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Redwing Bands You May Have Missed

Courtesy Woody McKenzie

So you missed the Red Wing Roots Music Festival. Or you went, but couldn’t get to see everyone you wanted to see. Well don’t worry, our special correspondent Kara Lofton was there and she introduces us to a couple of the artists to watch for in the coming year.

[Music]

Underneath the Kinship tent at Natural Chimneys Park, 14-year-old Sofia Fernandez is singing the old jazz tune Honeysuckle Rose.

She is the youngest of the Durham, North Carolina-based trio The Fernandez Sisters.

ELISE: My name is Elise Fernandez.

SOFIA: I’m Sofia Fernandez.

OLIVIA: I’m Olivia Fernandez.

At 19, Elise is the oldest of this dynamite trio that sings everything from folk to jazz to international tunes. They’ve been performing together for six years or so.

OLIVIA: So at first when we started playing we would play more of the bluegrass music and we did a few Irish songs.

That’s 16-year-old Olivia.

OLIVIA: And then we picked up jazz music and we started doing all the jazz standards. And then…

And then they moved more into playing “newgrass” and learning how to sing in harmony.

[Harmony comes in.]

Oldest sister Elise is now in at Duke studying biomedical engineering. She says since she left for college they sisters have spent more time focusing on their individual skills and what they can bring to the band than the ensemble itself.  

ELISE: Being sisters, I think the difference is, you are surrounded by music all the time. Whenever we are together at home we are always playing music. It’s not as much like ‘this is time for practicing with the ensemble’ – it’s not as boxed in.  

Another young group you might not have heard at Redwing this year calls themselves New Branch – for now. They’ve only been playing together as a group for about two months, so they’re still working on that name. (And they're so new, they don't have a website yet.)

GRANT FLICK: It’s kind of hard to put genres on things, I find…

That’s New Branch fiddle player Grant Flick, He, mandolin player Ethan Setiwan and bass player Jacob Warren met two years ago in Savannah, Georgia at the Acoustic Music Seminar for young artists. They’ve been playing instrumental music together on and off ever since.

But sometimes, they said, people struggle to connect with just instrumental music.  

SETIWAN: I think we were saying this to somebody else, you know having a singer can make us a little more accessible for some stuff. 

That’s mandolinist Ethan Setiwan. He and vocalist Sadie Gustafson-Zook grew up together in Goshen, Indiana and he invited her to be a part of this project.

New Branch is part of a movement to fuse different styles into a unique sound all under the branding of “Americana.” Jacob hales from a classical background, Sadie from singer-songwriter and Ethan and Grant from Jazz or Fiddletunes.

Jacob Warren explains.

WARREN: There’s kind of a trend it seems now among younger musicians to just do it all. To not just adhere themselves to one genre specifically and I think we definitely follow that. We’re sort of that post-modern group that sort of blends all these things.

And, finally, have you heard this band?

That’s the band Yarn. They’ve been together for more than ten years and just released a new album on May 27th called “This is the Year.” This is their sixth official studio record.

I sat down with lead singer Blake Christiana to talk about what has changed over the past ten years and what they are looking towards in the future.

CHRISTIANA: When I write, I just write about life. And so what I’ve noticed…. I mean I’m not trying to be, I’m not contriving any particular sound or trying to write for a particular group of people. I’m just doing what I do and our band is just doing what we do and luckily people have been responding….

Christiana describes Yarn’s sound as “genuine music” about life’s ups and downs.  I asked him what song on his album made him most proud of.

Another song on the record is called Love Hate. And that’s just kind of about the fine line. You can’t hate unless you love. It’s almost like you can love someone so much you hate them, I don’t really know how to describe it, but a lot of people have taken to that song.

[LOVE HATE fade out]

Kara Lofton is a photojournalist based in Harrisonburg, VA. She is a 2014 graduate of Eastern Mennonite University and has been published by EMU, Sojourners Magazine, and The Mennonite. Her reporting for WMRA is her radio debut.