Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, and Chris Thile have announced a summer tour of the U.S, bringing material from 2011’s The Goat Rodeo Sessions and 2020’s Not Our First Goat Rodeo on the road to Nashville, TN; Auburn, AL; Beaver Creek and Denver, CO; Salt Lake City, UT; Portland, OR; and Stanford, Berkeley, and San Diego, CA. The astounding group of virtuosos will be joined by singer-songwriter and Grammy Award-winner Aoife O’Donovan, for their first live concerts together in nearly a decade.
Seamlessly incorporating elements of bluegrass, Americana, classical, and international folk music, the music of both sets of Goat Rodeo sessions combines the talents of the individual artists, each a Grammy Award-winning talent, to create a singular sound that’s part composed, part improvised, and uniquely American. The music is so complex to pull off that the group likens it to a goat rodeo — an aviation term for a situation in which 100 things need to go right to avoid disaster.
But pull it off they do. Both The Goat Rodeo Sessions and Not Our First Goat Rodeo reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Classical, Classical Crossover, and Bluegrass charts; The Goat Rodeo Sessions also received Grammy awards for Best Folk Album and Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical. NPR’s World Cafe called The Goat Rodeo Sessions “organic yet composed in a way that only four deeply talented, in-tune musicians could make it,” with traces of, “Appalachia[n], Chinese, classical, Celtic, and jazz influences. If there was ever an album — or an unlikely band — that embodies the word ‘eclectic,’ this is it.” Writing of Not Our First Goat Rodeo, Gramophone said “The vast majority of crossover recordings sound contrived or half-baked (or both), and do scant justice to any of the genres involved, but Yo-Yo Ma and his collaborators got it right. There’s quite a lot of stylistic variety on both recordings, yet they each feel of a piece.”
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Goat Rodeo Summer Tour Hits 9 U.S. Cities
Jun 15, 2021
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