Next Stage Arts Project and Twilight Music present singer, guitarist, fiddler and banjo player Sam Amidon and his band at New England Youth Theatre on Wednesday, October 22 at 7:30 pm.
Sam Amidon grew up immersed in folk as part of a musical family based in Brattleboro, VT. His parents, Peter and Mary Alice Amidon, perform and teach traditional forms of song, dance and storytelling, and his brother Stefan plays drums with the Sweetback Sisters. Sam started on fiddle at the age of three and by eleven had formed a band called Popcorn Behavior, with childhood friend Thomas Bartlett and younger brother Stefan, to play New England fiddle tunes. They toured internationally, gathering attention from NPR, CNN and The Boston Globe, and released five albums. Sam’s first solo album, released in 2001, was a collection of traditional Irish fiddle tunes, simply titled “Solo Fiddle.”
Amidon’s subsequent albums of radically re-worked folk songs have included collaborations with Thomas Bartlett (with whom Amidon plays in Doveman) on “But This Chicken Proved False Hearted” in 2007, and composer Nico Muhly on “All Is Well” in 2008 and “I See the Sign” in 2010, both recorded in Iceland with producer Valgeir Sigurgsson.
“Lily-O,” Sam’s sixth studio release, consists of songs built around his music, with lyrics that he mined from obscure folk songs, some traditional and some that are more contemporary. What Sam had initially envisioned as an album based on the improvisational material that he and jazz guitar great Bill Frisell developed together a couple of years ago while touring as a duo, turned out to be a collection of distinctive, enveloping songs rooted in folk music. Recorded fully live in the studio, with virtually no overdubs, “Lily-O” features Frisell, Shahzad Ismaily on bass and Chris Vatalaro on drums and electronics, and has been called “a hauntingly beautiful new album” by The New York Times.
“Amidon has one of the most inviting voices around today…In bridging the very old and the very new on a handful of albums and collaborations, he has managed to meld the rural and the urban, the organic and the synthetic, the oral tradition and the written score.” – Pitchfork
New England Youth Theatre is located at 100 Flat Street in downtown Brattleboro, VT. Tickets are $18. For information, call 802-387-0102. Advance tickets are available at www.nextstagearts.org, Turn It Up in Brattleboro and Offerings Jewelry in Putney. For more information, visit www.samamidon.com, www.nextstagearts.org and www.twilightmusic.org.