Featuring workshops and a performance by special guests Luke Richardson, Cleek Schrey, and Joseph Decosimo.
A banjo, harmonica and fiddle player originally from Lawrenceburg, TN,
Luke Richardson has placed or won at some of the South's most prestigious contests. As a teacher, he has taught at music camps like the Alabama Folk School and the Midwest Banjo Camp. In 2012, Luke recorded on the new album of Chattanooga native,
Joseph Decosimo entitled "Sequatchie Valley". Together, Luke and Joseph won the Appalachian String Band Festival (Clifftop) tradtional band competion as part of "The Bucking Mules".
Born in Virginia in 1984,
Cleek Schrey is a fiddler/composer/improviser living in New York City. He holds degrees in Music and German Studies from the University of Virginia.
As a teen in Virginia, he was mentored (and, sometimes, frightened) by the legendary fiddler Brendan Mulvihill. Regular visits to the home of Paddy Reynolds, the great Longford fiddler who settled in New York, helped to intensify Cleek’s interest in the fiddle playing of the 78 rpm era. In 2005, the year of Paddy’s death, he co-produced the release of archival recordings of the late Reynolds’ surviving work.
Cleek was a featured musician on The Raw Bar, a documentary on Irish music that aired on RTE 1 in Ireland, and most recently on Féilte, a program on Irish music in America, for the Irish language station TG4.
Also an interpreter of Appalachian stringband music, his collaborative recording with the old time fiddler Rhys Jones, called The Girl Who Broke My Heart, was released to great acclaim. In the summer of 2010 their band, Bigfoot, garnered first place in the traditional stringband competition at the prestigious Clifftop Appalachian Music Festival. He also fiddles and flatfoots in the percussive dance ensemble Footworks, a group that specializes in southern music and dance forms, under the direction of superhumans Eileen Carson and Mark Schatz.
His fiddling has graced (or assaulted) many stages, large and small, with highlights including Orchestra Hall, Chicago (2004), Shetland Folk Festival, UK (2005), The Kennedy Center, DC (2006), Maryland Hall, MD (2009), Geneva Arena, SUI (2010), Lyceum Theater, NY (2011).
Collaborators in 2012 include old time fiddle goddess Stephanie Coleman, the innovative Irish fiddler Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, the Irish sean nos master Iarla Ó Lionáird, percussive dance phenom Nic Gareiss, and the viol consort Sonnambula.