For Telluride band Birds of Play, playing and performing together is all about having fun and finding joy in music.
The band will be in town Saturday for a performance at Indigo Room at iAM MUSIC. They’re also celebrating the release of their latest album, “Murmurations Vol. 2”
Member Alex Paul said the band has been together for a little more than three years, and while some members have known each other for longer than that, a series of events led to the formation of the band.
“I just kind of had a vision for this band for a while, and then three and a half years ago, two things happened that’d kind of lead to the band forming: I won the solo blues competition at the Telluride Blues and Brews Fest and then I got a small art grant from Telluride Arts District to record an album,” he said. “And that competition that I won, part of the prize package was an hour set at the following year’s Blues and Brews Fest, and so now I had a grant to record an album and this festival slot, and so I had a little bit of incentive leverage to dangle in front of the other two now bandmates and say, ‘Hey, now’s the time, let’s do this, it’s worth it.”
If you go
What: Birds of Play.
When: 7:30 p.m. (doors open at 7 p.m.) Saturday.
Where: Indigo Room at iAM MUSIC, 1315 Main Ave., No. 207.
Tickets: $20.
More information: Visit https://bit.ly/3hawuFR. For more about Birds of Play, visit birdsofplaymusic.com.
The musicians agreed, he said, and the group went into the studio in December 2018 and recorded their first album before they had ever played a show together. They also took that time to learn to play together in the months leading up to Blues and Brews.
The band includes: Paul on guitar, mandolin, vocals, songwriting; Eric Shedd on bass, mandolin, guitar and vocals; Anneke Dean on violin and vocals; and Jack Tolan on guitar, mandolin and vocals.
While listeners try to peg the band into a specific genre, Paul said that’s not how they view themselves.
“We’ve kind of been saying Americana roots, it’s got some folk, some bluegrass and some funk and blues – Americana is a good blanket genre for us, we’ve had so many different people offer their two cents ... We also don’t want to really be pinned down at all,” he said. “I like the kind of amorphous nature of our genre-ing or lack of genre-bility because there’s a lot of freedom in that. We last year incorporated two electric guitars in to our setup , and so we’re playing our album release show at the Sheridan Opera House on Friday in Telluride, and we’ll have three electric guitars on stage and two mandolins, and four acoustics, an upright bass and a violin and a resonator. We do fingerpicking blues songs and we do full-on bluegrass.”
If you can snag a ticket for Saturday night’s show, what you’ll notice is the fun the band has with each other – in fact, it’s the joy of playing together that helps form Birds of Play’s solid foundation, Paul said.
“We have so much fun ...,” he said. “There’s a lot of work that goes into it, the tour booking, social media, publicity, I’m on the computer a lot in between tours, but every aspect of it, even that, is joyous because it’s the work that goes into allowing us to get in front of a crowd of people and do what we love to do.”
katie@durangoherald.com
