Moonrise Cartel is a local folk outfit featuring lead man on acoustic and vocals, a Nicolette Larson look and sound-alike woman on backing vocals, keyboards, and fiddle. The singer had a booming voice, he sounded like Neil Diamond with a hoodie. Fiddle player had some nice jammy fills and the guy-girl vocal duets shined in spots. Their set closer Seeing Ghosts was a good warmup for Twisted Pine. TP is a Boston based new grass quartet that brought the goods. Kathleen Parks was the lead singer and played fiddle. Big guy Chris Sartori on standup bass did most of the talking between songs, Dan Bui on mandolin, and a young woman named Anh Phung on flute. I’m checking them by name because their gender and ethnicity highlighted the exoticism of their sound. Parks and Sartori were Caucasian while Phung and Bui were Asian or Amerasian. Bui was tiny and he looked like Tattoo from Fantasy Island, because of his stature, the mandolin looked like a Gibson hollow body in his hands (think Bill Halley or Wes Montgomery). The flute is not standard in a bluegrass band, and Phung’s addition enabled attempts on multiple genres. The set didn’t disappoint. The first tune was an instrumental that almost barfily veered into Celtic Woman territory. After that the set took off, Elizabeth Cotten’s Freight Train, Cold Rain and Snow, and a country tune sung by Chris were all excellent bluegrass renditions. Bui took control of a Beatles mash where Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds birthed an excellent Dear Prudence tease. Some nice originals, including top Spotify hit Papaya, showed that this band is itching to cross boundaries away from traditional bluegrass. Having said that, I was still awestruck when Chris announced “ now we’re gonna play a Frank Zappa tune”. They launched into a perfect Peaches En Regalia, with that group of instrumentation, had me smiling from ear to ear, as I was probably the only Zappa fan in attendance. A colleague said that Parks cut her teeth on the NY City Irish session scene but was ostracized for not sticking to the script. Closed with a funky cover of Bill Withers Use Me.
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