SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 11, 2010
8:00pm
JAY UNGAR & MOLLY MASON
With special guest
MATT BROWN
$25 ($22 members)

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The Hurdy Gurdy Folk Music Club is extremely proud to kickoff our 30th season with Jay Ungar & Molly Mason. Jan and Molly achieved international acclaim when their performance of Jay’s composition, Ashokan Farewell, became the musical hallmark of Ken Burns’ The Civil War on PBS. The soundtrack won a Grammy and Ashokan Farewell was nominated for an Emmy. The piece was originally inspired by Jay & Molly’s Ashokan Fiddle & Dance Camps in New York’s Catskill Mountains, which are still going strong today.

Jay and Molly are musicians of enormous talent who draw their repertoire and inspiration from a wide range of American musical styles—19th-century classics, lively Appalachian, Cajun, and Celtic fiddle tunes, and favorites from the golden age of country and swing—along with their own songs, fiddle tunes, and orchestral compositions.

In recent years, Jay and Molly have reached an ever widening audience through their appearances on Great Performances, A Prairie Home Companion, their own public radio specials, and through their work on film soundtracks such as Brother’s Keeper, Legends of the Fall, and a host of Ken Burns’ PBS documentaries. They’ve had the honor of performing at the White House for two sitting Presidents and continue to tour extensively delighting audiences across the country.

Opening the evening will be Matt Brown, an engaging performer of American roots music. An accomplished­ multi-instrumentalist and singer, he performs toe-tapping square dance tunes, haunting banjo pieces, and a variety of songs from the blues to ballads. Thanks to a banjo-playing father, Matt grew up with roots music; attending festivals and listening to recordings of the early string bands. He began violin lessons on his fourth birthday, and was soon playing fiddle tunes on the instrument. He added the guitar and banjo in his teens, and started singing soon thereafter. He has had a number of influential mentors, including David Holt, Dirk Powell, Ginny Hawker, Bruce Molsky, Paul Brown (no relation), Charles Williams, Tracy Schwarz, Dick Swain, and Bruce Greene.

Matt tours nationally as a solo artist and has performed at a variety of prestigious venues, including Millennium Stage at The Kennedy Center, Club Passim, the Annenberg Center, the Philadelphia Folk Festival, The Wheatland Music Festival, The Appalachian String Band Music Festival ("Clifftop"), The New England Folk Festival, and on Jay Ungar & Molly Mason's radio program, Dancing on the Air.