruments from banjos, bouzoukis and bodhrans, guitars, ukelele and hammered dulcimer.

The Vermont based group tours the country offering a mixture of lively and dry New England humor. The award winning band has been featured at Lincoln Center, The Chautauqua Institute, National Public Radio and on over 150 public television stations throughout the U.S.A.

The Woods Tea Co. suffered two tragic deaths within one year. In October 2006, a motorcycle accident claimed the life of fiddle player Chip Chase, and on August 15, 2007, Rusty Jacobs, the groupsʼ founder, died of a heart attack. The group has announced that singer/songwriter extraordinaire, Patti Casey has become the seventh permanent member of the Woods Tea Co. since 1981. Patti has appeared live on "A Prairie Home Companion" with Garrison Keillor, has won Texasʼs prestigious Kerrville Folk Festival New Folk songwriter's competition, and was a winner of the Chris Austin Songwriting Contest at the
legendary Merlefest in Wilkesboro, North Carolina. Patti also brings her skills on the guitar, penny whistle, flute and is a French-Canadian Clogger.



The Woods Tea Company displays a unique style of audience rapport and music that features rich vocal harmonies leaves everyone smiling. “Our goal every night is to please the audience,” says bandleader Howard Wooden. “I love it when someone comes up and says, ʻThey dragged me here tonight, but I had a great time!ʼ”



Opening the evening will be New Jersey folk music icon Mike Agranoff. What Mike does as a folk musician is a rather difficult question to answer. He plays a superb fingerstyle guitar in idioms ranging from ancient harp tunes to obscure Tin-Pan-Alley compositions. His concertina arrangements of music by anyone from Bach to Berryman's may be haunting, complex, exciting, but are, above all, musical. A performance might include a song of heart-stopping emotional impact, a Scott Joplin piano rag, an acapella Irish patter song sung to the melody of a mile-a-minute fiddle tune, a rivetting recitation in the style of Robert Service, and some of the most horrible parodies in the English speaking world. Whatever else he does, Mike puts a lie to the notion that folk music is boring.