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Jon Stickley Trio plays Tico Time

Jon Stickley has built the perfect festival band. At times a bluegrass band, other times a mish of acoustic fusion and a mash of instrumental indie-prog with subtle flavorings of jazz and jam, they are a trio that will take you to extreme highs with musical mastery before fast and whirling-dervish melodies stop on a dime and take a hard left into ambient exploration.

It’s an acoustic music experience that’s ripe for summertime stages, where guitar player Stickley and fiddle/violin player Lyndsay Pruett trade off licks, they’re masterful playing all locked together by drummer Hunter Deacon and his rock, funk and breakbeat rhythms.

The Jon Stickley Trio is one of the many bands performing at the Tico Time Bluegrass Festival, which is running through Sunday at Tico Time Resort just south of downtown Durango; The Jon Stickley Trio’s set is at 5:30 p.m. today (May 13). Other performers on the festival lineup include Liver Down the River, The Lil’ Smokies, Tim O’Brien and Jan Fabricius, Grant Farm, Wood Belly and more.

If you go

WHAT: Tico Time Bluegrass Festival with Jon Stickley Trio, Lil’ Smokies, Tim O’Brien and Jan Fabricius, Grant Farm and more.

WHEN: Through Sunday.

WHERE: Tico Time Resort, 20 Road 2050, Aztec.

TICKETS: Friday/Saturday single day $60, Sunday $40, Weekend Pass $150.

MORE INFORMATION: Call 903-0681 or visit ticotimebluegrassfest.com.

Teenage Stickley was a punk and indie rock lover who came around to bluegrass and acoustic music in the late 1990s. The early aughts found him in Durango playing in the beloved Broke Mountain Bluegrass Band, and he’s been pushing the boundaries of acoustic music ever since, starting to develop his current sound after meeting Pruett through the fertile acoustic music and jam scene in and around Asheville, North Carolina, in 2009. While this trio uses some of the ideals of bluegrass music, they remain a band not committed to any “genre.”

“There’s not really a genre in mind, but definitely a chord type that usually is a little less from the bluegrass realm,” Stickley said. “My chords I come up with are kind of a little more from the rock thing. Minors and stuff like that. But I see it still really through a bluegrass lens.”

A voiceless band without a bass player remains a unique offering. No vocals and no bass means you are putting a lot of the onus of the rhythm solely on the drummer, with both Stickley and Pruett contributing bass parts with their own instruments.

“This trio just kind of settled into being the groove, and it forced Lyndsay and myself to develop a setup with our pedals where we both emulate the bass at separate times. So, when she’s playing lead, I can lock in on the bass with the drummer, and we’re going a bass/drum groove with the violin,” Stickley said. “Lyndsay can do the same thing with her violin, so we now have a really broad palette that includes really heavy sounding bass, and that was just by force. It wasn’t really the plan, but we were like, ‘hey man, we’ve got to get some low-end in the band.’”

Stickley can flat-pick all day, and Pruett can rip through all of the traditional fiddle tunes that have served as the score of many a bluegrass festival. While the record they’re currently recording has more flat-picking on it then previous releases, they still remain open ended and open minded when it comes to what they play; the jam sometimes is more important than the genre.

“I’ve enjoyed the freedom to follow the muse where it goes as far as the songs go, but the band is all about capturing the spontaneity of a jam and having fun while playing the music,” Stickley said. “We’re not just up there regurgitating something we’ve memorized; we want to keep that spontaneous, and fun. It’s the main focus of it all.”

Bryant Liggett is a freelance writer and KDUR station manager. Reach him at liggett_b@fortlewis.edu.