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Glenn Weiser

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Glenn Weiser

Gift Guide: Folk, Blues, Bluegrass and Celtic

by Glenn Weiser December 6, 2012

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Given that vintage guitars, mandolins, and banjos are pretty pricey as Christmas gifts, the next best thing you can give a roots music fan are CDs of people playing them well as they sing blues, ...

Annie and the Hedonists

by Glenn Weiser November 8, 2012

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Three men of a certain age in Hawaiian shirts and a woman in a purple dress peer out at you from the CD cover, their upright index fingers pressed to their lips enjoining silence. That’s ...

Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival

by Glenn Weiser August 2, 2012

Sunny weather, temperatures in the 80s, and music to die for greeted bluegrass fans last Saturday at Grey Fox in the foothills of the northern Catskills. The four-day multistage concert is the top annual acoustic-music ...

Old Songs Festival

by Glenn Weiser June 28, 2012

This year, Old Songs picked the Mayan calendar to put on its commemorative festival T-shirts. The choice of the ancient circular bas-relief, which some say predicts global doom by fixing the end of time at ...

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Furthur

by Glenn Weiser November 22, 2011

“Furthur,” read the destination sign over the windshield of Ken Kesey’s psychedelically painted school bus in the 1960s. Now it’s name of the band who carry the mantle of the Grateful Dead, who were the ...

Landing on the Back Porch

by Glenn Weiser October 27, 2011

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Doc Watson’s dazzling bluegrass guitar. A harmonica-playing older brother tragically struck down in his youth. A midlife notion to play string bass. These three inspirations led to the unlikely combination of the Doornails: flatpicking guitarist ...

Roger McGuinn

by Glenn Weiser September 15, 2011

Roger McGuinn was perhaps the leading architect of the 1960s folk-rock sound. When the purists of Greenwich Village disdained his attempts in the mid-’60s to blend folk songs with pop rhythms, he headed to Los ...

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Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival

by Glenn Weiser July 20, 2011

At the Grey Fox Bluegrass Fest-ival, the annual four-day blue-ribbon acoustic music event in the Catskills, Saturday’s weather begrudged the attendees a warm, sunny day, and the lineup was one of the best in years. ...

Jake Shimabukuro

by Glenn Weiser July 13, 2011

Jake Shimabukuro was just anoth-er Hawaiian kid strumming easy tunes on the ukulele until a friend gave him a video of a Van Halen concert. Seeing a guitar god in all his glory drove him ...

Old Songs Festival

by Glenn Weiser June 29, 2011

Geordie MacIntyre, a thin, 60ish-looking singer of Lowland Scottish ballads, surveyed the heavens from the Dutch Barn stage at the Altamont Fairgrounds shortly after noon on Saturday and eloquently ...

Ramblin’ Jack Elliott

by Glenn Weiser May 25, 2011

Caffe Lena wasn’t Ramblin’ Jack Elliott’s first rodeo, that’s for sure. Long before he debuted at the storied folk establishment in 1963, Elliot Charles Adnopoz, the Brooklyn-born son of a Jewish doctor, ran away from ...

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Del Rey and Suzy Thompson

by Glenn Weiser April 20, 2011

The two women on the stage of Caffe Lena last Friday were a study in contrasts. Seattle native Del Rey, a masterful fingerstyle guitarist and ukuleleist, was tall and statuesque in ...

Leo Kottke

by Glenn Weiser March 9, 2011

The fingerstyle guitar instrumental is a tradition going back to the 19th century, when ladies sat in parlors playing semi-classical pieces like “Spanish Fandango” and “The Siege of Sebastopol.” In 1959 ...

The Egg

Funnin’ Around

by Glenn Weiser January 26, 2011

Gravitas? Not these guys. They have no use for it. They laugh, and the world laughs with them. More than anyone else, The Wiyos, a Hudson Valley-based trio of madcap musicians, can lay claim to ...

An Old Hand

by Glenn Weiser August 4, 2010

Doc Watson, the seven-time Grammy winning traditional country musician from North Carolina, is among America’s most influential guitarists. Discovered playing a Les Paul in 1960 by folklorist Ralph Rinzler, Doc (Arthel, his given name, was ...

You Can Pick Your Friends

by Glenn Weiser January 28, 2010

Rev. Gary Davis, the blind guitarist and street singer who influenced a generation of 1960s folk musicians, was remembered Sunday night at the Egg by two of his former pupils, instrumental ace David Bromberg and ...

Five Alive

by Glenn Weiser January 21, 2010

It’s not the presence of the cello that makes Crooked Still, the brilliant, youthful bluegrass quintet originally from Boston, so unusual. After all, Nancy Blake first used that instrument to back up her husband Norman’s ...