Press

The Del McCoury Band and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band to Release Joint Album
American music fans have an unprecedented opportunity to hear two masterful groups explore the common ground where bluegrass and jazz meet when the Del McCoury Band and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band release their collaborative American Legacies project on 4/12/2011. Inspired by the success of the Del McCoury’s participation on 2010’s PRESERVATION, a PHJB project made with multiple artists to benefit New Orleans’ unique Preservation Hall venue and its Music Outreach Program, the set offers a dozen songs filled with deep respect and joyful virtuosity. Complementing the release, the two groups have announced a joint tour that will feature them performing on their own and together in a groundbreaking concert experience.

With common roots in the rich musical gumbo of the American south in the 19th and early 20th centuries, bluegrass and jazz have sat alongside one another with a myriad of common influences and musical vocabularies that have nevertheless remained largely unexplored until now. But in the hands of these master musicians, the twin legacies are combined in ways that underline their points of contact while preserving their distinctive characteristics, as horns blend with string band instruments to produce something at once refreshingly new and yet profoundly familiar, from the opening, tradition-based “The Band’s In Town” through the closing “One More ‘Fore I Die.” It’s a no-holds-barred tour of songs and sounds that sum up the simultaneous (and often intersecting) histories of two distinctively American musical forms—the jazz that has drawn music lovers from around the world to New Orleans for more than a century, and the “hillbilly jazz” of bluegrass, created more than 60 years ago by Del McCoury’s one-time employer, Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys.

Known as one of the premiere ambassadors of bluegrass, the Del McCoury Band is fronted by veteran Del McCoury, who apprenticed in the honkytonks of Baltimore and with Bill Monroe before starting his own band more than 40 years ago. A hero to east coast bluegrass audiences through the 1970s and 1980s, he stepped onto the national stage with a move to Nashville in the early 1990s that started the Del McCoury Band on an unprecedented streak of International Bluegrass Music Association awards and international acclaim. Today, McCoury, along with a band that includes his sons Ron and Rob, are admired by hard-core bluegrass traditionalists and eclectic music fans and stars alike as they make appearances everywhere from the Bonnaroo Music Festival to late night network TV shows to their own popular Delfest. For millions of fans across the US and around the world, the Del McCoury Band is simply the face of bluegrass.

Founded just a few years before McCoury joined Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band has been carrying the distinctive sound of New Orleans jazz around the world on behalf of Preservation Hall, a unique venue that embodies the city’s musical legacy. With a cast of musicians schooled through first-hand experience and apprenticeship into the music’s historic traditions, the PHJB has served as an irreplaceable, vital link to the earliest days of one of America’s most beloved forms of popular music, evoking the spirits of times past in an ever-evolving modern context that has found them traveling around the world.


The Year of Del McCoury Continues With Release of New Studio Album
Nashville, TN, August 24, 2009: Released to great acclaim earlier this year, the epic Celebrating 50 Years Of Del McCoury boxed set might have appeared to be the summary and crowning achievement of a fabled career. But with the release of Family Circle on October 27th, the Del McCoury Band serves notice that the final chapter of the bluegrass patriarch’s story has yet to be written—and that there are still a few surprises left, too. Recorded this summer at sessions sandwiched between appearances at some of the country’s most popular and prestigious festivals—Merlefest, Bonnaroo, Grey Fox, and McCoury’s own mind-bending Delfest—Family Circle is a potent blend of old and new that finds Del and the boys (sons Ronnie and Rob, fiddler Jason Carter and bass player Alan Bartram) ranging more widely than ever for songs and arrangements.

Favorite writers like Billy Smith and Shawn Camp are back with new entries, along with Californian Joe New, whose “She Can’t Burn Me Now” was a highlight of McCoury’s Grammy-winning The Company We Keep, and Del revives pop classic “I Remember You” (learned from country singer Slim Whitman’s version), but like the pitchmen say, wait—there’s more. McCoury tends to his roots with “Sweet Appalachia” (from West Virginia’s Alan Johnston) and “Revenuer’s Blues,” written by Rob McCoury and long-time buddy (and hit songwriter) Ronnie Bowman, but he also grabs up songs from country and Americana’s Jim Lauderdale, Verlon Thompson and Buddy & Julie Miller—the McCoury reading of their “Does My Ring Burn Your Finger,” a hit for Lee Ann Womack, is one of the most unexpected and gripping performances in the set—and Dire Straits’ Mark Knopfler, and even throws in a dash of rockabilly with the Charlie Rich-penned Jerry Lee Lewis number, “Break Up.”

Yet no matter its source, each song on Family Circle is accorded a treatment that does perfect justice to its essence while preserving the distinctive sound that’s brought the Del McCoury Band its unexcelled legions of “Del-Head” fans and array of awards—and that balance is the McCoury magic that’s kept them winning new fans while keeping the loyalty of old-timers who have followed Del’s career for decades. Fifty years may have passed since Del’s first days as a bluegrass musician, but today, more than ever, the Del McCoury Band is making some of the freshest and most exciting music around.

Read More