Light the Fire: A Musical Welcome to Winter

Light the Fire: A Musical Welcome to Winter presents an evening of music to warm the heart and invite the soul in anticipation of colder, darker times. Celebrating the inspirational side of winter—realized in the musician’s retreat to the composing process and the practice room on dark winter nights—we feature original music by the John Depew Trio and the Fairy Jazz Orchestra in hopes of bringing the audience a new listening experience, which is also the aim of holding our concert in the welcoming theatrical space of the Wildflower Playhouse.

The John Depew Trio, our featured act, offers the music of one of the most innovative and energetic composers and performers on the current acoustic scene. John DePew’s music may have started life as bluegrass but it grew up to be something else entirely. With his virtuoso work on mandolin, banjo, and guitar, and his eerily original singing, John creates sonic landscapes jigsawed from far-reaching traditions and styles. The music has been called “prog-grass” and “chamber grass”; maybe it’s best called amazing. His brothers in The John Depew Trio—Taos’s own five-string banjo ace Peter Oviatt and bassist extraordinaire Jordan Hehl—share John’s virtuosity and weave an intricate cloth of harmony, rhythmic variation, and countermelody. It is a combination not to be missed in the intimate atmosphere of the Wildflower.

The Fairy Jazz Orchestra, the opening act, is an all-star cast of local musicians with Julie Hawley on harp, Jimmie Killingsworth on mandolin, Michael Mandrell on guitar, Minerals on tabla, Robert Quijano on guitar and bass, and Stephen Welter on guitar and bass. Like John Depew, we are known for genre busting and for mingling traditions from Celtic, Appalachian, jazz, americana, new age, and world music. In this show we feature our own song writing, which draws on the different traditions and occasionally explodes in new directions.

SHOWTIME
Sun, Dec 7, 7pm
$20

PRESENTED BY
Fairy Jazz Productions