Join us for a stunning evening with Broadway stars Tiffany Haas and Michael McCorry Rose, who’ve starred alongside each other in the Tony Award winning hit, Wicked. Get ready for a fun and flirty evening of popular Broadway love songs and the untold stories behind the composers who wrote them.

Join us for a stunning evening with Broadway stars Tiffany Haas and Michael McCorry Rose, who’ve starred alongside each other in the Tony Award winning hit, Wicked. Get ready for a fun and flirty evening of popular Broadway love songs and the untold stories behind the composers who wrote them.

Music’s ultimate inside outsider. Or is it outside insider? There is only one Sam Bush.

On a Bowling Green, Kentucky cattle farm in the post-war 1950s, Bush grew up an only son, and with four sisters. His love of music came immediately, encouraged by his parents’ record collection and, particularly, by his father Charlie, a fiddler, who organized local jams. Charlie envisioned his son someday a staff fiddler at the Grand Ole Opry, but a clear day’s signal from Nashville brought to Bush’s television screen a tow-headed boy named Ricky Skaggs playing mandolin with Flatt and Scruggs, and an epiphany for Bush. At 11, he purchased his first mandolin.

As a teen fiddler Bush was a three-time national champion in the junior division of the National Oldtime Fiddler’s Contest. He recorded an instrumental album, Poor Richard’s Almanac as a high school senior and in the spring of 1970 attended the Fiddlers Convention in Union Grove, NC. There he heard the New Deal String Band, taking notice of their rock-inspired brand of progressive bluegrass.

Shunned by some traditionalists, New Grass Revival played bluegrass fests slotted in late-night sets for the “long-hairs and hippies.” Quickly becoming a favorite of rock audiences, they garnered the attention of Leon Russell, one of the era’s most popular artists. Russell hired New Grass as his supporting act on a massive tour in 1973 that put the band nightly in front of tens of thousands.

At tour’s end, it was back to headlining six nights a week at an Indiana pizza joint. But, they were resilient, grinding it out on the road. And in 1975 the Revival first played Telluride, Colorado, forming a connection with the region and its fans that has prospered for 45 years.

Bush has released seven albums and a live DVD over the past two decades. In 2009, the Americana Music Association awarded Bush the Lifetime Achievement Award for Instrumentalist. Punch Brothers, Steep Canyon Rangers, and Greensky Bluegrass are just a few present-day bluegrass vanguards among so many musicians he’s influenced. His performances are annual highlights of the festival circuit, with Bush’s joyous perennial appearances at the town’s famed bluegrass fest earning him the title, “King of Telluride.”

“With this band I have now I am free to try anything. Looking back at the last 50 years of playing newgrass, with the elements of jazz improvisation and rock-&-roll, jamming, playing with New Grass Revival, Leon, and Emmylou; it’s a culmination of all of that,” says Bush. “I can unapologetically stand onstage and feel I’m representing those songs well.”

Free event (ticket required for entry)

Michigan ensemble the Moxie Strings has been working closely with the Steamboat Springs Middle School bands and Emerald Mountain School orchestra this year. Over seven workshops and multiple videos during the 2019-2020 school year, the students have practiced working as a cohesive ensemble and building improvisation skills with their artist mentors. On March 4th, the Moxie Strings plays alongside both bands and the orchestra in a culminating concert. Event run time: 70-85 minutes.

About Strings School Days

Strings School Days builds critical, curious, and confident students through artist mentorship, multicultural programming, and supportive classroom materials and visits. Strings School Days serves over 3,000 students in 14 schools for the 2019-2020 school year, completely free to students, teachers, and parents.

After celebrating their 40th anniversary with the cleverly titled 2013 live album >Disconnected In New York City, the hard working, constantly touring band – David Hidalgo, Louie Perez, Cesar Rosas, Conrad Lozano and Steve Berlin – leaps headfirst into their fifth decade with an invitation to join them as they open fresh and exciting new Gates of Gold, their first full length studio album since 2010’s Tin Can Trust (a Grammy nominee for Best Americana Album) and second with Savoy/429 Records.

The dynamic songwriting, deeply poetic lyrics, thoughtful romantic and spiritual themes and eclectic blend of styles on the 11 track collection has resulted in an American saga in the rich literary tradition of legendary authors John Steinbeck and William Faulkner. Yet true to form, these typically humble musical wolves started in on the project without any grand vision or musical roadmap. Over 30 years after Los Lobos’ major label breakthrough How Will The Wolf Survive? – their 1984 album that ranks #30 on Rolling Stones list of the 100 greatest albums of the 1980s – their main challenge when they get off the road and head back into the studio is, as Berlin says, “trying not to do stuff we’ve already done. To a certain extent, we are always drawing from the same multi-faceted paint box, and we sound like what we sound like. We’re proud of what we feel is an honest body of work. We just want to keep finding new ways to say things.”

In the band’s early recording days – those years just before and after “La Bamba,” their worldwide crossover hit from the 1987 film which reached #1 on the U.S. and UK singles chart – they prepared for album recording sessions with top producers like T-Bone Burnett with pre- production that included multiple rehearsals and “outlining” what the project was going to be.

Louie Perez, the “poet laureate” and primary wordsmith of Los Lobos, once called their powerhouse mix of rock, Tex-Mex, country, folk, R&B, blues and traditional Spanish and Mexican music “the soundtrack of the barrio.” Three decades, two more Grammys, the global success of “La Bamba” and thousands of rollicking performances across the globe later, Los Lobos is surviving quite well – and still jamming with the same raw intensity as they had when they began in that garage in 1973.

Few bands stick around for thirty years. Even fewer bands leave a legacy during that time that marks them as a truly special, once-in-a-lifetime type band. And no band has done all that and had as much fun as Leftover Salmon. Offbeat calls them, “one of the most spirited, jovial bands of the jam band nation.”

“Leftover Salmon has built a fervent audience with an insatiable thirst
for its energetic live performances” -NPR’s Mountain Stage

In their earliest days, Leftover Salmon was a progressive bluegrass band who had the guts to add drums to the mix. Unafraid to stir combustible styles into their ever-evolving sound, they became a pioneer of the modern jamband scene. Today, as elder-statesmen of the festival scene, Salmon keeps alive and vital the traditional music of the past– while pushing that sound forward with their own quirks.

Celebrating 30 years, the band now features a lineup that has been together longer than any other in Leftover Salmon history: founding members Drew Emmitt and Vince Herman, banjo-wiz Andy Thorn, bassist Greg Garrison, drummer Alwyn Robinson, and keyboardist Erik Deutsch.

Tickets start at $40.

Two gifted singer-songwriter guitarists team up for a night of acoustic tune trading:

Anders Osborne’s six-string virtuosity, inventive musicality, and poetic songcraft underpin an ever-expanding three-decade career punctuated by critically acclaimed studio albums and extensive live touring.

Americana and roots singer-songwriter Jackie Greene is a jack-of-all-trades, and an artist who can croon over soulful piano ballads as much as he can shred a bluesy guitar solo (like he did as the lead guitarist for The Black Crowes in 2013).

Please note new date: Tuesday, March 24

Free event (ticket required for entry)

Steel Betty has been working closely with the Steamboat Springs High School and Moffat County High School this year. Over seven workshops and multiple videos during the 2019-2020 school year, the jazz band students built their musical know-how and improvisation skills. Micah, Dave, and Maddy have mentored and inspired both groups throughout the entire year, guiding them through this process along with their excellent band directors. On March 25th, the bluegrass trio plays alongside both bands in a culminating concert. Event run time: 70-85 minutes.

About Strings School Days

Strings School Days builds critical, curious, and confident students through artist mentorship, multicultural programming, and supportive classroom materials and visits. Strings School Days serves over 3,000 students in 14 schools for the 2019-2020 school year, completely free to students, teachers, and parents.