Mike Pinto (21+ Event)

Big Richard (21+ Event)

Since exploding onto the Colorado scene in 2021, the four women of the supergroup Big Richard have been on a wild ride. Although they showed up to their first gig armed with homemade puff paint t-shirts, a load of crass jokes, and all dressed intentionally like Stevie Nicks, from the first few notes of their tight vocal harmonies, dazzling string virtuosity, and clever arrangements, no one had any choice but to take them seriously.  Determined to be more than a one-night stand, Big Richard hit the road. They slapped as hard as possible on the festival circuit, worked up their stamina on nationwide headlining tours, and left a wake of die-hard Big Richard Heads across the country swooning for their honest songwriting, chilling vocals, and fiddle-driven barn-burners.  Fueled by a steady diet of gas station snacks, Big Richard is currently touring their debut full-length studio album Girl Dinner, following a whirlwind year that included performances on PBS' the Cavern Sessions, NPR's World Cafe, Telluride Bluegrass Festival, Delfest, Bourbon and Beyond, Jam Cruise, and New Year's Eve at the Ryman in Nashville.  They often refer to themselves as the gremlins of the bluegrass world, and the gremlins are: platinum recording artist Bonnie Sims, who rips the mandolin and smells like Snoop Dogg's sock drawer; road dog Eve Panning, who toured extensively with the fiddle band Barrage and has trained her dog to murder on command; bassist Hazel Royer, plucked from the sidewalk in front of Berklee, can probably communicate with crows; and Dr. Joy Adams, who would just rather be skiing.

Carsie Blanton (21+ Event)

Born Carson Amanda Bradley Blanton, Carsie spent her childhood in the small town of Luray, Virginia, running amok. After careening around the country (finding temporary homes in Eugene and San Francisco) Carsie landed in Philadelphia, where she now resides.   A devotee of folk music from the womb, Carsie later acquired a taste for Jazz, R&B, Motown, and blues, and cobbled them together elegantly to create her own brand of musical shenanigans, which she released in the form of her first album, "Hush", at the tender age of sixteen. In 2005, Carsie released "Ain't So Green", her first studio album, which she now tours the east coast toting boxes of.   Since her move to Philadelphia in fall of 2006, Carsie has shared the stage with nationally and regionally hailed acts including Amos Lee, Jeffrey Gaines, Leon Redbone and Joan Armatrading, and has played at the Tin Angel in Philadelphia, Club Passim in Cambridge, the Birchmere in Alexandria, and live on WXPN radio.   Besides music, Carsie delights in teacups, the poetry of e. e. cummings, four-leaf-clovers, swing dancing, and playing with dogs.

Moe's Alley Presents: Prezident Brown

Rhett Miller (21+ Event)

Luciano (21+ Event)

The New Mastersounds (21+ Event)

In the late 1990’s, guitarist and producer Eddie Roberts was running a club night in Leeds called “The Cooker.” When The Cooker moved into a new venue with a second floor in 1999, there was space and the opportunity to put a live band together to complement the DJ sets. Simon Allen and Eddie had played together in 1997 as The Mastersounds, though with a different bassist and no organ. Through friends and the intimate nature of the Leeds music scene, Pete Shand and Bob Birch were added on bass and Hammond respectively, and The New Mastersounds were born. Though it was raw, and more of a boogaloo sound at first, it was powerful from the start. Their first rehearsal was hot enough for Blow it Hard Records to release on two limited-edition 7” singles in 2000. Fast-forward 15 years and the recorded catalogue boasts 24 more 7” singles, 9 studio albums, 2 live albums, 1 remix album and 3 compilation albums, released variously in UK, USA and Japan, where they continue to tour extensively. Joe Tatton, another veteran of the Leeds scene, joined back in 2007, replacing Bob Birch on organ and piano. As a band, and as individuals, they have collaborated or jammed with an impressive array of musicians DJs and producers, including: Lou Donaldson (Blue Note), Corinne Bailey Rae(EMI), Quantic (Tru Thoughts), Carleen Anderson (Young Disciples / Brand New Heavies), Keb Darge & Kenny Dope(Kay Dee Records), John Arnold (Ubiquity), Mr Scruff (Ninja Tune), Snowboy (Ubiquity), Fred Everything (2020vision), Andy Smith (Portishead), James Taylor (JTQ), LSK (Faithless), Lack of Afro (Freestyle), Page McConnell (Phish), Grace Potter, Karl Denson (The Rolling Stones / Lenny Kravitz), Melvin Sparks (Blue Note Records), Fred Wesley, Pee Wee Ellis & Maceo Parker (JB’s), George Porter Junior, Zigaboo Modeliste, Art Neville (The Meters) and Ernest Ranglin. As an example of the respect this band commands, Peter Wermelinger - DJ, collector, and author of the crate-diggers’ bible The Funky & Groovy Music Lexicon - places the 2001 NMS track ‘Turn This Thing Around’ in his all-time top-ten tunes, along with the likes of Eddie Harris, Funkadelic, and Herbie Hancock. The New Mastersounds are at the very top of an elite selection of acts that bring the true soul out of funk.

The Bones of JR Jones (21+ Event)

“There was no ‘a-ha’ moment,” says Jonathon Linaberry, “no life-changing revelation, no singular flash of inspiration. It was just a fierce, steady, undeniable energy, a force of nature I had to wrestle and wrangle with for years until I could harness it.” It’s easy to understand, then, why Linaberry—better known as The Bones Of J.R. Jones—would call his mesmerizing new album Slow Lightning. As its title would suggest, the collection is raw and visceral, pulsating with an understated electrical current that flows just beneath its seemingly placid surface. The songs are restless and unsettled here, often grappling with doubt and desire in the face of nature and fate, and frequent collaborator Kiyoshi Matsuyama’s production is eerily hypnotic to match, with haunting synthesizers, vintage drum machines, and ghostly guitars fleshing out Linaberry’s already-cinematic brand of roots noir. The result is a moody, ominous work that’s equal parts Southern Gothic and transcendentalist meditation, an instinctual slice of piercing self-reflection that hints at everything from Bruce Springsteen and Bon Iver to James Murphy and J.J. Cale as it searches for meaning and purpose in a world without easy answers. “I felt very lost at the time I was writing these songs,” Linaberry confesses. “It was a moment of deep crisis and anxiety, but I knew the only way out was through, which meant I just had to bring myself to the table every day and put in the work.” Linaberry’s no stranger to putting in the work. Born and raised in central New York, he got his start playing in hardcore and punk bands before becoming enamored with the field recordings of Alan Lomax, who documented rural American blues, folk, and gospel musicians throughout the 1930s and ’40s. Inspired by the unvarnished honesty of those vintage performances, Linaberry launched The Bones of J.R. Jones in 2012 and, operating as a fully independent artist over the course of the ensuing decade, released three critically acclaimed albums along with a trio of similarly well received EPs; landed his songs in a slew of films and television series including Suits, Daredevil, Longmire, and Graceland; and toured the US and Europe countless times over as a one-man-band, playing guitar or banjo while simultaneously stomping a modified drum kit everywhere from Telluride Blues to Savannah Stopover. Along the way, Linaberry also shared bills with the likes of The Wallflowers, G. Love, and The Devil Makes Three, soundtracked an Amazon commercial helmed by Oscar-winning director Taika Waititi, and earned praise from Billboard, American Songwriter, and Under the Radar, among others. After living in constant motion for the better part of ten years, though, Linaberry found himself at an unexpected standstill in 2021. At the time, he and his wife had recently relocated from Brooklyn to an old farmhouse in the Catskills, and the change of pace was both rewarding and challenging all at once. “It’s a pretty remote, rural area we moved to,” Linabery explains, “the kind of place where spring is just a continuation of the cold, grey, muddy, brown of winter. I was exhausted by the seasons, working on songs nine hours a day in the attic, and it all felt very isolated and insular.” Where the most recent Bones of J.R. Jones release, 2021’s A Celebration, drew inspiration from a trip into the vast, desert expanses of the American southwest, the songs that began taking shape in upstate New York this time around were more difficult to pin down, seeming to come and go of their own accord. “That’s where the notion of ‘slow lightning’ was born,” Linaberry explains. “It’s about a power you can’t control, a force that’s bigger than you and follows its own path no matter how badly you want to mold or direct it. That’s what this record felt like, and it’s something I had to figure out how to embrace.” That kind of all-consuming power is palpable from the start on Slow Lightning, which begins with the boisterous “Animals.” Gritty and insistent, the track taps into something primal and uninhibited, learning to trust its gut and make peace with aiming high and sometimes falling short. “Well my heart’s just trying to kill me,” Linaberry sings over roiling guitars and drums. “It always vibrates above / With always grand notions / But it plays in the mud.” Like so much of the album, it’s a testament to resilience, to letting go of failure and pressing on even when things feel hopeless. The bittersweet title track explores tenacity in the face of disenchantment, while the lo-fi “Blue Skies” insists on reaching for hope regardless of the cost, and “The Flood” conjures up a wistful portrait of survival and loss as it builds from a dreamy blur into a searing crescendo. “I remember lying in bed in the dark hearing the coyotes laughing out in the field behind our house just before they killed something,” Linaberry recalls. “It was so haunting and eerie, but at the same time, you’re just so totally in awe of what’s happening right outside your window, this elemental moment of life and death all wrapped up together.” Despite the looming sense of danger that permeates the album, Slow Lightning still manages to find moments of humor and levity. The darkly romantic “I’ll See You In Hell” revels in a love so strong it carries on through eternal damnation; the sardonic “I Ain’t Through With You” gets high on an addictively toxic relationship; and the relentlessly taut “Heaven Help Me” surrenders to overwhelming infatuation, with Linaberry recalling, “Love is the kind of thing that will keep you warm / That's what she said / As she was burning down my home.” In the end, though, it’s perhaps the breezy “Salt Sour Sweet” that best encapsulates the spirit of the record, with Linaberry looking back on a lifetime of love and heartbreak, dreams and disappointment, success and failure, and ultimately recognizing that it’s the grand sum of them all that make us who we are. “It’s the salt sour and sweet / That holds,” he sings in an airy falsetto. Call it maturity, call it self-awareness; it’s the kind of wisdom that can only arrive on a bolt of Slow Lightning.

Felly

Flóki Studios sits at the northernmost point of Iceland on a sliver of land abetted on both sides by water. On lucky nights, that water reflects the enchanting Aurora Borealis. Those lights drew Christian Robert Felner, BKA Felly, to Flóki, where he recorded part of his striking new album, Ambroxyde. The title refers to a synthetic molecule found in perfume and the scent memories that carry us from one stage of life into the next. “Ambroxyde is the start of something new being born,” Felly says. He made his name as a rapper and producer, but on Ambroxyde Felly taps into the indie and alternative music that has always soundtracked his life. This isn’t Felly 2.0 – it’s Felly as he has always been, removed from all expectation. “This is the album I’ve always wanted to make,” he says.    Since Felly started releasing music as a teen in 2011, he’s had no problem amassing a fanbase. From the scrappy early recordings he uploaded to SoundCloud and Bandcamp to his most recent EP, 2023’s I had a beautiful time, now I have to leave, the Connecticut-born, LA-based artist has created community around his introspective lyricism and idiosyncratic production choices. In college at USC, he helped form a collective named after the dorm room number, 2273, where he and friends gathered to make music, and it took off. Sampling records evolved into recording live instrumentation and touring with a full band. Over the course of his career, Felly has racked up over one billion streams across all platforms, headlined multiple U.S. headline tours, and collaborated with a wide array of artists, from Carlos Santana to Jack Harlow. Throughout his impressive career, Felly has developed a cult-like following through the raw energy of his live performances, where it wouldn’t be uncommon to find fans boasting tattoos related to his albums. “People have come up to me and shown me tattoos saying this music changed their lives,” Felly says. “Resonating with people in that way is beyond me.”     Ambroxyde contains some of the most personal songs of Felly’s career. “This album revisits some periods of my childhood,” he says. “Songs for the Crows” recounts the premonition of crows appearing on his lawn the day before Felly’s father was diagnosed with cancer. “My dad died when I was a kid, and as the youngest of five, I had to grow up fast.” On “Emmy,” Felly offers a message to his niece and his brother about “the fragility of life,  preciousness of youth, the indifference that time holds over us all.”    That indifference drives Felly to create. To make Ambroxyde, Felly chased inspiration outside of his familiar Los Angeles. Accompanied by producer Gianluca Buccellati, he traveled to remote parts of California and far-flung parts of the world. “Luca approaches production holistically. He’ll pick up a project and work with the artist for a long time,” Felly says. In this case, the duo spent over a year on the road together between Felly’s tour dates. “We went to Iceland first where we were really far from the rest of the world and could really tune out any type of influence.” They wrote “Wildfire” inspired in part by the remote, natural beauty of their surroundings. Its chorus  blows in like an unanticipated gale-force wind as Felly sings: “Come around like a wildfire/ When my wells run dry/ You fill my desire/ And make it all feel alright.”    Beyond Iceland, they wrote and recorded on the Greek island of Hydra, where cars have been banned since the 1950s and Felly could record at all hours of the night surrounded by crystalline Mediterranean water. There’s a hazy road narrative to be found on Ambroxyde, heard especially on songs like “High on You” and “Route 44,” wherein whole passing days are distilled into a single detail. Felly wrapped the Ambroxyde at the storied Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, TX, alongside a group of eleven musicians, ten of whom he’s worked with on past tours and records. This tightknit group of longtime collaborators weaved the disparate threads of Ambroxyde together over the course of two weeks. Though the pieces of Ambroxyde were recorded across long distances, they converged in post-production. Each song on the album combines takes from the various studios Felly and Buccellati frequented over a transformative year. “As we pieced these songs together, we tried to catch the soul of different places we’d been. On a single song we might take the Greece drums, the Iceland vocals, and the guitars from Sonic Ranch,” Felly says.   That patchwork process contributes to the textural, sensory experience of the album. When Felly talks about Ambroxyde, he tends to speak visually, using words like “dark indigo purple, northern sky at night, sunset” to describe it. The title track opens with the hiss of room tone and a sample of northern Icelandic winds before Felly’s spectral falsetto enters the mix. “See how it goes when I just don’t plan it/ Isn’t it obvious?/ We’re just some particles, yeah/ And the worries they hardly come,” he sings over earthen acoustic production.   “Ambroxyde” is one of a handful of love songs on the album, songs that Felly says are the most earnest of his career.. “I’ve tried to fake love songs in the past, but when you actually fall in love it’s scary, it’s raw, but it’s like coming into the light a little bit when somebody shows you new sides of yourself.” Album opener “Spinning Around” cocoons that terrifying sense of vulnerability. “You showed me who I was/ And it was sweet cause you’re sweet/ I think you’re something I’ll keep,” Felly sings of a love so disarming it threatens to upend him ahead of the psychedelic, electric guitar-led outro.    While Ambroxyde might mark a departure for Felly, he is still operating on a continuum. “This album might put people off who maybe hold me to a certain version of myself. “I’ve got to be honest with where I am, and who I am,” he reflects. That message of preserving authenticity resounds on “Black Shoes,” which has been sitting in Felly’s audio notes for years “just waiting for some context.” That context took time and experience to reveal itself. “I wrote that song when I was feeling wrapped up in a situation that didn’t feel right to me anymore,” he says. “It’s always nice when something you think is dead pokes its head up and takes in the light.” Like that song, this album didn’t emerge from the ether; it is in conversation with past iterations of an artist in a constant state of becoming. “It’s about coming into your being,” Felly says. With Ambroxyde, Felly is closer to his truest self than he’s ever been as he continues to create authentically over vast physical and emotional distances.