FolkWest | Late Night Stage Lineup | Home of the Four Corners Folk Festival

We've got big improvements in store for the festival late night stage this year, all designed to maximize the quality of the event for everyone. On Friday and Saturday (see schedule below), we're adding a venue to the festival and taking the show indoors to the Ross Aragon Community Center, located just below Reservoir Hill on Hot Springs Blvd. The facility holds 500 people in a dry and warm environment, complete with hot and cold running water and flush toilets.

The stage, sound and lights will be on par with the quality of the main stage and the indoor setting will allow our musicians to keep their hands nice and warm - all the better for smokin' hot performances!

We'll have Breckenridge brew on tap and the Pagosa Baking Company will have coffee and treats available. And best of all, the festival shuttle will run continuously between Reservoir Hill and the Community Center until 30 minutes after the last late night set. An on-site camping wristband will be required for shuttle service back to Reservoir Hill after the main stage music ends each day.

Late Night Schedule
Performances take place at the Ross Aragon Community Center

Friday, September 3
Open to on-site camping; 3-day and Friday-only passholders.

Saturday, September 4
Open to on-site camping; 2-day; 3-day and Saturday-only passholders.

Caravan of Thieves create fun yet elegant compositions that embody the spirit and swing of early gypsy jazz but with plenty of witty, inventive lyrics and vocal harmonies to serenade the listener. Fiery violin arrangements, thumping upright bass and rhythmic acoustic guitar spanking counteract the sweet, melodic, harmonious male/female vocals of Fuzz and Carrie.
Within their first year together, Caravan of Thieves managed to win immediate praise for their new and unique brand of alt gypsy acoustic music and their theatrical high intensity show. During that time the quartet found themselves performing in premiere venues around the country with world renowned artists such as Dan Hicks, Tony Trischka, Tom Tom Club, Menudo, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Trout Fishing in America and Ryan Montbleau Band. Caravan successfully connected with audiences on each of these diverse and at times, odd fitting bills proving the music to be a hit with folk, pop, rock and jazz appreciators alike as well as all age groups. This became evident when in only ten months they went from support act to selling out their first headline show.

Also in that first year and in a fit of creativity, the group wrote, recorded and released their debut full length album, “Bouquet” featuring 12 original compositions. They worked with producer Keith "Touch" Saunders and mastering engineer, Joe Lambert (B-52’s, Bright Eyes, Animal Collective, R. Kelly) to achieve the ‘timeless’ sound they were envisioning and the recording also includes a guest appearance from accordion player Bruce Martin (Tom Tom Club). To accompany this collection of dramatic and comical short stories, they built an interactive stage set of percussive junk which delivers the audiences directly into the wild, imaginative minds of Fuzz and Carrie and the Caravan of Thieves.

Comprised of Fuzz and Carrie Sangiovanni, the singers and acoustic guitar players, Ben Dean the violinist and Brian Anderson the double bassist, this ragtag cast of characters converge from vastly different backgrounds in folk, pop, classical, jazz and rock. Fuzz (who has spent the past thirteen years touring the world with funk and dance groups such as Tom Tom Club and Deep Banana Blackout) teamed up with Carrie in 2004 to create an acoustic duo and their full band Rolla together. In those early years they developed their songwriting and vocal harmonizing skills together, released two records and played hundreds of shows around the country. As their vision developed, the couple knew they needed to expand their palette and in early 2008 recruited Brian, who had toured previously in his experimental jazz trio Raisin Hill as well as Ben who had studied jazz and classical violin since an early age and performed in a variety of ensembles, bands and orchestras around Connecticut.

Purveyors of the nu-folk, bluegrass movement, Crooked Still are equal parts ambassador and innovators as evidenced on their newest release Some Strange Country released on May 18th on Signature Sounds. The musical prowess of this defiantly non-traditional bluegrass quintet is on display as radically re-imagined traditional fare blends seamlessly alongside four original compositions and a surprising take on the Rolling Stones’ “You Got The Silver”.

For their fourth effort, Crooked Still were snowed into the studio with Grammy award winning producer and engineer Gary Paczosa (Alison Krauss and Union Station, Tim O’Brien, Dolly Parton) in Charlottesville, Virginia. The isolation left little room for distraction and fueled more ambitious collaboration – quasi-orchestral string arrangements,
and unique vocal distortion techniques. Special guest vocalists include Ricky Skaggs, Tim O’Brien, Sarah Jarosz, and Annalisa Tornfelt.

On Some Strange Country, Crooked Still has honed in on their unique refraction of roots music, recording their most personal, visionary album yet. “The music is not just ‘alternative bluegrass’ or whatever people used to call it,” Brittany Haas remarks. “It’s at another level now: artful, but still grounded in that funky, string band thing.”

Some Strange Country is expansive yet intimate – a powerful document of five distinct musical voices working in concert to explore and redefine their relationship to tradition.

Three‐time International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA) award-winning band and Sugar Hill recording artist The Infamous Stringdusters hit the road this summer to deliver their unique bluegrass acoustic show to audiences across the country. Though the band is rooted in the traditions of bluegrass, fans can always expect to hear a mix of country, bluegrass and free form improvisations that help make every show a one‐of‐a‐kind experience. The band performs with such virtuosity and energy that they are equally as comfortable performing in a sit down performing arts center as they are in a standing‐room only rock club, and they relish this diversity in their performances. With a solid repertoire of original songs compiled from their two Sugar Hill albums, plus new songs and a constantly changing set list the band continues to pick up new fans each stop they make.

The Infamous Stringdusters’ genesis can be traced back to 2002, when Andy Hall, Chris Pandolfi, and original guitarist Chris Eldridge met in Boston. They knew they had musical chemistry, but their lives were too out of synch to start a band until they all found themselves in Nashville in 2004. By then, Hall had been in the band of acclaimed bluegrass singer and songwriter Ronnie Bowman, where he met Jeremy Garrett and Jesse Cobb. Together, this newly‐formed alliance of superpickers searched for the right bass player, who wound up being Travis Book, a product of the Colorado jamgrass scene. The departure of Eldridge in 2007 led to the addition of Andy Falco, whose blues‐infused style perfectly complemented the Stringdusters sound. Falco joined the Stringdusters in the late summer, and according to bassist/vocalist Travis Book, “It ended up giving the band a lift I don’t think anybody anticipated. It was almost like the sails finally filled up completely.” That same year the band released their debut album, Fork in the Road, through Sugar Hill Records.

The band’s sophomore release (June 2008) through Sugar Hill Records, self‐titled The Infamous Stringdusters, feels like an introduction of a sort. Whereas Fork in the Road was made during their first potent months together, this album displays the band’s evolution during two years of intense touring, meticulous woodshedding and brotherly jamming. It’s their first record with accomplished guitarist Andy Falco, whose blues‐infused licks and stunning virtuosity has added a new facet to the band’s musical personality. It’s the first producer Tim O’Brien, a Grammy‐winning musician who has pioneered and embodied the progressive school of roots and bluegrass that underlies the Stringdusters sound. It also features nine band originals supplemented by a few carefully chosen tunes from colleagues in the acoustic music community.

The Infamous Stringdusters continue to tear up the road relentlessly, hitting some of the biggest festivals in acoustic music like StageCoach, and jamming on major stages with heroes like David Grisman, Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, Del McCoury and Jack Black. Catch the spirit and their newest songs at one of these upcoming tour dates.

The John Jorgenson Quintet features guitarist John Jorgenson, a founding member of the Desert Rose Band, the Hellecasters, and six-year member of Elton John's band. Artists ranging from Barbra Streisand to Bonnie Raitt to Earl Scruggs have sought out Jorgenson's guitar work. Recently, John Jorgenson was chosen to portray Django Reinhardt in the feature film Head in the Clouds.

John Jorgenson is known as one of the pioneers of the American gypsy jazz movement. He has performed as a solo artist as well as collaborated with other musicians all over the world. His articles and lessons on gypsy jazz have appeared in prominent guitar magazines and he has given master classes around the country, and he has performed with some of the most respected European proponents of this style, Bireli Lagrene and Romane. His playing has been included on a CD with Babik Reinhardt and Jimmy Rosenberg, and on another featuring Angelo Debarre and Moreno. In 1988 Curb Records released Jorgenson's After You've Gone CD, a collection of Reinhardt- and Goodman-styled 30's swing, featuring guest artists Darol Anger and David Grisman.

At a John Jorgenson Quintet performance, audiences are amazed by John's dazzling guitar work as well as his mastery as a clarinet player and vocalist. Whether playing his own accessible compositions or classic standards, John and his band make music that is equally romantic and ecstatic, played with virtuosity and soul.

MilkDrive, the Austin alt-folk-progressive acoustic string band, actually got its start in the northern climes of Idaho, where principal songwriter-multi-instrumentalist Noah Jeffries grew up playing bluegrass and gospel in his family's family band and started writing amazing tunes at age 14. The first band he put together, 36 String Swing, toured the state as Jeffries studied jazz performance at Boise State University.

Jeffries moved to Austin and moved in with fiddling champion-mandolin player Dennis Ludiker -- a member of South Austin Jug Band that Jeffries had met long ago when both were competing in the National Old-time Fiddle Contest in Weiser, Idaho -- as well as the young Brian Beken, who would also ultimately join the band.

Jeffries began recording his own tunes under the name The Noah Jeffries Project and then with Ludiker, the duo trading duties on guitar, mandolin, fiddle and bass on an underground demo called "BoLth on the Rampage." Soon after, Beken, fiddler for South Austin Jug Band and The Gougers and a multi-instrumentalist himself, joined the band so it could perform live.

With the addition of Matt Mefford on bass, the band was complete and became MilkDrive. It released its debut CD in June 2009, MILKDRIVE LIVE '09, with arrangements described as "impeccable" and picking so fast it's "unbelievable."

Ludiker won the 2009 RockyGrass Mandolin Contest and holds fiddling championship titles from the 2009 and 2008 Texas State-Fiddlers Frolics, 2002 Walnut Valley Music Festival and 2001 Washington State Open. Beken was 2004 Texas Flatpick Guitar Champion. Jeffries won a Lionel Hampton International Jazz Festival Jazz Guitar Competition.

Awards are a great measure of technical prowess, but they reveal nothing about the musical soul so palpable in MilkDrive's music. The quartet's sound is a textural, multi-layer mix of rhythms, tempos, flavors, downbeats, improvisation — and it mixes well with the confidence each player possesses that comes from experience with an instrument.

Fingers flying at breathtaking speed, original tunes that feel familiar at first but go beyond extraordinary, heart and brains behind dynamic performances: It's an uncompromising musical journey the members of MilkDrive are on.