2018-19 Guide To Yellow Springs

21 Y e l l ow S p r i n g s N ews the Guide to YelLow Springs y 2018 - 1 9 y  A newgrass jam band musical melange  y By megan bachman Blend chucking mandolin, floating fiddle, lush guitar and plucked upright bass, add a splash of rich four-part vocal harmonies and season with a pinch of medieval chord progressions to taste. Simmered for seven years, it makes Blue Moon Soup. “The soup idea is that we’re a concoction of different ingredients — and we’re down to throw anything in at any time,” guitarist Justin Moon told the News in 2012. With music that sounds as good around a campfire as in a bar, Blue Moon Soup represents the next generation of blue - grass. In reflecting on the group’s growing suc - cess on the festival circuit, fiddler Robbie Marion tipped his hat to his Yellow Springs mentors. He learned fiddle at age 10 from Deborah Clark Colón of local Irish tradi- tional string duo Changeling. Meanwhile Brendan Moore, the mandolinist, came up in town playing with other local musicians, and taking notes from his father, jazz cor - netist Chris Moore and his mother, the late Christina Hess, a singer and guitarist for local Celtic band Heartstrings. Blue Moon Soup was officially formed by Moore and Marion in 2010, but the duo’s musical collaboration dates back to the McKinney Middle School orchestra and the Yellow Springs High School courtyard, where the two would play guitar at lunchtime. Moore progressed to playing loud rock through maxed-out amps in various base- ments around town, before stripping down to acoustic mandolin. Marion, meanwhile, trained in classical, bluegrass and Irish music, but now prefers to play the fiddle, not the violin, a distinction that Moore clarified. “They say the difference is you can spill beer on a fiddle,” Moore joked. The group also includes upright bassist Jon Baumann of Xenia and guitarist Moon, who lives in a rural area between Yellow Springs and Springfield. The band’s newest member is multi-instrumentalist Evan Lane. Nailing down the funky and folky sound of Blue Moon Soup is tough, especially when the group sees itself as separate from the recent folk-pop movement sparked by bands like Mumford & Sons and the Lumineers. As Marion says modestly, “we probably got into the bluegrass thing before this recent resurgence.” But Blue Moon Soup would be equally at home in the 1940s Appalachian bluegrass scene as they are in the 2010s indie-folk revival; they could hang with centuries-old Celtic traditional groups as well as 1960s jam bands, and would kill in 1930s gypsy jazz clubs as much as 1960s folk festivals. And since their older bluegrass fans may go to bed at an earlier hour, Blue Moon Soup has come to cater more to a young crowd that packs bar shows that start at 11 p.m. That has meant a move into a new subgenre called “newgrass” and towards a true jam band. In fact, while listing their influences, the band quickly dispenses with the Grateful Dead and banjoist Béla Fleck, name-drops mandolinist David Grisman, country and bluegrass legend Tim O’Brien and Irish folk musician Andy Irvine, and references the Beatles, the Band, Neil Young and Bob Dylan. Bringing those influences into the 21st century, Blue Moon Soup goes for Local four-piece string band Blue Moon Soup, shown here in 2012, is making a name for itself in the region with a sound that blends bluegrass, Celtic traditional, folk and pop. From left are Jon Baumann, Robbie Marion, former member Brendan Moore, and Justin Moon, with pitbull “Moon.” The current lineup also features multi-instrumentalist Evan Lane. high intensity in the vein of EDM — elec- tronic dance music — and soothes those fans’ digitally overburdened ears with real analog sounds. Their self-titled second album, released in 2013, spans bluegrass standards to Celtic ballads, an instrumental track featuring a Chinese pentatonic scale to a song with a Latin beat and claves. Songs reference crowns, 2,000-year-old curses and J.R.R. Tolkien characters; speak of natural elements like seas, mountains and stars and touch darker themes like death, murder and demons. Take “Mithrandir,” a sweet ballad using the “Lord of the Rings” character Gandalf’s elvish name: “So long! Until we meet again I’ll sing your song/ By the light of the moon I will find my way home/ Hold on, the riders cross the Brandywine at dawn/ And I must be away before the morning.” The album says many a goodbye and ref- erences many a quest, which seems fitting for the road-regular band that is making a name for itself far beyond the borders of Yellow Springs, far from the banks of the Little Miami. Blue Moon Soup released its third studio album, “Luna,” in 2015; they have numerus live albums available as well. 1 • Submitted photo by Suzy Perler Yellow Springs United Methodist Church Corner of Winter & Dayton Streets Established  Join us for   for all ages at : a.m. (Sept. through May only) and  at : a.m. (year-round) Church Office, - Pastor Rick Jones, -4-4 Chamber Music in Yellow Springs 2018–2019 Akropolis Reed Quintet Sunday, September 23, 2018 Attacca String Quartet Sunday, November 4, 2018 JACK Quartet Sunday, January 27, 2019 Seraph Brass Sunday, March 10, 2019 34th Annual Competition Finals for Emerging Professionals Sunday, April 28, 2019 First four concerts at 7:30 p.m., the Competition Finals at 4 p.m. in the First Presbyterian Church, 314 Xenia Avenue. Ticket information: 374-8800 www.cmys.org