Music Box: Teton Americana Winter Invitational

By Aaron Davis (for JHWeekly.com)Jackson Hole, Wyo. - Welcome to progressive Americana Week. Let’s go ahead and call it The Teton Americana Winter Invitational. By coincidence, all of these bands will be playing varying nuances of contemporary American roots music in Teton County in the coming week: Greensky Bluegrass, Matt Flinner Trio, Great American Taxi, Hot Buttered Rum String Band, Head for the Hills, Random Canyon Growlers, Screen Door Porch, Jonathan Warren and the Billy Goats, Boondocks, Steam Powered Airplane, Jackson Six, and One Ton Pig.Disclaimer: this is a made up festival name and concept, but yes, all of these bands are on the calendar. Seven venues in a five-day period, and shows range from free to $15.Zooming-in on Greensky Bluegrass, it’s immediately evident that this hardly strictly newgrass unit has the goods. With so many progressive bluegrass acts on the road in recent years, developing a distinguished modern take with bluegrass instrumentation has become a hard line to cross. Greensky helps define a new era of hair-band grass that brings folk harmonies, jam elements and the knack for branching out in the studio with pedal steel, percussion and even, yes, distortion pedals.“We’re more of a rock band with a traditional bluegrass setup,” said guitarist/vocalist David Bruzza, who grew up listening to his father spinning Bill Monroe and Flatt & Scruggs, and experienced his first Dead show at the age of 12.“We are definitely a live band—we use 16 channels and are really electric. We’ve been known to do 25-minute versions of songs, but it’s more tame on the record.”Handguns, the band’s fourth studio release, is one of the strongest non-traditional, bluegrass-based albums that I’ve listened to in a while. It boils down to the songwriting, the infusion of honkytonk and country-Western, and a low and lonesome sound that reminds me of New Grass Revival-meets-Railroad Earth. While experimental enough to be on a stage before a jamband like moe., Greensky can also pull heartstrings like the Avetts.“Three of us have been playing together for 10 years,” Bruzza said. “It’s pretty funny how you go backwards and then forwards. We started out playing Monroe and old traditional tunes, and then it got to the point where all of our other influences growing up—rock ‘n’ roll, a lot of us were really into the Grateful Dead and Phish. Just taking elements from everything we like, John Hartford and New Grass too, and adding to what they did in the 80s.”Though Greensky formed in 1999, it wasn’t after the 2006 victory in the Telluride Bluegrass Festival Band Competition that the group began crisscrossing the country and playing 175 shows a year. A wide demographic of fans began showing up to their sets, and they were invited back to Telluride in 2007, played the first Rothbury Festival in 2008, the Northwest String Summit Music Festival, and on to even bigger stages of Hangout Fest and Bonnaroo. Now they are selling out venues like the Bluebird Theater in Denver and the Fox Theater in Boulder.“Last year was amazing. We’ve grown immensely as a unit in the past few years. We’d come off stage somewhere and be like, ‘wow that was great,’ and the next week we’d play somewhere else and be like, ‘that was even better,’” Bruzza said.Greensky Bluegrass plays at 9:30 p.m., Friday, at the Mangy Moose in Teton Village. Admission is $10 at the door. MangyMoose.net.  tags: jackson hole show music musician live band singer songwriter nightlife concerts wyoming center arts photographer planet teton venues screen door porch boondocks guitar cd reviews