Joel Harrison Official Website | Joel Harrison on Facebook | Joel Harrison on Twitter |
Guitarist, composer, arranger, lyricist, vocalist and songwriter Joel Harrison has “created a new blueprint for jazz.” (New Orleans Times Picayune.) A Guggenheim Fellow (2010), and Chamber Music America, Meet the Composer, New Music USA, Jerome Foundation, NYSCA and Flagler Cary Trust commissioned composer, Harrison is a two-time winner of the Jazz Composer’s Alliance Composition Competition, and has appeared on the “Rising Star” Downbeat Magazine poll for many years.

His 20 releases as a leader showcase his prowess as a shapeshifting composer, including works for orchestra, string quartet, solo cello, and percussion, including the PASIC award-winning marimba solo Fear of Silence. Notable releases include Free Country featuring Norah Jones and David Binney, Infinite Possibility (for jazz orchestra), String Choir– Music of Paul Motian, and Search feat. Donny McCaslin. His buoyant, heartfelt, ever-surprising body of work seamlessly connects multiple American traditions. He was succinctly described by the New York Times, as “Protean…brilliant.”

Harrison is the founder and director of the Alternative Guitar Summit, a yearly festival devoted to new and unusual guitar music. Pat Metheny has called the Summit, “one of the most interesting and distinguished forums for guitar on the planet.”

The Messthetics on Bandcamp | The Messthetics on Facebook | The Messthetics on Twitter | The Messthetics on Instagram

The Messthetics is an instrumental trio formed by former Fugazi members bassist Joe Lally and drummer Brendan Canty with guitarist Anthony Pirog. Their intense music has been described as “jazz punk jam.” Pirog is one of the era’s leading guitarists combining jazz, punk, metal, skronk, country, and surf into an unholy whole.

Scott Metzger Official Website | Scott Metzger on Facebook | Scott Metzger on Twitter | Scott Metzger on Instagram
Scott has performed, recorded, and toured with acts including: John Mayer, Trixie Whitley, John Scofield, LaLa Brooks (of The Crystals), Phil Lesh (of The Grateful Dead), Warren Haynes, Shooter Jennings, Oteil Burbridge, Nels Cline, Marco Benevento, Anders Osborne, Amy Helm, and grammy winner Mike Farris among many others. He has performed extensively all over the United States, Europe, Japan, and Australia and has performed and recorded with projects of all genres, and is a first call player in many artists, producers, & engineers phone books. Appearances include The Montreux Jazz Festival (Switzerland), The Newport Folk Festival, The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, as well as famous and historic venues worldwide; Carnegie Hall, Ancient Belgique (Brussels, Belgium), Jazz at Lincoln Center, The Blue Note New York, The Ryman Auditorium, Red Rocks Amphitheater, The Fox Theatre Oakland, and Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Currently, Scott is a full time member of the critically acclaimed, increasingly popular Joe Russo’s Almost Dead, Bustle in Your Hedgerow, gypsy jazz influenced The Showdown Kids, and fronts the project WOLF! (Royal Potato Family Records), an instrumental guitar trio whose music has been featured on the hit television series Z-Nation.

Her voice, first. Amy Helm has a voice of a thousand ways, twists and turns, ascensions and intentions. It soars, flays, pleads, celebrates, guides, heals, teaches, and above all Amy Helm’s voice makes you feel. Her own emotion enables and encourages the lids and layers to come off your own, as you listen to her on a recording, or in performance. This alone would be enough; but Helm has been much more than a singer for a long time. After decades of practicing and perfecting her arts, Helm has shaped herself into a unique force, personality, and woman in the world of music—and the far wider world of all who love music.

Helm was born in Woodstock, New York, in December 1970. By the middle of the 20th century, Woodstock was the home to prominent and progressive musicians. One of them was Amy’s father, Levon Helm, whose voice and drums powered bands including the one that needed no other name than The Band. Levon’s father Diamond Helm, a self-taught Arkansas musician, encouraged his son and his son’s bandmates, too. Amy Helm’s mother, Libby Titus, is a singer-songwriter; Mack Rebennack, “Dr. John,” was Amy’s stepfather in the 1970s, and Donald Fagen of Steely Dan is Titus’s husband now. Helm’s first public performance was with Dr. John at the Lone Star in New York City when she was a child, singing harmony on “Come On Baby, Let the Good Times Roll.” Helm has shared a stage with them all, and chiefly with her father in his bands of the 1990s and 2000s. These are the rich roots from which a mighty and individual performer has come.

Amy Helm’s early days in ensembles, and learning from many artists, engendered in her two vast strengths: her capabilities as a performer, and her power as a collaborator and teacher. The blended talents of her New York City-based band Ollabelle, formed in 2001, show just how broad and deep Helm’s musical knowledge and abilities go. Helm works in rich and varied styles in the music she records, and makes. “Sing To Me,” the first song she wrote herself, is a perfect illustration of both her lyric and lyrical abilities. It is a slow air, a blues plea, a soul celebration, and a swinging, gently rocking stroll all at once.

Amy’s first solo albums, Didn’t It Rain (2015) and This Too Shall Light (2018), are a diptych, showing two views of a remarkable woman and what she can do. Her debut album was recorded at home in Woodstock, and in the company of bandmates and friends: Catherine Russell, Larry Campbell, Teresa Williams, Brian Mitchell, Elizabeth Mitchell, Daniel Littleton, Byron Isaacs, and more. For her second album, Helm went to Los Angeles and worked with Joe Henry, covering songs by artists as varied as Odetta, Rod Stewart, and Blossom Dearie, showcasing her own infinite vocal variety—and spreading her singing wings. What The Flood Leaves Behind (2021) combines the strengths fostered in Helm in the Hudson Valley, and by musicians she has known and performed with for decades, with her own increasingly formidable writing and singing. From “Verse 23,” psalm-based gospel gold written for Helm by M.C. Taylor of Hiss Golden Messenger, to “Terminal B,” her own sexy, kicky celebration of a mystery man in California, the whole record shows the triumphant path Helm is on now.

Catch her when you can, because Amy Helm is in constant motion these days. Writing and recording new songs, on the road again, organizing the annual Dirt Farmer music festival, and curating at Levon Helm Studios a monthly series of Midnight Rambles, she is a woman of seemingly boundless energy and passions. Asked what she wants from her career now, Helm replies, “I want what I think every artist wants at our core, continued creative expression as the ultimate freedom. To hold it because it’s our calling and our birthright.” That Helm is choosing, as she lives her life, to share that expression and freedom, to share her own birthright freely and gladly with so many others, is a benediction.