Crooked Still

Crooked Still in the original formation at the 2007 Calgary Folk Festival

Crooked Still is a progressive bluegrass band that was formed in 2001. In the last line-up as a quintet, it consisted of singer Aoife (pronounced: I-fah) O'Donovan , banjo player Gregory Liszt, bassist Corey DiMario, cellist Tristan Clarridge and violinist Brittany Haas. The band was characterized by their dynamic, innovative style, which combined technical brilliance and unusual instrumentation (lack of genre-typical instruments such as mandolin and guitar) with O'Donovan's voice. As a “Funky String Band” (self-designation), Crooked Still achieved genuine reinterpretations of classics of American folk music.

history

Aoife O'Donovan and DiMario met at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston , Massachusetts in the spring of 2001. Cellist Rushad Eggleston , who studied at Berklee College of Music , and Liszt, then a biology student at MIT , were already playing together.

In the summer of 2001, the four students formed Crooked Still. First appearances in Boston led to growing popularity and positive echo in the regional press. In 2004 the band was invited to participate in the Newport Folk Festival and Falcon Ridge Folk Festival . The debut album Hop High was released in September and became a bestseller. Following the success of these early festival appearances, Crooked Still toured nationwide and also performed outside of the United States.

In August 2006 Shaken by a low Sound was released ; the track Ain't no grave , originally a gospel by Brother Claude Ely and exemplary for the transformative musical potential of the troupe, was adapted for the soundtrack for the US series True Blood , which was also broadcast in Germany.

In November 2007, the cellist Rushad Eggleston, whose redefinition of cello playing had a major impact on the sound of Crooked Still, left the band after one last show to follow his own music with the band Tornado Rider . He was replaced by Tristan Clarridge in January 2008; at the same time, the band's line-up was expanded to include violinist Brittany Haas. With Still Crooked the band released their first album as a quintet in the same year. A live album was released in 2009. In May of that year, Crooked Still could also be heard live in Germany. In 2010 the studio album Some Strange Country was released .

To celebrate their 10th anniversary, Crooked Still toured North America in 2011 and released the 7-song EP Friends of Fall in October .

Since 2012 the band has been taking a creative break to pursue individual musical projects. Liszt, who worked with Bruce Springsteen on his Seeger Sessions tour in 2006 , founded the Deadly Gentlemen ; he was blogger for the Bluegrass Intelligencer and video director for Lake Street Dive , an indie jazz-pop group also founded in Boston. After the Deadly Gentlemen broke up in the summer of 2015, he took up a professorship in banjo at Berklee College of Music . O'Donovan started a solo career as a singer-songwriter . In the fall of 2014, the band gave some reunion concerts in their home region of Boston. In September 2017 there was an appearance at the Freshgrass Festival, in 2019 on the show Live from Here .