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Portland, Ore. – The Emmitt Nershi Band featuring Drew Emmitt of Leftover Salmon and Billy Nershi of String Cheese Incident will return to their progressive acoustic roots and perform their own form of Newgrass Bluegrass at the tenth annual Northwest String Summit from Thursday, July 21 through Sunday, July 24, 2011 in Hornings Hideout near Portland, Ore. Featuring four days of music and camping, the boutique music festival will increase to a four day event in celebration of its ten year anniversary.
Emmitt-Nershi came about in the fall of 2007 when Drew Emmitt and Billy Nershi found themselves with free time from their other projects. Both musicians maintained a strong friendship at shows and festivals where they crossed musical paths during years of performing and touring. They are joined by Andy Thorn, a young banjoist who is fast emerging as one of a new generation of hot pickers, and Johnny Grubb, a bass player who gained his chops holding down the rhythm section for the nationally-touring roots powerhouse Railroad Earth.
Advance 3-day passes for Friday, July 22 through Sunday, July 24, 2011 are available now at all TicketsWest outlets and online at TicketsWest for $145. Patrons can still upgrade to a 4-day pass by purchasing a single day Thursday, July 21 pass for an additional $20. The festival gates will open to the public beginning Thursday, July 21 at 4 p.m.
For more information about the Emmitt Nershi Band, to listen to audio tracks and to view videos, please visit http://www.emmittnershiband.com.
The 10th Annual Northwest String Summit will feature Yonder Mountain String Band (YMSB) with special guest Darol Anger; Railroad Earth; Keller and the Keels featuring Keller Williams and the husband and wife combo of Larry and Jenny Keel; Todd Snider & Great American Taxi Featuring Vince Herman of Leftover Salmon; The Travelin’ McCourys with Rob and Ronnie McCoury; the Emmitt Nershi Band featuring Drew Emmitt of Leftover Salmon and Billy Nershi of String Cheese Incident; Greensky Bluegrass; The Cascadia Project featuring Darol Anger, Scott Law, Sharon Gilchrist and Samson Grisman; Cornmeal; Danny Barnes; Jackstraw; Pert Near Sandstone; Pete Kartsounes & Benny “Burle” Galloway; Elephant Revival; and the 2011 band contest.
Considered the Pacific Northwest’s premier boutique music festival, the Northwest String Summit will provide four days of mostly acoustic music and camping in a family-fun atmosphere nestled in one of the most gorgeous festival sites on the west coast, Hornings Hideout, a beautiful forested site located just 20 minutes from Portland in North Plains, Ore. at the edge of Horning Reservoir.
A family-oriented festival, the Northwest String Summit will designate a specific family camping area where quiet hours are observed. The festival also provides a “kid’s tent” that features a variety of arts and crafts and other activities for young people.
For more information about the Northwest String Summit ticketing, please visit http://www.stringsummit.com . For more information about Hornings Hideout, please visit http://www.horningshideout.com .
With years of collective experience under their belts, Drew Emmitt and Bill Nershi exemplify the forward-thinking modern bluegrass musician. As linchpins of two legendary jam-bands –Drew with Leftover Salmon, Bill with the String Cheese Incident–both men have done the stadium- filling, high-profile rock ‘n’ roll thing to perfection. Along the way, however, they’ve honed their songwriting and playing chops and studied the bluegrass, rock and jazz masters they admire. Above all, Drew and Bill have shared a commitment to keeping music human- scaled and honest. Those qualities are found in abundance on their latest and greatest collaboration, New Country Blues–11 tunes made in Newgrass heaven.
Actually, the duo cut New Country Blues not far from home, in Colorado. Drew, who was born in Tucson, AZ and grew up in the heart of bluegrass country in Nashville, had been busy touring with Bill as the Emmitt-Nershi Band and had even done some reunion gigs with Leftover Salmon. Meanwhile, Bill had come to the Centennial State by way of New York State and New Jersey. Like his mandolin-playing bandmate, Bill had taken up bluegrass after catching a memorable edition of the Telluride Bluegrass Festival in the early 1980s. Back then he’d intended to return to New York, but the lure of blue-sky bluegrass in Colorado proved irresistible.
For New Country Blues, these two pickers went to write songs over a long weekend in Estes Park, CO. “We wrote the songs in three days,” Drew says. “We holed up in this house and we just sat and came up with these tunes. It was a really smooth process. We bring out a lot of good things in each other musically, and we do well playing off each other.”
Bill agrees, but he admits he wasn’t totally sure about the outcome of their collaboration in Estes Park. “I was a little nervous, because I hadn’t really written a lot of material at one time before,” he says from his home in Nederland, CO. “But it was real spontaneous, and both of us were willing to say yes to the other person’s ideas.”
Perhaps because Drew and Bill had cut their teeth in the somewhat more fast-moving world of their respective bands, they were willing to catch ideas on the fly and turn them into fresh music for New Country Blues. As Drew laughs, “Playing with bluegrass pickers, it’s not like the big ego of rock ‘n’ roll.” Growing up in Nashville in the 1970s, he was aware of bluegrass and old-time string music but was more into Outlaw country and rock ‘n’ roll. “I never played bluegrass until I came to Colorado,” he says. (Today he lives in Crested Butte with his wife and two children.)
Each man describes an epiphany in which they realized their true mission in life. For Bill it was Telluride and the inescapable influence of the Will the Circle Be Unbroken album his father bought upon its 1972 release. Drew says it was a combination of receiving a mandolin from his mother (he’d already been playing guitar) and seeing the legendary progressive bluegrass band Hot Rize. Drew began to explore the music in earnest, and played in his first band–Emily Cantrell and the Porphyry Mountain Boys. (Porphyry Mountain is a noted Colorado peak, in Jamestown.)
Like the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack nearly 30 years later, Will the Circle Be Unbroken introduced an entire generation to bluegrass. These days, of course, bluegrass is everywhere, adapting and evolving in strange, wonderful new ways. The Emmitt-Nershi Band takes the music in unexpected directions on New Country Blues, and Drew and Bill are very conscious of the need for the kind of tradition- rooted experimentation that you’ll find in their music.
“We’re coming at it from a different angle than a lot of bluegrass musicians do,” Bill says. Certainly, New Country Blues contains some blues (on the title track), an assortment of intelligently conceived and beautifully executed instrumentals, and inspired songs that make it clear that these men have learned a thing or two about writing since their days living on Salmon and String Cheese.
“There’s fewer boundaries in this band than in our big bands, and more room for experimentation,” Drew says. “And I do a lot more playing, solo-wise, than I have |
