Current Bands
- Ezekiel’s Wheels is a freewheeling five-piece acoustic chariot of fiery klezmer majesty. We play traditional Jewish music and 90’s pop covers like they’re something in between.
- Mierlita is a Romanian/Moldovan gypsy fiddle quartet. We recently released our first album, Stranger in Chisinau. Check it out!
- Cardinal Direction (formerly Firefly) is a hot, high-energy contra dance band consisting of fiddler Cedar Stanistreet, clarinetist Rebecca Bosworth-Clemens, and guitarist me.
Bands on De Facto Hiatus
- Garlic and Moonshine is an acoustic singer-songwriter trio that sits squarely at the intersection of folk, jazz, blues, and Forks of Nature.
- The Salt Wives are a Judaic chamber-folk trio on accordion, euphonium and fiddle with activist tendencies and the singular ability to convert intra-band friction into sublime musical darkness.
- The Contra Dance String Quartet (with Rachel Panitch, Daniel Hawkins or Ben Leddy, and the aforementioned Julie Metcalf) performed exactly once, but might very well continue to exist some day.
- Forks of Nature is often a double-fiddle string band with optional vocals; sometimes it is just me and Jonah on an adventure with surprise guests. We play for contra dances and parties in castles.
- Delta Wave is my fiddle techno duet with Julie Vallimont, who does literally all of the work and then calls me up to goof around over her sick beats.
Bands That Are Still Playing, But Without Me
- Somerville Symphony Orkestar is a six-piece electric all-original Eastern-European Punk-Funk band that somehow summons an elephant in a tutu to dance at the end of most of their shows.
- Sharks Come Cruisin’ adapts sea shanties for rock, and brings cue cards so that everyone can join in for the chorus.
- Barnacle is a peppy western-hemisphere-trad band that play an average of six instruments per band member per show.
- Gypsy Nights is a rolling-cast Hot-Club jazz combo fronted by one-man-band Chuck Rejto on guitar and foot-pedal chromatic harmonica.
- ARRR!!! is the Brown pirate a-cappella “choir.” Repertoire is mostly sea shanties, with a little Muppet Treasure Island on the side. ARRR!!!