2022 ARTISTS
Composer and Double Bassist Evan Premo creates heart-centered music that inspires audiences and musicians alike. His music has been commissioned by the Pittsburgh Symphony Chamber Orchestra, River Town Duo, Owen Dalby of St. Lawrence String Quartet, the International Society of Bassists, Diana Gannett, Paul Dwyer, The Pine Mountain Music Festival, Capitol City Concerts, and the Montpelier Chamber Orchestra. Evan is a member of New York City based chamber music collective, DeCoda with whom he performs in residencies around the world including four he led in Abu Dhabi, UAE. As a member of Ensemble ACJW Evan has performed many concerts at Carnegie Hall and participated in residencies in Spain and Germany. As a chamber musicians he has performed at summer music festivals throughout the country and has been featured on National Public Radio’s Performance Today. Evan is artistic director and founder of “Beethoven and Banjos”, residency that brings together folk and classical musicians for cross-genre concerts in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Evan lives in Marshfield, Vermont with his wife, soprano Mary Bonhag. Together they are the founders and artistic directors of Scrag Mountain Music, dedicated to presenting innovative, interactive, and affordable performances of chamber music. Evan holds degrees in performance and composition from the University of Michigan where he studied with composers Michael Daugherty, Susan Botti, and Evan Chambers and bassist Diana Gannett. www.evanpremo.com
Laurel Premo is a Traverse City-based roots musician known for her work over the past decade with the internationally touring duo Red Tail Ring. This year she presents solo performances on fingerstyle electric guitar, lap steel, old-time fiddle and voice, drawing on American and Nordic roots music alongside new compositions borne out of that traditional vocabulary. The glowing heartiness and rich grit of her sound reveal a love of and complete submersion in these heavy archaic roots—from the crossover of old-time and blues American traditions to darker Scandinavian sounds. MTV News described Premo’s new solo record 'Golden Loam' as “subtle but dazzling and rich in texture. Watching a live performance is pure hypnosis.” (10/08/21) With ruminant power, a masterful use of space, and the glint of the untethered wild, Laurel Premo bears renewed electric dirt - the golden loam layered by centuries of folk. Premo holds a BFA from the Performing Arts Technology Dept. of the University of Michigan School of Music, and has spent half-year stints at both the Sibelius Academy of Music in Helsinki, Finland and the University College of Southeast Norway in Telemark to study traditional music and dance. Important mentors who have helped shape Laurel’s lens in folk arts have been her parents Bette & Dean Premo (fiddle, guitar, and traditional song, Michigan), Joel Mabus (clawhammer banjo, Michigan), Arto Järvelä (fiddle, Finland), and Ånon Egeland (fiddle, Norway).
Jake Blount is an award-winning banjoist, fiddler, singer and ethnomusicologist based in Providence, RI. He is half of the internationally touring duo Tui, a 2020 recipient of the Steve Martin Banjo Prize, and a board member of Bluegrass Pride. He is a two-time winner and many-time finalist of the Appalachian String Band Music Festival (better known as Clifftop). Blount specializes in the music of Black communities in the southeastern United States, and in the regional style of the Finger Lakes. A versatile performer, Blount interpolates blues, bluegrass and spirituals into the old-time string band tradition he belongs to. He foregrounds the experiences of queer people and people of color in his work. His teachers include Rhiannon Giddens, Bruce Molsky and Judy Hyman. Blount has shared his music and research at the Newport Folk Festival, the Smithsonian Institution and Yale University, among other venues and institutions. He has also appeared on Radiolab, Soundcheck and NPR's Weekend Edition. He regularly teaches fiddle and banjo at festivals and camps like the Augusta Heritage Center, the Ashokan Center, and Midwest Banjo Camp. Blount tours domestically and internationally as a solo performer, with his duo Tui, and with his band The Moose Whisperers. He has performed and recorded solo, and in ensembles of up to six people. His first full-length solo album, Spider Tales, is out now on Free Dirt Records & Service Co. It debuted at #2 on the Billboard Bluegrass Chart, received positive coverage from NPR, Rolling Stone and Billboard among others, and earned five out of five stars as The Guardian's Folk Album of the Month. Spider Tales later appeared on "Best of 2020" lists from NPR, Bandcamp, The New Yorker, the Guardian, and elsewhere.
One of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch,” Nic Gareiss (he/they) is swiftly becoming recognized as a singular voice in traditional dance. Informed by 25 years of ethnographic study and performance of many world dance practices, Gareiss’ work draws from percussive dance traditions to weave together a technique facilitating his love of improvisation; clog, flatfoot, and step dance footwork vocabulary; and musical collaboration. He has concertized in sixteen countries with many of the luminaries of traditional music and dance including Alasdair Fraser, Bruce Molsky, The Chieftains, Colin Dunne, Darol Anger, The Gloaming, Ira Bernstein, Liz Carroll, Phil Wiggins, and Sandy Silva. Gareiss has performed at London’s Barbican Centre, the Irish National Concert Hall, the Munich Philharmonic, and the Kennedy Center. In addition to his two solo shows The Art of Treepling and Solo Square Dance, Nic collaborates in duo projects with Allison de Groot, Caleb Teicher, Cleek Schrey, Maeve Gilchrist, Simon Chrisman, Ultan O’Brien, and as a member of the quartets DuoDuo and This is How we Fly.
Meena Bhasin is an alluring violist and entrepreneur whose identity has never fit neatly into a box. Born in New York to an Iranian Jewish mother and a Punjabi Sikh father, her early life was filled with an insatiable passion for cross-cultural dialogue and an itch for interdisciplinary learning. She started honing her musical skills at the age of four. Through experiences as an adolescent performing and collaborating in places like Japan, Israel, China, and at the United Nations, she realized what a powerful connecting force music could be in the world. This realization has affected every artistic choice she has made since. Meena is a co-founder of Decoda, the affiliate ensemble of Carnegie Hall, a co-artistic director of Noe Valley Chamber Music, and is a member of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra. She makes regular appearances with the San Francisco Symphony, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, and the Boston-based chamber orchestra, A Far Cry. She relishes collaborations across genres and has toured the US as a soloist with legendary rock band Jethro Tull and performed Persian music as a soloist with the New York Philharmonic. Her chamber music collaborators have included Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman, Emanuel Ax, and Joyce DiDinato. As part of her training, Meena was in Ensemble Connect, the post-graduate leadership program of Carnegie Hall and the Juilliard School. Prior to that, she graduated as a Presser scholar from New England Conservatory and also holds a BA in international relations from Tufts University.
Praised as “dazzling” (The New York Times), “expert and versatile” (The New Yorker), and “a fearless and inquisitive violinist” (San Francisco Classical Voice), Owen Dalby leads a rich musical life as a soloist, chamber musician, new and early music expert, orchestral concertmaster, and educator. As a member of the St Lawrence String Quartet, Owen is Artist-in-Residence at Stanford University. With the SLSQ, recent and upcoming projects include tours of all the major chamber series in North America and Europe, as well as solo debuts with the LA Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and the NHK Philharmonic (Tokyo) in John Adams’s Absolute Jest for string quartet and orchestra. As one of today’s most active classical ensembles , Owen performs with the SLSQ around 75 concerts each year and spearheaded a major new release of Haydn string quartets (Opus 20) on vinyl LP, CD, streaming, and HD video. Owen is regularly invited to perform chamber music at festivals from Hamburg to Honolulu, and from Iceland to Mumbai. His many chamber music collaborators have included Stephen Prutmsan, Inon Barnatan, the Danish String Quartet, Daniel Hope, Christian Tetzlaff, Dawn Upshaw, the Persian kamancheh virtuoso Kayhan Kalhor, and Simon Rattle.Owen received early training with Anne Crowden at the Crowden School and bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Yale University where he studied with Syoko Aki. With his wife, violist Meena Bhasin, Owen is co-Artistic Director of Noe Music, a neighborhood chamber music series in San Francisco, where they make their home with their children Leila and Knight. Owen performs on the “Fetzer” Stradivarius made in Cremona in 1694.
