Reverend Peytons Big Damn Band

The Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band has performed in 38 countries and 48 states. They have been featured in Rolling Stone Magazine, Living Blues, Elmore, donned the cover of Vintage Guitar Magazine, have been #1 on the Billboard, iTunes and Sirius XM Blues Charts and have been nominated for three Blues Music Awards by the Blues Foundation in Memphis. The Indianapolis Star listed Reverend Peyton as one of the top 25 Hoosier musicians of all time.   Maybe you found the band because of virtuosic guitar playing? Maybe you came for the tent revival style live show? The reasons that brought you here could be extensive, but the reasons that keep bringing people back are HEART. Real, from the heart, music made by people who love music. The Sacramento Bee said, “It’s a group with boundless stockpiles of heart to spare — it cascades throughout every slip-n-slide vintage blues/soul ditty they tear through and croon in every show they play, and they always leave a little behind. The front porch is the church, the church is the dance hall and the dance hall is the river bank — your knees will fail you by the time you figure it all out.”   Often called, "the greatest front-porch blues band in the world" the Big Damn Band is led by Reverend Peyton, who is considered to be the premier finger pickers playing today. Rev has earned a reputation as both a singularly compelling performer and a persuasive evangelist for the rootsy, country blues styles that captured his imagination early in life and inspired him and his band to make pilgrimages to Clarksdale, Mississippi to study under such blues masters as T-Model Ford, Robert Belfour and David “Honeyboy” Edwards. Accompanied by Rev’s wife, the washboard virtuoso, Washboard Breezy Peyton, and kept on time by the deep rhythms of Jacob “The Snakob” Powell, Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band will leave you clapping, stomping, and singing along every handmade show across the world.   Their new record “Honeysuckle” was produced and recorded by Reverend Peyton and mixed by six time Grammy winner Vance Powell (Chris Stapleton, Jack White). The record features many special guests including gospel music group The McCrary Sisters on the song “Manger”, Blues Music Hall of Famer and Grammy nominated harmonica player Billy Branch who plays on the Blind Lemon Jefferson song “Nell (Prison Cell Blues)”, Grammy award winning and IBMA's 10-time Fiddle Player of the Year Michael Cleveland plays on "Freeborn Man" and Colton Crawford from The Dead South plays banjo on "The Good Die Young"    "This record is a bit of a return to my roots, a very personal mix of old and new songs that shaped me or that I’m currently shaping. It’s the most acoustic record we’ve made in years, vintage microphones, vintage guitars, vintage recording gear, and alot of me and my national guitar. There is a smattering of Big Damn Band thrown into the mix to spice things up, and a short list of legends that I’ve always dreamed of collaborating with", said Reverend Peyton.

Joshua Redman

Joshua Redman is one of the most acclaimed and charismatic jazz artists to have emerged in the decade of the 1990s.  Born in Berkley, California, he is the son of legendary saxophonist Dewey Redman and dancer Renee Shedroff and an alumnus of the jazz studies program at Berkley High School.  After graduating from Harvard College, Redman was accepted by Yale Law  School in 1991, but postponed his entrance for one year to satisfy a growing desire to pursue music.  Four months later, Redman's instincts were validated when he was named the winner of the Thelonious Monk International Saxophone Competition by a panel of judges comprised of Jimmy Heath, Branford Marsalis, Frank Wess, the late Benny Carter and the late Jackie McClean.Now fully committed to a career in the arts, Redman was quickly signed by Warner Bros. Records and issued his first, self-titled album in 1993, where he was featured on tenor saxophone.  That same year saw the release of Wish, where Redman was joined by an all-star supporting cast of Pat Metheny, Charlie Haden and the late Billy Higgins.  His next recording,  MoodSwing, introduced his first permanent band, which included three other young artists who have gone on to make their mark in the jazz world: pianist Brad Mehldau,  bassist Christian McBride and drummer Brian Blade.  Over a series of celebrated recordings including Spirit of the Moment/Live at the Village Vanguard, Freedom in the Groove and Timeless Tales (for Changing Times), Redman established himself as one of the music's most consistent and successful bandleaders, and added soprano and alto saxophones to his instrumental arsenal.  His second acclaimed quartet, featuring pianist Aaron Goldberg, bassist Reuben Rogers and drummer Gregory Hutchinson, made its debut on Redman's 2000 album Beyond, and is also featured performing the saxophonist's first extended composition on the 2001 disc Passage of Time.A year later,  Redman channeled his jazz sensibilities through electric instrumentation and formed a new trio, the Joshua Redman Elastic Band, with keyboard player Sam Yahel and drummer Brian Blade, building on an ongoing collaboration with Yahel.  The trio debuted on the 2003 release, Elastic, which was met with widespread critical and popular acclaim, and released a second recording the same year under the moniker Yaya3.  In a subsequent Elastic Band recording, Momentum, released in 2005 to inaugurate his affiliation with Nonesuch Records,   Redman alternated Blade on drums with Jeff Ballard, and the recording also featured an array of guest artists as Redman continued his exploration into the arena of electric jazz.In addition to his own projects, Redman has been heard with an array of musicians including Ray Brown, Dave Brubeck, Chick Corea, Lionel Hampton, Roy Haynes, Milt Jackson, Elvin Jones, Quincy Jones, Joe Lovano, Marcus Miller, Paul Motian, Dianne Reeves, McCoy Tyner and Cedar Walton.  He provided the music for the film Vanya on 42nd Street and is both seen and heard in the Robert Altman film Kansas City.  Redman will release a new Nonesuch album in January 2009 entitled Compass, with a newly-formed double trio of Brian Blade and Larry Grenadier on drums, and Gregory Hutchinson and Reuben Rogers on bass.

Bob Schneider and Rhett Miller

Bob Schneider has reigned as a de facto king of the Austin music scene for a couple of decades now, and while no one stays on top forever, the man shows no signs of decay in quality or creativity. Schneider is the city’s genius chameleon, mixing pop, hip-hop, folk and biting humor with essential melodies and bloody brilliant lyrics. His joys and heartbreaks, laid bare in song, help us understand our own. Schneider has been a recording artist for 25 years, putting out his first record (“Party Till You’re Dead”) in 1991 as frontman for Joe Rockhead, a funk-rock combo in the vein of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. That band was followed by his best-known group, Ugly Americans, which toured with the Dave Matthews Band and Big Head Todd and the Monsters. Ugly Americans was a kind of alt-rock supergroup, with former members of Cracker, Poi Dog Pondering and Mojo Nixon’s band. Schneider also fronted a full-on funk ensemble that played around Austin in the late 1990s called The Scabs, at the same time he was establishing himself as a solo artist. His first solo project, “Songs Sung and Played on Guitar at the Same Time,” came out in 1998, and he’s gone on to record an almost inconceivably diverse and eclectic array of songs since then, with his work making it onto the soundtracks of seven major motion pictures (and one indie film). All told, Schneider has been the singer and main songwriter on nearly 30 studio albums, and he has been named Musician of the Year six times at the Austin Music Awards. Considering the renowned strength of the music scene in Austin, that’s saying something. His artistry coupled with his movie-star looks and boyish charm makes it a wonder he’s not a household name around the rest of the country the way he is in Austin. His prodigious musical output is a result of a songwriting challenge group he started 16 years ago while touring. At first, the challenge was to write one song a day, and the people doing the writing were on the tour bus with him. They’d come up with a title each morning and at the end of the day play the songs they came up with for each other. The pace of the songwriting challenge has eased up substantially since its beginnings, going to one song a week, but the scope of the participation in the group has widened to include a lot of widely known musicians. “We’ve had lots of famous folks in the game from time to time, but they usually don’t last very long,” Schneider says. “The exception would be Jason Mraz, who has been in the game on and off for six or seven years and is one of the most consistent songwriters in the group. Very talented and will always turn a song in. At the end of the day, though, I really only have the group as a motivation to get me to write a song each week. Otherwise, a month might go by without writing anything and that would be a shame.” The past few years, Schneider has grouped the songs he’s written in a year under an album title, just to kind of keep track of when they were written. Titles for recent years have included “Here’s the Deal,” “The Ever Increasing Need to Succeed,” “Into the Great Unknown” and “Mental Problems.” This year’s theme (and the name of his current concert tour) is “The Practical Guide to Everything.” Schneider has a fantastic website where fans can listen to all of the songs from the three fivesong “King Kong Suite” EPs he released last year, with humorous commentary from Schneider himself between songs. The website also has the 10 videos he created for “King Kong” songs using public-domain found footage, including the menacing “Black Mountain” video that culls scenes from Francis Ford Coppola’s directorial debut. The website also offers a chance to stream his regular Monday evening shows at Austin’s Saxon Pub. “The Saxon Pub shows are unique in the fact that I play a lot of material there that I don’t play anywhere else,” Schneider explains. “New stuff that I wrote that week or in the last few weeks. Really old material that we haven’t played in a while. I hardly play any of the stuff that you’ll hear on the road, which is a mix of the best of everything. The best new material alongside the best of my last 20 years of writing songs.” …He has an almost Dylanesque reputation for keeping things fresh, with shows so different from one another that for years he [has] recorded every show and…[sold] copies for people to purchase right after the show. “I play a lot of cities twice a year, and I like the fact that a lot of my fans will come see me play every time I come to town, knowing that I’ll be playing material they’ve never seen me perform and might not ever perform again,” Schneider says. “I don’t have any of the banter planned either, so that stuff is usually unique to that night as well. It keeps things fresh for me and allows me to play crowd favorites that I’ve been playing for years, but still makes the whole thing feel new overall for me and hopefully for the audience.”

Bloomington Symphony Orchestra - Between Friends

Bloomington Symphony Orchestra - Between Friends

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