Hank, Pattie & The Current w/Brek at High Rock Outfitters

13 S Main St,Lexington NC 27292

09 February, 2023

Description

Hank, Pattie & The Current with Brek $10 Adv. / $15 DOS Reserved Seats and Tables Available We're returning to the legendary High Rock Outfitters with our good buddies from Iceland, Brek! Don't miss this unique Trans-Atlantic collaboration, Reykjavik to Raleigh! Hard-hitting bluegrass pickers who moonlight as symphonic classical musicians, Hank, Pattie, and the Current have forged their unique sound by approaching their string band much as they would a string quartet. The four-piece group based in Raleigh, North Carolina is led by banjo player Hank Smith and fiddle player and vocalist Pattie Kinlaw. On their new album, Letters, they present a collection of intricately crafted messages to their lovers, friends, and children. Kinlaw grew up in Williamson, NC, the daughter of a church organist. She began studying classical violin as a kid, but soon discovered and became enamored with the fiddle music of her native rural region. She never felt she had to choose between the two genres, and got a degree in violin performance before moving to Nashville where she worked with the legendary Mark O'Connor, and then Asheville, where she studied with bluegrass master Bobby Hicks. When Kinlaw moved back to the Raleigh area, she soon met kindred musical spirit Smith, and the two began playing together regularly. Smith grew up in South Carolina, and was a relatively latecomer to music, picking up the banjo at age sixteen. However, once he started playing, he was a man on a singular mission, studying the music of Earl Scruggs and Bela Fleck with extreme tenacity. “I was the kind of kid who would write research papers that were not assigned”, he laughs. “So I kind of did my own independent study in banjo music”. After completing an undergraduate and then a master’s degree in Middle Eastern History, Smith gave up the academic path to join the burgeoning jamgrass band Barefoot Manner, which brought him to the Raleigh area. As Kinlaw and Smith’s various musical projects began slowing down in 2015, the two friends realized that it might be time to start a project of their own. “We were playing in a band, both primarily as instrumentalists, and that band kind of imploded,” explains Kinlaw. “And as the other band members all went back to their regular day jobs, we both looked at each other like, ‘well we are full-time musicians, what are we supposed to do?’” Smith was determined that the two of them should create their own project. “We need to make a band”, he said, “We need to choose our players, play the music we want to play without compromising” Thus, Hank, Pattie, and the Current was born. The present iteration of the band includes bass player Stevie Martinez, who also performs with the Asheville Symphony, and guitarist Billie Feather, who hold numerous degrees in guitar and engineering. The group embraces their arguable over-education by bringing an academic perspective to Bluegrass. “In the past, we’ve created bluegrass arrangements and then added a string quartet to them, but with this album, we took a new approach to genre-bending, in which we simply treated the bluegrass band as a string quartet”, explains Smith. “The tone of this album reads much more modern than our past work, and my favorite thing about it is that all the band members really had a heavy hand in creating it”, adds Kinlaw. This “string quartet approach” to arrangements can be easily identified on tracks like “Why Don’t You”, and “The Freedom We Seek”, in which the guitar departs from a normal backbeat bluegrass role, and instead acts as a supporting element of the bass, hitting on the 1 and 3 and intermittently cross-picking while the banjo and fiddle play intricately harmonized lines of counterpoint through-composition. In the world of traditional music, it’s common for musicians to try and hide their backgrounds in classical or jazz genres for fear of seeming “inauthentic”. With a wealth of knowledge and passion, Hank, Pattie, and the Current refreshingly embrace their myriad of musical influences to create a unique sound, true to themselves. “Letters” is an album written straight from the hearts and minds of four people who are fully comfortable with the multitudes that they each contain. -Rachel Baiman ​The band Brek mainly plays original, folky music with various influences. The emphasis is on combining the various influences from different styles of folk and popular music. The band also tries to create an interesting but cozy atmosphere in their playing but at the same time challenging The band's songs are sung in Icelandic but it emphasizes the use of diverse wording and thus utilizes the large and beautiful vocabulary that Icelandic has to offer. The influence comes from various sources, but Brek tries to weave them together into his world of sound and thus try to break down walls between musical policies as well as connect Icelandic folk heritage with other types of folk music. Icelandic lyrics and voices mixed with the interplay of rhythmic and dynamic interplay of instruments are used to drive the music