By Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers
A dream team of younger generation acoustic musicians, including Punch Brothers, I’m With Her, and Julian Lage, is hitting the road this summer for a tour called American Acoustic. See the complete dates below.
The tour grew out of a festival with the same name that Chris Thile, the mandolinist mastermind behind the progressive string band Punch Brothers, curated at Washington’s Kennedy Center in 2016. The festival concluded with an onstage collaboration between the Punch Brothers and the trio I’m With Her—Sara Watkins, Sarah Jarosz, and Aoife O’Donovan—that sparked the idea for a collective tour, with the addition of jazz guitar prodigy Lage.
The American Acoustic musicians have not only state-of-the-art chops but a lot of shared history to draw from, including Nickel Creek (with Thile and Watkins), the Goat Rodeo Sessions (with Thile and O’Donovan), Lage’s duo with Punch Brothers guitarist Chris Eldridge, and Jarosz’s many appearances with Punch Brothers.
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On the American Acoustic tour, in addition to separate sets and the full ensemble jams that you might expect, the musicians will mix and match in every show.
“We’ll actually even be starting the shows with different collaborations every night—that’ll be instead of an opening act,” Thile said in a video announcing the tour (see above). “We’ll be trying different material in different cities.”
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The tour opens July 29 in Portland, Maine, and continues with dates around the East and Midwest, winding up August 15 in Park City, Utah.
