Greensky Bluegrass to bring concert spectacle here

PITTSBURGH - Greensky Bluegrass hits the road again this month, bringing along its big, bold light show.

"It's probably much bigger than it ever was," the popular bluegrass jam band's dobro player, Anders Beck, said. "We work closely with our lighting director, Andrew Lincoln, to create a visual spectacle built around the music."

Greensky Bluegrass' lively, intelligent tunes and deft musicianship are reasons alone to witness the band in concert, but that dazzling, dancing rainbow of visuals makes concerts a full-immersion experience.

"Being a band that has bluegrass in our name, I guess you can say we've got a chip on our shoulder," Beck said. "We play the same places that big rock bands play, and we long ago decided we want to be as sonically large as that and we want to look like a great rock show. I want our shows to be huge, and in every aspect, mind-blowing. We pride ourselves on that."

Interviewed this past Tuesday on the eve of the 2023 tour launch, Beck said he and bandmates Michael Arlen Bont (banjo), Dave Bruzza (guitar), Mike Devol (upright bass), and Paul Hoffman (mandolin) are eager to re-establish their stature on a tour that visits the Count Basie Center for The Arts, Red Bank, N.J., on Jan. 18; The Fillmore in Philadelphia on Jan. 21; Stage AE, Pittsburgh on Jan. 26; and The Anthem, in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 27-28.

"We do a lot of one-offs where we'll fly somewhere and play for a week, and we do a couple of big tours a year. For the winter tour, there's just something special about playing that one; just getting into playing again every night and reattaching to the music on that level," Beck said. "The band's playing really well right now. We're excited to see what that makes for this tour."

Fans will notice the urgency and restlessness of Greensky Bluegrass songs like "Until I Sing" and "Absence of Reason" from last year's "Stress Dreams" album.

"That album was born out of pandemic times and what we were facing, just missing what we had built," Beck said. "Missing touring, but beyond that missing our lives that we had created. That was not just true of musicians, that was true of everybody. We're not special. And when our lives just grounded to a halt, we ended up getting together and recording an album, which was no easy feat since we don't all live near each other. But during the pandemic, that's what artists do."

One of the new album's concert standouts should be the eight-minute "Stress Dreams" title track spawned with improvisation in mind.

"Sometimes you put a song on there and say 'Ooh, that's going to be so cool live,' but you don't want to put a 15-minute song on the album," Beck said. "But with that one, we stretched it out because it is a journey. That song is the stress dream, and you come out on the other end of it."

A love of improvisational jamming is a bond that brought the band together in 2000 when founding members Bont, Bruzza and Hoffman were still learning their instruments, leading to a debut gig at a house party in their hometown of Kalamazoo, Mich.

The band didn't even have a name then.

"One of their friends jokingly said, 'How about Greensky, because that's the opposite of bluegrass?'" Beck, who joined in 2007, said. "OK, insert dumb friend's laughter, but they liked it and went with it. And everybody liked the band enough that they got more gigs and sometimes that's the way it goes."

The jokey, contradictory name Greensky Bluegrass instantly stuck.

"But what's interesting to me, is that 20 years later, as the band has grown and we play bluegrass instruments ― but it's bluegrass and the opposite of bluegrass ― that duality fits better now, which is really cool," Beck said.

Like compatriots such as the Avett Brothers, Billy Strings and Trampled by Turtles, Greensky Bluegrass draws on bluegrass traditions, but spirals off into other progressive directions.

"One of the appealing things about bluegrass initially, being acoustic, you can get a banjo, mandolin and guitar and start playing it anywhere. The cost of entrance isn't so huge," Beck said. "But then there's also a canon of music that, once you get into, is really great. Also, there's the improvisational nature of it that people don't often think about, with the soloists. It's jazz, but like jazz for 10 seconds. It's kind of a players' music. It showcases the skills of the musician. Those are all interesting aspects that brought us into it."

Plus, bluegrass has a sincerity listeners appreciate.

"It's pretty real," Beck said. "It's hard to put a bunch of B.S. in bluegrass. You can't put meaningless pop lyrics over a banjo and expect it to be good."

Beck has helped innovate effects on his Dobro and other resonator guitars, instruments the same size and shape as a normal acoustic guitar, differentiated by a built-in metal speaker carrying vibrations from the strings for unique guitar sounds.

Beard Guitars, of Hagerstown, Md., recognized his innovations by coming out with its own line of Anders Beck signature resonator guitars made from Brazilian rosewood.

"This is my dream guitar. It's super-exciting," Beck said. "The 16-year-old me thinks I'm now cool."

"This particular model has all the bells and whistles to do what I do on stage," he explains further in a Beard YouTube channel video. "We've played a lot of big places ... whether it's Red Rocks or whatever, the sound of air and the instrument in a big place is so cool, and when we built this, we're trying to mimic that acoustically."

Hear how it sounds at a concert venue near you.

Having previously sold out back-to-back-to-back nights at the famed Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado, this tour focuses on 1,500,2,500-capacity venues like Stage AE in Pittsburgh.

"I remember when the Rex Theatre was our home there. I've got a million memories of there," Beck said. "Particularly when we were growing and playing venues that size, Pittsburgh was one of the first places to really show up ready to party and get down, which is exactly what we needed on a Wednesday night. It always felt like a home away from home. It's a circular thing, we provide the music and party but what we get back escalates it. We're all psyched to get back."

More:Sting does his thing with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra

Scott Tady is entertainment editor at The Times and easy to reach at stady@timesonline.com.

This article originally appeared on Beaver County Times: Greensky Bluegrass to bring sight & sound spectacle here