Happy 20th birthday to the Grammy-winning progressive bluegrass band The Infamous Stringdusters. And a way to do up 20 years as a band is to play a festival with a load of your festival and picking-circle colleagues. While events like the Telluride Bluegrass Festival will always be a sought-after destination fest, the last few years music lovers in the Southwest have been eyeballing a festival on the rise, that being the Tico Time Bluegrass Festival.
If you go
WHAT: Tico Time Bluegrass with multiple bands.
WHEN: Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
WHERE: Tico Time, 20 Road 2050, Aztec.
TICKETS: Tickets vary from full weekend pass to single day, camping and parking extra.
MORE INFORMATION: Visit www.ticotimebluegrass.com.
What started as a campground situated on the banks of the Animas River between Durango and the Aztec/Farmington metropolitan area has quickly grown into a festival oasis, a place that once summer hits, hosts festivals of numerous genres, including its bluegrass event, which will take place this weekend – Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
Bands performing this year include: Leftover Salmon and the Travelin’ McCoury’s, Rebecca Frazier and Railroad Earth, Stillhouse Junkies, Liver Down the River, The Fretliners, The Robin Davis Duo and many more, including The Infamous Stringdusters.
For bass player Travis Book, who cut his bluegrass teeth when he lived in Durango throughout the 1990s, it’s a homecoming and a way to connect with a new festival with old-school flair.
“I heard the site is just epic, and also has some old-school vibes, a little bit like Colorado festivals of the ’90s,” Book said. “I’m really looking forward to it, everybody just raves about Tico Time.”
File away The Infamous Stringdusters into the bluegrass section in the record store, as they remain well versed in the genre; they will effortlessly dig into the canon of bluegrass, able to bust out the music of Bill Monroe, The Stanley Brothers, Doc Watson and Flatt and Scruggs while also versed in the newgrass sounds perfected by Sam Bush, Bela Fleck or other bands that have kicked around festivals the last 30-some years, because they as music lovers have also kicked around those same festivals.
They are also Gen-Xers, dudes who know the catalogs of classic, indie and pop rock of the last 50 years. They’ve got 15 studio albums under their belts, with another that will drop later this year, records that include traditional bluegrass to experimental acoustic fusion to radio-friendly country and pop. Two of those studio albums are tributes to the aforementioned forefathers of bluegrass in Bill Monroe and Flatt and Scruggs, there’s a bunch of live albums, as well as a couple covers-only EPs where they’ve given a nod to the likes of The Allman Brothers, ZZ Top and Harry Styles, My Morning Jacket, Marvin Gaye, the Cure and Daft Punk. To call them solely a bluegrass band is a huge disservice to the band members’ individual interests and record collections. They remain dedicated players to the music world, masters at their craft who are forever chasing the music.
After 20 years, they’ve hit a solid stride, a band comfortable in their place but still eager to be out on the road, making new music and new fans.
“We’ve taken a little more of a mature approach; we’re putting out this record we just finished, recorded all in Colorado. We did 20 tracks for our 20 years, and that records going to be kind of an old-school method of getting back on the bus and trying to play every market coast to coast, so it will be a little bit of a return to those years where we were really just trying to hit it as hard as we could, because we want to celebrate what we’ve done. We’re going to Texas, and driving through the South, and doing the West Coast, the East Coast and, of course, coming through Colorado,” Book said. “So no, we’re not slowing down. We’re just aging gracefully.”
Bryant Liggett is a freelance writer and KDUR station manager. Reach him at liggett_b@fortlewis.edu.
