Bluegrass doesn’t get any better than Laurie Lewis & the Right Hands. She’s Berkeley’s own, she’s won the International Bluegrass Music Association award for Female Vocalist of the Year multiple times, not to mention a Grammy for her contribution to True Life Blues: The Songs of Bill Monroe, and her Right Hands are about as talented as a band has a right to be. Laurie sings and plays guitar and fiddle. Tom Rozum sings, swaps jokes, and plays mandolin, mandola, and guitar, Tatiana Hargreaves plays fiddle, Patrick Sauber plays banjo, and Grammy-winner Todd Phillips plays bass. If you’ve never heard them before, you need to hear them as soon as you can. And if you’ve already heard them, chances are you want to hear them again. Singout! calls Laurie “one of the leading lights of American acoustic music, a genuine national treasure,” and Country Standard Time says that she “has recorded some of the finest folk-inspired music of the past three decades.”

Tonight, in their first appearance since an action-packed tour of Australia, Laurie and the band will play music from their brand new album, The Hazel & Alice Sessions, featuring the repertoire of bluegrass trailblazers Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard. “Creatively ambitious and utterly unpretentious, steeped in tradition but doggedly progressive,” says critic Andrew Gilbert, Laurie “is a gifted fiddler, deft guitarist, inspired songwriter and powerfully evocative singer.” The Right Hands are her perfect complement. Don’t miss Laurie & the Right Hands in their musical home at the Freight.

Listen to a track from Laurie Lewis:

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Photo by Gene Balzer