67 South Randolph Avenue
Saturday, January 11 @ 7:30pm
Tickets $15 at the door.
Someday, you may say “I remember the first time I heard Pretty Saro at a small Hudson Valley Bluegrass Association concert on January 11, 2020.” By then, we’re hoping the progressive bluegrass band Pretty Saro will have gone on to fame, fortune and larger stages. They surely deserve it.
Pretty Saro is a four-piece string band made up of current and former students of the Berklee College of Music, that Boston fount of musicianship and dance that has given us so many players, performers and creators across a wide spectrum of modern music. Mandolinist Maxfield Anderson, fiddler Devon Gardner, guitarist Alex Formento and Joe Everett on bass are all young and classically trained, and they don’t play your father’s bluegrass. They enthusiastically mix a heady brew of contemporary folk, country and Americana into a dish that is a new interpretation of classic musical flavors. It is a sound that is uniquely their own.
The group is so fresh and new that their first faceoff on a contest stage was the Telefunken Band Competition at the 2018 Podunk Bluegrass Festival, in Goshen Connecticut. Their dynamic arrangements and high-energy performance nailed it, winning Pretty Saro a well-deserved first place.
Pretty Saro has found inspiration, and role models, in such acoustic titans as Nickel Creek, Crooked Still, Hot Rize and John Hartford, but they have made the music their own, and with it have rewritten the definition of American roots music. It’s an intense and invigorating blend of contemporary songwriting, traditional bluegrass and pop sensibilities.
The HVBA will be presenting Pretty Saro in concert at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, January 11, 2020 on the intimate Unitarian Fellowship stage at 67 South Randolph Avenue in Poughkeepsie. Tickets are $15 at the door.
